Useful Language Learning Techniques - Conversation Exchange
When I think back 50 years ago when I was studying Chinese, the idea that I could just get online and talk to someone through some magic computer was inconceivable.
Nowadays there are a number of sites that offer the opportunity to connect with teachers. Some are free; in other words, just a pure language or conversation exchange. On some sites you hire a teacher or someone to speak to. If I can find a tutor on LingQ, I use LingQ, but when I can't I'll go to italki, which I find to be a great resource. In order to take part in language or conversation exchanges, you need to be at a certain level in the language.
Until I have reached that level in the language, I don't enjoy the exchange. Very often I'll start at 15 minutes or half an hour and then as I progress in the language I'll get up to an hour. I want to make sure I understand what the person is saying. That's absolutely number one. Even if I can't express myself well, I want to understand what the other person is talking about. I also want to be able to express myself well in the language because it's actually quite stressful to talk over Skype. Even when we're speaking well, it's a more stressful way to communicate with someone than sitting with them across a table; It's more stressful and I find that it's a little bit more exhausting, too. I've started speaking with a Ukrainian tutor twice a week and I still speak to my Russian tutor, and at the end of an hour I'm kind of exhausted.
Even though I'm a proponent of input-based learning and that's how I spend most of my time. For example, with my Ukrainian I speak two hours a week, but I'm constantly reading. I'm reading about and listening to Ukrainian history, and I often listen to Gromads'ke (Громадське) radio. So input is king, but the output is necessary. These conversation and language exchange sites like italki and what we have at LingQ are a very good way of getting that output experience. As an example of how that works, I spoke to Deni from Russia who commented on one of my YouTube videos asking if we could talk a bit about learning Japanese.
It was quite a long discussion because it's very difficult to keep these things short, but we spoke in three languages: English, Russian and Japanese. We talked mostly about learning Japanese, first in English, then in Russian and eventually in Japanese. What's very interesting in this video, if you have the patience to follow it, is that I couldn't get my brain out of Russian.
I've been speaking and listening to mostly Ukrainian, then I had an hour of Russian with my tutor and after that I spoke with to Deni in Moscow. Even though my Japanese is stronger than my Russian, I really struggled to switch over to Japanese. It's the first time I've had that difficulty. Normally, I can move over quite easily. Maybe it's because I'd just had that hour of Russian beforehand and because I find the language exchange via Skype on the computer a little more stressful than just a casual conversation. Do you ever find it difficult to switch your brain over to a different language?
