Say that you have been completely out of luck: you are trying to learn French, but you can’t find anybody in your town that speaks your target language. You’ve tried everything. Looking for language cafés, meetups on Couchsurfing and what not, but nada. Maybe your town’s too small or maybe you’re just shy, not one for busy places and putting yourself out there, which is perfectly fine. So, what now? Last week I talked about how important conversation is for learning. This week I want to talk about something complementary to your conversation, and that is writing.
Finding people that speak your language
The first website I want to talk about is called conversationexchange.com . On this friendly looking website with a flashy/nostalgic it-feels-like-2004 design, you will be able to connect with people all over the globe that are learning languages you speak and offer to speak your target language in return. A tandem, that’s great right? People here really seem to be open minded about language learning, and it’s great. You meet like minded people who are on the same boat: they want to speak with you and they wanna learn a language and help you learn a language. You make a profile providing rather basic info in your bio(graphy), select one of the default profiles pictures (I put the cello one because cellos are cool), indicate the languages you speak and the ones you are learning and you’re game. From here, you can either wait for people to contact you, or actively write some people yourself. You will also indicate whether you want to write messages on the platform, whatsapp or skype or face-to-face conversation (or all three like I selected). I was surprised by the activity of members on this site. I spoke to a lot of people from Istanbul, exchanging mostly whatsapp messages so that I could always have some Turkish throughout the day. As a testament to this website, a French friend of my housemate here in Rome met an Italian girl in Paris through the platform. He’s learning Italian and she’s learning French. Much to my pleasure, they said they had met on conversationexchange.com. We had dinner all together and the French guy, who had been only studying three months, spoke Italian!
Writing, writing, writing...
Say you gotta write an email in your target language, or you decided to start the habit of writing a journal every day. Whatever it is you decided, lang-8.com is your friend. Here you’ll be able to submit texts and journal entries that anybody from the community can read, correct, and help you with. Like before, everyone here is incredibly helpful and open. You gain points by correcting other posts in the languages you speak. The more points you gain, the higher the chance of your posts being discovered and being corrected. In my last entry, I received a correction after only a couple hours and I had made, until then, only a couple corrections.
I was brought up speaking Italian and at the same time, force fed English by my mother until I spoke it, essentially. Still, whilst my English was good, I was far from fluency. What changed everything for me was studying in English when I moved to Tokyo. Here I studied at an American school and breathed and learned in an English-speaking environment. Point is, the combination of being forced to speak and communicate, write essays, be corrected, and simply socialize in your target language, is what ultimately makes you learn. I do, and I cannot stress this enough, want to encourage you to make conversation first, and write later. Even before learning substantial vocab. There’s something about the way our brain remembers things long term. We are probably built to learn by speaking and doing, rather than on books. Don’t get me wrong, books are invaluable, and they enable you to reach levels that would be impossible otherwise. But, there is a strong case to be made for learning from conversation and in the best case, from both conversation and writing.
To recap:
Go to conversationexchange.com for:
Meet people that speak your target language.
Write to, chat with or Skype with people that speak your target language.
Go to lang-8.com for:
Have a platform for journal and texts in your target language.
Receive corrections from other users.
Correct other users in the languages you speak and write.
Here's some classic Anatolian rock from the master himself: Erkin Koray.
Happy learning!
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