Question about the Exchange Corner

[111kg]

How do you people learn? I mean... do you talk via FB/Skype and decide to talk in a certain language on a certain subject. More exactly, how do you do this... exchange? I've finally found a person to talk German with, but I don't know how to do it to make it efficient for both of us.

[Mameha]

I think skype is good for writing and talking, if you have more people to talk with, you should use Teamspeak only because it lags less than skype.

Anyway i prefer Skype

[anna3101]

For me, the best exchanges happen over a coursebook and on Skype. Then you have some units with certain topics, like "Food", and plenty of exercises of "discuss/answer questions/talk to your partner" type. "What do you eat for breakfast? Do you think fast food is bad? What's your opinion of GMO crops" and so it goes

So I just open the book, turn on Skype and we start going through such exercises, answering questions in turns, or discussing and sharing our experiences about whatever the unit wants us to talk about. Sometimes we deviate from the main subject of course. But it's always fun and also a good way to know someone better. And learn language on top of that.

We look up new words as we go, and if there are grammar issues, we sometimes arrange to make additional exercises from the grammar book for our next session.

Hope that helps.

[xeylonfm]

There is a rather funny way that has helped me pick some Italian and I mean “some.” My girlfriend visited Turin some time last year and she happened to stay with some natives there as part of an NGO program she works with. In the house she stayed, no one spoke English and even the only one who could understand some English could only speak to some extent and hit a dead end. She on the other hand was far from getting acquainted with Italian. However she made close friendship with these people who showed the desire to keep on communicating. Emails and Whatsapp became preferred. However the problem is that there was still significant language barrier. She decided to communicate through Whatsapp alongside Google translate, ! It was funny and cumbersome but she managed it. Some sentences came weired but she managed to decode the meaning out of them and she did the same. So along the way some Italian stuck! , maybe you don’t want to work it this way.