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Hi all,
It has nearly been 4 months since I started my challenge and the one thing which I’m still struggling with is not the lack of resources, finding language exchange partners, understanding the grammar, but old father time, Ojciec Czas, El Padre Tiempo, and these three international masters of time have now been joined by время Отец.
OK, I don’t know whether the Russian translation of Father Time is время Отец or if the anthropomorphised depiction of time exists in Russia, but I do know that I have invited время Отец to jump on his Велосипед, come over to my world of languages and to take part in my challenge.
So why have I made my life more complicated by forcing myself to have weekly Russian language exchanges?
Well the answer is quite simple, I just wanted to know what it would be like to try to maintain a language whilst trying to learn a new one.
To be honest, I thought that it would be like riding a Велосипед and that my Russian language exchange would be a walk in the park but although some days are great (it turns out that I speak Russian with either a Russian accent or no accent at all), other days are a nightmare.
The good thing is that after two weeks of absolute chaos, which included me saying ‘ano’ instead of ‘año’ to Raul my Spanish exchange partner, I have become more organised.
For those of you who are learning Slovak and Spanish at the same time, make sure that you don’t say ‘ano’ instead of ‘sí’ when you are speaking Spanish.
Another issue which I was faced with was trying to find the right language exchange partners.
Before I joined Italki and WeSpeke, I managed to do quite a lot of research in regard to finding the best exchange partners but I still made mistakes.
My Mistakes
1) Being too nice and trying to be friends with everyone
2) Wasting time, talking about too many topics
3) Not being prepared for the exchange
4) Having back to back exchanges in different languages
My Solutions
1) Finding one language exchange partner per language and realising that I can’t talk to everyone, no matter how nice and interesting they seem.
2) Each week, find an agreed topic to talk about.
3) Send the vocabulary in advance
4) Never have different language exchanges on the same day and try to have a day’s break in-between
Right, I’m going back to my language learning, so that’s all folks.
learn23eublog 