Rdearman on language exchanges

[Querneus]

(I made this a separate thread so that it's easier to find in the future.)

From the thread: How does everyone use online tutoring?

"Polyglot Gathering" discussing the topic "What I learned from 500+ Language Exchanges."

The presentation is on Google Drive here. The question and answer period of the presentation was very good, with a lot of great questions coming in from the audience. I'm happy to answer any questions anyone might have.

That was very interesting.

I have two comments in particular:

1. Your experience with guys and your estimate that 95% are looking to talk only to women surprised me! And saddened me. And also made me wonder whether there might be differences between languages/cultures on this. In contrast to Italians and the French, it wouldn't surprise me if Chinese guys turned out to be less "flaky" when it comes to language exchanges, for example.

2. I found your advice about not filling the other person's blanks very useful. I do it a lot in the real-life Spanish conversation groups I go to, but I agree it's a bad habit! I have never gotten negative feedback for it from other people though, perhaps out of politeness, so I had never realized I'm helping other people less than I could by doing it.

[rdearman]

THere was another interesting discussion of LE's at the gathering by one of the guys who run the Tandem language exchange app. He had some statistics and found on their platform anyway there was a significant amount of M<->F exchanges. So it might be the mediums I used to find exchange partners. But also they are a lot stricter about "dating" type exchanges on the site. I was thinking I might give this app a try. Although I have more than enough exchange partners now, probably more than I can effectively use while working.

[sporedandroid]

THere was another interesting discussion of LE's at the gathering by one of the guys who run the Tandem language exchange app. He had some statistics and found on their platform anyway there was a significant amount of M<->F exchanges. So it might be the mediums I used to find exchange partners. But also they are a lot stricter about "dating" type exchanges on the site. I was thinking I might give this app a try. Although I have more than enough exchange partners now, probably more than I can effectively use while working.

That’s something I’m concerned about. I really don’t like guys trying to date me. One to one conversations with guys on the internet have never ended well. On forums like these my gender is fairly irrelevant, so I hardly ever mention it. When I have to speak a highly gendered language like Hebrew I’m in trouble.

[David1917]

2. I found your advice about not filling the other person's blanks very useful. I do it a lot in the real-life Spanish conversation groups I go to, but I agree it's a bad habit! I have never gotten negative feedback for it from other people though, perhaps out of politeness, so I had never realized I'm helping other people less than I could by doing it.

Good call on the new thread, and this was one of the biggest takeaways I got from the presentation as well. I feel that I definitely do this with people I'm just normally interacting with - be it friends who are not native speakers, etc. On the flipside, when I am conversing in one of my TL's and I take a stab at a construction, I'll sort of ask at the same time "is that how you say that?" or just use some type of questioning tone and pause. Usually, someone will just say "I know what you mean," and what I REALLY want is for them to just say the correct answer - like an interactive audio-lingual course. Obviously, not everyone you meet is your language coach, but this would be a similar thing to look out for - setting expectations on both sides about wanting to be corrected or just passably understood.

[Brun Ugle]

I think one of the most important things may be to be upfront about what you want and agree on the “rules” ahead of time. You can do this in the first messages, but if there is room, you can even put some of it in your profile. Obviously, this would include things like the frequency with which you want to talk, the length of time, the time of day (with time zone), but also things like how much correction and how to give corrections. I think it was a good idea to leave most of the corrections for the end, but I also liked the idea of being able to ask the other person, “Was what I just said natural? Is that how you’d say it? How would I say it more/less formally?” etc. I also think the idea of choosing topics is a good one, I’m just not particularly good at it myself. Whenever I’ve tried it, I’ve always felt in the moment that the topic was good, but then when I try to prepare, I find it is too broad or complicated, or I’m unsure how to approach it. I always get confused and frustrated.

Regarding Tandem, I think it is one of the better apps out there. It’s a bit like this forum, you have to work a little to get in and if you break the rules, you can get kicked out. They require you to have a Facebook profile and they check manually that you have one and it looks like you are a real person. You also have to answer three questions about why you want to do language exchanges, what kind of partner you are and what kind of partner you are looking for. I’ve never had any scam or “romantic” type messages on it, nor random messages from men who don’t even speak one of my target languages, but want me to teach them English. That was something I got a bit of on Italki before hiding my profile.