Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[Brun Ugle]

I can explain all of those in two words. It’s magic!

[rdearman]

I can explain all of those in two words. It’s magic!

So how do you say "It's Magic" in Japanese (without looking it up!)

[Adrianslont]

I can’t explain those things in my native language.

If you can, you are a very learned, articulate man, rdearman!

[eido]

So how do you say "It's Magic" in Japanese (without looking it up!)

"Mahou desu"? "魔法です"? I have a feeling that's too literal, though. And no, I didn't look up the words, but I did look up the spelling.

[Brun Ugle]

I would be interested in hearing more about how you conduct your language exchanges. How do you find/pick a good partner? How do you choose a topic beforehand? How do you prepare for it?

I think you must do more studying than you claim to do. I know basically how airplanes fly, but I’d still need to prepare myself before talking about it, both to look up all the vocabulary and to make sure I could explain it well. Even in English, I’d struggle to do it off the top of my head and have to go back and correct myself and add all the bits I forgot.

[rdearman]

I would be interested in hearing more about how you conduct your language exchanges. How do you find/pick a good partner? How do you choose a topic beforehand? How do you prepare for it?

You should go to my talk at the gathering. (( Which reminds me I need to add some of the below to my slide deck!! ))

How do you find/pick a good partner?

This bit is trial and error. You have to just talk to a few people and the ones who are punctual and return are keepers. Try these sites:
https://www.language-exchanges.org/
https://www.conversationexchange.com/

How do you choose a topic beforehand?

Mostly when I'm starting out there are 5-6 topics already built in. We talk about ourselves. Our work, children, pets, etc. After that it becomes more difficult to think of new things to talk about. So I created a document of language exchange things to talk about which I share with people and we talk about various topics. When we get bored with that then it is time to move on to things like the above.

How do you prepare for it?

Sometimes I prepare, sometimes I don't. So for the airplane thing last night it was off-the-cuff with no preparation. I know the subject, since I spent 10 years in the airforce working on flight controls so I didn't have to learn the subject. Where I went wrong was vocabulary. But this type of impromptu description really points out the holes in your vocabulary knowledge. A few of the words above I really should have known like climb, lift and wing. Because I didn't know the words, I have to try to describe what I mean with words I do know, so this was difficult for alieron and landing gear.

The subject for next time, which is to explain the recipe for a favorite dish I will prepare for and learn the words for the various ingredients. I suspect most of the corrections then will be pronunciation.

Another thing to remember here is that we aren't using this exercise to be perfect! We're using this exercise of impromptu descriptions to identify gaps in our knowledge. She had to explain grammatical differences between English and French that she had noticed. This lead to a long discussion of how to use progressive tenses, and where you use perfect tenses.

So with these impromptu topics the point is to pick something you know, but would be difficult to explain even in your native language.

[zenmonkey]

I've seriously not done any work with languages for a long time now, and I really don't see myself doing any more work in the immediate future. I'm going to the gathering but not really holding out much hope of showing any improvement in any language that I've listed myself as studying. In fact, I'm positive that both vonPeterhof and Zenmonkey have surpassed me in Setswana. But hey, I'm the "typhoid Mary" of languages, I'm just a carrier and don't seem to get infected myself.

I seem to have caught another part of the disease, I have done zero Setswana for weeks. We can sit in the corner while Brun Ugle and vonPeterhof chat in the language.

[Brun Ugle]

I've seriously not done any work with languages for a long time now, and I really don't see myself doing any more work in the immediate future. I'm going to the gathering but not really holding out much hope of showing any improvement in any language that I've listed myself as studying. In fact, I'm positive that both vonPeterhof and Zenmonkey have surpassed me in Setswana. But hey, I'm the "typhoid Mary" of languages, I'm just a carrier and don't seem to get infected myself.

I seem to have caught another part of the disease, I have done zero Setswana for weeks. We can sit in the corner while Brun Ugle and vonPeterhof chat in the language.

I keep telling you I’ve given up on Setswana and you keep trying to drag me back in. How am I going to find time for French and Hebrew if I have to learn Setswana?

[StringerBell]

So I created a document of language exchange things to talk about which I share with people and we talk about various topics. When we get bored with that then it is time to move on to things like the above.

I had to login for the 4th time in 2 minutes just to thank you for posting this - I plan to refer to it when I want to do some writing but I'm not sure what to write about.

[rdearman]

So I created a document of language exchange things to talk about which I share with people and we talk about various topics. When we get bored with that then it is time to move on to things like the above.

I had to login for the 4th time in 2 minutes just to thank you for posting this - I plan to refer to it when I want to do some writing but I'm not sure what to write about.

If you want to write, you might be interested in another document I have in which I collected a bucket load of essay questions.

It doesn't display well, because there are special characters in there that don't play well with web-browsers, but you should be able to download it and load it into word, or libreoffice, or google docs.