The Secret To A Perfect Language Exchange - Part 1
The goal of this article is to explain how to have a successful and productive language exchange by giving advice that I have learned from my own experiences and clear examples on how you can implement it immediately. The article is divided into two parts.
Part One: Backstory
First let’s start with a real life account of my very first language exchange, and then let’s talk about the things you can do to avoid the problems that I had in order to have the best language exchange of your life. If you don’t want to hear my story (I understand), simply skip ahead to part two of this article instead, which is filled with advice and information on language exchanges.
Ok, let’s begin. A language exchange is when two people meet for a coffee or speak on Skype and spends half the conversation in one language and the other half in another. This is a great way to have a native or high level speaker of your target language for free.
This is my story. I hope it helps and that the person it’s about never reads it (only joking, I’m sure he is a nice guy really!). It was March 2014, and after studying 30 minutes of Spanish every day with my textbook, I wanted to advance and had read that a language exchange was a vitally important part of studying a language. So I had learned quite a few phrases in three months, was feeling good about myself, and felt ready to have a conversational exchange. So, I went on this site here and started chatting with a young man from Spain that was living in my city, let’s call him Señor X. No, wait, that’s silly, let’s call him José.
My experience
José was a nice guy! We spoke a bit on Facebook and decided to meet for a drink and practise our languages. We met in town and went to a local bar. He greeted me in English, so we continued like that. We arrived at the bar and spoke for about 45 minutes in English. I then decided to test my Spanish, so I said “Do you mind if we practice some Spanish?” Claro (Of course) he said. Ok! Perfect! This is cool! Here I am, in a bar with a native Spanish person, about to speak Spanish for the first time, how awesome am I? If only my friends could see me now. Ok, here it goes, yes, ok, let’s speak Spanish, ok, umm, wait, ¿qué?
When I started to speak, I realized that my essential phrases such as “What is your name?”, “Where are you from?”, and “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” suddenly didn’t seem to fit the situation. The actual conversation happened a bit like this:
- Me: ummm, hola, ¿qué tal?
- José: … bien, ¿y tú?
- Me: bien… ¿Cómo te llamas?
- José: What? Haha, you already know my name.
What happened?
There it was, my official debut in Spanish and it lasted less than 15 seconds. I soon realized that I wasn’t actually able to have a conversation in Spanish. A combination of low confidence, basic vocabulary, and lack of experience cut my Spanish adventure short before it ever really started. For five more minutes we sort of struggled through broken Spanish and José replying in English with comments such as “where did you hear that? haha” and “that sounds strange”. Defeated and disheartened, we switched back to English and continued that way for about another 90 minutes with me occasionally saying random words like “Door, that is puerta in Spanish, isn’t it?”, to which José would reply “yeah, that’s door”. Why I stayed there so long I have no idea, but after about two and a half hours, we left.
- José: Sorry, we didn’t really speak Spanish today, maybe next time we should speak a bit more.
- Me: Yea, we spoke for two and a half hours in English and when I spoke Spanish, you casually laughed and responded in English. No, I didn’t actually say that, but I was thinking it. I simply said “Yea no problem, maybe”.
My takeaway
I don’t blame José for this bad language exchange experience, I accept full responsibility for it. I didn’t have confidence, didn’t outline what I wanted, and he just went along with the flow naturally. I left that evening and felt really bad, as if I had wasted three months studying Spanish every day for nothing.
Ok, so after my horrible first experience, I am also here to share the things I have learned since then which will help you avoid bad exchanges like this and make it smoother for both you and your language buddy (remember that successful exchange is also about your language friend as well!).
I soon picked myself back up and later read the book Fluent in 3 Months by Benny Lewis, which really emphasises speaking from day one! So, three years, four languages and a few countries later, I have returned with my advice on how to do an exchange.
My advice
Check out my next blog post (part 2) to see what advice I have for you!