After you’ve spent a good amount of time training your ears to HEAR the sounds of a new language (with music for example);
You’ve LISTENed carefully to all the different ways these sounds interact with each other, getting used to the unique patterns of the language;
Well, now it’s time to start SPEAKing!
With who though? What if you don’t have native speaker friends to ask? Or you want to get more conversationally fluent before talking to them?
Enter language exchange apps like HelloTalk, or countless others that have popped up recently.
With these apps, you find people to practice with who are also learning languages.
You offer to help others learn the language(s) you speak natively, and in exchange they help you to learn theirs!
It’s a win-win situation, and you don’t even have to pay for the basic features of most apps.
My language-learning exchange progression
- Find friends – Look for people learning your language who speak your target language. You can filter by age, gender, country of origin, etc. Choose people you’re interested in talking to, whose dialect you want to learn.
- Text introductions – Get to know each other, recognizing that many people won’t keep responding. Look for people who you click with, who you’re interested to learn more about. Don’t feel obligated to talk to anyone.
- Interact with messages – Long hold on a message to find features like correction, translation, and pronunciation (but ALWAYS be suspicious of machine translation and pronunciations. One time Airbnb translated the Mexican expression “qué padre” as “what a dad” – it actually means “how cool” 😃)
- Voice messages – This is a wonderful way to practice speaking and listening without the pressure and stress of live conversations! You can re-listen and re-record as many times as you need 🙂 If you don’t understand something, just ask! Good language exchange partners are always happy to help.
- Important note: since these are language exchanges, do your best to dedicate equal amounts of time to each language – it’s all about mutual assistance and learning!
- Voice calls – Once you feel ready (and even before! You have to jump in sometime 😉), try a live voice call with a language exchange partner. Remember, both of you are learning, so you understand exactly how tough this can be! Be patient and kind with each other. This stuff is hard.
- Video calls – If you feel confortable enough with people, video calls can help a ton: you get to see people’s mouth movements and expressions, which is huge for understanding them better! Don’t get too discouraged if you can’t understand everything yet – this takes many many hours of practice.
- Optional: In-person meetups – I’ve been lucky enough to make some great friends from these language exchanges, who I met up with in person after getting to know them for a while! Of course, always meet in a busy public place and take all necessary precautions.
And that’s my personal progression for starting to speak a language for free with native speakers, making friends with them as you go, and learning from each other.
If anything here doesn’t work well for you, please modify and adapt these steps to your own personal practice preferences.
However, if you want to learn to speak a language, eventually you’re gonna have to… well… SPEAK it!
And what better way than with fellow language learners around the world who are also looking for speaking practice!