How friends can help you to learn a language
Learning doesn’t have to be a lonely process. Teachers have their place, but there are lots of ways in which friends can help you to learn a language. I’m going to talk about 5 ways of doing this because some of the thinking around language exchanges is not very imaginative and just as people are all different, the ways in which people can help us are diffrent too.
1. Monolingual conversations
This doesn’t work well when you first start to learn a language because you don’t know enough. However, if you build the habit of only using the target language with certain friends, it’s really good practice for you.
I have a friend who only speaks to me in Romanian. That’s our language for communication. So my brain knows that communicating with her means communicating in Romanian -however complicated the topic or however challenging it becomes because we’re talking about things that are important to us.
Sure, she’ll help if I get stuck, but I like the challenge of finding another way to say the thing if I can’t say it exactly as I would want to.
This is not a language exchange. These have to be people who want to be your friends anyway because there is no exchange of skills in the traditional sense!
Another way for this to work is if you find someone who wants to talk with you, but who doesn’t speak your first language at all. Then you just have to do your best and you can’t revert to your first language because it’s easier. That option is not available, so you have to be a bit more creative!
Also, you don’t have to live in the country where the target language is spoken for this to work out. The internet opens up engless opportunities for us to find people with whom we have shared interests or experiences and these can easily lead to this type of monolingual friendship or exchange. You might even find some local people too!
2. Practise both languages
I have a friend with whom I meet and we swap the language each time. If we speak English this week, it will be Romanian next time. Sometimes people swap the language after half an hour, but this can make it harder because you talk about all the easy subjects first. For this reason, we’ve found that having one language per meeting works best, but you can experiment and see what works for you.
But the idea of alternating the languages keeps it fair and it’s really good if the goal is for both of you to learn and help each other.
Doing it this way also avoids the problem that you communicate more in the language that’s easier for communication – which, in practice, means that the person with the weaker language skills actually gets fewer chances to practise. That’s not fair because the person with the weaker skills has the most to learn. But we as humans often look for the easiest solution, which is why we often end up going for the easiest language for communication.
The problem with this approach is that it’s too structured for some people.
3. Do whatever feels good on that day
You can use both languages, keep switching, and train your brain in that way. This is much more spontaneous and less structured, but if both people want to learn, you need to make sure that they have opportunities to do that!
With German, it’s often swung in my favour and I got to practice more, which sometimes made me feel bad! But at the same time, quickly switching between languages or saying the same thing in multiple languages is a good skill to have and it helps your brain to switch faster if you give it plenty of opportunities to practise doing that.
4. Be inspired by their content
Sometimes it doesn’t have to be a dialogue! If you have friends who create posts, videos, blogs, podcasts, or any other kind of written, visuall or audio content, they can inspire you! You can learn from them! You can support their content too with likes, comments, and shares, but it’s a good opportunity for you to learn as well.
On the podcast I often talk about my good friend Rita Prazeres Gonçalves who has Portuguese episodes on both of her podcasts –
I am genuinely interested in this content, but it also gives me a real-life reason to practise listening to authentic Portuguese.
5. Both just use your own language
This can work really well too and in fact it’s one of the things that helped me most at the beginning of my Romanian journey – so don’t discount it!
I met an exchange partner online, someone who then became a friend. We fell into the rhythm of both using our first language. Ok, not on the telephone – we did do that, but it feels a bit strange after a while, so now we just choose one language. But in terms of writing or leaving voice messages, we both use our first language.
This helped my friend with her listening skills – to have real English, spoken by a real person and not as part of a language exercise in a course.
It helped me with listening too, but it also helped me with vocabulary and, equally if not more importantly, I learned how someone uses that vocabulary to build sentences.
This is one of the things that helps me the most, especially at the beginning, when I don’t have a feeling for what sounds good and correct.
Which phrases come up again and again? Where do the words go in the sentence? If it’s spoken, how does the language sound as the words come together and what is the rhythm of the sentences like? This is invaluable!
It also means that you can have a more menaingful interaction at the beginning when your passive language is more developed than the sentences that you can actively create.
So, how about you?
Which of these ideas have you tried? How did it work out for you? Are there any that you want to try now?
If you’re interested in language exchanges, I posted another article about how to get the best out of language exchanges.
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