I’ve had many language exchange partners over the years. I can’t seem to find the right balance in terms of communication and find myself getting easily overwhelmed and losing interest because I’m not really looking for a friendship. I’m just looking for someone to literally exchange languages with, but understandably so, people I partner up with always end up communicating with me solely in English and I find that these are the language partners I lose interest in and stop messaging. Another issue for me is the time difference, which I guess not much can be done to fix.
Does anyone have a similar language exchange experience? If not, what do you do to make the most out of language exchange?
2 comments
One thing you could do is agree on a timer from the start. 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes in one language, then switch.
#english: In general it helps when you both agree that half of the time is dedicated to English and the other half to Japanese. I’ve never ran into your problem where the entire session becomes English session, when it bleeds into my time I make sure to remind them and it works pretty well. For those particular eager ones I will lay out some exercises in the English portion to ensure they put in some good weight lifting, they almost seem relieved when we finally entered the Japanese half.
#time difference: I can wake up anytime so the time difference itself doesn’t really affect me, but I’m mainly bothered by its aftermath. During the times when I’m readily available and don’t have to go out of my way to accommodate, over 80% of the people available are retirees. Then it’s really hit-and-miss.
#my struggles: exchange was the quickest way for me to realize, including myself, most people are pretty boring. It was irrelevant of which language we were using, I‘m just prone to lose interest in general.