Many various kinds of learning methods exist nowadays and you can find them as easily as clicking your computer mouse. That is the good news. The bad news is which one to use. For experienced language learners, they may have figured out their potential and learning style. Nevertheless, this does not mean that they can be free from the confusion of the leaning method.
I have read about many language learning methods. I have even mix-and-matched them in order to find the most suitable one. However, I still sometimes find it difficult to learn with the existing methods and this condition keeps on urging me to find another method.
One of my previous methods is learning a foreign language in a foreign language, where I explain about how I use English to learn languages most of the time, Chinese to learn Tagalog, and Esperanto to learn French. The learning can be done by tandem learning or reading textbooks. I found out that this method is not really effective to some extent, so I needed to find another method.
Language tutor learns languages
I have been working part-time as a language tutor online and offline for a few years. I help students from around the world to learn languages, like English, Chinese, Indonesian, and Esperanto.Throughout this teaching-learning activity, I get the chance to observe the way students from various countries and levels learn languages. Fortunately, I also can learn many things from them, from their communication culture to their amazing language learning stories.
An idea occurred one day to me, "Why don't I teach a language to learn a language for free?" So that "free" refers to teaching for free and learning for free. It worked quite well, however, you need to have a conversational level of the foreign language that you want to use to teach and practice simultaneously.
For instance, I have a conversational level of Spanish so I can teach Indonesian, Chinese or other languages in Spanish. Several ways how I am benefited are I can practice speaking and asking for corrections if I make mistakes, improve my teaching skills, get to know new friends, and learn for free!
You also can offer to be a "good listener" by giving your language partner the opportunity to teach you your target language in your native language. In this case, you are not required to use any foreign languages. What you do is to correct the mistakes and help your language partner to improve his/ her conversation skill, as well as learn languages simultaneously.
What do you think about this article? Do you have other language learning methods? Share your opinions in the comment and subscribe to this blog to get the updates in your inbox.
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