Guide to Tandem Language Exchange
For students who have already learned the basics of a language, doing a tandem conversation exchange with a native speaker is one of the best ways to improve further. It's especially helpful for learning how to have real conversations and learn common expressions. It will also help you learn more about the culture and make new friends from other countries.
This guide aims to help you find a partner and plan a first conversation together.
Language Level
When you sign up on the site, we first ask you to enter what languages you are learning and your current level. This is really important, as it helps other people find a partner matching their own level. If there's too high an imbalance of skills, the exchange won't be as beneficial as it could be and often leads to one side losing motivation to keep it up.
Common Interests
Since you are likely to spend a fair amount of time together, it's a good idea to search for people with some common interests to yourself. It will make it easier to find interesting topics to talk about and improve the chances of good personal chemistry between you both. So it's really important that you have already taken some time to fill out your profile here on the site.
In the beginning, it's maybe less of an issue though, since just talking about the language and culture often becomes big enough discussion topics anyway for the first couple of meetups.
Pick the Place Carefully
A cafe or even a bar that you really like can make an excellent place to meet up. However, if too many of your friends are around or if it's too lively, it might be hard to focus on what you are doing. For some people, a quiet place can make the dialogue a bit stiff, especially when you feel a bit insecure about your skills. Then it can actually be beneficial to have a bit more background noise.
Since feeling comfortable and having a good dialogue is really one of the most important things here, we normally recommend people try out a few different places and see what works best for both sides.
Meeting Up Regularly
Depending on how busy you are, this might be an issue. But in order to make some real progress, you'd need to meet up at the very least once a week. Less than this and you'll forget too much of what you've learned last time, and you'd have to start almost from the beginning each time.
First Time Meeting Your Tandem Partner
Plan topics ahead that suit each other's level. It can be anything that you're curious about, like cultural differences, food, hobbies.
Some activities you can do together:
- Read books / articles together
- Translate texts
- Discuss the topics you have prepared
Stick to the Plan
Try to follow through with the plan and don't cheat by switching to English. Spend at least 30 minutes in each language so that you really have to try hard to make up sentences and use a dictionary or any other tool you might have available to fill up the missing vocabulary. Remember that the harder you try, the more you'll learn!