If you want to practice your speaking and listening skills in a foreign language, you may be interested in a language exchange with a native speaker and English learner, in addition to meeting with the drop-in and individual tutors available at Reed. During the exchange, you speak with your language partner for about half an hour in English to help them with their spoken English skills and then for half an hour in their native language to help you. Language exchanges can be especially useful if you’re studying or practicing a language not currently offered at Reed or not supported by Reed tutors (Arabic and Japanese, for instance). There are several websites that help language learners meet for a language exchange. Continue reading “Online language exchanges”
Tag: listening and speaking
Practice the Tones
Using tones to distinguish lexical and grammatical meaning is not always an easy task for native speakers of non-tonal languages. When I taught Chinese many years ago, the tones were the biggest headache for my students. As adults, my students were good at learning vocabulary and grammar (adults learn these differently from children who acquire Chinese as their first language, but that’s a whole different topic), but almost all of them struggled more or less with the tones. At the time, I had always wished there was a tool that could show the students the Pinyin of the characters and pronounce it for them, so that my students could get help whenever they practice. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything at the time, but such tools exist now and are available at Reed.