زبان ها را هوشمندانه تر و سریعتر یاد بگیرید

This is an All Ears English Podcast, Episode 24: Wisdom Wednesday.

Welcome to the All Ears English Podcast, where you’ll finally get real, native English conversation. Now here are your hosts, Lindsay McMahon, the ‘English Adventurer’ and Gabby Wallace, the ‘Language Angel,’ coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

In today’s episode, find out how you can use your own native language to help you learn English.

Hey Lindsay. How’s it going?

Hey Gabby. How are you today?

Good. So I heard you have a good idea for practicing and improving a new language.

Yes. I have a great idea. This is something I’ve used for Japanese and for Spanish and it’s turned out to be really useful. So the trick is find a language exchange.

What’s a language exchange?

A language exchange is (um) an opportunity to find someone who speaks the language that you’re learning as a native speaker and you sit down with that person and you exchange languages. So you speak in your native language for half of the time and in their native language for half of the time and the person corrects you. Okay.

That’s so cool.

Yeah, it’s very cool. So…

So, it’s usually free right?

Yes.

Okay.

Definitely free. Yeah.

So I’ve heard of at least one website where you can do this online (um) using Skype or using (um) (you know) G-chat or whatever. There’s one called Livemocha. Do you know that one?

Yeah. Livemocha is one.

Okay.

Is one way you can do it and another thing, place you can go is (uh) languageexchange.com.

I’ve heard of that one too.

Yep.

Mixxer.com.

Mixxer, I don’t know.

M-i-x-x-e-r.

Okay.

It might be the same as Languageexchange.

It might be. It might be the same.

Okay.

And another place you can go is Craigslist. I mean, (you know), obviously with Craigslist, you have to be careful, but that’s for a local connection, right?

Yeah.

(Um), just meet the person in a public place. Um… yeah.

Well, I was gonna (going to) say locally speaking for you guys living in the US, (I mean), you can go to a meet-up. There’s (there are) often meet-ups for specific language groups. (Like) I know in Boston there’s a Spanish meet-up for people who wanna (want to) speak Spanish and learn English and (um) or rather people who speak Spanish and wanna (want to) learn English, and English speakers…

Yeah.

who wanna (want to) learn Spanish. (Um) there’s one for Arabic, for French, for Portuguese. I mean there’s (there are) so many different meetups.

(Um) so that’s a great way to do it. Also, if you live near a university, check out if the university has any language exchange set up (like) in their international department.

Awesome.

Yeah.

So there’s (there are) some great tips. So go for a language exchange. The point is you need to be practicing speaking as much as you can and a language exchange is a great way to do that.

Yeah. Cool. It sounds like a, a great way to practice.

Absolutely.

All right. So I’ll see you tomorrow for our (uh) Deep Thoughts Thursday.

Absolutely. I’ll be there.

Cool.

Will you be there?

Yeah. I will.

See you then.

See you then.

Hey. So I’ve heard that a lot of students get stuck at the intermediate level and they’re looking for a way to push through, break through to that advanced, fluent level of English. One of the best ways that you can do this is to listen to the podcast we have here but then also check your listening by reading our transcripts. (Um) it’s the best way to get the most out of your All Ears English experience. So you can find all of our transcripts, everything we say, word for word, on our website. It’s www.allearsenglish.com/conversations.

Thanks for listening to the All Ears English Podcast. We’re here to help you learn English and you can help us by leaving a five star review on iTunes.

See you next time!