*Multilingual Native Speaker Group* Would this be a good idea? A small group of people (maybe 5 or 6 might be ideal) on a video call, each with a different native language, each speaking only their own native language - to join the group you have to bring a new language to the table and you have to be able to understand most of what is said in all the others. You wouldn't say anything in the foreign language, unless you needed to say a short word or phrase in order to ask for help with understanding something, for example to ask about grammar. You'd be in the group to practise your listening skills, not your speaking skills. You'd have to establish how quickly/slowly people would speak and how obscure the vocabulary they would use would be, to match the comprehension skills of the other people. What combinations of languages do people think they could cope with?

I think I probably discovered a special fascination with Mandarin when I realised that to me some of the sounds seem like water dropping onto glass.* I also think the changes in the third tone (falling-rising tone) feel like changing gears in a car. Earlier in life I remember noticing that the way words change in Italian seems particularly beautiful. And there have been various times when the feel of the words of a language in my mouth has struck me as particularly satisfying - Flemish, Japanese and Spanish in particular. * if you are into phonetics, I'm talking about unaspirated, voiceless plosives as initial consonants.

I'm a native speaker of English, but I was struggling to explain a point about grammar (about "since") to a Greek friend of mine, and am wondering if anyone can give a better explanation: It's not grammatically correct to say "in Greece we consider that children should learn a foreign language since the age of eight" [you would have to say "from", not "since"], but it is correct to say "any child who attends a Greek secondary school should be quite proficient in a foreign language, as they will have been learning it since the age of eight". Why? I think the answer is that the "since" time has to be in the past relative to (i.e. has to be a time prior to) some other specific moment in time expressed or implied in the sentence, so that you are looking back in time from that other moment to the "since" time. So in my second example the implied time is "the time when a child is attending secondary school", and you look back in time, from the perspective of that time, to the earlier "since" time when the child was eight. Perhaps a corollary of this is that normally "since" is used with a perfect tense (though that could be pluperfect or future perfect, just to catch you out). Is that right? Is there a better, more precise or at least clearer way of explaining this?

Hi, are you looking for an English native speaker for a conversation exchange? I'm learning a few different languages as a hobby, and I could probably fit in one or two more conversation exchanges. So if you are a native speaker of one of the languages I can hold a conversation in, if you message me we can see what works :-) I can at least more or less hold a conversation in Dutch/Flemish (maybe A2 for speaking on the CEFR scale, B1 for understanding?), French (C1?), German (C1?), Greek (A2/B1?), Italian (B1?), Japanese (A2?), Mandarin Chinese (A2/B1?), Portuguese (B1?), Russian (B1?) and Spanish (B2). I speak British English with a fairly standard accent (similar to contemporary RP, if you know what that is). My availability is limited to evenings (British time) except at the weekend.