If so, how has it affected your attitude and motivation towards mastering the language? Online or Offine.
I speak from the perspective of the online l student-teacher correspondence on Italki. Firstly, as a serious language learner, I am well-aware of the ethical issues and boundaries of appropriate conduct between teacher and studemt. This is neither a dating nor a strictly social networking site. That said, the personal connection I have in mind is not only romantic but also platonic and casual.
Quant à moi, this experience hit me when I least expected it and has so-far served as a double-edged sword in my personal French-learning journey, igniting a hitherto untapped passion and perhaps accentuating my negative, quintessentially perfectionist tendencies as a language learning. To recount, I was amazed that I had so much shared interests with one of my first French tutors that finding conversation topics was not only effortless, but also overwhelming in its potential. That is, we often come to the point where we do not know where to start a conversation. She and I are around the same age and level of maturity and have compatible personalities and temperaments, and I just feel like I can be truly and comfortably be myself around her, even if she is still technically the teacher. Consequently, it is not hard to keep our conversations goings, even 100% in French, to the point where even an hour-long session hardly feels enough. And strangely enough, we both feel the same.
This is not a budding love interest, though, but I do feel even more motivated to not only master the language but, more importantly, to grow as a person in the process. I am not yet advanced or near-fluent in French, maybe between a B1 and B2 on the CEFR standard, while my tutor is perfectly bilingual in French and English. However, this does not prevent me from resorting to English as a fall-back option; as I discipline myself to use French as regularly as I can in all my correspondences with her. Not necessarily because learning a foreign language sustainably demands such discipline and transient discomfort (although it does!), but rather because I am intrigued by my interlocuter and her culture, to the point where I would . But I feel like cultivating close and deep cross-cultural connections like these, even if they arise fortuitously, has motivated me to improve more than any prospective language certification or job offer ever has.
Now I can start envisioning and, indeed, striving towards more and more flawless conversations with my tutor: how much richer and meaningful our interactions will be once I have enough vocabulary, grammar mastery, or speaking experience to talk to her about anything. Suddenly, the language becomes a living, breathing, personally-relevant entity instead of a rigid set of rules and I am more diligent and conscientious in refining the complex nuances of casual French and have a insatiable, almost ingenuous desire to expand my vocabulary and to perfect my pronunciation with all the tools albeit limited at my disposal. I might even one day strive to take the DELF B2 exam to make it "official" and live for an extended period in a French-speaking country. Unfortunately, this quixotic, starry-eyed motivation comes with a slight, though not fatal, drawback: I become a bigger perfectionist than I already am, particularly feeling frustration that I am not progressing as quicky as I want or that I was not "lucky" enough to be fluent in French already. Pour faire une historie courte, somewhat blinded the euphoria and desire to cultivate a new friendship or the need to constantly make a "good" impression, I occassionally forget that I am still a learner, limited by my inexperience with French or an underestimation of the amount of time and effort needed to reach conversational fluency.
In any case, I think the "interpersonal" and "intimate" dimensions of foreign languages is still worth reflecting on, as others experience not just the student-teacher dynamic but, more broadly, intercultural contact differently. That may motivate some, discourage some (in some cases, forcing them to confront considerable cultural and lingusitic differences), whilst leaving others unmoved.
Yes, I have pretty close friendships with three of my language tutors, two men and one woman, all much younger than I am. I know more about their personal life than a typical student-teacher relationship and they know a lot more about mine than I would ever share professionally in my own profession. The distance and online part of it seems to make sharing feelings and opinions safer-- there are some natural boundaries that will never get crossed. We come from different cultures and very different environments and it fascinates me to discover what are the differences and what are the similarities. With some of my teachers we have also discussed the Myers Briggs Personality Test. Some have taken it, and so far all of my favorite teachers who have discussed their results with me have come out to be different types but share one characteristic with me. We are all N´s-- intuitive types which are much less common in the general population than among people who study foreign languages voluntarily. I think N´s can often find it very refreshing talking to other N´s.
