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What do you talk about with your language exchange partners?

Hi, everyone. I want to practice English. And I found some language exchange partners. But I don't know how to start a chat. 

Asking them where they live, how old they are, what the job is. I just felt  like I was a police questioning them. After three questions, I felt embarrassed and I wondered if I should keep talking.

So how are you start a chat with a language exchange partner. And what do  you talk about?

评论 · 6

2

Well, it depends on your language level in the practice languages. When I first started trying to chat in French, I couldn't do much more than respond to very basic questions and even that was a stretch. Hopefully you have very understanding language partners and you both really want to help each other.

One thing that you can do is plan ahead before the chat and suggest topics that you would like to try and discuss. Hopefully you have also made it very clear what your level is. If you go in knowing roughly what to talk about, you can at least look up a little vocabulary ahead of time.

If you run out of topics quickly, you can try some open ended questions. i.e. do you have any stories from your childhood that you would like to share? Can you describe the town where you grew up? What was your favorite meal last week?

In other words, try to get the other person to talk about something that let's them go into as much detail as they can. Don't constantly interrupt your partner, but do try to ask some questions based on what they have told you. It's good practice for both of you to confirm that you are understanding what they are saying. It's also a great way to branch off into other topics.

Example:

A) What was your favorite meal last week?

B) I had pizza on Tuesday, it was great.

A) Oooh , pizza. I love pizza too. What was on the pizza?

B) Bacon, onions, and pepperoni. What do you like on pizza?

A) All kinds of things. Once I made a pizza with chicken and french fries on it!

B) No way! What made you think of that?

.... and on it goes.

Even with a very basic level of vocabulary, you can talk for quite a while about simple stuff. Also don't be afraid to throw in words in your native language if you don't know the target language word. Hopefully your partner will help you out with the vocabulary you don't know and vice versa. Have google translate handy just in case :)


1
My experience has been that it is good to hold the conversation about language learning goals, how to do things, etc, in the language of the more advanced learner.  In my case I have always felt my partners English skills are stronger than my Spanish skills, so we do this in English.  Then we split the time left and do what each person chooses for half the time.  I am always prepared with activities to do that are within my level and that do not require specialized teaching skills on the part of my partner.  I take responsibility for my own learning and use them as a consultant.´I look for activities I think they would find interesting while I learn.  For example, if Vladana was my partner, I would probably suggest a history exhibit on Google Arts and Culture.  We could discuss the pictures, read the articles and/or work on translating them into Czech if I were wanting to learn Czech.  If they choose to have an unstructured conversation in English for the portion that they choose that is fine with me.  But for my language learning time, an unstructured conversation at first was too hard for me.  Now I can do an unstructured conversation but my anxiety is reduced when I know we have plenty of material that we can talk about things other than my personal life.  I tend to think others would find my life boring.  Very much of a conversation about what we ate and what we did, like Vince suggested, probably would get boring to me unless my partner were really good at conversations.   
1
That is a really big problem in case you wish to practice with your language partners over a long term. Books, reference, articles, videos, or audios that are relevant to English learning and study can be involved into your practice.  
0
That is very true if you are always talking about personal lives,the discussion can barely sustain long with high passions. Therefore, suitable preparation for relevant materials ahead of the chat would necessitate a cheerful, awesome and enlightening discussion.   
0

I like to start off with a discussion about our language learning goals, how long we have been learning the language, our language exchange experience so far (often times people have never done them or done very few) and talk about any structure either of us might prefer.  A little bit of conversation about our lifestyle and our schedule tends to come naturally from this. I explain that for the portion of the session where I choose what we do, I prefer to do activities using online materials to help us instead of simply have a conversation.  If the other person is not familiar with how to share the screen in Skype, I teach them this.  I have found many partners have only done unstructured conversations before and are happy to learn that there are other ways to do language exchanges.   Some of the materials that I have used to give us interesting things to discuss include:- https://www.eslconversationquestions.com/english-conversation-questions/topics/  -YouTube videos we like-  music and TED talks, pronunciation videos (Use watch2gether.com  to watch them together and discuss.) -Discuss videos about where they live, places they have traveled to, and places they would like to travel to. -Use Google Arts and Culture or other sites on the internet to look at art or photographs together and discuss.-Use Bing images and discuss what we see.-Use GoComics.com to use English comics and translate them into the native language of the partner.-When using Zoom instead of Skype, use radio.garden to listen to radio stations together. -Read books together,  the native speaker reads the phrase first and then the other imitates).  


 

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