Day 1 of Skype Language Exchange The first day is always the hardest. Apparently even native speakers get what is commonly known as 'foreign language anxiety (FLA).' I now get a glimpse of what my students go through when I put them on the spot. Okay, so I message a bunch of people on the conversation exchange website and I get a few replies here and there. So finally, I installed Skype and added various people to the list and then I got struck by FLA. I felt weirdly anxious and nervous and an irrational fear about Skype and talking to complete strangers online. This feeling persists for a few hours at least. I then make a decision that I'm not going to care, I'm just going to jump in head first. So the first person I talk to is Tony Parker (not his actual name) who's a huge NBA fan. Sadly, he had trouble hearing me while I could hear him perfectly. Being the keen learners that we were, we try and tweak some settings in the hope that this problem will be remedied. Unfortunately, nothing helped. Swing and a miss! The second person I spoke to (whose name I can't even recall now) was from Taiwan. Much better connection and he's studying to be an English teacher as well which I thought was pretty awesome. He was very patient and a good teacher and I didn't expect the conversation to flow so well. We talked for about half an hour. Next up was a lady from China now studying in Melbourne. We spoke for about 45minutes and discovered that 25 is quite old in China. I'm like ... What?! No way. It's good to get little tit bits about China and cultural norms. And lastly, I think he was from China. Yes, he was. Maybe he was the English teacher, I honestly cannot remember. Was another good, long conversation which flowed fairly well for 45 minutes once again. Anyway, after about two hours of talking, I really had to rest my voice as I had a 6 hour class to teach the very next day. The first day was a bit of an eye opener and it helped me to establish some ground rules for language exchange. For instance, when we're practising Chinese, you need to reply in Chinese (not English!). Also, it would be nice if you asked me questions back in Chinese like a regular conversation. That forces me to think in Chinese and rely less on translating (which I try not to do but subconsciously it rears its ugly head).