Hello everyone! Have you made a conscious choice today? If so, don't forget to write to us with #vyb-act ! Let's make conscious attitudes become positive hype.
Today my conscious attitude is to tell you about a project I've been thinking about since before Vyb existed. For those who don't know, I'm Brazilian and I'm not fluent in English. I write to you using the help of Google Translate and Grammarly. My English is still basic, although here in Brazil, people consider it intermediate, I have a lot of difficulties and I'm far from fluency. I have a certain facility for reading, however, for writing and speaking, I still have a long way to go.
The biggest difficulty for someone to learn a language completely is the lack of practice. Practicing is essential for a person to get as close as possible to fluency in the language they want to learn. For this reason, I would like to create groups with the intention of practicing languages. How would these groups work? I confess I still haven't thought of everything, lol
However, I'd like to share what I've thought so far:
1 – The groups would actually be doubles. I'll give an example from my case: I want to improve my English, for this reason, my partner would have to be someone native or fluent in the language. The pairs would have to talk every day so that there would be practice, of course, schedules would have to be established because everyone has their real-life tasks. For the conversation to flow, themes would have to be established, for example; movies, music, series, and so on. Ideally, it should be an easy topic that you both enjoy.
2 – You need to have a basic understanding of the language: Well, it's not classes, it's just conversation. It can be done in writing or audio. Ideally, there should be honest and gentle feedback between the pair about each other's performance. If both want to improve in each other's language, great, it's a perfect match! However, if only one of you is basic knowledge of your partner's language, the other person's job will be a little more difficult, and the conversation will not flow. Once again I'll give my example: My fluent language is Portuguese, if my partner doesn't have any notion of conversational Portuguese either by message or audio, I'll have to teach him and I don't know how I would do it in a way that the conversation would flow well since I'm not a teacher and I don't know the most efficient teaching techniques that wouldn't interfere with a conversation.
3 – Challenge yourself! If you would like to participate in this project but don't know the basics of a new language, take a month or more to learn something about the language you want to speak fluently. That way you will communicate better with your partner. I recommend Scott H. Young's book Ultralearning to help you not only at this stage but throughout your project to learn a new language.
4 – The pairs can be exchanged after a while. A month talking with a partner, you can have a conversation experience with another person, so everything becomes more dynamic and you better educate your ear for different dictions and vocabularies.
5 – The main intention is to improve the language, the second main intention is to make friends and have fun. After all, it's all about being nice to talk to someone in a language you want to learn and about a subject you both like.
Now I want to hear from you: What do you think about this idea? Which languages would you like that to be part of this project? Comment here your native languages and which ones you would like to learn! Shall we kick off?
