Language Partners

Some language learners find it useful to have a language partner when they start learning a new language, while some other learners don't find it necessary, or ever it is not something that would cross their mind, to look for a language partner.
For you to decide whether you need a language partner, you need to ask yourself few questions:
1- What am I learning the language for?
2- How good do I want to be in it?
3- How important are culture, pronunciation and daily expressions to me?
Most people who want to learn a language, they want to be (or they don't mind being) perfect in it, having as much vocabulary as they possibly could have, and sounding like ,or close to, a native speaker.
To help you answering the question whether you need a language partner, let me tell you that a language partner can be a great boost to your language skills, but as you can tell, you need to have language skills to start with!
If you are an absolute beginner, then the need of a language partner will not be that important right now, unless you are interested in the culture of the country which you are about to learn its language (most learners are!) Say you want to learn Japanese, and (or because) you are really interested in the Japanese culture, then it would be a great idea to have a Japanese language partner, who would keep you interested and enthusiastic, and also keeps track of your language improvement, which is really important to you later to know exactly how far you gone with the language. Unbelievable how your partner would know exactly how good you are, better than you.

If you are not addicted to chatting, go for it. But if you are, then be careful. Having such a partner in an early stage can distract you from your main mission you have set, the language learning mission.Unless you already have some conversational skills you want to practice, try to keep the idea of a having a language partner later.
Once you decide you want a language partner, there are few things you need to keep in mind. First of all, a language partner is someone you have to stick to for the next year or two, or maybe longer, so be sure you get one who you can really talk to; someone who shares lots of interests with you. In the beginning you won't feel the need for being so picky, most language learners don't consider this when they look for a partner, since it's not ''personal'', but after few months, when they start having some conversational skills they start finding the need of having few conversations about random topics, guess what? the partner then doesn't make that good company to be with, and they start looking for another partner from scratch, or they draft into normal conversations with few native speakers online, which is not bad itself, but having a constant language partnership beats anything else. In one year, your partner would know everything about you, what you want to say, what is on your mind, what mistakes you always do, what words you don't know, what words you overuse, and much more. and this is incredible for your language progress.
If you are Jewish, look for  a Jewish partner, if you are a person full of passion for politics, try to look for someone like that, etc...
Soon I will post a list of free methods to find a language partner.

Livemocha... Why and why not!

Livemocha is a wonderful place to find your dream language partner, whether you are learning a language for fun, business or a trip, you will always find the right one for you there.
Just like any other social network, it's so hard to predict what kind of people you would find there, but somehow Livemocha happens to have serious learners.
The language teaching method is honestly retarded, a worse version of Rosetta Stone, which doesn't really do good itself. You still get the lesson presented to you through four-picture set, you just listen and go through the lesson and Livemocha expects you to memorize/learn all the vocabulary in the lesson, besides figuring out all the grammar rules just by listening and doing some silly review which doesn't really cover all the parts of the target lesson, and even it requires some extra knowledge about the target language sometimes , or at least some high IQ.

However still the 'submissions' part is wonderful, LiveMocha lets you read some test and let native speakers listen and evaluate it, in so many ways this helps, getting acquainted with how the language varies from one speaker to another, different accents and different intonation. Almost everything is different than what you expected after reviewing the Livemocha lessons. However they are still much fun and informative, and still you can ignore the text and say whatever on your mind, most reviewers wouldn't mind you doing so, and would just go on and correct your pronunciation. Same with 'written submission' which offers great tolerance itself to whatever you would like to write, though it does point you with few things you ''have'' to mention/translate.

Though the teaching method fails terribly, the one-million-member community is wonderful, just the language partner that you need is waiting for you there, just like you want them, you can start picking from tons and tons of native speakers who are so willing to help you out, in exchange of some help in your native language, or even for nothing!
Definitely do NOT waste your time going through Livemocha lessons, unless you have finished Michel Thomas and Pimsleur courses, you wouldn't get that much revenue from Livemocha if you are an absolute beginner. Build your language the right way and don't mess it up with some Rosetta-Stone-alike method, they are just not worth the time unless you already have an idea about what you are learning.
Honestly even comparing Livemocha+Rosetta Stone (VS) BYKI doesn't seem possible, BYKI is far much better with how it functions than Livemocha or COSTY Rosetta Stone. The way they both present flashcards is terrible, you wouldn't be getting that much of your hours spend on both.
Still Livemocha is the best there if you are just looking for language partners to share what you already learnt elsewhere with. Or at least to have some fun and support with the audio and text submissions.

Classroom Languages

I always heard that Hebrew is a classroom kind of language. So, as an independent (not necessarily smart) learner, I always avoided such languages, so I never really thought of brushing up my Hebrew by taking any individual actions. But later, when I wanted to dig in my forgotten Jewish roots, I decided that it was just the time that I SPEAK Hebrew, not just knowing few words, that are related to religion, anyway.

The typical recommendation was given by all my friends who know a bit about Hebrew, the start-taking-classes advice. But honestly, since I am not a classroom kind of guy, except for teaching on and off, I didn't want to sit any Hebrew classes.

So the ''challenge'' was to learn Hebrew without the classroom environment, even without a tutor. Actually struggling in learning Italian helped me a lot later with the dos and don'ts, so I decided to take the short way and avoid all mistakes related to my Italian learning experience, first mistake is surely sitting classes, second was concentrating on the written instead of the spoken language .So I immediately got Pimsleur Hebrew course, since Michelle Thomas, unfortunately, didn't make a Hebrew course.

After finishing level 1, I realized the main reason why people think of Hebrew as a classroom language. Actually it's the same reason why they assume that Japanese, Chinese and Russian are classroom kind too.

It's the fact that those languages don't have a typical Latin alphabets (Russian does to some extent) Even Japanese and Chinese don’t even have alphabets at all!

As far as I know, most language learners want to speak the language desperately, but they are not so desperate when it comes to writing down what they want to say. Google doesn’t let people hit so many dictionaries these days, even people started caring so much about their spelling.

So I believe that speaking a language should be much prior to writing it. I could lead a basic conversation without a problem in 2 months, and I never felt I am missing much just because I can’t write Shalom in Hebrew alphabet.

After I was able to have some basic conversation, I decided it was time to start writing down a little bit, and the process took me around two days to master (nothing smart about me, it’s just that easy) I realized then how different it is when you completely understand what you are trying to write, since I did it the other way around in Russian.

Nothing beats spoken words specially when they are in your target language, make sure you learn so much of the spoken language before you start worrying about how you write things down.

THERE IS NOTHING such as classroom languages, under normal circumstances you don’t need a classroom or a tutor, get all decent audio courses you can get, after few months of improving your conversational skills, feel free to start getting familiar with the written language.

How to make the most of flashcards

Flashcards or Flash Cards came up and down a long time ago. Though lots of language learners still count great respect for flashcards as an incredible impact on the language learning experience, people just think of flashcards , still you can hardly find any of those learners using flashcards regularly, or even at all.
Though flashcards are not really dead, they lost their importance to people's learning experience with today's world of iPods and visualization. Computer's other methods pushed flashcards aside.
But still flashcards are a wonderful way to learn vocabulary painlessly. Just if you know how fun they can be when you play them with other language partners, you would actually get addicted to them. I would like to share two methods or ways that I use flashcards with.
First method:
- Make some flashcards (make them in even numbers if you are playing this with 2, 4, 6 etc partners)
- Put them all above each other in random order.
- One of you should start picking one card, read it in the target language, then say out loud the English translation (assuming that you are English speakers)
- If the player guessed the meaning correctly, he would keep the card to the end of the game.
- If the player doesn't guess it correctly, he should leave the card at the bottom of the cards.
- The rest of the players do the same still all cards are out.
- Each player's cards get counted, and the score would be written down.
I have been trying this with my nephew and nieces, (after they got really bored and disappointed with Rosetta Stone and stared hating the Japanese language) I started playing flashcards this way in Japanese (The kids are 4, 6 and 9 years old) Surprisingly, the 6 year-old girl is the one who been keeping the highest score for like 5 months now, we keep the scores' record and we add up the new score every time we play, the kids find it MUCH fun that they even ask like everyday to play it.
Second method:
Now the second method is not really a method, it's a computer software called BYKI (Before You Know It) And just like the name says it, you really learn so many words so fast and painlessly.
Though the program is free, and it got tons of words list made by the online community. You actually have to make a paid upgrade to be able to create your own words list. However, if you need to make a BYKI words list, just send it to me and I will create it for you for free, I had my hard time too before I could upgrade.