In my seventh grade French class, our teacher handed us little slips of paper with the names and addresses of our French pen pals. I remember the thrill of receiving those hand written letters (even though I could barely make heads or tails of her penmanship). Fast forward a few decades later, and voila! Thanks to Kevin Chen, founder of italki, you can enter a free online community that helps people from around the world practice their language skills for free (and no snail mail waiting periods between conversations).
Kevin and I discussed his initiative, and the expat language scene in Shanghai. Check out excerpts from our conversation:
Kevin Chen: “I tried learning Chinese Mandarin as an adult in Shanghai in 2004. In addition to Mandarin classes, I also started doing language exchanges. Like many people, I found that I learned the language much more quickly from trying to communicate with people, rather than sitting at home with a textbook. I think both methods are important, but in traditional language education, one side is completely neglected. Looking back at when I was learning French, I studied it for three years and never spoke to a French person once. It’s crazy and absurd to study a language, and never use it to actually communicate. It leads to situations where you can remember whether or not a chair is masculine or feminine, but you can’t say, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
With the internet, this issue of talking with native speakers of a language, is no longer a cost issue. With Skype and other VOIP options, talking internationally is free. However, how do you find a language partner? There needs to be a place where you can find friends, and connect. That was the original inspiration for italki. Since then, we’ve built on that community idea — what if you could ask questions about learning a language? What if you could get your writings corrected? What if you didn’t have time for a language exchange, but were willing to pay for a teacher? That’s how we’ve tried to build italki out.
I think if you really want to understand another place, you really have to have some grasp of their language. At the very least, this is so you can actually talk to the people on the ground — always going through a translator is inevitably an artificial process. Being able to read the local media, or get your own information firsthand, I think is critical to really understanding a place.
Expats that don’t learn Mandarin in China — I think it’s a bit shameful. I suspect that many of these expats are only touring through China or work in international environments. On some level, I think they can only look at China from the perspective of data, or else they simply skate on the surface. You don’t need Mandarin to live in Shanghai, but you need it to actually understand it.
That being said, italki is a global website, and Chinese-English is only one of many language pairs that exist. We have tens of thousands of users learning Spanish, Japanese, French, etc.”
.
Ok, so maybe I can go back to trying to learn Mandarin. (This time without a special request for a lobotomy.) If you want to follow Kevin, you know where to find him on Twitter.
Related Posts
Tags: italki, kevin chen, learning a new language, online language school
