People have learned French for months now and yet they still feel uncomfortable practicing it or speaking with native speakers.
This article can help you resolve that problem. With a site called Speaky, you can improve your French skills quickly from the comfort of your own home. Best of all it’s free.
How and why you need to practice French with natives
There are many benefits of practicing and testing your language skills with native speakers:
- First off, you’ll learn the perfect pronunciation and rhythm of the language by using common expressions and vocabulary.
- Secondly, you will learn about different cultures and opinions while making friends around the world. Who knows, visiting your language buddy might be your first step to an amazing trip off the common tourist tracks in the country you always wanted to visit.
- Third off, your native buddy will be able to correct you and give you instant feedback; this will boost your confidence and increase your motivation.
Exchanging languages with a friend fosters a friendlier environment to learn languages. You don’t have a harsh teacher giving you grades or an onslaught of classmates to mock you.
For those of you who are not familiar with language exchanging, here is how it works:
You are native in a certain language and you are ready to “exchange languages” with someone learning your mother tongue for their native language (i.e. French). You’ll meet together, establish a time limit – for example 30 minutes in French and then 30 minutes in English – and then you’ll both get to bond and practice your target language for free.
It’s a win-win!
If you want to learn more about exchanging languages, there is an awesome blog post written by Olle from Hacking Chinese via language exchange.
Why you should consider trying Speaky
Finding the right language buddy is easy, yet difficult as well.
There are plenty of French natives who want to practice English and vice versa. But finding one that shares your interest, passions and ambitions (read: same level of motivation and allocated time to learn the language) can be much more challenging. You have to spend a good amount of time with this person – you have to bond with this person.
Ludovic, the co-founder of Speaky, reached out for comment and wanted to share his personal story with FrenchCrazy’s readers:
“As a native French speaker I was for a long time stuck with an “intermediate level” of English and progress came to a stand still. Eventually I started practicing with an American that shared the same passion for entrepreneurship as I did.
It was incredible how fast I learned. We talked for hours at a time and I quickly made recognizable progress. Having things to share with a language buddy was a real game changer to staying motivated and consistent with my learning.
This experience impacted my life. My university friends came back from their Erasmus program in Spain and learned Spanish the same way I learned English. We thought, “Wow! There is something awesome we could create here.”
That’s how we came up with the idea of Speaky.
Speaky is a social network where you learn languages by connecting, meeting and practicing with native speakers. You can find the right buddy for you, chat, meet and practice. All for free.
The project is still in its infancy because we started only six months ago, but the community is growing really fast! We just reached 35,000 users registered from all around the world, especially in French-speaking countries. So, if you feel like testing your language level with native speakers then give it a try.
I’m available to answer any questions in the comments about Speaky, and I thank John for featuring us on FrenchCrazy.”
