For people who want to get communicative in some language.
The goal of the meeting is to discuss how to learn a new language fast. The meeting will be in the form of a walk in the park - we walk and talk with each other answering questions listed below.
The meeting will be in bilingual form - some people will be discussing in English, some in Polish.
Agenda
- What languages do you know? What languages do you want to learn? What language is a struggle for you?
- Why do you want to learn a new language? Do you need it to have a job? Do you live in Poland and you want to learn polish? Do you want to be able to read/watch content in this language? Or maybe you want to learn it as a hobby?
- How long have you been learning the language? What is the current level of it? How much time do you spend learning it weekly?
- How do you learn it? Do you participate in some language school? Do you read/listen to some content in this language? Do you speak with native speakers?
- What is your biggest struggle? Reading? Writing? Speaking? Listening?
- Are you using some apps like Duolingo? How do you evaluate it?
My Personal Story
The only foreign language I know is English. I started learning it in primary school and it took me +15 years to get somehow communicative in it.
Though not really.
I failed one job interview not because of my technical knowledge but because of my weak English skills. I was simply not able to answer questions on the final interview with the boss of the company - I know the answers but I couldn’t translate it to English and it resulted in some gibberish.
Next job I got was thanks to my very good knowledge of C++ programming language (people are complaining that it’s difficult but it took me only +3 years to get “communicative” in it!) and some luck.
This luck was that I was invited to Zurich to have these technical interviews (during in person meetings you can partially use body language to convey some meaning).
I was hired and was forced to use English everyday - after one year people in the company stopped mentioning in reviews that I need to improve my English.
Thus after almost 20 years of learning I could say that English isn’t a problem for me anymore.
It took waaaay too much time!
Gamification
I believe gamification could help to learn a language faster.
There is an example of Duolingo App that makes people do something everyday (thanks to streak design) so they learn a language at least a minute daily.
The problem is that using this app won’t allow people to get above some threshold of learning the language - for example this app won’t help much in learning how to speak and write.
What is interesting to me is if there exists a different gamification design that would help to get better in language.