In this week’s mindset podcast we welcome Shayna Oliveira to talk about language exchanges, building friendships and teaching English.
Shayna is teaching English over at http://www.espressoenglish.net/.
For a number of weeks I have wanted to get Shayna onto the podcast to talk about improving your ability to teach english. Why? Because one of the best ways to improve your Spanish is making long term friendships with Spanish natives. You can do this by finding a language exchange and then providing a ton of help when it comes to the part in English.
This has been a big part of my language learning process.
At the end of the interview, I suggest you head across to Shayna’s site and discover a piece of english theory that you can take to your next language exchange.
In this first part of the interview we talk about:
- The merits of finding a language exchange and how to help someone who is learning English.
- We talk about one of the trickiest parts of the English language to teach. Shayna gives a great tip for teaching this difficult part of English and draws a parallel to how this technique is very similar to how we learn as children.
- We talk about Shayna’s language journey and how she ended up in living Brazil and meeting her husband. We talk about how her husband didn’t used to be able to speak english and what is like to live in a single language household that was not her first language.
- What talk about some of Shayna’s biggest language learning challenges. And how she overcome them.
- Even though Shayna learnt Portuguese in an immersion environment, we also talk about Shanya’s thoughts on learning a language back at home.
- Shayna gives a great tip to get over the feeling of freezing up in the moment of a conversation. Then how to reduce the number of times it happens.
- Shayna then talks about the idea of passive and active vocabulary and converting words from your passive vocabulary to your active vocabulary.
What did you learn from the first part of the interview with Shayna Oliveira for this mindset episode?
Podcast: Play in new window
Shayna said something that I finally heard (as if for the first time). She said (and you have said it as well) when you learn a new word, use this word in sample sentences. I have done something along this line. I ‘find’ sentences as examples and save them in Anki. But I am not ‘creating’ the sentence which may be an important step. The issue is knowing if the sentence is correct. Perhaps I have a spanish speaker friend or I use Google Translate (not that reliable) but if not, I don’t know of any sources online to check the sentences. Perhaps there is some source?
Hey Rosemary, the best way to test your ideas is with spanish natives or tutors. On iTalki, there is an option to submit your writing and have it checked by other users, this might be a low barrier way to test your ideas.
As you said, Google translate can be unreliable. It is good for translating individual words but it often makes mistakes with grammar and sentence structure.