Soft selling

[Benjamin Barrett]

I connected with an Italian speaker the other day. I didn't mention LH at all; instead, we just arranged to do a video chat on Skype.

He asked right away what we should talk about, so I suggested a game. I jumped right into it:

I'll give you X
Here you go (an expression learners rarely know)
I gave you X

Some of the time I used signs, some of the time, not. We switched languages once or twice.

At some point after that, I texted him with the name of the game. Today, we did a second session, practicing "what is this?" and "trade X for Y." He just jumped right into it and switched languages at what seemed like appropriate intervals. We also did "Do you want an X" - his "v" pronunciation in "vuoi" sounded like a "w" to me, so I was completely lost for a few seconds--a great lesson for me!

Even though separating the two languages into two sessions would have been a bit more productive, we both learned some language, and at the end, he really wanted to know more about the technique, so I sent him links to two videos.

We have another session scheduled for Saturday. Maybe I'll get a little practice of those endless pronouns--but either way, I'll be happy to just master the genders a bit more.

Ben Barrett
La Conner, WA

[Willem Larsen]

Cool Ben! I think that's the best approach - no explanations or theorizing, just playing the game.

yrs,

Willem

--
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Language Hunters group.

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to language-hunte...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/language-hunters
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Language Hunters" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to language-hunte...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.