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Hello,
It’s me, JimLeu_italki from Taipei / Taiwan! About me: Hi I’m Jim and I work on Community Development at italki. I’ve been with italki pretty much since it’s inception almost 11 years ago where I ran Operations, Teachers, Regional (East Asia and South East Asia) and now focused on our Community. I’m so happy that italki had been a strong supporter of the Polyglot Conference from when it started and happy that we’re continuing our support this year.
I’m originally from the Ohio in the United States but have spent most of my adult life in Asia now. 16 years in Shanghai and for the past 3 years in Taipei.
I’m a late bloomer into the Polyglot world. Grew up speaking Taiwanese with my first generation parents from Taiwan at home in Ohio. Later learned Mandarin Chinese after moving to Asia. Because I worked at italki dabbled in Spanish for a bit just though taking lessons but it wasn’t until 2+ years ago during a trip to Ho Chi Minh City where I felt, Vietnam is a really cool country. The vibe is like Taiwan when I first moved there in the early 1990’s and the same feeling of go go go potential when I first moved to Shanghai in the early 2000’s. Started trying to figure out how to learn Vietnamese on my own and feel I’m at a B1 level now. Then last year, I attended the Polyglot Conference where I met a few Polyglots who encouraged me to try learning two languages at once so started with Japanese in October of last year. Anyways, I’ve caught the language learning bug and it’s just fun… I’m also trying to get my bilingual kids (English and Chinese) to learn Japanese.
My native or near-native languages: English
My C1/C2 languages: Chinese
Taiwanese
My B1/B2 languages: Vietnamese
My A1/A2 languages: Japanese, Spanish
I also want to learn or have started to learn:
French, Latin
To find out more about me, you can visit https://https://www.facebook.com/jimleu512.
Looking forward to talking with you all and sharing our love of languages!
Nice to meet you! I have been looking at doing some language exchange with italki partners for about a year now, but have so far been hesitant - do you have any pointers about using the service?
Hi Heather! Sorry about the delay in response as haven’t logged into here for a while. You can still find Language Partners on italki by participating in the Community. The best way is to help correct someone’s English (in the language you are learning) or answer someone’s question and then follow them. If they follow you back you unlock the ability to private message and then can become language exchange partners. The best partners are those that are also highly motivated so that’s why I like finding those who are actually using the community - asking questions, doing exercises, making posts about language learning the best. One thing that we did not like before on italki was “dating” language partners. We removed Language Partner search because of this was oftentimes abused for “dating”. We’re still trying to figure out the right balance as our Community continues to evolve.
I noticed that - that is the main reason I hadn’t tried to connect with a language partner, because the last time I did, it seemed like I was bombarded by persons who might not have been solely interested in language exchange! I will have to delve a little deeper.
Yes, this is why we feel that if you’re actually contributing to the community and connect via the content you produce, you’ll be able to find a more legitimate partner.
Hi Jim~ It’s interesting to learn about your language journey.
I’m Trang/August from Vietnam and I’m living in the US. I’ve been to China, Taiwan and HongKong and love the food. I started learning Mandarin about 2 years ago. I’m curious about the difference between Mandarin and Taiwanese? When do you think is a good time to start a new language? Should I wait until my Mandarin reach an advanced level?
Nice to meet you. I’m probably not the best person to ask about learning 2 languages at the same time. There are a lot of more experienced Polyglots that can give a better answer. But for me, I find that learning Vietnamese and Japanese is easier because the languages are so different. I was about 2 years into Vietnamese and probably at a low B1 level before I started with Japanese. I would say I’m at a low B2 in Vietnamese now and probably a high A1 / low A2 now in Japanese. If you pick 2 languages that are very different from each other AND the your level in the languages is very different, I think that helps.
I’m actually now taking italki lessons from Vietnamese teachers that also speak / teach Japanese so they will teach me Japanese in Vietnamese which also helps.
Thanks for sharing about your background. You have an advantage to speak different tongues in different environments. You have just conducive environment that challenges you to learn and use them!