Last week I found a useful online community website called Gumtree where you can post all kinds of messages. The site was originally just for London, but there are now local versions for many other cities in the UK, including Brighton, and other places around the world. One section that particularly caught my attention is called skills & language swop, where you can find language exchange partners.

I posted a message there and already three people have contacted me – one from Venezuela, one from Spain and one from Belgium. I met the Venezuelan today and we talked mainly in Spainish for about an hour – the longest conversation I’ve ever had in that language. I was able to express myself quite well, inspite of my sometimes muddled word order and dodgy grammar.

A similar community site with versions for even more cities and countries is Kijiji, which means village in Swahili apparently.

One reason why I chose to learn Czech with the Pimsleur course was because I hadn’t done a Pimsleur course before and I want to test as many different types of language course as I can find. To date I’ve tried quite a few Colloquial and Teach Yourself courses, one Rosetta Stone course (Russian), which I’ve yet to finish, and a few lesser-known courses.

When comparing language courses for the same language you can’t start each one from the same level because you can’t erase from your memory what you’ve learnt in each one before trying the next one. If you try comparing a course from the same series for several different languages, you often find that the courses are not identical – the basic format is probably the same, but each one has a different author and the quantity and quality of material varies. Each language also presents you with a different set of challenges, and you may find that some types of course work better for some languages than others.

Generally I find that no single course is sufficient to learn a language, so I often use several different courses during my studies.

When learning a foreign language, you sometimes encounter false friends: words that sound like words in your native language, but which don’t mean the same thing. For example, the French word sensible means sensitive, not sensible. The French for sensible is prudent or sage. A Rathaus is not a home for German rats but a town hall. The Irish word for food, bia, sounds like beer – but beer is beoir or leann. The word pan means bread in Spanish and Japanese, and sir or mister in Polish and Ukrainian. And remember not to try to borrow books from a French or Portuguese librairie, a Spanish librería or an Italian libreria – these words all mean book shop. A library is a biblioteca in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and a bibliothèque in French.

Some foreign words sound like rude words in your language. For example, the German words Fahrt (ride, journey) and Fach (panel, case, subject) cause much amusement among English-speaking students of German. As do the Irish words faic (nothing), as in faic na fride (not one jot), and feic (to see/see!).

Fortunately quite a few words are international and are used in many different languages, often with some adjustments for the spelling, writing and pronunciation conventions of each language. International words include telephone, television, taxi, hotel, restaurant, airport, etc.

You can find a longer list of false friends here.