italki.com

Alright, tonight ill make this blog pretty short. I want to write a little bit about a website i stumbled across. The website is www.italki.com. It is a language exchange site set up for people from different countries speaking different languages to talk to one another and to teach one another their language. It also is good for exchanging culture with one another.

Now normally when i come across a cool website like this there arent many people involved, its normally a cool concept but lacking the people to make it good. Well with www.italki.com that is not the case. I signed up and within minutes I was talking to people.

I set up my native language as english, and then indicated i had a moderate understanding of spanish, and that i wanted to learn arabic. With 15 minutes i was talkin to two people from egypt, another from syria, and yet another from oman. It was amazing. Here it was 11 at night, for them it was mid-morning. Not only was i able to practice arabic, but i was able to learn some cultural insights. heres a run down of some words i found to be good to remember:

kwais-good
ma ismik-what is your name?(f)
ma ismak-what is your name?(m)
ah-yes
naam-yes
la-no
izayak, izaiak, or izayik-how are you? whats up?
kefak-how are you(syria)
enty menen-where are you from?(f)
enta menen-where are you from?(m)
tesbah ala khir-good night
sabah al khir-good morning
kam raqamak? “male”..kam raqamik? “female” - Whats your number?
Kol shai tamam?-is everything ok?

italki-1.png

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 3:28 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “italki.com”

  1. lana Says:
    July 27th, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    Thanks for the information on italki. I have heard that there are many websites available for learning a new language online but I haven’t taken the time to check any out. Just today I have seen now two ads…this one and one for a site called edufire.com…is this one any good? What are the major differences between the sites? Do you both offer the same thing?

  2. ben Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 2:35 am

    well i had a quick look at the site you mentioned. It looked like you might have to pay? not sure. but italki was the first language site ive come across, and so far so good!

  3. Mef Says:
    October 15th, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    You know, italki’s lots of fun, but I’ve got to say that my favorite language exchange site is InterPals http://www.interpals.net, not exactly language site per se, but rather a huge online penpal site that touts language and “cultural” exchange.

    I’ve found that the detailed interaction with speakers of foreign languages (in my case Italian and Polish!), has done significantly more for my language skills than the lesson plans and flash cards on other sites — or the casual multilingual “hello how are you’s” you get on many of these other sites.

    Plus, even if you’ve forgotten all your high school spanish, most of the people on the site are friendly enough to help you start from scratch again (at least that was my experience).

    Anyway, just thought I’d let you know, since it seems that penpal sites are often under the radar of other language learners!

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