So if you have been following my journey, I have been trying to focus more on listening. I seem to be ok with reading, I have learnt a lot of vocabulary, and I can make simple sentences. However my listening skills are very poor. I’ve been trying to watch some TV, listen to the moroccan radio stations and watch some youtube videos but the problem was the TV and radio was too difficult and the youtube videos were very easy. I still try to listen to all three but I found I was not improving. Then I started looking into iTalki.
For those of you who don’t know what iTalki is, well it’s basically a site you can use to find a teacher, tutor, or speaker of the language you desire to learn. With teachers and tutors, they will help you to learn the language with teachers having more structured lessons. With speakers they just practice speaking with you. All this is done for a fee which is listed on each person’s profile. My thinking was, since I wasn’t making any progress, maybe a teacher could assist me.
I found a teacher which I thought was really good. So I started to schedule some lesson with him. Basically I spoke to him and told him what my goals were. He said to attain fluency or conversation level in any language would take years. I have no problem with that so I told him to teach me. He basically used a document which went through some dialogue of certain events, such as going to a hotel or speaking to your friend about what he is doing tomorrow. I did learn some new words and he was able to explain certain concepts I didn’t understand. In the beginning I didn’t find him speaking with me a lot. We mostly did reading. I did get homework which I did. The next lesson he spoke with me in Darija for a few minutes and we continued reading again. I’m thinking that the idea is to build a set of vocabulary which can be used for conversation later on. I took a break from the italki because I was sick for a while and then I travelled for 2 weeks. I will try to start again and try to keep it consistent for about 3 months to see if I have improved. After 3 months of lessons I should be able to give a good conclusion of iTalki.
If anyone is interested in lessons with iTalki just click here