I am sitting here next to my sweetheart, who is working on his schoolwork. I just recorded a couple videomessages for my Czech friend who lives in China in response to the ones she sent me.
I feel a little bit like a moron for not having thought of the idea of asynchronous sound/video messaging before now, but really what got me to think of it was my sisters in laws' fetish with this app called marco polo (wrote about it at length here). I don't have any idea if it works internationally. I don't really even know if I would want to try to find that out, since it is not...well, it's not exactly optimal for what I'd want to use it for when it comes to Czech learning. Anything to avoid trying to explain through broken Czech how to download and use some kind of app, since there's a pretty wide range of computer/tech ability amongst my collaborators. But all of them use facebook, hangouts, and skype.
The idea of being able to replay a message over and over and over is super appealing to me. It's like what I was doing with quizlet but with real language in context. There's still room for quizlet, because of it's quizzy interface - but to hear natural speech is super valuable for me.
Also, it's possibly a better tool in some ways than face to face real time communication because it's a LOT easier to correct someone.
So I thought, why not. I'll try this. I sent a couple collaborators some video messages, got back some great responses - they could immediately see the value in it for them. Basically, I sent a message in English and one in Czech and asked them to fix my Czech. So then they responded with fixing my Czech and saying something in English. So then I respond with fixing their English and saying something in Czech, etc. It is kind of fun.
Another super big advantage: since I am saying some of the same things over and over again to the same people, it can be good practice for me to try to say it naturally. It's maybe not great to be practicing my mistakes over and over, so I will try to like, correct myself on the second round of Czech messaging.
It was really neat to see Alena's view from the balcony of her apartment in China, the flower arrangement that she learned how to make, etc. I tried to tell her about the book I am reading - the same subject which I droned on and on about to my other collaborators.
Some notes to future people who may want to attempt such an experiment:
- you might want to talk about it beforehand with your collaborators, lest you totally weird them out.
- since you'll be working with a time change, you might accidentally end up waking them up, which is *the most embarrassing thing* - more embarrassing even then recording the stupid message in the first place.
- you will want to practice beforehand since most of these free videomessaging/voice messaging services are short - limited to only 1-3 minutes. It is REALLY hard to say everything you want in one minute. 3 minutes is better, but that is also hard.
- it feels really good to get a nice response. So be sure to give nice responses.
With language learning collaboration, you're always like, jumping between the layer of what you're actually talking about and the aboutness layer, the meta-conversation. It's really rare to find people who can easily navigate the meta-conversation with you, so sometimes you have to like, really hide your train of thought. I should give another concrete example, but the clumsy conversation tab on this blog (as of this writing) already does a pretty good job, I guess.
Time for bed.
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