Hellotalk group

[Flickserve]

Anybody up for joining a group chat on hellotalk?

 

It's a bit of an experiment to give a different angle to learning. 

 

Basically looking for a hsk 3/4 level person to join the group. A HSK 5 is OK if you have weak listening skills - you are looking to improve the overall listening aspect on material that you know

 

The group aims more focussed on listening skills and speaking rather than idle chatter and the aim is to have a proactive approach to with an approximate 50:50 split of voice and text messages in English and Chinese. 

 

Quite a lot of people get short snippets of free time during the day so the recordings and corrections function on hellotalk might work out quite useful. 

 

The group won't be large. Maximum of 12 initially to help get people more involved. 

 

Please PM me for more details. 

 

This is non-commercial. 

[mungouk]

Presumably there will be native-Mandarin-speaking English learners on there if you're going to have English content as well?

 

Interesting idea. Does it matter what timezone you're on?  I've never used HelloTalk before.

 

 

 

[Flickserve]

57 minutes ago, mungouk said:

Presumably there will be native-Mandarin-speaking English learners on there if you're going to have English content as well?

 

Thanks for the query. Exactly. Because we want to improve listening skills, our hope is to also get a bit of variation of accents of both languages and build in a reciprocal relationship. 

 

For instance, if you had a recording without transcript, you could use the record function to get it on the group chat. Then you can write the characters that you did recognise and ask for help on the characters you didn't recognise. Then other Chinese learners can benefit. You don't need to wait to your next italki lesson for an answer. You might want to listen when waiting for a bus or on a train etc. 

 

I got the idea from another group which is quite good but there are only a core of active people. Despite the attempts of the admin to encourage other people to be more proactive, and an agreement that passiveness will result in removal from the group, people still don't take part and then get miffed off when removed. So again this group will do the same on the assumption that lack of messages means the learner doesn't have much time.

 

That group has twenty plus members which seems to be a bit large. So, I arbitrarily set a figure of about twelve persons. Perhaps people feel a bit uncomfortable in a large group and a smaller group would address that. 

 

Other things I saw observed were a couple of very skilled L2 people who basically don't need much listening practice. Nice people but since they are already at a high level, I could see some of the other intermediates being demoralised and withdrawing. So, a skilled L2 person won't match very well - they require specialised topics. 

[mungouk]

OK I'll give it a go.  Will PM you.