In all of my language learning experiments over the years, language exchanges have always played a key role.
When I was focussed on Mandarin in 2014, I did a number of one-on-one language exchanges every week, and also held a hotpot at my house each Monday night as a group language exchange. Now that I've taken on German (my partner's Father has just moved to Germany for the long-term, so I've got a real motivation to learn!) I'm now again doing a weekly language exchange with my new language buddy Melanie.
Language exchanges are beneficial for a whole heap of reasons, but one of the best parts of them is that you gain a friend who gets to see you progress with the language over the weeks and months. They see you go from a stuttering, incoherent speaker, to a fluent communicator (hopefully!). It's also really motivating for both of you when they use a word or phrase one week, and take the time to explain it to you, then it becomes part of your usable vocabulary and you use it in subsequent weeks!
But for this to happen, you need systems. Writing doesn't work that well, I've found that it really breaks the flow of conversation if you're always stopping to write things down, or your language partner is, and it gets in the way of a focus on communication. So, for quite a few years now, I've been searching for a way to get the most out of my exchanges.
I now feel like I've cracked it, and it's through the power of tech that I've done so! Put simply, it requires recording the language exchange (as I'm doing mine through Zoom at the moment, this is really easy), then reviewing key phrases and vocab by listening back to the recording in full, as well as turning key segments of the discussion into flashcards in Anki. The flashcards help retain the key ideas for the long term in a structured way, and the full recordings, listened back to at various times, help me to retain the context of the phrases and act as an additional memory aid.
The following video shows this process of turning recordings into flashcards from start to finish, so that you can make the most out of your language exchanges too! It uses the freely available software Audacity and Anki. Good luck : )
ps: If you'd like me to write a post on how to set up and run a language exchange, let me know in the comments or via an email or tweet.
Credit to languagegirl for creating the first video that alerted me to the fact that this kind of approach is possible : )