Beyond Liden and Denz: Moscow Language exchange

The good command of foreign languages gives plenty of personal, social and professional advantages you can use in Moscow Language exchange. It opens the gates to different cultures, lifestyles and employment markets. More generally, a good grasp of another tongue and the contact with other social communities make of us more tolerant, open-minded and progressive human beings. Therefore, to cultivate and to entertain a passion for foreign languages could be an extremely positive and useful thing to do.

Also, we need to be able to approach the languages as an asset. The command of a foreign language is a skill and accordingly there is a process of learning which requires some active management from us as ultimate beneficiaries. In other words, we have to make sure that the learning process works to the best of our interest. Below, I give just a couple of examples of how I have organized my trip to Moscow in order to get the maximum out of it.

Choose the best school for learning Russian

First, any studying exercise abroad involves choosing the school which suits YOU best. For me, I am sure that Liden & Denz was the right choice. That said, I did my homework making a selection and contacting several schools in Moscow before I chose Liden & Denz. This school has been several times awarded prizes for their educational services. They have an informative and beautifully presented website [https://lidenz.com/]. On it, there are plenty of free of charge services which allow you to test your Russian or even to take a lesson without committing to anything [https://lidenz.com/live-russian-lessons-online/]. Their staff is dynamic, helpful and competent. Also, they have offered me the chance to get the language courses for free in exchange of some part-time work I do in English.

Here it comes the most important thing: their tutors are extremely well prepared and experienced to handle properly and to guide the learning process. Their teaching method is based on a lot of speaking which to me offers an enjoyable and challenging context.

Language exchange with locals

Second, immediately after arriving in Moscow, I subscribed to a couple of websites on which Muscovites offer language exchange. The local population seems to be mostly interested in English and German, but languages like Spanish, French and Italian are also very frequently required. This is another example of how, this time your mother tongue, can be an asset, allowing you to get some direct contact in Russian with the locals outside of school. Of course, these conversations cannot replace a language school, as they fulfil a substantially different function and help you to test yourself in a real context, where nobody will follow closely how you use the cases, the verbs of movement or the perfect or imperfect aspects of a verb. Therefore, be aware of the limitation of these exchanges: your interlocutor, most probably, will not be a linguist and may not be trained to teach. Still, in my experience, these encounters are a useful complement to a more structured class-based learning. Here are two sites I have found to be helpful, in the event you consider a Moscow language exchange: http://moscowlem.ru/ [https://vk.com/moscowlanguageexchange] and http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/

Good luck !

This blog was brought to you by Garbis, currently studying Russian at Liden and Denz