Monday 31 October 2011

Why not learn Russian?

By wanting to travel around the world, it gets very useful to learn or improve language skills. Since we are in the world capital, where you can listen to dozens of different languages while you're walking along Oxford Street, London as also to offer hundreds of associations, clubs, exchange groups and whatever you want to name, most of them for free.

We've been attending several meetings by the London Language Exchange & Social group (http://www.facebook.com/groups/llanguageexchange/), from meetings in bars, where the main goal is to meet people from different language backgrounds and "exchange" this valuable knowledge, to karaoke events, where you can listen to songs in japanese.

This time, we went to a French Conversation group, held by the Euro Club (http://www.euroclub.co.uk/public/ - the group also provides classes if you want to develop your skills further in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and even Russian), and we spent 45 minutes trying to have a decent conversation with a group of French natives that are living in the UK. After that, we turned to English and this time it was them making an effort to be understood. It was a very interesting gig, where we met very nice people and even a native from the Reunion Islands, that we've learned are still under French domain (close to Madagascar, former French colony).

There are a lot of places in London where you can improve English and learn other languages, some of them for a symbolic fee or even for free. It's not an excuse to live here and not to go to one of these events! So, for anyone thinking about moving to London but who is a little bit affraid about the language, don't bother, there are millions just like us!!!

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