So as part of my efforts to learn Haitian Creole I signed up for a few resources that would connect me with people. One is italk.com, which I’ve talked about before. It is a middleman that connects people who want to teach a language with people who want to learn a language. I found it to be effective, with a caveat that I’ll talk about later.
The other is Lingbe, which does something similar but connects you with people who just want to have a conversation in the language that you want. I signed up but have never used it.
The reasons for my not using Lingbe are part of the caveats I had when signing up and using italk: both just plunge you into an interface where you’re speaking with someone whom you’ve never met & who might see you as an incompetent learner/speaker, and who wants to have someone else in the world catch on to your secret that you are all bluff and bluster and no talent?
Okay, that’s how my mind works. I just could not go with Lingbe when I first got started because holy moly I was still so new. Just a few weeks of instruction under my belt and that was all. So I never went through with it.
italki was a little less intimidating. I was able to browse a lot of potential tutors/teachers. Each one of them put up a web page with their bio and their introduction, and most of them had a video introduction as well. Not a one of them was anything other than earnest and professional. And by having a chance to see them in their intros before I connected, I felt like I “knew” them a bit. (That’s just me and my anxieties!)
The tutor I selected is a delightful man who is the perfect fit for me. Like me, he enjoys humor. He enjoys making jokes. He enjoys the interaction. And in spite of my broken kreyòl, I think he enjoys working with me.
I try very hard to be on time, to have practiced my work religiously during the week, and to have some ready-to-go phrases (that I never use but that spark me to have a conversation).
I could not be happier with the arrangement.
Would I go back to Lingbe, or use it?
Maybe! I would be happy to have the conversations at some point. I’m still not confident. And as I am diving deeper into learning this language that is spoken by 14 million Haitians, I am finding that so much of it, like every other language, is more about context and shortcuts and slang than it is about the formalities of grammar and vocabulary.