Language Learning... 2.0 style

On Wednesday, I went to see Robbie Douek of Friends Abroad present on what they're doing. It's a really nice web application designed to facilitate peer to peer learning and communication!

Here's what they're all about:

FriendsAbroad is an Internet service for anyone to meet and communicate with new people all around the world.

The aim is to help you make friends and find out about each other while using your language skills.

For example, you help a new friend with their English and in return they will help you with your French.

For now until the end of 2004, it is all completely free. Later we will need to charge an inexpensive subscription for some premium services.

With the current beta version, you can:

• Enter a short profile of information about yourself
• Search for new friends
• Email each other
• Have live text chats with each other

Later we will add many features including a rich environment for voice conversations.

Listening to what he had to say, I can see lots of potential! The crucial element to really make it stand out has to be voice communication. Having pointed this out, he responded by saying that some of the larger VOIP providers were less interested at this stage as FriendsAbroad wasn't considered large enough. To me, this seemed very short sighted of them as surely the drive towards globalisation just means more people need to learn new languages.

In my experience, nothing beats talking to people when it comes to language learning! Good luck to Friends Abroad, and Robbie!!

Whilst at the event, I asked Robbie to say a few words in his own voice. Click to play or Download robbie_douek_friends_abroad.mp3