What is Crosstalk?

Crosstalk is a different kind of language exchange. In a traditional language exchange, you and a partner speak your target language for half the time, and your partner’s target language for half the time. When doing crosstalk, each partner speaks only one language, the one that the other person is learning (in many cases their own first language). When doing crosstalk, you practice listening and never practice speaking the language that you are learning. With the right partner, we believe Crosstalk is the single most efficient way to learn a language, even more than our own content. Crosstalk has multiple advantages, since you are spending 100% of the time receiving input, instead of only half when compared to traditional language exchange. You are also not being pressured to speak your target language. Besides avoiding all the problems with early output, you can also focus on understanding what your partner is saying, since you don’t need to start thinking and stressing about what you are going to answer. Unlike a regular language exchange, Crosstalk can be used to start learning a language from zero by using the same communication strategies that we use in our videos. This is particularly useful if you're learning a language for which there is very little content that can be understood by absolute beginners. You can read more about the many advantages of Crosstalk in English in our blog post. In this video we explain it in detail and show a demonstration of two complete beginners doing Crosstalk in Polish and Japanese: We also explain Crosstalk in one of our videos (English subtitles):