Language exchange in Vietnam and my experience with it

I recently signed up for a language exchange program just for the sheer hell of it. The idea behind this is that you meet up with Vietnamese people and talk to them in both languages. The idea here is being that both of you are going to improve your language skills in the other's language and in theory, this should actually work.

I went to two of these meetups and probably wont do another one and here are the reasons why?

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The people that you meet up with are meant to tell the truth about their level of English speaking ability before you meet up because almost all foreigners here speak almost no Vietnamese. Therefore in order for this to work at all, the Vietnamese person has to speak a meaningful level of English in order for this to accomplish anything at all. In exchange for me helping them to hone their supposedly already existing English-speaking skills, they are meant to teach me a few useful phrases that I will almost certainly forget before we even leave the coffee shop.

Here is how my first meetups went. The first one was a male university student who was studying tourism and part of their curriculum is foreign languages, namely English, Mandarin, and Korean. He listed himself as being "intermediate" as far as his language skill was concerned so I thought it would be a bit of fun and maybe even I could make a new friend.

He definitely lied about being "intermediate" and honestly, I can't imagine that he does very well in his English classes. Even though I spoke very slowly if I deviated even slightly from his current curriculum - which he showed me after we sat down - it was clear that he had absolutely no idea what I was saying. We weren't more than 8 minutes into the 30 minute session before Google translate was being used simply so we could speak to one another. This was surprising to me because of the fact that when we were speaking on Zalo (the most popular Vietnamese messaging app) he seemed quite quick and concise in his responses. As it turns out Zalo has a translator built in that works both ways so not only was he not learning anything while we were at the coffee shop, but he wasn't even trying to understand my written English when we were making plans to meet up.

I was polite but when my phone dinged I pretended as though it was something urgent and I had to leave early. We were accomplishing nothing and it was a waste of both of our time to be there at all.

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Now let me get to the second session that I signed up for which was with a recent college graduate that is working as an IELTS teacher but is hoping to move on to more meaningful and better employment. She is 22. We met up on the beach and just sat at one of the tables there to talk to one another.

Now as far as the environment is concerned I preferred this over the coffeeshop by a mile. It was far quieter so we couldn't blame background noise for any interference.

This girl could understand a great deal more of what was being said to her than the previous guy and she was a lot more honest about her ability although I think that she too was likely using the translating app on Zalo when she was typing to me. She was using quite advanced words when we were type chatting but using very basic words when we were speaking face-to-face.

Even though she teaches English to others she frequently asked me to speak more slowly and said "pardon" about 20 times in the 30 minutes we were there. This is fair enough but I am kind of curious as to how someone who needs to do this is actually teaching others how to speak English. It seems to me like someone who is teaching others a language should be almost completely fluent and able to speak at a pretty high level. I teach English online and I am completely fluent which isn't me bragging because I am a native-English speaker.

Where things got strange is where she started talking about all of her financial issues and how she wants to take this course and that, or how she misses her family but doesn't make enough money to go and visit them. I have lived in this country for a long enough time to realize that she might have been using her youth and beauty to try to "simp" me into giving her money for this. She never actually asked me to give her some money or for a loan, but the way in which our conversation always steered towards her lack of funds kind of made me uneasy. I did not give her any money and have no intention of doing so.

So after all of that I don't even remember any of the Vietnamese words that I was taught by them although the girl did refine my pronunciation on a few words that I do know. I guess I appreciate that.

I guess you could say that I don't think that these "language exchanges" or at least the ones that I have experienced are actually exchanging languages at all. It is Vietnamese students looking for free lessons and well, I would be ok with doing that every now and then but I guess you could say I don't like the deception. Also, the begging for money has got to go but she was so young and pretty that I would imagine that this probably works out for her very often. That sort of witchcraft doesn't work on me though!