My order of A2-B1 conversation topics

I group topics that go together, such as travel and climates.

My list of conversation topics

When I start practicing conversation with italki tutors (in 30-minute sessions), I practice the same group of topics with several tutors so that I can get good at them. After that, I move on to the second group of topics, and so forth. In this article, I make the list of topics available to my readers, in case anyone finds them helpful.

 

Background

I can already speak and listen at the A2 level and I already know a lot of grammar before I hire tutors for conversation practice. My preferred path as a beginner is to learn basic grammar and vocabulary through Michel Thomas or a similar audio course, which also gets me speaking the language immediately by translating lots and lots of sentences aloud. After 15 hours, I find myself automatically and unintentionally starting to talk to myself (think aloud) in my target language. Then I purposely talk to myself as I take walks, using a pocket or electronic dictionary to look up words I don’t know. With a lot of practice, my speaking proficiency eventually reaches A2 (high beginner). Next, I listen to dialogs on Innovative Languages podcasts to bring my listening up to A2. Once I can start understanding some of what italki tutors are saying in their self-intro videos, I start hiring tutors for conversation practice. (If you would like more information, please read my article, “Ready for conversation practice”. https://oregonpolyglot.com/2017/08/17/ready-for-conversation-practice/ )

 

I hire at least three (and hopefully many more) tutors for the first round of topics. In the second round, I choose not to rehire the tutors who have poor conversation skills or are otherwise unsuitable for conversation practice. By the third round, I generally keep about half of the tutors I started out with. After four rounds, my conversation skills have hopefully reached B1 (low-intermediate). It worked for French, Spanish, and Japanese, but I fell short in Russian because the grammar is so complex and because tutors overcorrected me so much that I lost confidence.

 

Topic selection

How did I select topics? I started by brainstorming the topics that interest me and yet are general enough to interest most tutors. (I avoid geology because it interests me but not many tutors.) Then I tried to imagine how much vocabulary I would need to have even a basic conversation on each topic, and ordered the topics from easy-to-difficult. Finally, I grouped the topics that go together. For the first round, I selected travel–but when talking about travel, people usually talk about climates and weather, too, so I grouped them together. As a polyglot, I also group travel with language. One of my motivations for travel abroad used to be in order to get more exposure to a particular language (before the internet made it possible to immerse myself in a foreign language in my own home). This made the first round of topics clear: travel, climate, and languages.

 

When I schedule my first round of sessions with several tutors, I tell them that I’ve prepared the following topics and that they can choose one or more of them to talk about from this list: Travel, climate, and languages. I don’t go in-depth into these topics (such as carry-on baggage size), but instead ask and answer questions like “Where have you travelled?”, “Where would you like to travel?”, etc. (In my article “How I use italki”, I go into more detail. https://oregonpolyglot.com/2017/08/24/how-i-use-italki/ )

 

Tutors can select any one or more of the topics I gave them. One tutor spent the entire half-hour on languages, while another covered all three topics in our session. Even within the same topic, tutors asked me different questions and I had varied questions for them as well. Every session was unique. It never got too repetitive or dull, no matter how many tutors I had (unless a particular tutor had poor conversation skills).

 

My list of topics

Here is my full list. Each round is much more difficult than the previous one:

  1. Travel, climate, languages
  2. Leisure (TV, movies, sports, music, hobbies, etc.)
  3. Lifestyle (daily and weekly routine), work, food, health and fitness
  4. Childhood, School and past careers

 

Strategies for success

I start with 30-minute sessions mainly because I get mentally fatigued quickly. However, by the fourth round, I’m usually less fatigued and start scheduling 45-minute sessions. When I approach B2 (high intermediate), I can start handling 1-hour sessions. An outgoing person could probably handle longer sessions much sooner. Of course, longer sessions are more expensive, but I also have fewer tutors by then.

 

Good tutors ask me a lot of questions so that I do most (or at least half) of the talking. In order for me to get the most out of each session, I need to give long answers to almost every question, volunteering more information than was asked for. (I write about this in my article, “Ask longer questions”–in my opinion, the most important article I’ve written so far. https://oregonpolyglot.com/2017/10/22/give-longer-answers/ )

 

Every topic required a lot of preparation. On the topic of leisure, I spent time beforehand preparing to describe my hobbies. For example, some of my tutors had never heard of the sport of orienteering (which is my favorite sport to play), so I had an example map ready to show them as well as enough vocabulary to explain how the sport is played. Likewise, I had to think about my life experiences and be ready to use the past tense(s) in order to talk about my childhood, school, and past careers (round 4).

 

Then what?

Usually, once I’ve completed these four rounds with multiple tutors, I want to take a long break from conversation practice and start reading in my target language in order to build up my vocabulary toward B2 proficiency. After a lot of reading and listening, I’m then ready for more challenging conversations. At that time, I go into depth in one topic for several sessions. I’ll talk about that in a future article.

Author: AndyMountHood

Lover of languages (linguaphile) in the US Pacific Northwest (PNW). Formerly Oregon Polyglot and PNW Linguaphile. I'm over 50 years old, work in IT, and love hiking.

3 thoughts on “My order of A2-B1 conversation topics”

  1. How do you access podcasts on Innovative Languages? Are they free? Great article, by the way. I will definitely be trying this when I bring my next language through the A2/B1 threshold.

    Like

    1. Innovative Language is the company that makes the …Pod101 series (such as FrenchPod101). You’ve probably used them already. Their Premium membership is free for a week and $25 a month after that (but less if you pay for several months or a year at a time). Basic membership (PDF’s and MP3 files and videos only, but covering their entire archive of podcasts) is $10 (or less, like Premium–personally, I prefer to buy 3 months at a time for $21, which works out to $7 per month). Free membership gives you access to only their most recent episodes. They also provide a lot of free videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, Premium and Basic memberships are per language, so I only subscribe to one or two languages at a time. Premium membership is good for listening practice because you can listen to a podcast episode and then download just the dialog as an MP3 file. I like to listen to 10 or more episodes, download the dialogs, and then replay the dialogs in shuffle mode. This helps my listening skills. Basic membership helps, too, but is less convenient. Absolute Beginner dialogs are very short, but they get longer as you work up to the Intermediate level. Also, some languages (such as Filipino) have minimal coverage, while others (such as Japanese and Korean) have huge libraries of past episodes. A recent feature added to many languages is their 400 Activities lessons, which list sentences such as “I get out of bed”, “I take a shower”, “I drive to work”, “I turn on my computer”, “I print a document”, “I download a file”, etc., which provides a lot of useful vocabulary with collocations. The 25 Questions lessons show you how to ask and answer questions like, “Do you like Russian food?”, “How old are you?”, etc., which people are often asked when meeting a native speaker for the first time. So, like so many people in the polyglot community, I use and recommend Innovative Languages, at least for beginners. I’m currently using FilipinoPod101 because I just started learning Tagalog and I want to learn how to talk about some of those 400 activities.

      Liked by 1 person

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