How to succeed in language conversation exchange?

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I cling to hopes of moving to France in a couple of years’ time so rather late in the day I’m having another go at Language exchange, but am up against the same sort of issues I had the last times I tried it …

In life generally I am an autodidact and my hope was to revise the things that cropped up as I went along, but I am being encouraged to take some classes.
I was a support technician in a Language Faculty for a very long time and I bizarrely didn’t speak any French with my colleagues.

My level is likely around A2/B1 in terms of understanding spoken French - though I still use French subtitles to make watching French videos less of a chore.
My pronunciation is probably quite good if I’m reading from a script, but I become tongue-tied when having to speak in real time.

I think it’s mainly my fault as, having retired, I don’t have very much real life human interaction at all and my life is dominated by my struggle to get my house to a saleable condition and my affairs in order generally … I long ago stopped watching TV, and don’t regularly follow the news in either language as it’s so grim - though I do dip into France-Info and France24 and am aware of the political theatre in France.

I have so far had seven hours of face to face on Teams / WhatsApp with four different partners I found on conversationexchange .com.

I had to say goodbye to the first one because by the third hour we had nothing left to talk about - they apparently had several other regular partners …

The next one lasted one session as they had almost no understanding of spoken English and I couldn’t see how I could have made it work as I’m not an English teacher.

The third one found me and he was an almost tri-lingual French teacher in peru with a son who teaches at the Sorbonne and I was totally outclassed - we had a reasonable two-way conversation about South American flora as that is an interest of mine. But he gave me a link to Courrier International and the idea was that we might choose serious topics to discuss.

The fourth one I have had two hours with and seems the best match so far, but once again after two hours we have already run out of topics. (I was surprised that he didn’t know that I would need a visa to emigrate to France…)

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I think you’ve been unfortunate.

My wife found a French and a Spanish partner on CE and she speaks to each fairly regularly.

I had two French partners. The first I ditched - after a couple of years - because it ended up with him wanting to speak English for the entire two hours (which was very onerous in itself).

The second is now a close friend. We’ve been speaking for maybe 7 years, and now it’s quite personal.

But I understand your problem. I had the same at the start.

We used to agree topics and prepare. (That is also what we do with the French friends to whom we’re giving English conversation practice.) If you don’t prepare, you will indeed run out of conversation!

Out of the half-hour, perhaps you could pick from the following ideas

5 minutes of recent news in France

5 minutes ditto UK (what interests you probably won’t interest him)

5 minutes on what you did at the weekend

5 minutes on what you plan for this weekend

5 minutes on what is going on in your life at the moment: work, family, social life, friends

5 minutes on your long-term plans

5 minutes reminiscing on your childhood, school, early career

10 minutes on your passion (football, reading, film, television, poetry, music, cooking) - though we avoid football, for example, because neither of us has any interest in it

Quizzes are always fun, too. Food; film; books; geography; sayings, …

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Really good advice from Porridge. When I was teaching online I had one student that just wanted to improve his conversational English only. I’d usually send him an article to read that wed discuss, after all the other general things Porridge mentioned. He had about 6 months of lessons of 1 hour and we never struggled (although I’m.a big chatter :rofl::rofl:).

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We started our conversation group here in France with French and English speakers in order to facilitate conversation in both languages. We found very early on that, if we didn’t set a couple of topics for each week’s session, the conversation would just go round and round each person’s particular hobby horses. The topics are incredibly wide ranging, which means that people can prepare and also extend their vocabulary into a wide range of areas, whether they are particularly interested or not. Explaining why you don’t like something is at least as useful as describing an interest.

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In our first months here, we were introduced to a retired lady who wanted to keep up/improve her English speaking skills.

Once a week for a couple of years, we met for afternoon tea (yes, at her place and she made quite a ceremony of it… )

We discussed what we’d each been up to/seen/read during the previous 7 days.

She’d tell us in English and we’d discuss/reply in English. Thus similar vocab was used . She heard how we pronounced the words and noted our phrasing … and this helped her.

When it was our turn, we’d talk in French (normally about cars and trips) and she’d respond in French. She loved hearing about our activities and helped us enormously with our accent and which words to use when… (why are there so many French words which mean the same thing???)

She drummed into us that making a grammatical mistake didn’t matter, just keep talking!!

We also swapped childhood memories/stories etc etc

We were from different generations, yet shared a common love of life and humanity… all in all those 2 years were a wonderful experience

Sadly, she died unexpectedly and subsequently we never found anyone who could fill her shoes in quite the same way.

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Thanks all.

I watched a level test video yesterday that shamed me and confirmed I need to do some classes in some form - notably my relative pronouns, conjuctions and of course the subjunctive are lacking… AI opens up some possibilities -…

It’s a bit like “exercise” - I know I need to do some, but I prefer to get on my pushbike and actually get somewhere…

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I think a reasonable thing to aim for is the qualification level for multi-year residency - even though at my age I would be exempt…