You are about to embark on an amazing journey of a life time, sending an entire school-year abroad and living with host families in another country.

But your adventure starts now. You have been accepted into our Rotary Long-Term Exchange Program. Over the next few months there will be orientation sessions and your attendance at all of them is mandatory.

COUNTRY REVEAL

This is the time when the country you will be spending the next year in will be revealed. It’s something that you have been waiting for and now it is time to find out.

PREPARATION

The amount of ahead time preparation you put into your exchange will have a huge impact on the success of your exchange. If you read up on the country you are going to and study the culture and language in advance, your experience there will be so much more meaningful and your language skills will get so much better, than if you wait until you get there.

ONLINE LANGUAGE LEARNING

Once you know your destination country, it is time to start learning the language. Use the next six months well and try to learn as much of the language in advanced as possible If you do that, the full immersion experience in your destination country will then raise your language skill to total fluency.

There are three major online language course providers that you should know about, and most of them offer the courses via web browser on your laptop or tablet, or as an app on your phone:

1. Babbel

2. Rosetta Stone

3. Pimsleur

Babble is the one that our Rotary District Team recommends. It is also the least expensive of the three, at a cost of $49 for a six month subscription.

Rosetta Stone is perhaps the most well-known of the three products and is very much based on a visual learning approach, But their approach is about 25 years old and in a recent test we found Babblel to be superior.

Pimsleur is the oldest of the three. it is audio only so quite a different experience, but they have the largest selection of languages. So if your language is not available on the other two providers, please make sure you check out Pimsleur.

LANGUAGE TUTOR

In addition to these online courses, we also recommend taking a few hours with a language tutor if possible, especially after you have already made some progress with the online courses.

For some languages you will be able to easily find a tutor, but for others it may be more difficult. There is also a fairly new online language tutor platform called Verbling They offer a huge number of languages and will connect you with a live tutor in another country for an online video chat. The cost per hour varies by the language and typically ranges from $10 - $29.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

First Night Questions in two languages side-by-side

CISI Insurance information from ESSEX

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