Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #30 November / December 2017
Extras
The Beginning Of A Surprising But Promising Partnership - LingoHut and TeachMe.vn

The Beginning Of A Surprising But Promising Partnership - LingoHut and TeachMe.vn

by Vincent Esnoul
November / December 2017 |  asd

Sometimes I see the most certified tutors not getting the best feedback from their students as they would expect. The student would say that the tutor is not engaging enough and that they lost their appetite for learning a new language they so desperately needed in order to learn. And for a tutoring marketplace like mine, this is a big deal. TeachMe.vn is the first tutoring marketplace in Vietnam. We connect tutors and students all over Vietnam for 1-to-1, face-to-face tutoring in a variety of subjects. We believe this way of learning can be one of the most effective ways to learn if and only if the student gets an adequate tutor; that’s what we do at TeachMe.

For all of the tutors we send students to, we make sure they are a right fit for the students, and that they have the right material to teach. Yes, the right resources can make a big difference. We do see tutors with no prior experience or certificates doing a better job than certified and experienced ones when depending on the teaching resources they use. But in Vietnam, it can be hard to come across the right books, especially for a platform like ours which provides tutoring classes in a wide range of languages.


And that’s when I started to look for online resources for our language tutors. An interesting tool that I found was a language learning website which taught a wide selection of languages for Vietnamese speakers: LingoHut.com/vi

You see, I loved that LingoHut puts the student in the driver’s seat by allowing them to listen, see, and interact with the new vocabulary. It offers quick, easy games that can be a great engaging resource for tutors like ours who struggle to find the adequate material to engage their students here in Vietnam. Students can find language learning resource here, but they're not the best teaching resource in a fast technology-adopting country like Vietnam, where people have a tendency and a strong appetite to choose technology-based learning experiences over books. I liked the LingoHut platform and knew this tool would assist our teachers and benefit our students.

So I reached out to Kendal, co-founder of LingoHut, to see if LingoHut would be interested in a partnership with TeachMe. I knew TeachMe still has a low profile compared to LingoHut which is starting to gain traction internationally, but I thought 'why not contact LingoHut, what could I lose?'. After all, TeachMe already had a team here in Vietnam familiar with the cultural differences and a presence in Vietnam while looking to expand through Southeast Asia; and I knew we could help LingoHut be recognized in this part of the world. Kendal replied within hours, asking for more details about TeachMe, and agreeing that such cooperation could be mutually beneficial.

Our partnership began as a simple link exchange for our services on our respective websites. But soon enough it became clear that the cooperation would become much more than that. We realized that we shared common values such as improving the learning of languages on a large scale. We both think learning new skills is challenging but deeply necessary in this rapidly evolving world. And we both believe our projects can help teach these skills in a better, more effective and cheaper way, especially in developing parts of the world.


And that’s the beauty of it. Even though we never met, live in different countries, speak a different mother language, and run different websites, Kendal and I, were able to connect, find similarities in our projects and most importantly work effectively together. As Kendal quoted Helen Keller at the end of our second talk: "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.", Only then did I realize what this phrase really meant. Partnership to be continued…

Whatever you’re learning, the journey can be long and challenging. And for some people, having a tutor can help tremendously.

Whatever you want to learn, it’s probably on TeachMe.vn, and there’s probably a teacher just minutes away.

With TeachMe.vn, it’s easy to learn anything, anywhere in Vietnam.

Cofounder and responsible for the Marketing and the Operations at TeachMe, Vincent Esnoul owns a Master’s degree in International Sales and Marketing. He speaks 3 languages fluently_: French (his mother tongue), Spanish and English, that he learnt not at school but by binge-watching American tv series during high school. You can find him at http://www.teachme.vn

The Beginning Of A Surprising But Promising Partnership
Writer: Vincent Esnoul
Images:
Kendal Knetemann: Man in park; Couple in park;

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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Dual Language Word Searches - English - Welsh - Volume 1



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