Language Partners

SprachDuo – language partnership program on a new level

“SprachDuo” language learning face-to-face with a native speaker of your choice reaches a new level. After years of development a small group of AEGEE members established a multi-language easy-to-use web application for local groups interested.

The idea of SprachDuo

The idea of “SprachDuo” has started in summer 1999 as an “offline” language-partnership program between “TUM-international”, an initiative of the Technical University of Munich and AEGEE-Munich. The person responsible, Tim Appel, soon discovered that the coordination and combination of language-partners is a full-time job. Therefore the two students Holger Bosk and Alexander Schael helped him set up a web-interface giving students the possibility to register and search for language-partnerships online. The approach has been widely accepted and is in use by several AEGEE antennas already.

Due to some copyright problems with the first name “Sprach-Tandem”, AEGEE-Munich renamed the project and went online with http://www.sprachduo.de  in June 2001.

With more antennas starting to use “SprachDuo” the development of a new, multi-language and east-to-use web-solution began in 2003 in cooperation with Michael Burger and Philipp Balasch

SprachDuo today

Today more than 1’900 students in Munich alone take part in “SprachDuo”. Every 6 months (after an ERASMUS-term) expired records of the database are being deleted, but the number of records soon recovers simply because of a “mouth-to-mouth-propaganda” among the students.

Thanks to SprachDuo, AEGEE-Munich is able to invite 1’900 more students in a direct way to its various events. AEGEE-Trier, for instance, asks its 300 SprachDuo-participants to excursions, and “get-to-know-parties” – with great response. Further “SprachDuo” enjoys positive feedback, active cooperation and sponsoring by some universities and their “international centres”, not only in Erlangen-Nuremberg, but also in Trier and Munich.

The new web-solution will make it even easier for your antenna to enjoy the possibilities offering and supporting a language-partnership program. At the same time you will help with the integration of foreign students (e.g. ERASMUS-students) at your university and you will focus on AEGEE’s aim of supporting tolerance – apart from having great fun! To join or for further questions write an email to admin@sprachduo.de.

Info: Alexander Schael (from AEGEE-Trier) and Philipp Balasch (from AEGEE-Erlangen-Nuremberg)