I had to take a break from Indonesian “study” for two days so I could catch up with all the comments I was getting and because I’ve gotten myself involved in something BIG here, something that I think has the potential to make Hive even more awesome.
My decision to learn Indonesian was a rather casual one. “Why not?” I thought, I plan on traveling there when travel opens up. 15 minutes on duolingo every day plus a little blog at hive to practice, maybe a few documentaries and vlogs during meals to learn a bit about the culture. It seemed like it wouldn’t be a big deal.
3 days later, I’m trying to organize what has the potential be one of the biggest initiatives at Hive, or at least could be my biggest contribution.
After a few minutes on the Tandem app for language exchange, I realized this is exactly what we need to onboard new users, and I wrote a post about it. Now all kinds of people are reaching out to me and telling me they want to build a language exchange community at Hive. Me too!
Building cohesion
Language learning is something many people have talked about but no one has really cooperated on to any large capacity so I guess that’s where I come in. I am organizing the local communities of each country with people who may want to learn English, smaller English study communities, and students of various other languages to make A more cohesive community around language learning and bilingual services. I want Hive to be a place that is extremely attractive for anyone studying a language or looking for culture exchange.
Building International connections
One of my favorite aspects of steem when we were at our peak of active users was the amount of interacting I was able to do with people from all different cultures. I particularly connected with some Nigerians, a country which I knew absolutely nothing about and, to be honest, had a rather negative image of. These new friends got me thinking about going to Africa in the not too distant future and made me realize that, despite living in 3 very different cultures in my life, I still have a lot to learn about the world.
I love how this random connection to a random country just happened organically through comments. That is exactly why I want to grow a language and culture exchange community. We could do way better at Hive than we ever did at Steem because this time I think we will be able to keep the people that come over.
A revived effort in strengthening regional communities
Excitement about language exchange has the potential to boost every single regional community at hive. That’s what leads to meetups, easier onboarding, more excitement, more word of mouth.
I remember seeing big meetups in the Philippines and all over Africa. We had tons of Venezuelans sharing what was happening there and a fair bit going on in other places too. We can easily build that up again in each area, this time with more connections between locals, foreigners, and people overseas interested in the culture.
A New Communtiy
I revived the Language Exchange! community and discord and people started reaching out right away. I got quite a few people from India, a few people who want to learn Japanese, one who wants to study French and another Portuguese. 3 different small initiatives mentioned wanting to collaborate. The momentum is building.
I just put out an invitation to the Japanese community and hope my new Indonesian friends will notice this one, if not I’ll mention it again in a bilingual post.
We are starting with bilingual blogs, study questions, cultural discussions and informative language posts but I already have a lot of ideas for much more we can do with it and I’ve had a few people sharing their great ideas as well.
Tandem - language exchange app
I found 3 people interested in starting Hive blogs from Tandem. Whether they will sign up or not we will have to see, but I'm confident that if I stay in touch with the people I've met, someone will join. I think I should slow down and not try to just drop Hive on as many people as I can, better to make some real friends and bring over 10 people that I can look over and help grow than bring over 100 that I can't do much for. The idea is to get every language learners to bring over a few. If our community can grow to 100 people and each brings over an average of 3 users, that's 300 new users, all of which could potentially do the same with their language partners.
My studies (Day 3 postponed)
So since I skipped my Indonesian blog for the day (and posted this a day after I wrote it because I had a massive headache).
I studied question words today, perhaps the most important thing to study besides simple sentence structure. I will make a survey using these question words tomorrow to get to know the Indonesian community better. So far they have left a lot of great comments for me to practice and there are 3-4 people I already feel really interested in knowing better.
This “30 day of” (#30daysof) initiative may turn out to be a turning point for me at Hive.
If you are interested in studying language, join us at
Language (and culture) Exchange Community
And find us in our discord chat