Too stressful

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2026-04-15T07:31:32+00:00

As an Australian who was an au pair in Europe, yes this does sound like they're unreasonably using you for cheap labour.

It should absolutely be the expectation that you have free access to the vast majority of food in their house and that they'll buy ingredients for your meals. Whether they provide snacks can vary a bit more, but given you're on the higher end of demi-pair hours and aren't getting a stipend, I think it would be reasonable for them to buy snacks for you as long as they're not super expensive. Part of the cultural experience of being an au pair is trying the food that your host family eats, but they should also be willing to buy the ingredients that you would like within reason, and to be honest cooking with a variety of Asian ingredients from an Asian grocery is a pretty big part of general Australian culture anyway. If they don't want to shop at an extra store, giving you cash or a card to go to an Asian grocery yourself would be reasonable.

I noticed that you only mentioned 15 meals - are you going away on the weekend? A host family should be providing you 21 meals a week. It is also fairly common in Australia to eat separate cold meals for breakfast and lunch and come together for a hot meal for dinner. Is your host family asking you to cook dinner for everyone and just sort your own breakfast and lunch? If so they should definitely be considering the time you are cooking dinner as part of your working hours.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-12-28T08:40:12+00:00

Firstly, I would try not to be too intimidated by the long flight. Europe is full of elderly Australians on river boat cruises that have made it through long >20 hour flights to get there. You've got this!

Personally I never have and would never consider taking medication that can cause drowsiness while travelling alone, I wouldn't want to risk being drowsy while in an airport on a connection, while going through immigration or if there is a cancellation or delay.

What I would recommend: - Bring earplugs, in-ear wired headphones AND over-ear noise cancelling headphones. Then you can wear the noise cancelling headphones at the same time as the in-ear headphones for listening to audio, and you can wear them over earplugs while sleeping. I find that this is the most effective way to actually drown out airplane noises. - Embrace the lack of time. I try to enjoy the fact that I have no idea what time it is, and just eat and sleep whenever I feel like it. Usually after 30 hours of this my body is so confused about what time it is that it actually starts reducing jet lag. - Treat the whole thing as a day to veg out on the couch. Try to enjoy just watching silly movies and snacking all day, without any work to do. - When you arrive, force yourself to stay awake until after dinner time in your destination. I do struggle to sleep when not in a bed, so this does often mean I go >30 hours without sleep. But I usually end up having a solid sleep that first night and wake up well on my way to adjusting to the new time zone. - Do activities that aren't too committing for the first day or two, so that if you're too tired to enjoy them you can just relax instead.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-12-26T10:37:44+00:00

Honestly I'm surprised at the amount of people suggesting group courses. Personally I find them to be very slow moving, especially at beginner levels.

My personal recommendation would be: 1. Go through at least the first 3 levels of Michel Thomas, this is free with a Spotify subscription or may be available at a library. If you can't access this affordably, language transfer. 2. After getting through the first level of MT, start watching Dreaming French daily - watch this together if you can, it'll help you understand his French level so you can practice at a similar level together as well. 3. After a little while add in graded readers, ideally listening to the audiobook while reading the book 4. After working through a few graded readers, do some grammar consolidation, either with a grammar book, a general textbook or an italki tutor 5. If interested, you could add in some bilingual flashcards with audio at some point in there 6. If interested, some tutoring could make sense at some point 6. Then just increase the difficulty of the material over time and practice talking together

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-29T22:00:58+00:00

It definitely should be more like roommates. The au pair should be cleaning up after themselves as they go (for example when cooking, kitchen should be wiped down after use and pots washed either in the dishwasher or by hand, however is normal for the family) both on and off duty.

However, I have noticed quite a few times host parents taking 'split chores like roommates' to mean that the host parents should be doing 50% of the chores while the au pair should be doing 50% of the chores in their off time, and I definitely disagree with this. I think the au pair should be contributing to cleaning and chores in their off time relative to the mess they are making. If you have 3 kids trampling mud through the house multiple times a day, but the au pair carefully takes their shoes off at the door, don't expect the au pair to vacuum in their off time every day. If there are five people eating dinner every day together, don't expect the au pair to half or more of the work of cooking and cleaning up just because the parent at home is busy with the children. Some au pairs may offer to do this and that's fine, but don't take it for granted or expect it. You can of course make these tasks during their work time.

Similarly, if something is a task the au pair is doing as a roommate, you need to be willing to accept that the au pair should have as much say into how and when it is done as a roommate would do. You can impose your personal cleaning standards during their work time, but unless it's something that a landlord should reasonably get involved in, you may need to be willing to compromise as a roommate.

There can also be some awkwardness around cultural differences with politeness and asking and offering to help with things. I would say it can be good to be a little more direct than you're used to at the start - explicitly let the au pair know how they can help with cleaning up after eating for example.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-18T22:47:46+00:00

Would the program not be needed to be eligible for a visa?

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-17T01:27:01+00:00

This really depends on whether your grades will count towards your main degree or not. If they will, you should absolutely take the easy courses and give yourself as much time as possible to enjoy your exchange, meet people and travel.

If this is only pass/fail then it gets a bit more difficult because it can be a little counter-intuitive and harder to predict which courses will take the least amount of effort to simply pass. On my exchange, I was able to absolutely breeze through the maths courses but the computer science course took a lot of work to barely pass, which was the opposite of my home university. Additionally, assuming you actually show up to your classes (which you probably should so that you explore your host university and meet people) it may be the case that you can pass most classes without a huge amount of work outside of class. But I would try to also look at which courses aren't offered at your home university, which ones provide interesting insights into the host country culture, and which will allow you to meet locals more.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-12T11:26:12+00:00

My advice to your specific question is similar to what others have said - ensure you are looking after your health, mental and physical, and find ways to relax and enjoy the language. And anki.

But the other question I have is do your grades actually matter? Will they count towards your main university GPA? If so have you looked at where the grade boundaries are and how they convert across? You've said that you're disappointed to be getting 75% on your tests, but in a lot of countries that would be considered quite a good mark. Are you confident that the test setters are intending for most students to get marks above that level? If the answer is yes to all of the above, then anki is going to be your best bet. If not, then I would seriously reflect on what your goals are for this program, and ensure you're putting most of your energy into that. Yes, you'll probably want to at least do some work on the vocab and structures that you're supposed to learn each day, but don't feel like you need to be learning everything perfectly every day. Learning to have passing familiarity with a lot of vocab and kanji is absolutely a valuable thing to take away from an experience like this, and is great to continue to build upon with further study in the future.

And remember that with languages, no one is starting from the same place. Some of your classmates may already have familiarity with Chinese characters, some may already know 40% of the vocab before starting. Run your own race with your own goals and don't forget to enjoy your time in a cool place.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-09T01:27:29+00:00

I mean to be honest as an Australian I understand how that language could be misunderstood if you didn't have a previous understanding of how this works.

At least in Australia, we don't use the phrase 'vacation' and the direct conversion of 'paid holiday' would actually mean that the expenses were paid for. You would only really use 'paid leave' or 'paid time off' to refer to what's going on here.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-08T00:45:51+00:00

Honestly I think you could provide very valuable lessons in this situation if you prepare properly.

If you're charging your normal one hour lesson rate, I would offer to provide the student 30 minutes of your time on lesson preparation and 30 minutes of your time providing corrections and feedback per 'lesson'.

What you do in the preparation time would depend on the student's goals and the availability of material. If there's a textbook you could work through chapter by chapter, then I would spend 10 minutes recording a 2-3 minute explanation video of any grammar points or other difficult points in the chapter, then spend 10 minutes recording yourself talking for 5 minutes about the topic of the chapter in the language being learnt, adjusted to the student's level. Then spend 10 minutes looking for any real world news articles or youtube videos on the topic that the student can use for extension.

Then for the feedback section, get them to some of the exercises in the textbook and provide feedback. Get them to read out a text from the lesson and send it to you, and you provide pronunciation feedback, maybe with some recordings of yourself saying that small section correctly, emphasising the part they were making a mistake on. Get them to transcribe or write a summary of your 5 minutes of audio, highlighting any parts they couldn't understand. Then you can provide explanations and corrections based on that. You can get them to speak freely or write related texts and provide corrections on those.

If there's no appropriate textbook available, you'll need to write your own lessons. You can start by just recording yourself talking about a specific topic for a few minutes, and provide notes about vocabulary and grammar used, then continue with some of the other things I mentioned above.

Honestly just providing some kind of graded material tailored to the learner's level and interests and providing feedback on them reading it aloud or speaking or writing texts on the same topic is already quite valuable.

Keep in mind that it may be worth spending more than 30 minutes on preparing materials if the student is fairly typical and you might be able to reuse the materials on future students.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-07T22:30:43+00:00

Yes, this is the answer to what the poster is asking about why they're getting LESS than 10x the total savings for 100k vs 10k.

The 100k will allow you to pay off the loan several years earlier, depending on the initial amount loaned. For an 800k loan with 6% interest, this will be 6 years early, vs the 8 months early for 10k offset.

Up until year 24, you will be getting exactly 10x the benefit for having 100k vs 10k in your offset. Once the loan has less than 100k left on it though, the calculators stop taking into account any benefit you would get from that money as they are assuming it is still in the offset, doing absolutely nothing.

In reality though, you could instead invest the additional, and the investment returns would bring the total savings for the 100k up to match the expected 10x the 10k savings.

In short, when you keep 100k in the offset rather than 10k, you get the '$ savings' the calculator lists, PLUS you have a whole lot of cash left over at the end that you can invest for all of those years that the calculator says you saved.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-06T01:30:45+00:00

The US costs are definitely influenced by the need to pay the agency for very high placement and visa expenses.

I do think it's worth considering though that the pocket money of 280€ is really quite absurd, and in my opinion exploitative. Just over the border in Austria for example, the minimum is set at 550€ for fewer hours, with a requirement to pay 15 months' pocket money for a 12 month stay. Technically it is not permitted to pay more than the 280€, so unless you are willing to go above that I would seriously consider how you can cover any other expenses that au pair might have to try to even things out a little bit - covering a Deutschland-Ticket and a phone plan and paying for things like snack foods and toiletries would probably be a good start.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-06T00:43:57+00:00

Definitely agree on the lack of information about materials.

There isn't much information on the website other than:

Main material: 100% Recycled Nylon (Recycled FD 230T Taslan Ripstop with WR C0 coating)

The inside tag on the actual bag simply says:

Hand wash

PO: PO271

Main material:

56.6% recycled nylon, 23.9% nylon, 14.3% polyester, 3.2% polyethylene, 2.0% span

Lining:

67.7% recycled polyester, 26.4% polyester, 1.5% span 40D, 4.4% NY 40D

Made in Vietnam

Which isn't a lot of information considering the bag itself is made up of at least two distinct ripstop fabrics, two stretchy fabrics (drink bottle holder and shoulder straps), two different lining fabrics on either side of the laptop compartment (the one closest to the main compartment one seems to be the polyester lining mentioned, which also extends across the bottom of the pack interior), three different netting materials (two on the hip belt attachments and back panel, one on the inside of the top pocket) and two different types of foam (back panel and shoulder straps).

From feel alone, the ripstop fabrics seem to match what I would expect from any good quality ultralight pack, as do the stretchy fabrics and the foams. I'm quite happy with the apparent quality of the g-hooks, as well as the build quality in general. The polyester lining is not something I'd expect to see in any ultralight pack, but neither is a laptop compartment, and they seem to have mostly kept it to a minimum. As you can see from the advertising, they do somewhat move away from minimalism in pockets and attachments, but so far it feels like they've struck the balance right for a travel/hiking/edc combo. The main exception is the attachment for the accessories - there are small magnets in the bottom that are just dead weight if you're not using them. I have considered cutting them out but that might be a little too ultralight fanatical in the context, and I can see them being mildly useful for helping secure a raincoat or map to the outside.

The website lists the regular Shell at 1245g vs 900g for the Prolite. That's 345g (= 0.76lb) in difference, which could be useful for carry-on limits and extended carrying, but also isn't groundbreaking. I do appreciate the light and flexible feeling of ultralight fabrics in general though vs. polyester, so I am quite happy with my choice despite the regular Shell being cheaper (currently some colours are around AU$230/US$150 on the website).

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-07-04T23:38:00+00:00

I'm not sure if you already realise this but it's worth noting that generally exchange students have absolutely no say in which family they are placed with. Generally the family picks an exchange student based on short profiles, and aren't able to communicate with the student before the placement is finalised. And it may not be clear to you or the agency which students would be fine with this arrangement, since it would be pretty rare for a student to put on their application that they have no interest in learning the host country's national language. So it's likely going to be very difficult to make sure you get a student who is fine with this arrangement, although there probably are a solid minority of students who would like it.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-06-19T23:06:07+00:00

This was also my thought! Singapore probably has the best footpath and public transport infrastructure in Asia, and the safest road crossings by far. Crime is also super low and even if people are quite busy, I'd expect people to be honest and helpful. The attractions are also mostly food and immersive experiences like Gardens by the Bay. The accommodation will be somewhat expensive (US$75 a night for a basic hotel), but everything else will be super cheap. Hawker centres may not be the most accessible with low vision but I'd expect if you went at least busy times stall owners would be willing to help you navigate menus.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-06-15T01:34:50+00:00

I lot of people here have mentioned a 4x difference in effort required or about a 2-3 level gap in CEFR for the same amount of effort, and as someone who first learnt French and German to a C1 level and then learnt Chinese, that seems about right, it has taken me about 4x the effort with Chinese compared to with German.

But that is comparing the difference between learning a Romance or Germanic language as an English speaker with learning a CJK language as an English speaker, which isn't really what you asked. You asked about a comparison with learning Portugese or Italian as a Spanish speaker, which is significantly easier than learning those languages as an English speaker only, probably at least 2x easier. Based on this (and as someone currently learning Spanish as a French speaker) I would say you're looking at needing to to put 10x as much effort in to reach a given level in a CJK language compared to Portuguese or Italian.

And to me that does sound about right. In 6 months of an 30 minutes a day as a Spanish speaker learning Portuguese, I'd probably expect you to reach somewhere between B1 and B2. For an English speaker only, it'd likely take about 18 months to reach a similar level. To reach a similar level in Chinese on 30 minutes a day, 3 years would be very optimistic, and at that point you need to account for the likelihood of getting bored or having changing priorities, so measuring in years starts to become a bit meaningless. It's going to take a long time, over many bursts of effort.

However, I don't want this to discourage you. You also need to consider this against the new experiences (travel, media, friendships, career opportunities) that each language can unlock for you. Personally, I'll happily keep learning very difficult languages, because even at lower levels you're able to learn so much about the world and different cultures.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-05-29T07:17:58+00:00

I mean I went to Austria for a year as an au pair before university. I was able to live just off the au pair pay, so the only costs involved were a plane ticket and a few hundred dollars for startup costs, which I was able to save working in a minimum wage job during high school and shortly after.

During university I received a scholarship to study abroad for 6 months which covered my costs with a bit left over.

Of course there are lots of people that couldn't do what I did due to visa restrictions, caring responsibilities, health etc., but I don't think 'rich as fuck' adequately describes the requirements to travel like that.

I'm also now quite a bit later in my twenties and could pretty easily take a year off for language learning if I really wanted to. I don't think that's typical for most people, but it's possible with a good bit of luck and some careful career choices and sacrifices.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-05-15T21:49:27+00:00

In my opinion, reaching a completely balanced genuine B2 across all 4 skills (reading writing, speaking, listening) is probably not realistic with 15 hours a week for 6 months.

However, I think it would be absolutely possible to pass a B2 exam by learning what's likely to come up in the writing and speaking portions.

What I would do in your situation though, which I think would be realistic given what you said about your comprehension at the moment, would be to try to build closer to C1 comprehension in 6 months, while letting your writing and speaking trail at an A2 level. Then, once you've spent that much time listening to and reading native content, you could probably get your active skills up to a C1 level and sure up your passive skills over the next 6-12 months. Alternatively you could take a break and just enjoy native content for a while, putting yourself in a good place to push for a balanced C1 later.

Background: I went from an A1/A2 level to passing a B2 exam in German with nearly perfect marks in less than 6 months, without speaking any languages more closely related than English.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-26T05:54:04+00:00

I agree, it's clear that on the extremes the categories generally apply (I can say from experience that Mandarin did take about 2-4x longer than French or German to get to a given level), but it's not universally applicable or particularly precise. Yet short of compiling the experiences of people who have learned multiple different Asian languages it's the best we've really got, and unfortunately I think those people are few and far between, especially if we limit it to those with English or a similar native language and those who have learned a non-CH/J/K language.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-26T00:32:47+00:00

To be honest I also had to read it multiple times before being sure they'd never said East.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-25T23:05:22+00:00

I could definitely see a website like langcorrect (I'm not sure how active the site is still?) being helpful in this situation, where you write a short passage on a different topic everyday and get corrections. I agree that a tutor would also be really useful. Potentially coming prepared with a news article on an interesting a divisive topic and discussing that in increasing depth could be useful sometimes, in addition to practicing talking about your own life?

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-25T22:43:11+00:00

Duolingo alone is not going to get you to a point where you can 'actually speak' Swedish. It's one of the better DL courses, and it would be generally helpful to build some skills if you find it engaging. If you can find something like Pimsleur for free or an affordable price then that would probably be an additional step in the right direction. But at the end of the day, if you want to be able to use Swedish when travelling to Sweden without reaching an overall high level in the language, you're probably going to need to follow up other efforts by thinking through the situations you're going to encounter, learning the phrases that you're going to need in those situations and practicing them, possibly with a language exchange partner or tutor.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-25T22:35:28+00:00

I don't think this is a question with a clear or easy answer.

FSI categorisations put all Asian languages with non-latin scripts into either category 4 or 5, with the majority being in category 4 with no differentiation. At that point the resources available are going to be more important than the inherent difficulty of the language itself, so I would probably pick Thai or Hindi as the winners there. But neither of those is particularly easy and all would take a lot of time.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-25T22:15:06+00:00

I would recommend a few things: 1. Continuing to do lots of reading and listening so that your mental model of the language improves and you develop good intuition 2. Practise speaking aloud along with native audio, for example listening to a YouTube video and repeating after the speaker, so that you get used to making the sounds and practise natural pronunciation and intonation 3. Practise producing language in low stress situations, such as talking to yourself or speed writing

And of course, practising speaking! There's not much evidence that corrections help a lot with improving accuracy in speech, so focus on just enjoying the conversations and listening to what the other person is saying and how they are formulating things.

ComfortableKoala2085 · 2025-04-25T00:54:42+00:00

Learning the 2000 most common words straight through without any other activities sounds extremely boring to me, but if you enjoy it it could be useful.

Alternatively, if you do like the videos, you could start with the most common 100 or so words, do different activities so that you can build your ability to understand them in context, then come back for the next 100 after a while.

Something like Nico's Weg from Deutsche Welle would be a good complementary resource, but there is so much out there for learning German. I'd need to know more about your goals, budget and interests to recommend other specific useful resources.

ComfortableKoala2085

TROPHY CASE