I'm a writer. English mother tongue, living in Lisbon and Barcelona. I'm focused on Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian and Turkish at the moment. I study with Assimil and Complete language learning books and audio, use Anki for flashcards, and generally plan my lessons myself since I have a lot of experience learning languages. If I need help with a specific area of grammar I will ask for the teacher to plan it in advance. I like to work with a few different teachers for different perspectives. But most often with Italki classes I just want to practice things I've learned and get careful corrections. I want to learn the spoken version of the language. I don't want to learn the academic, written version of languages to pass any test. I do want grammar, insofar as it helps me learn to communicate with the spoken version of the language. The exception is French and Italian, for which I do want to improve my literary vocabulary.