I just downloaded HelloTalk the other day. Although it was hard to find a good partner at first, now that I have one I am happy to have someone I can speak Chinese everyday with. Plus being able to interact with native speakers has already been building my confidence.
Has anyone tried any of these apps? Living in an area without a huge Chinese population, I am glad something like this exists.
You need a decent number of vocabulary and grammar knowledge before being able to use them
I have used HelloTalk along with Memrise as two of my biggest tools in my learning a language tool belt. Memrise is great for learning vocabulary and phrases, and then HelloTalk is a great way to use your new vocabulary with real native speakers. I really like that it has all the functionality of Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger, but is specifically for language exchange. It’s nice too because if I just have a free 5-10 minutes I can get on the app and practice via messaging someone, or I can even just scroll through the news feed and see posts, memes, articles, photos, etc by people that speak the language I am learning, which helps me see the language in action and learn new parts or the language I didn’t previously know.
The one downside that several of my female friends have commented to me is creepy guys will spam them, flirt with them without any indication that it is welcome, and even send inappropriate texts. Luckily though with HelloTalk it’s easy to report someone and they have a no tolerance policy for inappropriate behavior from their users.
Also, depending on the popularity of the language you are learning, and your native language, you can run into unique challenges. When I was learning Brazilian Portuguese, I found out that not many Americans on the app are looking to learn Brazilian Portuguese, so I would often get up to 20 messages in a day from Brazilians wanting to practice with me. Because of that situation, it was easier to find language exchange opportunities, but it also was overwhelming or a bit annoying at times. On the other end of the spectrum, when I was learning French, I quickly found out that many Americans were doing the same, so it was a lot harder to find a francophone who wanted to practice with me regularly, if at all. That being said, just for the learning value of the app as a whole, I think it’s a very good use of language learning time.
All in all I have enjoyed and found HelloTalk useful and efficient and would recommend it to anyone looking to seriously or casually have a language exchange experience.
Love this comment! I completely agree with everything you said. Being a woman, I have had the experiences you were talking about. But luckily it is pretty easy to ignore those men to.
I often wonder if not many Americans are not wanting to practice Mandarin (which is surprising to me) because I get A LOT of messages during the day from Chinese people wanting to learn English. So much sometimes it is hard to keep up with. I guess the best advice would be to weed through the obvious spam and message back those who seem serious.