Today, on social networks, you can not only like photos and follow the life of friends, but also learn foreign languages. Special language social networks will help you find a live interlocutor who will improve the level of your foreign language. And at the same time it will help to replenish vocabulary, relieve you of hackneyed phrases and revive your speech with real phrases of English, German, Italian, Chinese, and any language you like. All Courses has compiled for you a selection of popular language social networks created just for this purpose.
You can already communicate "with the dictionary", but still worry about pronunciation? Then social networks will come to the rescue, where you can find new friends around the world.
Lang8
Social network brings together people from 190 countries, and these are 90 languages \u200b\u200bto study. The idea of \u200b\u200bthe site is simple: a user writes a phrase or a post in the language he is studying, and a native speaker checks and corrects speech, grammatical and spelling errors, if any. You can attach tags to notes, and the most popular ones get to the top. You can also make friends on the site.
There are two options for using the network: paid and free. The second allows you to learn only two languages \u200b\u200band make no more than 500 entries in a notebook. In paid content, there is an unlimited number of posts and languages, and at the same time it is allowed to post photos, leave comments in pdf format.
Lingq
Lingq relies on expanding its vocabulary, so communication requires at least a minimum knowledge of a foreign language. The social network has been open since 2007 and today offers access to 16 languages, among others there are English, French, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, German. All new words are easily saved in the profile. In addition to free communication, there is access to audio lessons and you can send written work for review.
The site has both paid and free content.
English, Baby!
The main feature of the site is communication in correct English, American or British. For this, the site has daily free lessons on new topic, thematic audio material, including monologues and celebrity interviews. Many people use the net to prepare for TOEFL. There are also those who prefer to improve their grammar and just communicate.
There is a separate section for English teachers where teachers exchange experiences.
There is paid content.
Interpals.net
Site for finding an interlocutor for language exchange. Friends from 154 countries are now available. And these are more than 100 languages, including the main European and Asian. The social network is completely free. You can register in it via facebook. For communication there is a forum and a chat, you choose a partner yourself. You can choose the interlocutor by age and gender, or by specifying a specific country. The resource always shows who is online and who is not on the site now.
Conversationexchange.com
On Conversationexchange.com you need to register and select a partner for communication in Windows Messenger or Skype. The resource is also interesting in that it helps to find a native speaker of the language you are studying in your city. This is how you get additional opportunity chat with a person tete-a-tete. In addition, you can improve your written language on the site.
Speaking24.com
After registering on the site, a quick search for native speakers will open in front of you. You can choose an interlocutor by age, gender, and the studied language. The resource will immediately offer you the person's contacts in Skype or other messengers. The main advantage of the site is only communication. Fluency is encouraged here and does not focus heavily on grammatical errors.
Easy language exchange
The new social network for communication in a foreign language today has about 72,000 users from 56 countries. The site pays special attention to learning English: there are courses for beginners, as well as courses for those who want to increase their vocabulary and improve grammar. In addition, useful articles are published on the resource, there is a forum where you can find an interlocutor for learning Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages. A separate plus is registration as a teacher.
Paltalk
The service offers more than 5,000 active chat rooms where you can discuss the latest music, sports, current events, or just chat with people around the world. And these are 37 major European and Asian languages. Additionally, you can communicate via text messages, which will allow you to master the written language.
Internations
Site for advanced users of foreign languages. A community that can help you not only find interlocutors and friends around the world, but also invite you to attend events and meetings. The service will be very useful for immigrants - in a short time a person will be able to acquire a new circle of friends and get to know the city.
The site will help you practice in the target language. On home page you can immediately select the interface language: English, Russian and Spanish. You choose the interlocutor yourself: gender, native language, target language. Besides there are sections "Forum", "Articles", "Invitations". To communicate, you must register on the site.
HelloTalk
This is not a social network, but a chat program for mobile device, which offers to communicate with the interlocutor through text and voice messages in over 100 languages. The program options allow you to train pronunciation, as well as collect your own base of materials on the target language (audio, words, sentences, pictures).
What is learning English without communicating in it? And, of course, it is best to communicate with native speakers, because their language is the most alive. True, classes with native speakers are usually not cheap, and still not everyone is happy with them - many of them are not professional teachers and cannot really teach anything, but can only chat in English. But not everything is so sad. There is a way to get the practice of communication in English for free and I already talked about it in the article about - these are sites for international communication.
Today we will consider in detail the use of the site InterPals Penpals, designed to find pen pals from different countries... With it, finding a native speaker to practice your English is no longer a problem. He, like other similar sites, is sometimes criticized for the abundance of intrusive Turks and Arabs. In fact, you just need to know how to use it (I'll show you how to block some countries so that you don't receive messages from there). Using this site wisely, you can find penpals to communicate in English and make interesting new acquaintances.
My experience with this resource is quite positive. Several years ago, I found some interesting interlocutors there, including a talented young photographer from Great Britain, a teacher from America and a lawyer from Japan who spoke very good English.
A few tips for newbies
- If your main goal is language practice, it is best to try to find a native speaker or someone who speaks almost at a native speaker level. Sociable but illiterate Turks, Arabs or Indians will give you nothing in terms of language learning. If a native speaker wants to learn Russian, you can offer a so-called language exchange. mutual assistance in learning languages.
- It's good if you have some common interests with your language exchange partners. You are going to talk, and everyday topics quickly exhaust themselves.
- If you find a language exchange partner, agree on how your peer learning will take place. For example, first he writes to you in English and you answer in English, then he writes in Russian and you answer in Russian. Or do you agree to chat on Skype - 5 minutes in Russian, 5 minutes in English, etc.
- Ask the other person to point out your mistakes to you. The media are usually very relaxed about errors. If you don't ask, then the person you are talking to will most likely simply not pay attention to them.
- Don't waste time talking to everyone who wrote to you. At first, out of politeness, many try to answer absolutely everyone and this can take a lot of time and effort. As a result, you will no longer want to go to the site, thinking that there are hundreds of messages to unsubscribe to. Have you looked through the profile of the interlocutor and realized that you most likely will have nothing to talk about? You can safely ignore it.
registration on the website
1. The site offers to log in with a Facebook account, but for some reason I didn't succeed. We fill out such a registration form and click Sign up .
2. Next, we are asked to indicate our real name ( first name) and select the area ( region ) and city ( city ) ... Press again Sign up .
3. After that, you should receive an email with a confirmation link. On gmail I never got it, but gmail has lost a few more of my emails from other resources in recent days, so it's probably not about Interpals. Then I re-registered to Yandex mail and everything went fine.
We proceed to editing the profile.
4. Step 1 - step one. Add a profile photo. In the Description box, you can add a description of the photo, but I'll leave it blank. To add another photo, click Add files or just drag the photo into the adjacent gray window. Push Save changes
. 
5. Step 2 - step two. We fill in the profile information. In the window Tell the world a bit about you you can write a few words about yourself (interests, hobbies, etc.). I am skipping it for now, because a more detailed questionnaire can be filled out later by going to the profile.
Here you need to indicate which languages \u200b\u200byou speak and at what level:
- beginner / elementary - beginner
- intermediate - average level
- advanced - advanced
- fluent - fluent
- native speaker - native speaker
To add a language, click + add a language .
And on the same page, you need to select the goals of communication:
- Email Pen Pals - correspondence on e-mail (on the site that is)
- Snail mail pen pals - exchange of real paper letters
- Language Exchange - language exchange: you help a foreigner in learning Russian, and he / she helps you in learning English or another language
- Friendship - friendship
- Romance / Flirting - flirting
- A relationship - relationship
I chose Email Pen Pals , Friendship and Language Exchange ... To save changes, click Create Profile .
6. Step 3 - step three. Here we are invited to invite friends. We skip it, promising to do it later - Not right now, remind me later .
7. Now we can set up a profile and choose where we want to receive messages from and where we don't. We open in top panel settings - Settings, in the settings, select the privacy tab - Privacy.
First point Accept messages from (from whom to receive messages) can be left unchanged, let it be all users of the site. We are most interested in the second point, which I have circled in a red frame - Age / sex / location limits - age, gender and location.
- In the first line, we choose with whom we want to communicate - with men ( males ), with women ( females ) or with both ( males and females ).
- The next line is the age of the interlocutors from and to.
- Then we choose from which continents you would like to receive letters. I chose Europe, North America and Australia.
- And one more useful setting item - Blocked countries ... We block countries from which you do not want to receive messages. I blocked Turkey and Egypt (of which they write most often), but then the list can be expanded.
With the main thing sorted out. Let's see the rest of the settings on this page.
- Available for chat with - with whom you can communicate. I left it unchanged - with everyone on the site.
- View my wall - who can view my wall. I didn't change anything here either. Everything is on the site.
- Blocked users - blocked users. If someone starts to write obsessive messages to you, they can be blocked.
- View instant messenger - who can view information about your messengers (Skype, etc.) I have not added any contacts (and I do not advise you, you can exchange contacts already in the process of communication), so I leave everyone - everything.
- View my friends - who can view my friends list. I also leave - everything.
- Display my profile in searches - display my profile in the search. Check the box so that site users can find you through the search.
- Receive friend requests - receive requests to add friends. We also tick the box if you want to be added as a friend. In general, adding to friends is not necessary for communication.
- Only people I have contacted with can add me to friends - only people with whom I communicated can add me as a friend. I checked this box because I am not going to add everyone as a friend.
- Exclude my profile from search engines - exclude my profile from search engines. If you don't want Google, for example, to index your page, check the box.
8. We fill in information about ourselves. If you have no idea what to write, you can look at the profiles of several users and get some inspiration from there.
- About - About Me.
- Requests - wishes.
- Language exchange requests - wishes for language exchange.
- Hobbies & Interests - hobbies and interests.
- Favorite music - favorite music.
- Favorite movies - favorite films.
- Favorite TV shows - favorite TV shows (this also includes series).
- Favorite books - favorite books.
- Favorite quotes -Favorite quotes.
9
... To start looking for partners for language exchange, open the appropriate tab - language exchange. 
Choosing which language you speak I speak ... and which one are you studying I am leraning ..... If you press More options , you can choose gender, age, country, and the purpose of your interlocutor's communication, as well as the presence of a photo.
When all the parameters have been determined, click Search ... In general, then, you can not look for yourself, but wait until someone finds you and offers to communicate. This usually happens pretty quickly.
! Separately, I note that this and similar sites are suitable exclusively for older teens and adults. Correspondence resources for children must be moderated. Here I wrote about my experience with ePals - a site for finding penpals for children.
I hope this article was helpful to you. If you have any questions, please write in the comments. Good luck with your English!
Photo from personal archive
Suitcase-plane-America. The first weeks, and maybe months, you come to your senses and generally try to realize where you are, who you are and what is happening to you. The reasons why you are here are different for everyone. Someone dreamed for a long time and, finally, decided to turn his life around. Someone met a loved one and realized that this was more important for him than everything that happened before. Someone deliberately went for a more prosperous life - if not for themselves, then at least for the children. The reasons are different, but everyone who came to the United States after 30 sooner or later encounters something terrible cultural adaptation. language barrier and job search. With loneliness.
There are tens of thousands of kilometers between you and your loved ones. The first time you fight. Even out of habit, you are going to drink wine with friends - however, now on Skype. But every month it becomes less and less. Everyone has their own worries, and the time difference certainly does not contribute to the cohesion of relations at a distance. No, you still chat with them on social media and sometimes call. But Friday night you get lonely as hell. And even if you come here with your family, sooner or later you will become lonely. Because there, in your homeland, you had not only a family. And here - no one else. And here you can go in two ways - say that "after 30 friends do not start" or still try to "make" them. I suggest the second.
Photo from personal archive
So where can you meet new friends when you are over 30.
Photo from personal archive
Work.Let's start with the accessible. It may be trite, but, of course, colleagues can become your friends. You just don't have to think "who needs it." At first glance, it seems that those who have lived here for a long time certainly do not need new acquaintances, but in fact, if you communicate with people heart to heart, you often find all the same suffering from loneliness. Therefore, take a look around your new team - perhaps it is among colleagues that you will be able to find friends. I invited my friends to visit, we played board games, drank wine, celebrated Christmas together - and now I can safely call many of them friends. But I could have just passed by, leaving our relationship only within the working framework.
Photo from personal archive
Groups of former compatriots. Social networks are full of groups of Russian-speaking emigrants and I highly recommend taking a look there. Firstly, there you can discuss all the difficult topics for newcomers. And besides, it is a great resource for finding new friends. For example, in another lonely evening I asked in one of the groups: "and no one here plays board games?" (at home my friends and I fought almost every weekend). As a result, several people answered me, and one girl wrote: "I remembered how lonely I was at first, but come to us, we have fun." I went. And in the end, after a couple of weeks I went with the guys to celebrate New Year and skiing in Pocono.
Photo from personal archive
Hobby.Speaking of skiing. If you have a hobby - this is a direct way to find new acquaintances, moreover, it is a 100% guarantee that you will have something to talk with new friends. In my case, this hobby turned out to be skiing. I knew that there are ski tracks not far from New York, I really wanted to go for a ride, but the lack of a car and understanding of where to go, and how everything was organized in general, slowed down. As a result, again, in one of the Russian-speaking groups, I wrote: I want! Take someone with you. And after that I went for a drive with new acquaintances.
Photo from personal archive
Places of study. Of course, most adults move to the US with some linguistic background. Alas, I am an exception - I have studied French all my life, so English appeared in my life just a year before I arrived in New York. And the first thing that had to be done here was to go to language courses. I specially chose it away from Russian-speaking areas so that there was no chance to speak Russian with classmates. As a result, guys from other countries were added to my arsenal of friends. I can't say that we became friends - the difference in cultures and the complexity of expressing thoughts in English still hindered me (after all, the most important thing in friendship is heart-to-heart communication), but all the same, this communication was useful, pleasant and brightened winter evenings.
Photo from personal archive
Dating websites. Of course, if you have a spouse and a couple of children, this is hardly your way. But for those who are lonely, I would not advise to neglect them. Moreover, if you are not looking for a romantic relationship, you can indicate right in the status that your goal is exclusively friendship. Unlike dating sites in the post-Soviet space, in which freaks and perverts abound, in America you can meet very decent people on these sites. Especially if you are 30+. After all, where do people meet at this age? It's not a tumultuous adolescence, with every party full of new faces. It's easy to find someone just as lonely on the site with whom you can chat over coffee or walk around the city. If he has lived here for a long time, he can show and tell a bunch of interesting things. And it is quite possible that this person will become your friend, in any case, it happened to me more than once. Moreover, thanks to one of these acquaintances, I got into a company with which I flew to Alaska in the summer - if someone had told me a year ago that this was possible, I would not have believed it.
Photo from personal archive
We can summarize all of the above - if you want to find new friends - look. The most difficult thing in this matter is to overcome yourself - to become simpler, easier to communicate, try not to worry, if it did not work out with someone - everything is simple, it means it was not your person. Believe me, it was difficult for me to step over this. People who were too close remained at home. I looked around and thought, could someone replace them for me at all? Replace - no. Just take another niche - yes. But for this you need to work on yourself.
Photo from personal archive
The fact is that after 30 most of us "stiffen". Usually, by this age, people have already developed some kind of familiar life and a familiar circle of acquaintances, and we do not let new people come close - after all, all the places are already taken. Moreover, we are becoming much more demanding of people. So, probably, the first thing to start with if you want to make friends with someone in a new country is to become more tolerant. It was in our youth that we scattered our friends left and right, following our maximalism. Do not like it - goodbye! Now it is worth becoming much more careful - you must agree - and you are not a present, which means that everyone has the right to their quirks.
Photo from personal archive
New friends won't be easy. "Lapping" is inevitable and with age it becomes more and more difficult. Moreover, here it is superimposed on general employment and fatigue. But if you take the risk, you will have someone to chat with over a cup of coffee, travel around America, ride bicycles, and you will find someone to call if you suddenly need help. “You’re not so badly settled, since you have someone to sit around the fire with,” one friend wrote to me on Facebook. And I agree with him.
Communication in English is one of better ways learn the language and improve your skills. The experience of voice communication and even correspondence is invaluable for those who are going to live and study abroad, as well as take the IELTS and TOEFL language exams.
Today, there are many sites that help you find friends abroad, communicate with them and practice your English. Introducing the Top 10 Resources for Communication with Foreigners ...
Until then, download free university brochures to learn about different possibilities study abroad. Just click on the country button!
This international social network connects people from all over the world looking to find penpals. Users from Great Britain, India, USA, Russia, France, Japan, Korea, Spain, Germany and many other countries are registered here.
You can upload photos and information about yourself to the site, as well as write an ad about who you are looking for and for what purposes. Most of the portal users strive to find people for language practice, but this is not the only purpose of the resource. The social network relies on the ability to find a true friend and soul mate anywhere in the world!
The resource has an official Android app.
2. Pen4 Pals
The site is designed specifically for language exchange between native speakers of different languages. It is enough to go through a quick registration to get acquainted with a native speaker of a foreign language and start a correspondence.
The resource is based on mutually beneficial language exchange. For example, you teach english language and communicate with a native English speaker who is learning Russian. In addition to English, you can learn Italian, French, Spanish and other languages \u200b\u200bon the site.
For the convenience of users, there is a forum and groups through which it is easy to find new pen pals.
3. Livemocha
The resource provides versatile opportunities - from language lessons at all levels to finding penpals. There are many users on the portal who regularly exchange language experience, check each other's written assignments, write messages and communicate with each other in a convenient chat.
4. Learning Russian with Russians (Facebook)
This is a popular group in facebook networks... It brings together over 4,000 users from all over the world who want to learn the language by chatting with Russians.
Most of the group members are ready for language exchange and will gladly help you learn your native language in exchange for helping you learn Russian.
5. Abroad Pal
The site brings together a large number of users who are native speakers of all kinds of languages. There are special groups and forums for communication of interests. In addition, you can correspond in private messages and leave comments on the pages of other users.
6. Shared Talk
This is a portal for quickly finding interlocutors and language exchange. Users from various countries are registered here, with whom you can communicate in real time.
The site has not only a convenient text chat, but also voice chat, communication in which will help you develop your speaking skills in a foreign language.
7. Learning Russian with Russians (Google)
This Google Community is analogous to a Facebook group. More than 3,000 users are registered here.
In a group, you can meet foreigners who are learning Russian and ready for a language exchange. The community is useful not only for language learning but also for simple communication on interesting topics.
8. Learning Russian with Russians (In contact with)
Another version of the popular language group, which will definitely appeal to adherents and active users of the Vkontakte network.
The group is not that big, there are only about 1,000 members. Nevertheless, there are many foreigners here who study Russian and want to find penpals for language exchange.
9. Inter Pals
Here you can correspond in private messages, communicate online and on the forums. The site brings together more than 11,000 users from 164 countries around the world seeking to communicate, learn new languages \u200b\u200band other cultures.
10. Penpals club "Edelweiss"
This portal was created specifically for Russian-English language exchange between native speakers of these languages.
Here you can find penpals abroad, improve your language skills, get new experience and even meet your soul mate! The portal also has a forum for communication and has posted a lot of useful articles with tips on how to learn a foreign language.
