These free conversation exchange websites work by connecting you with someone over a text, audio, and/or video service to facilitate communication. Usually, you’ll simply contact someone over a text chat or email first, and then you can both decide the best way to continue talking. An advanced search tool lets you describe your perfect language partner. You can choose what language they speak, what language they’re learning (what you’re proficient in), their skill level, country, town, time zone, type of exchange, age, gender, and name. You can sort the search results by last login date to find a language partner that’s actively using the website. Details about the type of exchange each user is willing to participate in are shown in each profile. Once you’ve found someone on Conversation Exchange that fits your requirements, you can add them as a contact and send them a private message to get all the details sorted out about how you’ll communicate. Once logged on to the website, you can search for users who can help you learn the language you’re interested in, message or call them on Skype, and send them private messages through The Mixxer. You can even see when a user was last logged in to The Mixxer, which helps you sift through inactive accounts, as well as view a list of all the currently logged in users, with a link to each profile. In addition to contacting individual users, you can post publicly accessible writings that any user from The Mixxer can correct you on so as to improve your writing skills. There are currently tens of thousands of users at Easy Language Exchange. You can quickly browse through all the matching users to see what languages they speak and which ones they’re learning. A list of online users are shown on the bottom right of the website, where you can instantly chat with any of them. You can also add other users as friends as well as send any of them a private or public message to decide how you want to proceed with the language exchange. A fully integrated, clean, and very intuitive chat program is available, which you can use to chat with people you add as friends. You can also speak over audio and video with the built-in calling feature. Speaky has a translator that’s always accessible at the bottom of the page that you can use to translate any text to your primary language, or vice versa, for quick help when chatting with someone using a different language. One option in the settings of your profile will block all the people who don’t speak your primary language from contacting you. This means you can rest assured that the people who try to help you are knowledgeable of the language and won’t be wasting your time. You can also use this website through the Speaky Android app. There’s a writing section where you can post text and have other users comment on how accurate it is. They can be single sentences or multiple paragraphs, and someone who knows the language can explain where you went wrong. The Groups section of the website is simply a forum where you can post a question or request and have other users publicly answer you. It may be easier to find a language exchange partner through the forum than simply waiting on someone to message you through the search tool. In addition to the above, Papora lets you add users as friends, private message them, and send a smile. Your profile can include multiple languages (and your skill level) that you know and/or would like to learn, plus there’s a text area where you can write anything else you’d like people to know about you. You can also define how you’d like your communication with others to be done, such as through email, voice/phone calls, video chat, text chat, and/or face to face. One thing that sets LingoGlobe apart from nearly all other language exchange sites is that users can’t bombard you with messages until you’ve both agreed on an exchange. And proposing a language exchange is as simple as clicking one button. I like LingoGlobe because the search function is extremely easy to use. Once you find a user, you can see all the details they chose when they made their account, such as the languages they need to learn. There’s also a forum and a chat room that all the logged in users can participate in at once, which are other quick ways to find a language exchange partner. Plus, the homepage shows you new users as well as ones that are currently online. You can search for other users by their gender, city, and of course language. Users can be contacted by sending them private messages, after which you can setup something external like Skype, phone calls, text messages, etc. There’s also a forum where all users can interact with each other. You can search for people between two particular ages, by gender, country, and by the language you can teach them. In addition to filling out the languages you know and want to learn, your profile can contain information about yourself and/or what you want to get out of an exchange.
