EDUCATION - LANGUAGES - 18.01.2018

Learn languages with the help of real people

How does it work?

A language exchange website functions as an intermediary platform. You should first specify your mother tongue and the language you wish to learn, improve or brush up. The platform will then look for matches with other users. As soon as you’ve found a suitable partner, you can start e-mailing, chatting or Skyping with them.

Tip. The fact that you maintain a live correspondence with a native speaker not only ensures better quality and authenticity, it also enables you to find out more about local customs and the culture of the country concerned. This can prove an extra asset when doing business with foreign customers.

Where?

The test. We checked out a wide range of language exchange websites and looked for native speakers (living in their own country) who wanted to teach us Italian, Czech and Japanese, while we offered to teach them English in return.

A lot of initiatives turned out to be disappointing. With Babelyou ( http://www.babelyou.com ) and Polyglotclub ( http://www.polyglotclub.com ) we even failed to sign up. Babelvillage ( http://www.babelvillage.com ), Scrabbin ( http://www.scrabbin.com ) and Language Share ( http://www.languageshare.net ) offer too few options to search or filter, e.g. to look specifically for native speakers. And Papora ( https://www.papora.com ) produced too many irrelevant results in our test.

Which is best? The table below lists the websites which really do what they say. Still, there are quite a few differences between them. In spite of its old-fashioned interface, we found most language partners with MyLanguageExchange ( http://www.mylanguageexchange.com ). Conversation Exchange ( http://www.conversationexchange.com ), Speaky ( http://www.speaky.com ) and Easy Language Exchange ( http://www.easylanguageexchange.com ) also passed our test.

Finally…

If you prefer a mobile solution for language learning, check out HelloTalk ( http://www.hellotalk.com ), a highly popular app which lets you chat via your smartphone with native speakers around the world. It supports over 150 languages and claims it has more than 8 million members to chat with.