Hello, hola, salut!
In a community as large as Smogon (and even more on Showdown) it is quite common to interact with people from overseas, whose native tongue is not necessarily always English, and it's a blessing for the people specifically interested in languages, especially since English is the predominant language everywhere nowadays, and particularly online. On the other hand it can also be quite a huge wall to climb for the people who struggle with English, but today I'd like to focus on learning languages as a whole, whether you do it as a passtime or it's been your passion forever.
As a native French speaker who had to learn English and Spanish in middle school and high school, there is no need to say that it has always been quite easy for me to find relevant resources for these languages, or partners to practice with, be it in real life or online. Then my university days started, alongside my beginning in the world of learning German and Swedish; finding help with the former was still easy (although a bit less common), but with the latter, it became much harder, since the language isn't spread nearly as widely as the first three that I had learnt; I eventually got lucky enough to have as a tutee for 1 year a girl coming from Finland who mastered Swedish, so she's been of a great help to help me practice.
I do certainly plan on resuming my study of the Swedish language, and on adding other languages to my list of spoken ones in the future, especially now that I have quite a lot of free time. Though, unless I choose to learn widely-spread languages (such as cantonese, arabic, portuguese...), the resource & the people to practice with are going to be harder and harder to find, which is why I'm sharing some cool online places to practice languages with other people, and will happily take any suggestion of similar sites that I do not know yet. I'd also like to add that I value human interaction more, so these places are more likely to suit you if you already have some basics in your target language; there are resources for learning a language as a whole online, but I don't know much about them since I prefer the good old way, with books or inside a classroom (so I won't talk about things like Duolingo here) !
→ The language chatrooms on Pokémon Showdown (or any chatroom if you want to practice English): if there is something convincing me that my 7 years on Showdown weren't a complete waste of time, it is how much I have polished my English and my Spanish by interacting on a nearly daily basis with other people in these languages, natives or not. In most cases, people will forgive you if you make mistakes, and understand when you tell them that you're not a native speaker, so you can safely put your fears aside when talking with the goal of improving in a given language, and focus on understanding what's going on. I can speak with experience, and attest that while in my early Showdown days (2013-2014) I consistently had a Google Translate tab open for all the words that I couldn't understand, and it has stopped being a necessity long ago, so I can't stress enough on how beneficial online chatrooms can be for those who seek human interaction and aim at improving their communication skills. Although in all honesty, it is common to hear that the users in the French and Portuguese room constantly destroy their own language and, while I can't verify whether this statement is true or not for the Portuguese chatroom (except the fact that they remove all the vocals from the words for some reason), it is definitely the case in the French room, which happens to belong to a language who gets butchered by its speakers on a daily basis, and it goes much further than a native English saying "could of" or getting "affect" and "effect" mixed. It's usually not that distracting and you can catch the meaning of most sentences, but when visiting online chatrooms that are not specialized into teaching a language, you should not adopt a "watch and learn" point of view, solely a "it's an occasion to practice with natives" point of view. Might be very hard to grab things if you're a very beginner.
→ The Conversation Exchange website: It is not super duper big, but it still has quite a lot of users, and this time, it's specifically dedicated to exchanging language experiences, skills... You're able to select your native language, as well as the languages you want to practice and to what level of mastery, then there is an option to help you search for people with similar goals that match yours. For example, if I say that my native tongue is French and that I want to look for people who speak Swedish, then the algorithm will do its best to pair me with a person whose native tongue is Swedish and who wants to improve their French. Every person can specify whether they're willing to teach to beginners or if they simply prefer to chitchat for practice, so with time, you can certainly find a language partner who suits you and whom you suit. It has some chatrooms too, but they aren't very active, so this website is much better suited for 1 on 1 conversations. You can also be matched with people from your area, which can potentially encourage meetups if you live in a big city.
→ The Cave of Linguists Discord (to which Annika kindly invited me): Perhaps the widest place that I know that is specifically dedicated to language exchange, there are channels for nearly every language that you can think of, as well as events hosted by the channel leaders to help you practice. The language channels are usually not cluttered (but, on the other hand, you might not get an answer immediately, especially for some of the lesser spoken languages), but I've found them to be quite useful, and it doesn't matter if you want to get help for a specific homework or something that you don't understand, or if you simply want to casually talk for language practice: both are allowed and encouraged.
→ Facebook pages dedicated to language exchange: These are a bit harder to find & to list, and I don't know if there's a list of the "best" of them somewhere, but there are quite a few groups dedicated to help between speakers of certain languages. I can name "El Muro de los Idiomas" on top of my head, it is specifically dedicated to Spanish and I have found a peruvian friend on there with whom I still talk 6 years later. There's also "BlaBla Language ExChange" who hosts meetups and events in which you can meet other people who share your passion of languages and practice with them, provided you share a common language, around a warm coffee. These events might be exclusive to Europe, I don't recall exactly (although something similar probably exists elsewhere), but given the crazy amount of students who come from a given EU country and go study in another one thanks to the Erasmus program, I assume that it is logical that more events take place on the old continent.
→ Tutoring programs in universities: If you're a university student in Europe, it's likely that your university is a member of Erasmus and welcomes foreign students every semester (and outside of Europe, there are still partnerships for exchanges between countries). That is the case in my university, which is how I was assigned a Finnish tutee for a year, and that was perhaps my best experience so far in learning languages; outside of having made a long term friend, I had also helped her with her French as much as she helped me with my Swedish, and I will definitely try to renew the experience when my availabilities match the required ones again. If you already work or if you're not in university yet, such exchange programs might be harder to encounter, but if you live in a big area then it is likely that there are events somewhere, held regularly, in which people talk to each other in languages nobody would hear anywhere else in the street!
That's all of the things I can mention/link for the moment, and the main ones that I use! I wish there would be a big renowned place specifically made for language exchange, like a kind of Tinder except it's not for dating but for interacting... maybe that already exists and I just haven't had the chance to stumble upon it yet?
Please do feel free to share your own experience regarding languages, which one you've learned/targeted, your resource of choice if necessary... And if someone is wanting to chat in French, English, Spanish or Swedish, feel free to reach to me!
(if many people reply, I might edit the OP and add a list of who speaks what, which could be cool for people wishing to find a language partner
)
In a community as large as Smogon (and even more on Showdown) it is quite common to interact with people from overseas, whose native tongue is not necessarily always English, and it's a blessing for the people specifically interested in languages, especially since English is the predominant language everywhere nowadays, and particularly online. On the other hand it can also be quite a huge wall to climb for the people who struggle with English, but today I'd like to focus on learning languages as a whole, whether you do it as a passtime or it's been your passion forever.
As a native French speaker who had to learn English and Spanish in middle school and high school, there is no need to say that it has always been quite easy for me to find relevant resources for these languages, or partners to practice with, be it in real life or online. Then my university days started, alongside my beginning in the world of learning German and Swedish; finding help with the former was still easy (although a bit less common), but with the latter, it became much harder, since the language isn't spread nearly as widely as the first three that I had learnt; I eventually got lucky enough to have as a tutee for 1 year a girl coming from Finland who mastered Swedish, so she's been of a great help to help me practice.
I do certainly plan on resuming my study of the Swedish language, and on adding other languages to my list of spoken ones in the future, especially now that I have quite a lot of free time. Though, unless I choose to learn widely-spread languages (such as cantonese, arabic, portuguese...), the resource & the people to practice with are going to be harder and harder to find, which is why I'm sharing some cool online places to practice languages with other people, and will happily take any suggestion of similar sites that I do not know yet. I'd also like to add that I value human interaction more, so these places are more likely to suit you if you already have some basics in your target language; there are resources for learning a language as a whole online, but I don't know much about them since I prefer the good old way, with books or inside a classroom (so I won't talk about things like Duolingo here) !
→ The language chatrooms on Pokémon Showdown (or any chatroom if you want to practice English): if there is something convincing me that my 7 years on Showdown weren't a complete waste of time, it is how much I have polished my English and my Spanish by interacting on a nearly daily basis with other people in these languages, natives or not. In most cases, people will forgive you if you make mistakes, and understand when you tell them that you're not a native speaker, so you can safely put your fears aside when talking with the goal of improving in a given language, and focus on understanding what's going on. I can speak with experience, and attest that while in my early Showdown days (2013-2014) I consistently had a Google Translate tab open for all the words that I couldn't understand, and it has stopped being a necessity long ago, so I can't stress enough on how beneficial online chatrooms can be for those who seek human interaction and aim at improving their communication skills. Although in all honesty, it is common to hear that the users in the French and Portuguese room constantly destroy their own language and, while I can't verify whether this statement is true or not for the Portuguese chatroom (except the fact that they remove all the vocals from the words for some reason), it is definitely the case in the French room, which happens to belong to a language who gets butchered by its speakers on a daily basis, and it goes much further than a native English saying "could of" or getting "affect" and "effect" mixed. It's usually not that distracting and you can catch the meaning of most sentences, but when visiting online chatrooms that are not specialized into teaching a language, you should not adopt a "watch and learn" point of view, solely a "it's an occasion to practice with natives" point of view. Might be very hard to grab things if you're a very beginner.
→ The Conversation Exchange website: It is not super duper big, but it still has quite a lot of users, and this time, it's specifically dedicated to exchanging language experiences, skills... You're able to select your native language, as well as the languages you want to practice and to what level of mastery, then there is an option to help you search for people with similar goals that match yours. For example, if I say that my native tongue is French and that I want to look for people who speak Swedish, then the algorithm will do its best to pair me with a person whose native tongue is Swedish and who wants to improve their French. Every person can specify whether they're willing to teach to beginners or if they simply prefer to chitchat for practice, so with time, you can certainly find a language partner who suits you and whom you suit. It has some chatrooms too, but they aren't very active, so this website is much better suited for 1 on 1 conversations. You can also be matched with people from your area, which can potentially encourage meetups if you live in a big city.
→ The Cave of Linguists Discord (to which Annika kindly invited me): Perhaps the widest place that I know that is specifically dedicated to language exchange, there are channels for nearly every language that you can think of, as well as events hosted by the channel leaders to help you practice. The language channels are usually not cluttered (but, on the other hand, you might not get an answer immediately, especially for some of the lesser spoken languages), but I've found them to be quite useful, and it doesn't matter if you want to get help for a specific homework or something that you don't understand, or if you simply want to casually talk for language practice: both are allowed and encouraged.
→ Facebook pages dedicated to language exchange: These are a bit harder to find & to list, and I don't know if there's a list of the "best" of them somewhere, but there are quite a few groups dedicated to help between speakers of certain languages. I can name "El Muro de los Idiomas" on top of my head, it is specifically dedicated to Spanish and I have found a peruvian friend on there with whom I still talk 6 years later. There's also "BlaBla Language ExChange" who hosts meetups and events in which you can meet other people who share your passion of languages and practice with them, provided you share a common language, around a warm coffee. These events might be exclusive to Europe, I don't recall exactly (although something similar probably exists elsewhere), but given the crazy amount of students who come from a given EU country and go study in another one thanks to the Erasmus program, I assume that it is logical that more events take place on the old continent.
→ Tutoring programs in universities: If you're a university student in Europe, it's likely that your university is a member of Erasmus and welcomes foreign students every semester (and outside of Europe, there are still partnerships for exchanges between countries). That is the case in my university, which is how I was assigned a Finnish tutee for a year, and that was perhaps my best experience so far in learning languages; outside of having made a long term friend, I had also helped her with her French as much as she helped me with my Swedish, and I will definitely try to renew the experience when my availabilities match the required ones again. If you already work or if you're not in university yet, such exchange programs might be harder to encounter, but if you live in a big area then it is likely that there are events somewhere, held regularly, in which people talk to each other in languages nobody would hear anywhere else in the street!
That's all of the things I can mention/link for the moment, and the main ones that I use! I wish there would be a big renowned place specifically made for language exchange, like a kind of Tinder except it's not for dating but for interacting... maybe that already exists and I just haven't had the chance to stumble upon it yet?
Please do feel free to share your own experience regarding languages, which one you've learned/targeted, your resource of choice if necessary... And if someone is wanting to chat in French, English, Spanish or Swedish, feel free to reach to me!
(if many people reply, I might edit the OP and add a list of who speaks what, which could be cool for people wishing to find a language partner
)
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I’m happy to report back I’ve decided to take the leap and start learning Swedish. Putting aside the notions of “practicality” allowed me to see what language I really want to learn, so thank you,