Well, I don’t want to use apps such as tandem and hellotalk since they are focused more on dating.
I want to know where I can find natives to speak with. I finished Minna no nihongo 1 and 2 and am now doing Tobira. I really want to get better in Japanese and I think speaking with natives might be a good chance. There are some natives in my uni, but they all have their own groups and I find it hard to penetrate them.
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If you are prepared to pay: you can hire community/non-qualified teachers on sites like italki relatively cheaply and they will talk to you in Japanese. That’s what I did. They are not interested in dating.
Having said that, I found quite a few language partners on italki (for language exchange) who were not at all interested in dating either.
For me, in my city there is a Japanese-English meetup language exchange so I used to go to that. Online, are there any facebook japanese language groups in your city? In mine there are and people post about looking for conversation partners.
Search for conversation clubs, learners gatherings or language exchanges in your town.
They may be hosted by organizations or just regular learners that set up a time and place once every X time to get together and practice.
I found that The Japan Foundation holds monthly conversation clubs in my town, totally free and open for anyone who wants to join (they do ask that youre at least able to kinda sorta hold a conversation which makes sense all the sense in the world).
Also check out the site meetup.com , learners themselves set up gatherings at like, parks, plazas and the like to practice too.
There are also discord communities that focus on JP-EN language exchanges (and other languages im sure but ive only found JP-EN ones), where you can get into voice chats with others and practice without even having to leave your home so yeah, both a comfy and useful alternative.
Clubhouse app is very popular with Japanese too.
Interesting, I’ve never had a problem with people trying to do dating on tandem and such, although I typically talked to people of the same gender as me who indicated they were pretty serious about studying. However, I can also recommend Italki, I’ve had some good teachers there.
I have never had an issue with HelloTalk being used as a dating app, I’ve met my best language partners-turned-friends on there!
Check out Ohanasi Kagawa:
https://ohanasi-kagawa.com/en
I haven’t had an issue with hellotalk to do exactly what you’re looking for.
since when are hellotalk and tandem for dating..?
I used italki… great app, albeit you have to pay for the “lessons / conversations”.
I paid anywhere from $10 – $20 per session. Totally worthwhile.
Hellotalk is not a dating app, please do not send messages to people asking for romance.
I made good experience with hellotalk by getting only same sex results