Looking for language partners as a Japanese female is extremely difficult. Need advice.

18 comments

1. You could try language exchange discord servers, but I won’t guarantee that talking with people from there won’t devolve into degeneracy once they know that you’re a woman.

   At least it’ll take more time since your profile is anonymous by default.

2. Honestly, it might be worth your while to look at au pair subreddits or networks.

   My sister speaks Finnish, Norwegian, and German. She is an au pair and made the decision to be an au pair because she loved learning languages. There’s also a better chance for you to have a language friendly that’s female as au pairs are predominately women. I think the most difficult part is that Finland isn’t the largest country, and even though Japanese is a very popular language it can be difficult (especially with time zone issues) to find someone often enough for practice, let alone someone you actually enjoy speaking to.

   The Japanese English Language Exchange discord has English and Japanese speakers who speak other languages as well. So those discord servers and other Japanese Exchange servers may have someone you’re looking for, but it may require more effort.

   Lastly, I’m sorry about your experience. I’m a redhead and my time in Japan when I was young was pretty similar to yours. I have no advice, only that it got better for me with age. People still hit on me now, but my experience is they’re a lot less creepy about it and will actually leave me alone when I turn them down. Hopefully your life moves in a similar direction.

3. Honestly, it’s difficult even as a guy on those services, regardless of TL. I’m married and state that on my profile. Even tried having a photo clearly showing that I’m with someone. But what you then face is just a bunch of highly uninterested, unmotivated people who seem to have installed an app thinking it works like magic.

   I sort of just decided that the time spent navigating whichever popular app of the year wasn’t worth it and that it was worth to pay a little bit to have a high-quality interaction on something like iTalki.

4. Sadly, there’s just more guys online than girls for this kind of thing, and just like how your responses from women have been scarce, the responses that guys get is also scarce. This often leads to some guys becoming desperate which is sad and cringey. Even other guys hate it when other guys do that which probably leads to the reason why many women avoid this kind of thing which creates the disparity.

   If your Finnish is somewhat decent, I would try and bypass those channels and try and find communities that are relevant to your hobbies. Whether its games, discussing TV shows, arts and craft, there’s probably something out there.

   I would avoid saying you’re female if possible unless your community has a higher female representation. It sucks that it comes down to this, but at the same time I don’t really think I’ve ever had to specify my gender.

5. Although a guy, but somewhat, I can relate to it. Tried HelloTalk and a couple of other tandem apps before, and finding a good language partner is difficult there (although I did find a couple of people who were great). From a guy’s perspective, girls don’t respond or reluctant to talk to a guy due to many weirdos and thinking “great, another one” and guys looking to talk to girls more than guys, so when a guy writes to another guy, they usually get ignored or doesn’t really bother that much to talk.

   It’s kind of annoying when there is a bunch of people on those apps who barely speak, even their native language, and trying to hit on every single breathing (or not) living being on those apps.

   Then again, a lot of those apps do have the same or similar monetization model as dating apps.

6. Unfortunately that’s a pretty common experience for women on language exchange apps. Langauge exchange apps are such a shit show and you’re looking for an uncommon language pair, so maybe it’d be more worth your time to reach out to organizations working on Finnish-Japanese cultural exchange. Like the Japanese department of the University of Helsinki or the Finnish Institute in Japan. Those aren’t language exchange organizations per se, but they may be able to point you in the right direction or even be able to connect you directly with someone interested in doing a language exchange

7. I have not personally never seriously tried to find language partner, I might need to look into that again myself. Never thought someone speaking my target language would be interested in my native language in the first place.

   That said I am 31F and my first language is Finnish.

8. Easy enough to see that becoming a problem (had the same happen to me before for English, though that is no longer relevant), it’s tiring as hell🙄 I just gave up back then.

   I mean it’s the same for women playing games online (that is why they often use software to change their voice to sound like a guy, maybe that could be helpful?). I do not play online games except for a Japanese gacha game, so not a problem I have faced.

   Either do not use a picture of your face or just use an AI generated image of a random guy that does not exist. (Invisible watermarks that indicate AI generated images, can be removed when running stable diffusion or the like yoursef locally, if you wanted to be safe that no one gets that you are not a guy.)

   I would not be helpful for you since I am native German speaker, good luck otherwise. I never tried to do that sort of thing again. I would not need it for English and also never tried it for Japanese.

9. That is horrible but unfortunately does not surprise me.

10. you could use iTalki for paid lessons

    you could try r/languageexchange perhaps

    > maybe it’s because i show my face on profile page?

    put something else on there and see what happens (for science)

    change your age to something over 50 as well, or over 60 even

    just be like “granny wants to learn finnish, any questions?”

11. If you don’t mind paying, there are a lot of community tutors on italki (community tutors are not trained teachers so they are a bit cheaper) who just do conversation practice.

12. Honestly only advice is to keep looking, and to not have a cute girl profile picture.

    I had most luck on hellotalk, but also some on tandem.

    90% of the people there are not looking to 100% learn language. But the 10% are, and you just have to find a few good connections. Like you said, you do come across some genuine ones. Just like with job applications, you only really need 1 (or in this case, maybe a few) to be a good fit.

    I’d also recommend not going into DMs. The benefit of hellotalk, to me, was the ability to do comments and corrections on posts. And I made a few good opposite-sex connections through that.

    Lastly, there are way less people involved in the Finnish-Japanese exchange than English-Japanese, so just accept it’ll take some time and searching.

    It might be fair to say it’s a rule of language-exchange apps that if you use your face in your profile picture, you’re looking for real connections, that is, not strictly language exchange connections.

13. I haven’t used HelloTalk in a while, but they used to have an option in the settings to only allow the same gender to find you. I had the same problem as you, and that solved it entirely!

14. Unfortunately a huge amount of the language learning community, both men & women, both English and the other language, treat these communities as a dating app

15. Definitely worth trying a profile pic that isn’t you (I use an anime character I like on HelloTalk). While I get a lot of dud messages, where the conversation goes nowhere, I haven’t had anyone trying to hit on me, mention dating, etc (I’m in my 30s, if that makes a difference). Also I don’t reply to any solely Hi/Wave messages (which I say in my profile)

    As others mentioned, commenting on & correcting posts , or even making your own might be more fruitful for connecting with people.

16. It’s easy, just find a gay finish guy which wants to learn Japanese.

    He won’t hit on you

17. There’s a bunch of Finnish and swedes on Gaia online forums just search the finish name for the Finnish language

18. Unfortunately it’s the reality, if you want serious language learning partners you need to find serious people. HelloTalk and Tandem are services that enable you to do this, but you have to filter through a lot of people. If you’re looking for speaking practice, that will be difficult as a lot of men as soon as they find out your gender will seek an opportunity outside of language learning. Your best option is just to pay for a tutor if you want serious language learning practice, a language study partner is great, but it is often a lot of effort for little reward.

    Since your English is great and I’m sure your Finnish is coming along (there’s a lot of fluent English speakers in Finland), you might just want to embed yourselves into communities outside of language learning partners. For this forum, the best way many of us learn Japanese isn’t to find a language partner, it’s just to put ourselves in all Japanese communities that align with our interests. We watch listen, read, and watch Japanese media as the primary means of learning the language and when we’re advanced enough, seek out communities to progress our learning.

    This is personal experience, but my initial attempts were similar to yours, I tried to find a language learning partner and really couldn’t find anyone serious enough. People who are passionate about learning another language usually involves them being passionate about a hobby or some aspect connected to the language. So I gave up and just sought out communities where my only option was to use Japanese or don’t communicate at all.