ConvEx

I mentioned a while back that I was disappointed to have lost contact with a few people with whom I'd spoken in French, over Skype. These were people I'd met on the Forvo site - one in Switzerland, and one in southern France. I liked talking to them, both because they were interesting and because, well, I don't have a lot of people with whom I can speak French. Conversation's important. I still miss talking with them, and hope they surface again, but I've stopped trying to get in touch. You can only ping somebody so many times before you could be classified as a stalker, and nobody wants that.

But I've found a decent alternative for conversations, and so far it's been working out.

The site is called Conversation Exchange, and it's specifically aimed at people with language profiles like mine -- fluent in one language, studying another (or in some cases, two or three). Last week I got conversation requests from two people, and I've sent a couple out as well. As a result, I've had one lengthy Skype conversation and about 20 email notes with a woman who lives in Paris, a native French speaker who wants to improve her English. We talk or write in English sometimes, and I help her with minor errors, and we talk or write in French, and she does the reverse. As for what shall we talk about, the site has a long list of suggestions. In our case, we talked about driving in Paris versus driving in Boston, about politics, about recipes, and - as you might suspect - about learning another language.

I'm delighted.