I believe that most people here have tried language exchange apps before, and some of them stopped using them because there are many spam people in the App. Same here.
I'd been using HelloTalk for a long time. I've practiced speaking with people through the app. At that time, I lived in Tokyo so I actually met some people to practice speaking. I quit using it about three years ago because I didn't like how they changed the UI and some functions.
Then I downloaded Tandem. On the first day that I started the app, I got too many messages. I think I even didn't write my profile or anything. It overwhelmed me a lot and I immediately uninstalled it.
Now I just use X(Twitter) but I'm wondering to use something new for language exchanges again.
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I had the opposite experience. I used Busuu for a while, which I quite liked for its lessons and exercises. It has a community aspect as well: you had writing assignments that would be checked not by the system but by other users. I was constantly getting notifications: check this user's post, check that user's post. Those posts already had dozens of corrections. People were even replying with the same thing someone had already posted. But my posts received zero corrections. I guess that's because there are a lot of foreigners who learn Japanese, so there's not enough manpower to check all their assignments; and not a lot of people who learn Russian, so posts in Russian received tons of corrections.
My experience with both Tandem and HelloTalk have been less plagued by spam. Probably because I am mainly studying Japanese.
Another issue I encountered was that most conversations just ended up being entirely in English. Mostly because it's just hard to stick to your target language especially when you're not really that fluent in it yet. While I tried to keep my replies in Japanese, I usually got replies in English rather than German or Japanese. Sometimes no answers at all. It's part of why I stopped using these two apps after a short while. Every few months I get back to them however. The few and sometimes rather short conversations I get to have are quite fun despite many of them never leading to a long-lasting friendship or anything of that sort.
Another app - which isn't necessarily a language learning - that I like to use from time to time is called Slowly. It's main selling point is that it is imitating the slow process of sending letters. Getting to read a long reply or a story of someones day is quite a pleasure, honestly. And you can certainly use it to practice using your target language. Since you can sort of target who to write a letter to and where they should be from.
@BalaG I've heard Busuu before and I feel like I always hear good things about it! xD I get how you fet feedback is different depending on which language you learn and which language you native one is. I'll check it out :)
@Elaktrato I think the number of learning English is way higher than learning Japanese so there are more likely spam people -.-
I felt the same way when I was trying to reply in Spanish xD I'm totally a beginner so people assume that I wouldn't understand what they meant if they use Spanish instead of English... maybe ;D
I've used Slowly before! I... totally forgot to reply a lot and eventually I stopped using it lol