how to find chinese chat rooms ?

[lostguy06]

hello,

Because I was frustrated with my oral chinese, I decided to try to find some language partners (mostly trough italki) and I tried to have regular conversations with them trough skype. At first it was ok, but now, most of the time my conversations devolve way too often into english only conversations and my main goal was to enhance my mandarin speaking skills, not my english.

It is perfectly normal that they want to speak english but that is a problem for me, that's why I figured that maybe if I could find some chinese chat rooms, I could try to make friend with chinese people who are not interested in talking english and with whom I could have whole conversations in chinese.

does anybody know where I could find such chat rooms ? I know that I could also try to randomly contact people trough QQ but it seems rather time consuming.

[Jane_PA]

If you want to find some Chinese to practice your spoken Chinese, I might think there are 2 ways.

One is you pay people to practice Chinese with you.

The other is you and the Chinese exchange learning: speak in Chinese one hour and speak in English another hour.

Sure, if you are in China, you can find many Chinese native speakers to chat with you. But if you are in the U.S., that would not be easy.

[Meng Lelan]

most of the time my conversations devolve way too often into english only conversations

A zillion threads in here say the same thing about language exchange becoming language non-exchanges. Or more like English only chats.

You should have a good foundation in Chinese before you're able to have entire conversations in Chinese. I believe there are chatrooms in qq.com but I've never tried them.

Are there student groups you can join - for example interest groups in Chinese martial arts, Chinese choir, taiji, Chinese church (only if you are into churches that is), etc? Usually they aren't so English crazy and more willing to converse in Chinese more of the time.

[amandagmu]

I agree with the previous advice. You're going to either need to pay, or you need to find someone who's English is worse than your Chinese. I had your problem until I reached a low advanced level (or high intermediate level perhaps?) of Chinese. Partially this is because once you get to that higher level you're also more likely to know where to go or how to make friends with people who don't speak much English... with a low (or even intermediate) level of Chinese this can be extremely difficult (hard to find patient people with poor English, most will just run the other direction). On the other hand, if you can read/type/understand Chinese pretty well without using much English, why not just enter an online chat room and use Chinese the whole time, then wait to see who notices you're a foreigner? If you want to practice spoken Chinese, I suggest paying a tiny bit of money for a tutor on Skype (I have done this before) who will let you rattle away and have a conversation with them for an hour or so at a time. Look through the forums or elsewhere online, this is not that difficult to find and I guarantee you that if you tell them not to speak English then they won't-- they don't want to lose your business (no matter how minimal; the market for this is saturated and they know it)!

By the way, I've paid between $12-15 USD for an hour of Skype lessons (not just chatting), but I know that for half that cost (and probably less) you could easily find someone from mainland China to just chat with you on Skype...

[KonW]

yy is a tool for team talking

(http://www.yy.com/), mostly used by MMORPG players of some guild or sort of that...

maybe you can try to join randomly some rooms(频道) and try to blend in.

[coco]

i send a message to u ,pls check.

[Chinabound]

There are several language groups in QQ International and there is a site called Livemocha where you can find others who are willing to chat with you either via QQ or Skype without changing over to the use of English. I currently have about 25 friends on QQ who help me with my Chinese pronounciations whenever I have the time. I find that using Livemocha helps as well because it is a free Language learning site which allows native speakers to correct your written and spoken exercises.

[woofleboofle]

I know exactly what u mean! QQ has been the best so far, doing the random search... but like u could said, that can be tiresome.

I was hoping someone might put some more useful responses in here because i've had little luck too. Saying we can pay someone doesn't really help lol. i think we already know that.. :S

I know as far as china goes, good chat rooms can be hard to find. But i was thinking taiwan, singapore or even malaysia might have some good ones?

Camfrog is not bad, it has a large chinese community and there is a section for chinese only chatrooms and there is quite a lot of them. I rarely find people that can, or want to speak english there. Not so great for voice chat though unless u go to a small room.

I am trying 9158.com, qqliao, and yy. I'll let you know how they go. It's pretty tiresome downloading them, installing them and then finding out they are just rubbish.

Don't bother with ones like liaoliao.com, loveliao.com and 17guagua.com.

Good luck! And if anyone has tried sites/programs like these please post

[Hesham119]

QQ 群 or qq groups is the best

You can go to http://qun.qq.com then in the search tap type your country's name ( E.G: I am from Egypt I typed 埃及 in the search bar ) and found so many groups for Chinese people living in Egypt, and I could make some Chinese friends around here whom I can hang out with

try it and tell me what you think

[afritzse]

Thanks, I tried QQ群, it works great. (works in the browser)

However, the 5 groups I've been in were not very active, even though I sorted them for the most active. The last message was 15 minutes ago, the one before 30 mins ago, and so on.

Follow this advice, but be careful about spyware:

http://qq.bur.st

I'm now installing QQ for Linux, there it doesn't matter if it's got spyware.

[Hesham119]

Dont worry

sometimes they are active, and some they like if you are in the middle of the desert

[woofleboofle]

Ok, well... here's a list of ones not to bother with:

qliao

17guagua

loveliao

liaoliao

9158

飞信

新浪UC (is like qq, and has a similar search new people function... but qq is better so not much point).

Yy is the only one that's okay im still trying to figure out the chat room things though...