HelloTalk

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Our little group came off the boil a bit. It was pretty good when we had it going. Quite a bit of 听写. We only had a small group and it didn't suit some people that were invited. I think that's normal. I think our other two native English speakers have moved on to HSK 5 and beyond.

 

Hellotalk now has a group chat function. Some are setup for language learning but by and large they are more social rather than language orientated. I tried a few but one danger is you get sucked into spending more time on the social aspect rather than language learning. 

 

I did hear more Mandarin in messages. Our little dictation group was good. Although I have done very little other active self study, in some way my listening skills have got better because I was able to cope in China by myself.

 

I once tried a group class for pronunciation. Revision is good. Only 5USD for three classes. There were four, three and two of us respectively for each subsequent class. It looked like ten people had actually paid for the class. I was the most advanced and I purposely avoided being too dominant. The other very motivated 同学，was from the Philippines with a phenomenonal level after studying part-time daily for 8 months. He explained proficiency in Chinese would enable him to double his pay.

 

If you are a native English speaker, what I suggest is to really utilise the app for speaking and listening rather than majority of time on text messages. There are too many who just want to 'talk to a foreigner' or some who just speak English. They are easily filtered out if you insist on real time dialogue and check on the first conversation whether there is reciprocation.

 

A minority of the groups will group call. I found these chats more socially orientated and so not very useful. You also need a very chatty person.

 

I have decided to drastically reduce my time on the app and may delete it from my phone. It's really very distracting and plays on that social media addictive aspect. A few of the language partners have been moved on to wechat or line (yes, Taiwanese). Trying to talk to and explore new people was fun but there comes a time to stop that and focus more on other learning tasks.

 

A lot of the relationships are transient and so, one really is unable to tell how things will continue.