japanese language exchange community websites

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Summary

Palabea is a social network site for practicing, learning, teaching and otherwise communicating in foreign languages. It has a beautiful site design and its features are quite strong.

After testing thoroughly the entire user interface, I am convinced that this is one of the most solid social language learning network platforms in cyberspace. It has a clean and friendly interface, the site loads quickly and the wide variety of features were well thought-out and executed.

The features include:

• uploading and sharing audio, video, photos and documents
• managing friends and meeting new people
• creating and partcipating in virtual classrooms
• watching videolectures, reading documents and listening to podcasts from other users
• calling friends and translating on the fly
• tool for recording audio and video right through their site!

There are plenty of others, too. And the team seems to be active in developing more features and improving upon those already available.

Palabea is currently ad-free! I'm not sure what their business model is, but they've partnered with Deutsche Welle, Babylon and Café Babel. They partnered with Babylon on the widget to translate on the fly while talking with someone (or just surfing), but I am not sure exactly how they are affiliated with the other two - both of which are very cool, by the way!

The site is localized in 6 languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish.

So congrats to the folks at Palabea! I know I'll be stopping in over there.

From Website

Learning a new language just became fun, easy and free.

palabea.net is an e-learning website and social community that offers opportunities to learn and practice foreign languages. It offers a wide range of tools and technologies which support its users with their learning endeavours, and allows people to communicate and learn about different cultures.

Changes in society triggered by the effects of globalization developed the need to learn and respect cultural diversity. To maintain a dialogue between people in different countries, and to forge multicultural relationships, learning foreign languages is essential. Some obstacles in learning a foreign language, including: lack of motivation and time, and high costs, but using palabea.net everyone has the opportunity to learn a foreign language and communicate with people around the world without leaving their home.

palabea.net users are able to:

- Access a portal of contents (video lessons, podcast and multimedia educational material), information on language schools, au pair opportunities and traveling abroad. More information will be added as the portal develops.

- Have online conversations in a foreign language: palabea users can easily find friends who share similar interests, and who will help them learn and practice languages. Users will be able to speak about any topics, or if they prefer, use lessons or situation games designed for to improve language skills -Practice comprehension with audio and video applications. The users can listen to podcasts in other languages or watch video lessons, which help explain grammatical aspects of the language. -Play teacher and assist others in learning their native language which allows for innovative ways in collaborative learning.

- Generate their own content, as individuals or a group. People can present themselves with information, pictures/videos. - Unlike other social networks, palabea.net offers an integrated video-chat system that appears on the page and doesn't require users to download an extra application. -palabea has created virtual classes to help users practice their written language skills. In these classes the users collaborate with documents and assist each in learning languages. These virtual classes can be created by a group of users, or if the user prefers, they can request the services of a professional language teacher.

Palabea.net complements traditional language schools rather than competing against them. It is another distinctive aspect of palabea.net, who from the outset, worked with many schools to help produce e-learning applications that are both be easy to use and effective.

Palabea.net was founded by Sebastian Schkudlara, Guido Veth and Patricia Sierra Fernandez in Berlin. The Palabea.net team is a small and international group of multilingual speakers, with three official languages: English, German and Spanish.

Visit Palabea.net

Summary

Worldia is a social networking tool for making friends and practicing languages. It focuses on using Skype to bridge the virtual gap and connect with real people worldwide as friends. The foreign-language-learning networking tools are accompanied by community building possiblities and paid private language lessons. The ensemble creates the potential for someone to quickly and interactively learn to speak foreign languages.

At Worldia, members can become tutors and earn money teaching online. This adds a nice twist to the social language learning gambit, and makes it a feature-rich web community for learning and teaching foreign languages - and getting paid! Nice.

One aspect of Worldia that I dig is the world map feature that allows you to view locations of all the friends you encounter on the site. Sweet.

Worldia is also available in Japanese. I imagine they'll add more languages in the future.

From Website

My Page

My Page is your home in Worldia, where.you give your self-introduction to others, write your diary and manage your activities in Worldia. You can also see what's going on with your friennds and communities and send/receive messages and let other members to start Skype conversations with you.

Find Friends

You may find someone who can related to while reading diaries and joining communities. You may also be able to search members to find your friends. You can find out more about the person by visiting his/her "My Page."

If you find someone interesting, send Friend Request politely. It would be wonderful if you fill up your World map with friends.

Communicating with Other Members

There is a dedicated messaging system in Worldia. Worldia also use Skype features so that you can actually talk with your friends. Some members are actually teaching native languages to each other using this feature.

You should actively provide and exchange information by wrting comments in community topics and friends' diary, and writing reviews of books and movies.

* Since Worldia is inter-cultural site, please make sure to respect others and act courteously while communicating with others.

Join Communities

Communities are where people with the same interests join to form a place for discussions and events. You can search existing communities to find the one you want to join or you can start a new community yourself.

Take or Teach Language Lessons

In Worldia, members who have registered as tutors are teaching language lessons to regular members. For student members, they can find the language and lessons they want since tutors are coming from all over the world. For tutor members, they can start lesson business with students from all over the world. Try the free trial lessons today!

Since starting as WannaTalk in March 2007, Worldia has grown to the site with close to 10,000 members from 170 countries and regions of the world. We will continue to work on improving our service so that more users will use our site.

Visit Worldia.net

Summary

VoxSwap is a social language learning community start-up. Currently, they provide instant messaging and groups amongst members. According to the site, they will soon be offering voice exchange as well, hence the name.

VoxSwap uses Kwiqq social website building software to manage this endeavor.

From Website

Hi, we’re VoxSwap.com and we’re dedicated to helping people learn and improve languages.

We’ve always found social networks fun but thought there must be a way of making friends online more mutually beneficial.

So, the idea behind VoxSwap is simple. If, for example, you are English and learning German (as our founder is) then we can match you up with a someone who is German and is learning English. You can then send each other VoxSwap emails on the site and, soon, actually talk to one another across the web via VoxSwap. Most importantly, you not only get to chat, you can also help each other improve.

There are videos for your enjoyment and entertainment, as well as forums so you can ask the VoxSwap public a question, tell them your views and add your comments to their posts. So use the service, recommend it to people and, above all, have fun.

VoxSwap is here to match people up so learning languages can be fun and help you meet new people. It doesn't matter if you are a student needing help to get better language grades, a former student who doesn't want to let their language skills go rusty or a business person needing to speak another language for work, VoxSwap is here to ensure you can talk to real people and offer one another pointers on how to excel in a language.

Lessons, books and CDs are great ways to learn and practise a language but they can't replace speaking to a native speaker who can help improve your grasp of their language as you help them excel in yours.

VoxSwap.com works by people helping one another learn languages and so the more people who register (for free!) the better it is for everyone.

Link

Visit VoxSwap at http://www.voxswap.com

Summary

Mixxer is a place to find language exchange partners using Skype. It was created and is maintained by Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, USA. The site provides a secure way to meet folks who are interested in learning languages, sometimes via teachers from countries worldwide who are looking for language partners for their students. In this way, it differs from some of the more trendy Skype/IM/VoIP language communities like iTalki or LiveMocha.

All in all, a great piece of free web goodness for language learners!

From Website

The Mixxer is a free educational community for language learners and teachers to find a language partner for a language exchange. The language partner is someone who speaks the language you study as their native language and is studying your native language. The partners then meet online to help each other practice and learn a foreign language.

Visit Language-Exchanges.org (Mixxer)