Chat Pals (compañeros de charlar)

Although you may improve your ability to understand English by listening to podcasts, if you want to learn to speak it, you’ll have to practice speaking—preferably by speaking with a native English speaker, so that he or she can help you correct your errors in grammar and pronunciation. With the advent of free Internet services such as Skype and Windows Live Messenger you can speak with people throughout the world at no charge. All you need to do is to find a native English speaker who would like to chat with you. Fortunately, there are thousands of native English speakers who would like to practice their Spanish, and who would be happy to speak with someone in English in exchange for the other person speaking to them in Spanish. There are several Internet based services that bring such people together. The site that I have used is My Language Exchange http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/default_spn.asp and I’ll tell you a little about that site.

Thousands upon thousands of men and women have registered on the site, and the site claims to have speakers of 115 different languages. I didn’t take time to count them, but I assure you there are a lot of languages represented on the site! I entered information about my native language English, and said that I wanted to find a native Spanish speaker who was interested in improving his or her English. If you wish, you can specify the gender, age, and country of the type of person you want to speak to. I was hoping to get perhaps 30 names of people. I got over 23,000 names! The hardest part was selecting people from the list of 23,000. After selecting a few names, I used the site to contact the people. I finally came up with 3 people with whom I now regularly chat. One is in Spain, one in Mexico, and the third in Colombia. The site is free to register; however, if you do not pay for the “gold membership” you have to wait to be contacted by somebody. If you buy the “gold membership” for USD 24 per year, you can initiate the contact. You can also buy a one-month gold membership for USD 6, which should be adequate for contacting many people and establishing numerous “chat pals.” You must use the web site to initially contact the other members, but after that you can use your regular email address.

I have been having conversations with my “chat pals” for about two months now, and I find that my ability to speak Spanish has improved considerably. We usually use Windows Live Messenger (available for free at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d78f2ff1-79ea-4066-8ba0-ddbed94864fc&DisplayLang=es ) or Skype (available for free at http://www.skype.com/intl/es/ )