Communication in English is one of the the best ways learn the language and improve your skills. The experience of voice communication and even correspondence is invaluable for those who plan to live and study abroad, as well as take the IELTS and TOEFL language exams.

Today there are many websites that help you find friends abroad, communicate with them and practice English. Introducing the Top 10 resources for communicating with foreigners...

In the meantime, download free university brochures to find out about different study abroad opportunities. Just click on the country button!

This international social network brings together people from all over the world who want to find pen pals. There are registered users from the UK, India, USA, Russia, France, Japan, Korea, Spain, Germany and many other countries.

You can upload photos and information about yourself to the site, as well as write an advertisement about who you are looking for and for what purposes. Most portal users strive to find people for language practice, but this is not the only goal of the resource. The social network relies on the opportunity to find a true friend and soul mate anywhere in the world!

The resource has an official application for Android.

2. Pen4 Pals

The site is designed specifically for language exchange between speakers of different languages. It is enough to go through a quick registration to meet a native speaker of a foreign language and start corresponding.

The resource is based on mutually beneficial language exchange. For example, you learn English and communicate with a native English speaker who is learning Russian. In addition to English, you can learn Italian, French, Spanish and other languages ​​on the site.

For the convenience of users, there is a forum and groups through which it is easy to find new pen pals.

3. Livemocha

The resource provides versatile opportunities - from language lessons of all levels to finding pen pals. The portal has many users who regularly exchange language experience, check each other's written assignments, exchange messages and communicate with each other in a convenient chat.

4. Learning Russian with Russians (Facebook)

This is a popular group in Facebook networks. It unites more than 4,000 users from all over the world who want to learn the language by corresponding with Russians.

Most group members are open to language exchange and will happily help you learn your native language in exchange for help learning Russian.

5. Abroad Pal

The site brings together a large number of users who are native speakers of various languages. There are special groups and forums for communication based on interests. In addition, you can correspond in private messages and leave comments on the pages of other users.

6. Shared Talk

This is a portal for quickly finding interlocutors and language exchange. There are registered users from different countries with whom you can communicate in real time.

The site has not only a convenient text chat, but also a voice chat, communication in which will help you develop speaking skills in a foreign language.

7. Learning Russian with Russians (Google)

This Google community is analogous to a group on the Facebook website. More than 3,000 users are registered here.

In the group you can meet foreigners who are studying Russian and are ready for language exchange. The community is useful not only for learning the language, but also for simple communication on interesting topics.

8. Learning Russian with Russians (In contact with)

Another version of a popular language group that will definitely appeal to fans and active users of the VKontakte network.

The group is not that big, there are only about 1,000 members. However, there are many foreigners here who are studying Russian and want to find pen pals for a language exchange.

1. Always be yourself. This way you won’t deceive anyone when you meet and you won’t disappoint anyone when they get to know you better.
2. Think carefully about what you value most in people and who you find easiest to communicate with. Keep this in mind when looking for new friends.
3. Don't be biased, don't judge new people by rumors or first impressions. Get to know the person better, only then draw conclusions.
4. Friendship is a mutually beneficial relationship. Offer help when you see that a person needs it. If this is the case, then you can count on help in return.
5. Keep in touch with new friends: communicate on the Internet, arrange new meetings, try to diversify your leisure time together. But don't be too persistent. If a person ignores you, don't push yourself.
6. Don't worry if new acquaintances lose interest in you. You may have met the wrong people or made mistakes. Analyze the experience and keep searching.

With the spread of the Internet, many of us began to spend more time in front of the monitor and less time communicating in person. It is a fact. But not everything is so simple. The web is just a tool and everyone uses it differently.

The Internet can be seen as both a refuge from the real world and a powerful means of socialization. The platforms and services that will be discussed below are introduced to a huge number of people every day. Today you can make friends there.

Find friends in online communities

Internet forums, chats in messengers like WhatsApp and Telegram, public pages and groups on Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and others in social networks- all these are platforms for effectively finding new acquaintances.

You just need to choose the right community, which may include people you are interested in, and unobtrusively invite them to get to know each other. Nothing complicated.

If you live in a small town, look for a community based on geography. In large social networks, almost every locality has local groups like “Typical Bryansk” or “Overheard in Chernigov”, where you can communicate with fellow countrymen. To find such a group, just enter the name of your locality in the service search.

When you find a community, look at its description and read the posts of other users. This way you will learn how dating happens here. Most often, participants directly publish brief information about yourself with an offer to meet. On VKontakte, such data is usually sent to administrators, who then post it for the rest of the group on behalf of the sender. You can respond to one of these posts or leave your own.

If you are from a large city, then it makes sense to look for a community of interests, without reference to the locality. This could be a chat for discussing cinema, a public page about fishing, or a forum about bodybuilding. Choose what is closest to you.

The main thing is that your city is big and your community is popular. Then among his audience there will probably be your “neighbors”.

In communities of interest, so-called gatherings are popular - mass meetings of participants to meet people and spend time together. Such events are organized by the participants themselves or the administration. An example is the meeting of users of LiveLib, a social platform for book lovers. But before you go to such an event, prove yourself on the site. Participate in discussions, make your own publications - let them notice you and accept you as one of their own.

Some communities of interest have special sections for dating. For example, on the website of the humorous platform Pikabu there is a popular thread “Dating League”. Participants from different cities and countries tell about themselves here and offer to meet offline. After free registration you can write to someone who interests you, or publish your profile.

Find friends using dating services

The Internet is full of services designed specifically for dating. Most often, they are used to look for partners for sex or romantic relationships, but nothing prevents you from looking for friends in this way.

Find friends in online games

If you've never played a multiplayer game, you may not be aware of how strong a social bond it creates between players. In virtual worlds they find not only real friends, but even future husbands and wives.

Games like Destiny, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft create situations in which you need to interact with strangers. You join forces with other players for common goals and experience shared adventures. In such conditions it is easy to get closer and find common topics for conversation. If you wish, you can continue communication in the real world.

If you meet online, don't forget about netiquette

1. Get your online profile in order. Remove posts and pictures that may make you seem worse than you really are.
2. When publishing your profile for future friends, succinctly describe your qualities, dating goals and interests.
3. Try to write correctly, use punctuation marks.
4. Don't overuse emoticons exclamation marks and capital letters.
5. Don't split your message into multiple parts unless necessary. Finish your thought and then send it, so as not to annoy your interlocutor with a stream of notifications.
6. Avoid banal remarks like “Hi, how are you?”
7. Don't swear.
8. Don't make dirty jokes.
9. Do not argue over trifles, respect the point of view of your interlocutor.
10. Be polite.

If your communication from the virtual world moves into the real one (and this is exactly what you want, right?), you will probably find the advice from the next paragraph useful.

How to find friends offline

If you are an old-school person and don't like all this virtual stuff, you can always find interesting people in the real world.

Look for friends at school or at work

Schools, universities and offices are the places where people usually make new acquaintances. But since you are reading this article, it means that this option did not work in your case.

If there are people in the team with whom you would like to make friends, but no one takes the initiative, take it into your own hands. Talk to your manager about joint activities like going to an antique cafe or bar after work. You can simply offer these options directly to your colleagues. Informal atmosphere will create the preconditions for friendly relations.

If you study or work remotely or there are no like-minded people in your team, there remains a radical way - or study. But before taking decisive action, try the following option.

Look for friends in local sections and clubs of similar interests

Another old-fashioned way to find friends is to enroll in a sports section. It is advisable to choose a team sport like football, hockey or handball. Alternatively, you might consider dancing.

If you don't like active sports, try to find a club with similar interests. This could be an establishment where they play Board games or discuss literature. Choose based on your interests: this will help you find like-minded people. The addresses of such clubs are usually available on the Internet.

When communicating live, do not forget about manners

1. Before the meeting, think about how to spend your time as interesting as possible. Offer your options to new acquaintances. Ask if they have any suggestions.
2. Don't be late for meetings: no one likes to wait.
3. Do not violate a person's personal space.
4. Be open to new places, activities and travel.
5. Use to please your interlocutor.

We hope these tips will help you make new friends. We will be glad if you share your experience.

Today, on social networks you can not only like photos and follow the lives of your friends, but also learn foreign languages. Special language social networks will help you find a live interlocutor who will improve your foreign language level. And at the same time it will help to replenish your vocabulary, get rid of hackneyed phrases and enliven your speech with real phrases of English, German, Italian, Chinese, and any other language. All Courses has collected for you a selection of popular language social networks created just for this purpose.

You can already communicate “with a dictionary”, but are you still worried about pronunciation? Then social networks will come to the rescue, where you can find new friends around the world.

Lang8

The social network unites people from 190 countries, which means 90 languages ​​to learn. The idea of ​​the site is simple: the user writes a phrase or post in the language he is studying, and a native speaker checks and corrects speech, grammatical and spelling errors, if any. You can attach tags to notes, and the most popular ones get to the top. You can also make friends on the site.

There are two options for using the network: paid and free. The second allows you to learn only two languages ​​and make no more than 500 notes in a notebook. Paid content has an unlimited number of posts and languages, and at the same time you are allowed to post photos and leave comments in pdf format.

Lingq

Lingq focuses on expanding your vocabulary, so communication requires at least minimal knowledge of a foreign language. The social network has been open since 2007 and today offers access to 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, and German, among others. All new words are easily saved in your profile. In addition to free communication, you have access to audio lessons and you can submit written work for review.

The site has paid and free content.

English, Baby!

The main feature of the site is communication in correct English, American or British. To do this, the site has daily free lessons on a new topic, thematic audio materials, including monologues and interviews with celebrities. Many people use the Internet when preparing for TOEFL. There are also those who prefer to improve their grammar and just chat.

For teachers in English There is a separate section where teachers exchange experiences.

There is paid content.

Interpals.net

A site for finding a language exchange partner. Friends from 154 countries are now available. And these are more than 100 languages, including the main European and Asian ones. The social network is completely free. You can register with it via Facebook. There is a forum and chat for communication; you choose your partner yourself. You can select your interlocutor by age and gender, or by specifying a specific country. The resource always shows who is online and who is not currently on the site.

Conversationexchange.com

At Conversationexchange.com you need to register and select a partner to communicate in Windows Messenger or Skype. The resource is also interesting because it helps you find a native speaker of the language you are studying in your own city. This is how you get additional opportunity chat with a person one-on-one. In addition, on the site you can improve your written language.

Speaking24.com

After registering on the site, you will see a quick search for native speakers. You can choose your interlocutor by age, gender, or language being studied. The resource will immediately offer you the person’s contacts on Skype or other instant messengers. The main advantage of the site is communication. Fluent speaking is encouraged here and there is not much focus on grammatical errors.

Easy language exchange

The new social network for communicating in a foreign language today has about 72,000 users from 56 countries. The site pays special attention to learning English: there are courses for beginners, as well as courses for those who want to increase their vocabulary and improve their grammar. In addition, useful articles are published on the resource, there is a forum where you can find someone to talk to for learning Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages. A separate plus is registration as a teacher.

Paltalk

The service offers more than 5,000 active chat rooms where you can discuss the latest news in music, sports, current events, and just chat with people around the world. And these are 37 major European and Asian languages. Additionally, you can communicate via text messages, which will allow you to master the written language.

Internations

Site for advanced users foreign languages. A community that can not only help you find people to talk to and friends around the world, but also invite you to attend events and meetings. The service will be very useful for immigrants - in a short time a person will be able to acquire a new circle of friends and get to know the city.

The site will help you practice the language you are learning. On home page You can immediately select the interface language: English, Russian and Spanish. You select your interlocutor yourself: gender, native language, target language. In addition, there are sections “Forum”, “Articles”, “Invitations”. To communicate, you must register on the site.

HelloTalk

This is not a social network, but a chat program for mobile device, which offers to communicate with the interlocutor via text and voice messages in more than 100 languages. The program options allow you to practice pronunciation, as well as collect your own database of materials on the language you are learning (audio, words, sentences, pictures).

Isn't it wonderful that nowadays you can communicate endlessly via the Internet? Our letters are not delivered to the addressee for several weeks or even months across the planet; to tell about how our day went, today we just need to click the mouse.

Communication in the virtual world

Thanks to virtual communication, we can communicate with old friends who have gone abroad, with distant relatives, call and correspond with classmates and fellow students. Is it possible to find friends online who share our interests? Of course, all this is so simple, because there are virtual mail, instant messengers, social networks, chats and Skype. We don’t languish in anticipation of a letter, but can endlessly communicate via video with each other every day. All this helps us stay in touch with loved ones.

Virtual friends

When communicating on social networks with our friends and loved ones, we often come across the pages of people from other cities, countries living several thousand kilometers away. Virtual communication that has no boundaries and erases distance allows us to view their pages, follow their lives on the Internet and, of course, communicate and make friends.

Friendship on the Internet is romantic, mysterious and has many advantages, but the Internet cannot provide us with the opportunity to take our friend by the hand and hug him. Messengers and Skype are not omnipotent, but if you are a loyal friend who is ready to wait, one day you will be able to overcome the distance between you and experience the joy of meeting.

Finding new friends on the Internet is very easy, we will definitely tell you how to do it, and also talk about the advantages and disadvantages of long-distance friendship, virtual communication etiquette and how to maintain friendship.

Pros of virtual friendship

Before you find friends on the Internet, you need to know that long-distance friendship requires endurance and patience. Let's talk about the benefits of virtual communication and long-distance friendship:

• One can highlight as a plus the fact that virtual friendship is available, and there are no obligations between friends;
• your friend doesn’t care what you look like, what you’re wearing, whether you’re overweight, because he communicates with you because he’s interested;
• you have no reason to be jealous, on the Internet we are all equal;
• you can be frank with a virtual friend, he will not be able to use information about you as compromising evidence;
• you can be anyone you want on the Internet, just as you can be much more honest than in life;
• if you don't want to communicate now or want to end the friendship, all this is solved with a couple of clicks.

Disadvantages of having a long distance friend

Alas, virtual friendship cannot replace real friends. And sincere friendship is very rare on the Internet. Both of you must reach out and hold on to this friendship to withstand the distance, time.

There are as many disadvantages as there are advantages to virtual friendship:

• you cannot be sure of the sincerity of your interlocutor;
• if you do not communicate by phone or video, you have no guarantee that the person is who he says he is;
• it will be difficult for you to get practical advice from a virtual friend, he does not know you in real life;
• your virtual friend will not be able to come and console you if there is a long distance between you.

But what to do if you have an online friend? It’s okay, communicate, it’s great that you have found an interesting interlocutor. The main thing is to be confident in this person and continue to maintain the relationship. Perhaps one day you will have the opportunity to meet in person.

How to find friends on the Internet?

Well, we have already figured out what virtual communication is and what are the pros and cons of communicating with a person via the Internet. Now we have to figure out how and where we can find friends on the Internet. What sites, applications, platforms help people find each other? Perhaps we will be able to find a friend closer to you, and not several thousand kilometers away, and get rid of a few disadvantages.

Online communities

You probably have a page on a social network, this could be Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, Facebook, as well as various messengers. These are all great, convenient places to find an old friend online or meet new people. To find a new person, you need to find groups, forums and chats that bring together people by similar interests. All you need is to unobtrusively offer to get to know each other. There is nothing to be ashamed of on the Internet.

If you are looking for new acquaintances in your city, then you can look for groups whose main theme is your city. Usually such groups have names: “Typical Smolensk”, “Overheard in Irkutsk”. There are groups created to find each other, for dating, search by name: “Looking for you in Minsk” or “Dating in Lviv.” There you can communicate with fellow countrymen and, if you make friends, it won’t be difficult for you to meet.

Once you open a group, read other people's posts, look through comments, or leave a little information about yourself. Bored people and people who want to get to know each other will definitely write to you.

If you live in a big city, for example in the capital, then by finding a group based on your interests ( computer games, hunting, handicrafts), you can open a search by participants and select your city. The main thing is that your city is large and the group is popular.

Gatherings and meetings

If you are still looking for a friend with similar interests, then in popular groups, for example, in fandoms of musical groups and TV series, gatherings are organized, mass meetings of guys who want to meet people like them, for example, fans of the TV series “Supernatural”. Most often, meetings are scheduled in the city center, in squares, near shopping centers, near attractions, where there are a lot of people. These places are safe for meetings and are chosen due to the large number of people walking.

Some groups create separate forums, discussions, joint chats and conversations so that people get to know each other. It's convenient, leave your request. Perhaps you can find a friend from your city, or maybe someone who lives across the street.

Dating sites and apps

On the Internet you can find many sites that allow you to search for each other. Dating sites Tabor, Badoo, Tinder are aimed specifically at meeting new people. Such sites are divided into several categories and each of them has its own filters. On any of them you can indicate the purpose of your acquaintance: romantic relationships, friendship, one-time meetings.

The most popular and very convenient application That's what Tinder is for. This largest service, operating all over the world, finds friends for you near you. Register, fill out the form, post a photo and indicate the purpose of meeting. Tag the people you liked, if they liked you too, the application will notify you and offer to write. This is a great place to find a new friend.

Online Games

This is another way to find friends via the Internet. If you like to play computer games, register for a browser game or install it on your PC, tablet, or smartphone. If you've never played online games before, you should give it a try. Not only are these adventures fun, but they're also the easiest place to make friends online. During the game, strong bonds are created between students. Conquering virtual peaks and conquering virtual castles, you will not only find common topics for conversation, but also, having united, you will be able to help each other in achieving virtual victories. If you wish, you can continue communicating online on popular social networks or in real life.

Online games are very popular, many of them are played by people all over the world, so the games can be considered excellent option to find an online friend from another country.

Rules of communication

Before you make friends online, remember the etiquette. It is not very different from the real thing, let's briefly discuss some of its aspects:

• to win someone over, put things in order on your page, remove material that could push someone away from you;
• try to write correctly so that your interlocutor enjoys reading you;
• do not overuse emoticons, exclamation marks and capital letters;
• write your thoughts in messages completely, and do not break them into several parts, breaking sentences;
• when making acquaintances, avoid banal remarks;
• don't swear;
• avoid vulgar jokes if you don’t know the person well;
• Be polite.

Respect your interlocutor, respect his time and opinion, so that you are treated the same way, and then you will have a good, interesting friend, a pleasant interlocutor.

How to maintain friendship?

When you find your virtual friend, you will have to try hard not to miss the thread of communication. Don't stop communicating if you don't agree or on other trifles. Don't push your friend away if he makes contact. If now is not the time to talk, tell him so, but don't ignore his messages.

Make jokes, send each other notes and photos, this will help maintain communication, if nothing is happening and nothing to tell, perhaps this way you will find new topic for communication.

Don’t be shy to write to your friend first, there’s nothing wrong with that, because he’s your friend. Show interest in him, ask how he is doing. Call sometimes using Skype or instant messengers, a real voice will significantly reduce the distance between you. It's always nice to hear a friend's voice.

Try to surprise your friend. For example, write a letter, send a small parcel or order delivery to his home, perhaps flowers or a toy, a cake or any other little thing. Despite the fact that you did not present this gift, you chose it, this is very nice.

Yes, write letters. Picking up a letter that a friend has carefully written out is very touching. Don't forget about important dates, birthdays or days of acquaintance. Memory and a small, albeit virtual, postcard are very nice. Talk to your friend if he feels bad or sad. It's a pity that you can't come to him, but try to console him with words or call him, it will help.

We are sure that you will find our advice useful on how to find friends on the Internet, how to behave and how to maintain communication with them. Despite the fact that virtual friendship implies the presence long distance between you, if you really want to, then one day you can meet.