Talk to girls online: a fortnight of notes from a language learner

The phrase is a filter request. Nobody types «talk to girls online» hoping for a random person; they type it hoping the randomness has been removed for them. That is the assumption the whole first evening spent dismantling.

On the free services there's no filter that survives contact with the pool. What you get is a queue, and the queue contains whoever was waiting. Roughly seven in ten of the people I met in the first hundred connections were men, which is the number everybody who has counted reports and nobody puts on a landing page.

So the first note is the dullest one. If the filter is the reason you're here, stop now — it doesn't work, and the paid versions that do make it work manage it by recruiting and paying the people you want to meet, which is a different product carrying a different price.

None of that is an argument against the format. It is an argument against the phrase — and against every page that takes the phrase at face value and sells you a filter to go with it.

Second evening I stopped counting and started listening, and the obvious thing arrived: everybody here is speaking a second language, badly, at full speed, with a camera on. That is the exact exercise I've been paying somebody thirty euros an hour to simulate.

Nothing else gives you that cheaply. A tutor is patient, slow, and adjusts to you — comfortable, and precisely the thing you need taken away. An app hands you sentences with nobody attached to them. A live video chat hands you an impatient stranger who leaves if you take too long, and the leaving is the part that does the teaching.

I'm aware how that sounds. It sounded worse on day two, when I was still telling myself I'd come for something else.

Here's the first thing I got wrong and want to write down properly. I spent the first three evenings chasing calls and ignoring the text box beside the picture, on the theory that typing isn't speaking practice and I came here to speak.

That theory cost me three days. Listening comprehension and reading comprehension sit in different places and improve separately, and the box is the only reading practice in the whole arrangement — not textbook prose, but the way people actually type their own language at two in the morning. Abbreviations, dropped accents, spellings that exist nowhere in a dictionary.

So: use both halves. The call for the ears, the box for the eyes, and the two of them together for the thing neither does alone, which is connecting the sound of a word to the shape of it.

There's a second, smaller use I found late. Ask somebody to type the name of a dish, a street, a band — anything where the spelling carries the whole of the information. Hearing it teaches you nothing; reading it teaches you the spelling and the sound at the same time.

I went back and checked this against the recordings I keep of my own lessons, which was uncomfortable. In a lesson I speak for about a fifth of the hour. On an evening here, across thirty short calls, I speak for closer to half of the time I am connected — worse, faster, and to people who have no reason to wait for me.

The note I'd want somebody to have given me before I started, and the one argument in here against doing this at all.

Most conversations on a video chat with strangers are between two people speaking a second language to each other. That's the format's great strength — nobody is judging you, because they're in the same position — and it has a cost nobody mentions.

You absorb their errors. After two weeks I was confidently using a preposition I'd picked up from a Brazilian in Lisbon who had it wrong, and using it the way he did, because I'd heard it from a confident fluent-sounding person eleven times. That is how language acquisition works and it does not care whether the input was correct.

There's no fix inside the format. The fix is outside it: keep one source of correct input running alongside — a tutor once a fortnight, a podcast, anything with a native speaker in it — and treat the calls as volume rather than as truth.

I'd add one caveat to my own advice. Input here arrives at unknown quality, and a good half of it comes from people who learned the language the same way you are learning it now. Volume is the product here; accuracy has to be bought somewhere else.

Every evening I'd been opening it around ten, which is when I'm free and therefore when I assumed everybody else was. Wrong in the way that costs a week.

Working out which hour is which takes one evening with a clock and a list of cities. I'd put off doing it for six days because it sounded like homework, and it turned out to be the single change that mattered most.

Matching runs on availability. Whoever's waiting is whoever's awake and unoccupied, and that's a function of the clock where they live rather than where you live. Chasing a particular language, the question was never which button. It is what the clock says in the places where that language is spoken.

For Portuguese that moved my evenings four hours later and changed the whole fortnight. For Spanish it split into two windows, Madrid and then Latin America, several hours apart, and the two windows sound different enough to be separate exercises.

A lifeguard on night duty in Lima, three in the morning where he was, spent most of a call rummaging in a drawer for something and narrating the search the entire time. I understood perhaps sixty per cent and he didn't slow down once, because he wasn't teaching, he was looking for a thing in a drawer.

That was the most useful twenty minutes of the fortnight. Nobody adjusts to you at three in the morning; there's no lesson shape and no politeness budget. You either keep up or you don't, and keeping up badly for twenty minutes does something that forty careful minutes with a tutor doesn't.

The commentary is the part to notice. Somebody narrating what they're doing produces the kind of speech no lesson contains — half-finished, repetitive, full of the small words that vanish from textbooks — and it is exactly the register you will meet in a shop or on a platform.

I've turned that over since. Being understood is a tutor's whole job. Nobody else's is, and the world outside the lesson is entirely made of people whose job is not to be understood by you.

By the second week I'd been skipped several hundred times and had stopped noticing, which is worth describing because the first evening it was the whole experience.

You get a second and a half. In that time the other person decides whether there's anything to build on, and they're deciding it about a still, silent, slightly blurred image of a stranger. It isn't about you and it barely involves you.

For a learner it matters more than for anybody else, because the instinct after ten skips is to stop speaking first — and speaking first is the entire exercise. The evening you stop opening your mouth is the evening the whole thing becomes worthless.

The other thing a fortnight of this teaches, and it took me until day eleven to name it: a video chat with strangers is the only place I know where being incomprehensible costs you nothing. Nobody you fail in front of will ever see you again, and the fear that keeps learners silent in a classroom has no purchase here at all.

I tried the group rooms for two evenings as a comparison, because somebody suggested they'd be less intimidating for practice. They are, and that's exactly the problem.

In a room of five you can go quiet and stay quiet, and a learner will, every time. In a one on one chat the silence is yours to fill or to end, and both of those teach you something. There's nowhere to hide, which is uncomfortable for about four days and then stops being uncomfortable.

That's the honest case for this format over the friendlier-looking ones. Not that it's pleasant. That it removes the option of not speaking.

Which connects to something I keep circling. The exercise is not really about the language. It is about tolerating the half-second in which somebody decides about you, four hundred times, until the half-second stops registering. Everything the fortnight did to my Portuguese was downstream of that.

Worth putting in the diary because it explains a thing I kept noticing and misreading.

None of these services charges, and none ever has. The money comes from sending people onward to places that do charge, which is also where the promoted accounts in the queue come from — they're not a failure of moderation, they're the business model standing in the queue.

Practically that means a share of what you meet in talk to girls online is working. For a learner it's a minor tax: they open in a language you're not practising and the conversation goes nowhere useful, so you press next. That tax rises in the thin hours, simply because the ratio shifts when ordinary people go to bed.

One more comparison, since the fortnight kept producing it. A group room is a live video chat too, and it is the friendlier-looking option, and for a learner it is a trap for exactly that reason. Friendliness is what lets you go quiet.

Two weeks, roughly four hundred connections, maybe twenty-five conversations that ran past five minutes. Here's the summary, and it isn't the one I expected to write.

If you came to talk to girls online in the sense the phrase implies, the filter doesn't exist and the free version won't build it for you. That's a flat no and I'd rather say it than sell you the next paragraph.

One number I'd have wanted in advance: four hundred connections is about nine hours spread over a fortnight, which is roughly what a month of weekly lessons costs you in time and a great deal less in money. Whether that trade suits you depends on what you're short of.

A last note on the numbers, because somebody will want them. Of roughly four hundred connections, about two hundred and sixty ended before either of us spoke. Ninety or so produced a sentence each and stopped. Twenty-five ran past five minutes and four ran past twenty. That distribution did not improve over the fortnight and I no longer expect it to; what improved was how quickly I stopped minding it.

If you're learning a language, this is the cheapest hour of unscripted listening available anywhere, it is genuinely unpleasant for the first four evenings, and it stops being unpleasant. Keep a correct source running alongside it, use the text box as much as the microphone, pick the hour on purpose, and speak first every single time.

And take it as given that everyone worth talking to is lost the moment the call ends. Nobody here can be reached twice; that is the blueprint and not a crack in it — and after a fortnight I find the loss stopped bothering me, which is the sentence in all of this I least enjoy putting down.

Open it and speak first