HelloTalk language exchange app

[Walkingtree]

What is it?

HelloTalk is an app for Android and iOS cellphones. It's a language sharing platform that allows people to both teach and learn a language. Currently a new user is capable of setting one known language and one target language. Additional languages can be added for a small fee.


Functions

On the main page you'll find four tabs on the bottom and on the top. On the bottom you'll have a HelloTalk page where you can view your active conversations. Just to the right is a partners tab where you can see your friends list. If you are like me and randomly add anybody there is a way to mark your most useful partners as favorites. Just go to their profile and on the top right you'll see three dots. Hit that and an option to favorite that person pops up. If you select it their name will be moved to the top of your friends list with your other favorited friends.

Next is the search function. It recommends people based in your time zone, although you can do a custom search to specify parameters such as age, languages, skill, nationality, city, etc.

Finally we have the ubiquitous settings tab. You can mess with your profile, get usage tips, or access the store.

However, if it were just these it would simply be another WeChat clone. There are a number of language learning features that make it stand out.

The first is the Favorites tab. You can long click on any message received and move it to your favorites tab for further dissection or review. There's also an in-App translator. I haven't used it much, but I suspect it's on the same line as a Baidu or Google translate.

You also have a history bar labeled Language Exchange that tracks requests sent and received. What is a Language Exchange? It's a different type of chat window that ensures a balanced back and forth of language usage. Sinosplice I believe had a fun article on "Language Wars" - this feature works to directly combat that.

You can set it for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 500 characters or 1,000 characters. At a certain point only the specified language will be transmitted. This means if you choose 5 minutes, for 5 minutes you will both speak in English, then for 5 only in Chinese. I use this function if only to control and direct the attention of a specific tutor. This helps but does not ensure the attention of the tutor. Otherwise people are free to drift in and out of a conversation.

There is also a notepad feature where you can sandbox phrases.


Usage

The chat windows work exactly like a WeChat. Users have the option of entering text, or recording their voice in a walkie-talkie type feature. There's a smattering of smilies as well.

Users can also: send a photo, take a picture, doodle, enter a long text, do a language exchange, or introduce one friend to another [i assume, so far I haven't used this feature].

When in a chat you can hold down [long click in the parlance] on a sentence or audio file to get a pop-up menu. Through this you can send the message to your favorites tab, correct a sentence a la Lang8, copy it to your clipboard, have a computer read the sentence aloud OR attempt to transcribe an audio file to a text file, or translate from or to a specified language.

It's this transcription function that could be really really cool. It's been hit or miss so far - it seems to correctly get around 60-100% depending on the speaker, the ambient noise, the difficulty of the word, etc. More than half the time I simply have to ask the tutor to write what they mean. I don't know if there is any way to make this function better.


My Experience

I downloaded this program about two days ago. So far I've used it for around 10 hours. It's precisely the thing I was looking for - a quick and painless way to get myself to speak more Chinese.

Obviously you'll have the same conversations over and over again "你来自那里?" "你做什么工作?"  等等 ....  I've found the best course of action is to just start the action - lead off with a polite introduction, then as quickly as you can ask a content question - What's your favorite method of transportation and why? Which is more important, luck or skill? etc. This will get the ball rolling quickly and help you move onto whatever target language you want to practice.

Alternatively, asking the tutors what they want is also a good way to go about things.

In general, it pays to be very upfront about your expectations. I expect to both give and receive corrections, so I try to make that one of the first 5 sentences I share. Because it's so easy to find dozens of language partners, eventually you'll find a few that share your goals and methods. To date I've befriended around 50 people, and about 4-6 are what I'd consider useful partners.

I've also noticed a lag in the sending and receiving of messages. Using WeChat as my baseline I'd say it takes between 0 and 10 seconds to have a partner see my message, or vice versa. We tested this by sending messages more or less simultaneously over WeChat and HelloTalk. Not a big deal, just
the way it works. To be honest outside the Language Exchange feature this is totally meaningless.

Also, because the notifications icon is small, red and circular, I'd like to see either its or the flag's position moved. In my chat screen at a glance it's hard to see how many active conversations I have because the small Chinese flag looks very similar to the notifications flag.

There is a store feature. It offers two services. One is unlimited translation. There is an soft limit of 25 translations per day, but for 6 RMB you can get unlimited for a month, with discounts offered if you buy months in bulk. They also charge you 12 RMB per additional language that you offer or want. Otherwise the app is free to use so far.


Rating

9/10

It appears this is a well developed WeChat style program that has many useful features specifically designed for language exchange. Apart from some very small details the usage has been smooth. Today I literally sat down after dinner and carried on dozens of frantic conversations in two/three languages for 5 hours, not to mention the aggregate time I spent all afternoon. Normally to get that level of excitement people play Candy Crush or whatever, but now I not only have new sentences patterns to practice, but my 口语 is flowing more easily, and I've made new friends.

 

TLDR: Wanna practice a new language? Try it.

[Walkingtree]

Reserved

[Melanie1989]

Great review, thank you. 

 

Where can we find the app, i don't see it at the playstore?

[AdamD]

I've used this app to death so I'm writing a lengthy post about it. In the meantime...

 

Walkingtree: You can mark friends as favourites, and they'll show up at the top of your friend list. Go into the user's profile, tap the three-dot menu (in iOS; I don't know how this looks on Android) and mark them as a favourite there.

 

Melanie1989: It's definitely in Google Play. You need to search for HelloTalk as one word. Last I heard, some third-party Android app stores weren't offering it for some reason.

[Melanie1989]

I looked for it as one word but I guess I have said crappy third party app. That's a shame.

It's just bringing up duolingo and a "speak American" app. I'll try not to take it personally!

[Mr John]

I started using this app about a month ago, after first seeing it in one of Pokerface's videos. Pretty hit and miss, but that's probably more due to my own personality and interests. I don't really have the time or the energy to maintain "friendships" with people everyday, but I've found it useful when I have specific questions. I would estimate that I've found about four people out of about one hundred, where it has been mutually beneficial. Fortunately, I'm not a sexy girl, so I haven't been getting bombarded with photo requests.

 

In my opinion, it's worth a shot.

[Walkingtree]

You can indeed mark friends as favorites doing precisely as you mentioned. I'll go back and edit the original. Thanks!

[Pokarface]

@Walkingtree Great review! You accumulated 10 hours in 2 days?!?! You smashed my record x-D

I didn't even know about the transcribe function, I've seen the button but it didn't seems like an obvious thing (meaning that I used to brake the replay voice message button before, haha)

 

If you are like me, you can speak with a lot of people and never add them to your friends list, haha. I think the limit is that you can send or receive up to 5 text/voice messages (without someone being in your friend list), if the other user does not reply at all after your 5th message, you can no longer receive messages from him/her until the user replies back (likewise, if both parties keep sending messages, it's possible to keep talking indefinitely and never add anyone to your friend's list). How often was your HelloTalk unable to send a voice message? Some of my voice messages have gotten "lost" and I have to record them again o_o (I'm using an Android with Lollipop OS) 

 

@AdamD. How often are your voice messages lost?

@Mr John. And judging by my videos, it seems like I have the right personality for these kind of apps =-D   (If I lived nearby a Chinatown, I'd be talking to strangers all the time, but I'd also like to talk with regulars and get to know them better).

 

Talking about sexy picture requests and marriage proposals.

One of the new features I've noticed is that in the settings you can adjust to be found specifically by the same gender (but not the other way around. Now girls can avoid such proposals), so if you are a guy, you can look exclusively for guys or for both genders, but you can't look exclusively for girls.

 

This is VERY valuable for guys learning Mandarin as it's been noticed in the forums that some people wish they could mimic more "manly" voices in Chinese (probably because of the tones and lack of deep voices in learning material in general, and because guys want badass voices/accents!). I have also read that Donovan from MezzoGuild.com was asked by his Korean tutor if he had spent a lot of time with Korean girls.

At first he didn't understand why he was asked this, but then it was revealed that he was saying a lot of "girly" stuff in Korean, haha!! I have never studied Japanese, but it seems that everything that's said in Japanese is badass and manly enough as it is, unfortunately for Chinese and Korean, that's not the case. 

[AdamD]

I've been using HelloTalk for at least a year. It's hands down the best way to do language exchange on a phone or tablet.

For Chinese Forums members, this app is like winning the lottery. I'm guessing there are hundreds of Chinese speakers learning English per every English speaker learning Chinese, because every week I'm pinged by 15–30 new people. If new friend requests overwhelm you, you can hide your presence for weeks or months.

The message recording function lets you play the other person's audio as many times as you need to, and it also lets you scan through the message. When someone sends you a 40 second message and you need to go back to the 18 second mark, you can do that. It's a bit fiddly because the scrubber is small, but at least it's possible.

Being able to correct text is worth its weight in gold. It shows you clearly which words the other person corrected. All the corrections you receive from everyone show up in a dedicated section of the app.

HelloTalk has some risk avoidance in place, such as restricting the number of accounts you can create on each device, and it seems to work. As I'm a white guy in an industrialised western country, I've copped a handful of women looking for a boyfriend (see below), but to date I've not come even close to being scammed, and I would easily have had a thousand friend requests by now.

The GFW hasn't yet blocked HelloTalk, as far as I'm aware. I hope the developer has taken steps to let the CCP do what it needs to do in order for the service to remain active there. Text translation didn't work when I was in China recently.

There aren't many negatives, and those which exist are not unique to HelloTalk, but I feel the need to mention them here so you know what to expect. They're all annoyances, not deal breakers.

For me, the biggest drawback is that the occasional language partner gets clingy. Of those, some are hyper-keen to be best buddies and some want to hook up. Hiding your online status can help, but you should also resist taking friendships beyond language exchange unless that's you're thing.

Here are some stories:

 

• In November a language partner suggested we exchange photos, which I suppose was fine, but then she started sending me "Good night! Sweet dreams!" messages every night before bed, and a couple of weeks ago she said she's coming to visit me. Some people love that sort of thing; I don't.
   
• A friend of mine had a HelloTalk partner in China who suddenly asked his friend in Australia to hand-deliver a gift to my friend's office. That came out of nowhere and crossed a heap of lines.
   
• Some people see HelloTalk as free tuition. Avoid them. Last year a guy flung daily 2–3 minute audio spiels at me for correction—evidently I had become his free English tutor—and if I didn't reply within a couple of hours he complained that I was ignoring him. Around that time, a quite brusque girl was in a English exam at school and sent me photos of the exam paper. "Quick!! Don't explain grammar, just give me the answers!!"
   
• A handful of people complain when I don't reply within 10 minutes. Some do this at 2 am, so I'll wake up to a string of increasingly impatient messages from a complete stranger who doesn't understand time zones. I explain that we're not all glued to our phones, and if it gets out of hand I just stop replying. Hiding my online status has disempowered the more anxious types.
   
• People regularly nag me to migrate to WeChat. I say no.
   
• Occasionally I'm smothered by a woman who's looking for a boyfriend or husband. Others treat HelloTalk like their personal Hot-or-Not and ask me to rate their selfies. If I can even be bothered replying, they all disappear the second I mention my wife.

 

All this is easy to avoid, and if you don't disclose too much about yourself you're not at any risk. The usual internet caveats apply.

With that in mind, you should start using this app immediately. It's done wonders for my language ability, and as Walkingtree said, you can lose yourself in it for hours at a time.
 

[roddy]

Thanks folks, ton of useful info here!

[Walkingtree]

AdamD - the whois associated with the HelloTalk website is registered to a Hong Kong company, so hopefully this means some agreements have already been made/considered regarding mainland usage. Good point about being able to scan through a voice message. That slider sure is small I totally missed it. Hopefully it's something the devs can upgrade.

 

I've also had at least two women ask to meet me so far. Dunno if it's scams, just somebody who has reverse yellow fever, or what, but thanks for bringing it up. Don't share your personal info people!

 

Quick question - how do you hide your online presence? Now that I have roughly 50 friends I can barely keep up with the people I have, much less respond to the dozen 你好 or Hellos I get.

 

 

 

Pokarface - For some reason sending text is just fine, but sending voice messages seems lag. It's especially bad when I'm not connected to wifi. Perhaps it's my phone?

 

Concerning Korean...I taught in a Middle School over there for a few years. Most of my coworkers were middle aged women, so hence most of my languages exchanges were with them. I speak/spoke "girly" Korean I guess. Who knew?

[HelloTalk Zac]

Hi fellow chinese-forums users,

 

I am Zac, founder of HelloTalk app. My thanks to Roddy for telling me about this post. I will try to answer some questions about the app here.

 

Let me share some useful HelloTalk features first:

• with iOS 1.8.6 version, you can now just tap on (rather than long press) text message to bring out the options (to come to Android for next next version - 1.6.6)
• double tap text messages will expand text bubble to full screen for favorite, text to speech. You can long press individual words here for iOS dictionary. Looping text to voice coming out soon in this mode
• you can double tap voice message to bring out options
• while recording voice message, slide up to blue speaker icon to listen first before sending out. You can record hands free in this mode. 
• incoming message by default translate to your native language (if source language is same as your native language it'll intelligently translate to the language you learn). For messages you SENT out, it'll translate to the language you are LEARNING. Most people don't know this feature, it can help you learn.

 

• long press and tap on "more...", select multiple messages and hit "play" icon (the triangle blue icon next to mail), it will play out text/voice like a playlist for learning. This feature available for favorite plugin too (for learning and review). The top right corner share button let you customize your chat screen to share to social network.
• same "more..." function give you forward function, you can forward useful frases Notepad
• tapping profile picture from chat list takes you directly to a user's profile 
• top right corner ... from chat screen gives you many useful options (create group chat, put chat to top of chat list, customize target translation language etc)
• searching users from a specific city (supports multiple languages input) is possible under both best match and custom search

 

• from Setting/Who_Can_Fine_Me, you can hide yourself from search, or specific only people matching language can find you
• For iOS users, enhanced text to speech voice can be downloaded from iOS system (Speak selection)
• Adding an extra language pair (US$2) will actually double or triple a user's exposure and chance to find language partners (although native English users learning Chinese don't have such a problem). We made this a paid feature so only users who are serious about learning that extra language will have it. 
• VoIP Free Call actually works really well under stable network condition. I encourage everybody to try it out. 

 

@walkingtree

I really have to tip my hat to you, for your deep understanding of the app features in such a short period of time. Also thank you so much for writing this detail post.

 

@AdamD & @Pokerface @walkingree

Our Android version still leave much to be desired. There's occasional issues with connection and sending messages. Some users even experienced database loading failure. We are working hard to improve it.

 

@AdamD

HelloTalk by default turns on Don't Disturb time from 11pm-7am (can be changed) for each user's local time. During this period all message notifications are silent. 

 

Feel free to send me private message so I can tell you my HelloTalk ID for any future feedback and suggestions.

[HelloTalk Zac]

By the way, I forgot to mention that it's actually possible to specific the language you are learning as Shanghainese (text to voice & transcription not available), in additional to Cantonese and Traditional Chinese. 

 

I actually encourage everyone to use voice messages more. Listening to voice messages you don't understand is a fantastic way to learn. Ask your partners to speak slowly and clearly for you. Transcription gets you 60-100% accuracy but usually good enough for you to understand and figure out the rest (you can edit transcription & translation result - long press for pen icon).

[imron]

Feel free to send me private message so I can tell you my HelloTalk ID for any future feedback and suggestions.

Or feel free instead to discuss things here rather than private message so everyone can participate and benefit from the discussion.  @HelloTalk Zac, you can 'follow' this topic to receive notifications whenever someone posts.

[Pokarface]

Hi @HelloTalk Zac! Whoever runs your twitter account likes to retweet my videos =-p

https://twitter.com/BaldemarGuerra

 

I'm not sure if it adds value to retweet this, but I have an old video with subtitles using HelloTalk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItHm5MgJ0d8 (Just renamed the video to, American speaking Chinese with strangers on HelloTalk since that's more accurate)

 

The database function works for me. I have a strong feeling that every time we mention apps in this forum, the developers WILL find our posts and address our concerns, haha.

 

@Walkingtree, Yeah, I've noticed that about text vs. voice. Haha, girly Korean. I guess it's not a concern if you don't plan to live in Korea or to conduct business speeches in Korean.

[AdamD]

@Walkingtree:
 

the whois associated with the HelloTalk website is registered to a Hong Kong company, so hopefully this means some agreements have already been made/considered regarding mainland usage.

 

Good news! I get the feeling that the app would really suffer if China couldn't use it.

@HelloTalk Zac:
 

HelloTalk by default turns on Don't Disturb time from 11pm-7am (can be changed) for each user's local time. During this period all message notifications are silent.

 

Thanks for the tip.  My phone goes into do-not-disturb mode at night anyway, so nothing can cause it to wake me up.

Good to see you here, by the way. Welcome.
 

[pross]

 

 

 "Good night! Sweet dreams!"

 

Is this common? (I am getting these too!)

[AdamD]

Not very common, in my experience. If I get messages from established language partners that late at night, usually it's to keep up the conversation or to ask a question about English. I think I've only ever had this one person send me out-of-the-blue "sweet dreams" messages every night.

[Mr John]

Maybe I give off a certain "vibe" because I get "sweet dreams" etc quite often too. I'm guessing most of the them have heard it being used in American t.v shows or movies and decided that it works (even with virtual strangers).

 

Also, in case anyone is interested, it's quite easy to save useful sentences from in-app conversations and export them for review. Personally, I use google drive, but there are probably other ways to do it as well.

 

Lastly, I must say, I'm fairly impressed with the quality of the in-app text-to-voice function.

[Pokarface]

@Mr John. How do you import voice messages to your google drive? I was trying to import voice messages to my computer but I kept getting something that looks like a picture of my conversation instead of the audio.