Come Join! Discord (Voice Chat) for Chinese Study

[Guest]

Hi all,

 

In order to make Chinese studying a bit more social and less of a solitary task, I've made a Discord (open voice call) channel with the purpose of being both a Chinese study room and bringing those studying Chinese a bit closer together. If you'd like to come and hang out, say hello, find language partners or buckle down to some study with a friend, this could be a nice place to do it!

 

The channel has separate chat rooms for HSK levels 1-6 alongside a general chat (the 酒吧) and a separate text-only room for posting Chinese-learning resources.

 

To my understanding, Discord isn't blocked in the mainland (potentially due to a bulk of its funding coming from Tencent). The channel is hosted on a Hong Kong server, so should work well for both those in the Mainland and those outside of it.

 

The link for the channel is here, and it should work forever!

 

Hope to see you there.

 

(PS: To my knowledge, posting this isn't against the rules, but please let me know if I'm mistaken.)

 

[Shelley]

Oh sounds good. I know nothing about Discord, would you explain a bit more about it. Is it like IRC? with audio?

 

I use to many years ago run a IRC chat room (ChinaTalk) but that format has become unpopular, I haven't even looked at it for ages.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Shelley said:

Oh sounds good. I know nothing about Discord, would you explain a bit more about it. Is it like IRC? with audio?

 

I'm not entirely sure what IRC is (#youth), but Discord is a fairly popular group chat client which you can use for either direct messaging with friends (messaging via either text or voice) or messaging others in a group. Most of the conversation is done with audio instead of text, but both options are available and run largely concurrently. Think of it as a Skype call that's always on and anyone - provided they're invited using the above link - can join at any time.

 

One benefit of this is that a discord channel can act as a nice little community hub - come and go as you please, chat away as you like. It's great for both social purposes (i.e. computer gaming as a team - indeed, PC gaming is a major use for it) or specific work purposes (i.e. conference calls, free hosting means everyone can talk at once, the text function means links and attachments can be shared easily).

 

There are separate 'rooms' within a group conversation available, where members can go via a swift double-click, to talk about whatever specific topic the room in question is to be used for. In the case of this Discord channel that I've made, there are rooms available for HSK 1-6 and a separate General Chat room, so that people can have conversations/group study with people of their level.

 

Hope that helps as an explanation! Here's a link to the official website for Discord.

[Shelley]

IRC = internet relay chat. text only messages arranged in chat rooms.

[Shelley]

Seems like a revamped version of IRC, I would like to try, bit nervous about being a newbie but I will give it a go.

Do you suggest downloading it or using in a browser?

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Shelley said:

Do you suggest downloading it or using in a browser?

 

I can't say as I haven't tried it on browser - I only use the downloaded version, but that runs exceptionally well.

[Shelley]

Ok so I am running it in a browser at the moment. I will see how it goes.

[Guest]

Awesome, let me know.  Some of it might look a little confusing, but send me a message if you have any issues and I'll do what I can to help.

[Shelley]

Ok thank you, although I am a bit nervous I am looking forward to actually having someone to speak chinese with. My situation means I have no one to talk to, so listening and speaking are my weakness.

I will warn you that although I might be in the chat room, because I am "at work" I may have to dash off at anytime during business hours so may have to leave conversations at very short notice, but this is a small price to pay for having the time and ability to pretty much spend my time as I wish in between customers and work.

[xit]

Hi, I want to join~ I'm not sure how it works tho.

[Guest]

Just had a chat with Xit using the software - it's working well!

 

Come visit - dip in and out as you like.

[xit]

It's amazing~ I haven't spoken Chinese in ages. Hope more people join~

[Shelley]

I wonder if I have done something, my text is grey and now enter only gives me another line.

[lrumin94]

I just joined this! I hope I get to communicate well with you guys. I am very new to Mandarin but just took my HSK 1 recently. I can't read characters much since I've only just started with the pinyin but I can read a few. Hope we can learn a lot from each other!

[Guest]

Just thought I'd pop my head in again to say thanks all for joining! The chat's been a bit sporadic (time zones, commitments and what not) but the response to this has been great. The discord chat currently has 13 members, myself included.

 

I was wondering if people would be interested in having an online chat/introduce yourself event one day later this week on the discord? We could arrange a time that generally suits everyone (for example, next Sunday at 2pm GMT) and at that time all go onto the discord and say hey to one another, introduce ourselves and get some general study done (or failing that, just have a nice community chat).

 

What's everyone's thoughts on this?

[Shelley]

At 2pm GMT will the rest of the world be awake? This actually made me go and look at a time zone map to see if that would be the middle of the night for anyone, I guess it must be.

At the moment its actually BST so its GMT +1 so for me it will be 3pm, wonder if others have Summer time or equivalent. I just wonder how easy it is to get together.

Maybe you could have a couple of meets and people could choose which one or all depending on whether they are night birds or whatever.

Did you mean actually talking or text based?

I think that's why text based works for general chatting cos you can pop in and out when you want. I think maybe if people want to chat they should organise a time between themselves so it is a useful tool for learning chinese. At the moment the general chat is the only one anyone has used (so far) and has covered many topics.

 

I would be up for a introduction meeting if we can work it out

[lrumin94]

9 hours ago, Napkat said:

I was wondering if people would be interested in having an online chat/introduce yourself event one day later this week on the discord? We could arrange a time that generally suits everyone (for example, next Sunday at 2pm GMT) and at that time all go onto the discord and say hey to one another, introduce ourselves and get some general study done (or failing that, just have a nice community chat).

Sounds great! I'll be awake on my end, thar's 10PM Monday for me.  

[lrumin94]

I still can't figure out how to do the voice chat but it would be lovely to hear from you all, especially Xit!

[Guest]

@lrumin94 - for voice chat, look below the text chat menus (accouncements, general-chat etc) until you see a section called 'voice chats.' There's various voice rooms there, one for general conversation and various others for different levels of HSK practice. Xit's in there a fair bit!

 

Brilliant! I'm tied up this weekend and early next, but I'll set the (provisional) date as Friday 28th July, 2pm (GMT).

 

Hopefully I'll see some/all of you there!

 

 

[Shelley]

Ha, I will be at the hospital seeing my consultant for my 6 month check-up, can't miss that, so I will have to miss the get together. Never mind I am sure it will be ok and I will meet people as they join or something.