Output Stream of Consciousness

Link: http://www.mylanguageexchange.com

Here's an interesting little site, essentially the modern-day equivalent of seeking out pen pals in other countries, but with an eye to learning languages. There are a lot of people online, with varying levels of skill in varying languages. I'm learning Swahili, so I paid for a membership to write (the Classmates model - that you can read and be sent anything for free, but you must pay if you want to initiate contact), and got a pen pal already: a tech support guy in Nairobi. It's pretty interesting.

There are actually an astounding number of people on there. One very handy feature that they have is that you can search for people by what they're learning, what their primary language is, and by last login date, so people who logged in more recently are at the front of the list. That makes it a lot easier to identify people likely to respond. Nifty.

The interface is a bit rough, but workable. The most annoying bit: posting doesn't work well in Mozilla Firefox. I'm a bit annoyed at having to switch over to IE for that one very important function.

Yale's Kamusi Project is a very, very handy resource for Swahili learning - the word lookup alone grabs phrases and colloquialisms as well, which gives you more means to say things than plain online dictionaries do, and there are songs, poetry, grammar, etc.

It's on hold pending donations, though, but the resource itself remains up.