Unlike My Language Exchange, which was mentioned in the original post, my site allows free members to contact up to two new people per week for free as well as receive unlimited messages for free. I’m not in this to make money; although I don’t need to practice my own Japanese as much anymore (I’m a translator living in Japan), I wanted to give people the same opportunities I had to talk to lots of Japanese people so they can improve their own language skills as they help others.

And I find its “exercises” ridiculous & repetitive.

It’s basically Rosetta Stone and Facebook merged into one entity. People from all over the world create profiles with a picture, their info, and the languages they speak and what level, etc. You can add friends and IM each other in whatever language you want while otherwise doing Rosetta Stone-like exercises with the site’s built-in software.
The learning exercises also include speaking and writing parts; of which upon completing, you send your submissions to native speakers of that respective language so they can grade it and tell you how much you suck thanks to high school courses/how awesome you are thanks to following the methods from AJATT.

Oh, and it’s FREE!!!

lang-8.com/

It’s a website where you input sentences in your target language, and a native speaker comes along and corrects any mistakes you made in the sentence, you can correct other people’s English too. Very useful if you’re about to input sentences into your SRS IMO.

www.sharedtalk.com

See you =D !

I’d also like to take this post to give my first hello to Khatzumoto (and to all those who frequent his blog), what an inspirational site you’ve got going here. After learning Japanese (at school + university) for over 10 years, finally I’ve come across some practical and effective study methods. To be honest I was fed up with attending my Japanese classes, week after week after month after year, not getting anywhere fast — now I’m learning faster than ever and I have you to thank.

This site is awesome, keep up the good work!

Cameron

This admission really did make me laugh – I mean, what a stalker hangout this website is 🙂

So, here’s a suggestion if anyone happens to be in London,and the legal restraining orders that Japanese co-workers/acquaintances have obtained against you are limiting the possibilities of speaking Japanese:

The prime Japanese-speaking-opportunity seeking stalker hangout in London has to be the Japan Centre in Picadilly – it’s chock full Japanese people, and you can even stalk the staff in Japanese if you want. Not that I really know, of course, eeerr…, I just happen to (frequently) pop in there to eeerr… gaze at the wonderful products on display….

And it even has a message board as well.

If you need an invite, this guy offers it to anyone for free:

gaijinwomen.com/be-invited-to-mixi/

Plus, if you’re kind of a beginner with Japanese, he can help you set up an account. But, I wouldn’t suggest Mixi for a complete beginner, seeing as the whole website is in Japanese.

I hope that helps some people.