This is NOT a sales episode, I promise! Seriously, I have found and tested the BEST place to find people to practice speaking English with for free. It only takes 5 minutes to set up an account, and you'll be up and running, practicing your English with nice people from all over the world. No hidden charges, no sales, I promise you...as of September 2020 when I am publishing this podcast, it's 100% free. There aren't even annoying ads! No excuses. Start speaking NOW. :-)

You can find free4talk.com here. It's a great place to practice speaking with other non-native speakers.

If you prefer to have structured lessons with a native speaker teacher, italki is probaby still the best value. But for FREE speaking practice, definitely check out free4talk! For my list of other places where you can practice your English online, see this page.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, English learners, Lori here, your teacher from betteratenglish.com.

Today I have a very short and simple episode for you. Now, I know a lot of you really want to get more English speaking practice, because you're mainly concerned with becoming more fluent with your English speaking. But the problem is that you have a hard time finding people to practice with, especially since, you know, it can be expensive to get an online teacher, and you don't have money and I totally, totally understand.

So what if I told you that five minutes after listening to this podcast you could be online, joining in a whole community of people just like you who want to practice their English. And you could actually be practicing, literally within five minutes.

I swear it blew my mind when I found this site. It's called Free4talk.com, and it's 100% free.

And I promise you, I have no vested interest in this website. I don't know them. They're not paying me anything. I don't make any money for recommending it to you. I just think it's such an amazing resource that I would actually feel really bad if I didn't tell you all about it.

Now, if you're already listening and thinking, "Oh, no, no, that's not for me. I've already tried conversation exchanges and it's a real pain in the butt because I have to first log in and look at a bunch of profiles and then find somebody and then send a message and, and hope that they're going to get back to me and then we have to arrange a time and then more often than not, when I show up for our appointment, there's nobody there, they've totally flaked on me." And I get it. That is a real pain, and that is frustrating. And you've spent all this time and still not gotten any practice.

I promise you free4talk is 1000 times easier. Literally, within five minutes, you can find the site, create an account, log in, find a room and start talking to people. And the big difference between free4talk and these other conversation exchange sites is that it's based on chat rooms. And that makes it super, super easy.

I've been logging in off-and-on over the past couple of weeks and giving it a try. And the good news for all of you who are listening who are learning English, is that English is by far the most popular language. Every time that I've logged in there's been at least 40 different chat rooms. Sometimes there's been close to 100 different chat rooms of learners all over the world, people just like you who are on there to practice their English.

So I hope this is getting you excited. And that you're thinking "Yeah, cool. I want to go try it." So here's what you're going to need if you want to try it. All you need is a computer with a mic. Or you can also use an Android phone or an iPhone. And you're going to need a Google account because that's how you log in. I think the site is actually based on the same engine that drives Google Hangouts. So you can't use it if you don't have a Google account.