Practice -your-chinese chat room

http://247yak.com/ was trying to be a site for people to rondevouz for practice either learning English or Chinese.

Talking about the ChinesePod forum, does anyone know how to reset a password or why signing up with new accounts is not working? I'm still unable to contribute...

Yeah, I only know of zhongwen.com too, as I knew of that site since 2002, but it's chat (from a few years ago the last time I checked) just supports pinyin, and usually when I went there it was always young kids trying to use bad words to ask women about their body and make comments on them... no fun. Downloading QQ and going to their chat rooms is the only other way I have chatted, in Chinese characters, and when I told them I was a 美国人 they didn't believe me... Still, wish there was a chat room here to chat with you guys while we post and listen to podcasts on CPod. :)

There is a Facebook app called Social Chat which has live chat rooms and you can create a private passworded rooms. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support the direct typing of Chinese characters, but you can still copy and paste characters into the chatbox.

You can type directly if you using IE but not in Firefox. Also you can only name a room after yourself or a network, so you couldn't call it ChinesePod.

Of course you're always going to have the critical mass problem, at least initially. You're only ever going to be chatting with people in a similar time zone, and if you're chatting in Chinese then that probably limits you to people who are past a certain level and have chosen to learn characters. Has anyone tried Google Talk? I'm connected to it 24x7 (unixhag) but I don't know anyone to talk to, and haven't tried it with Chinese. Mac users tend to have a thing called iChat open most of the time, and iChat can easily be configured to include a Google Talk account. Anyone can chat via its web interface, and I believe there's a Windows client program.

Just found an ideal facebook app: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6479624997 You can create rooms and name them whatever you want and it supports Chinese characters. The custom rooms only stay open as long as there's someone in it though. So if it's not there you can just create it and name it 'ChinesePod' and use a password we agree on, like 'jennyzhuisthebest'. ;)

this seems to be a good chance promote the cpod-skype-meet up-weekend again(taken place on the weekend nearest to the middle of the month, every month). (if we don´t forget to turn on our skype,hehe...) ^_^

...to promote...

ha, now we know Bazzas account password...(or not?) ^_^

The only one I know of that actually gets used is on Zhongwen.com.

BTW, excuter, I'm going to be cut off from the network completely, for up to two weeks, starting just before next Skype weekend (15th), so I won't be around to mother people together for the weekend.

hmm...should I make an anouncement then (2-3 days before) ? (hmm... maybe that´s how it feels to be a father... well, maybe one day I´ll find out... being a single isn´t as easy as I thought; too many thoughts...) :-)

If you could do that, that'd be great, thanks! It's the weekend closest to the middle of the month, every month, so people should be able to work it out for themselves, but you know how it is, all these interesting lessons distracting everyone from real life. Even I forgot last time.

Thank you all! I think I am going to try to download skype tonight when I get back to school. I have used zhongwen before - and part of the reason I posted was becasue of the issues there. Then again, if you stay up really really late youll find people come on from Vietnam and Germany, and then the conversation becomes really interesting. But you have to wait...and sometimes the site goes down completly. Maybe over summer break I'll try opening up a facebook room for people and my chinese class. Thank you again! Jennifer

Jennifer, if you get Skype all set on your machine and see me online (user: thejulesong), feel free to chat or Skype me. :)

there is a discussion topic over at the chinespod forum wich is about the skypeweekend, so if you want that other´s contact you, you should go there and post your skypename there as well, because this thread will be gone soon as it happens to all others as soon as the attention is gone. http://forum.chinesepod.com/viewtopic.php?t=2317

Hey thanks I posted there My skype username is jennyoldyoung I can;t call or receive calls till after this weekend 9I dont have a headset yet) but soon I will Can't wait to chat with you all!

Congratulations, Skyper Jenny! You can still do text chat with Skype. In fact, most Skype conversations seem to start that way, and many end that way too.

I'll leave it open for a while if anyone wants to try, I've used the password above. :P