SpeakTalkChat: Linking Language Enthusiasts and Learners

Today we have a guest post by Aodhán Ó Duagáin (Aidan Duggan) of www.SpeaktalkChat.com

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SpeakTalkChat is a language platform that allows users to link based on shared languages and shared interests. Our goal is to link us together based on shared interests to chat through our shared languages. Our philosophy is that much progress in our languages is achieved by language peers chatting together about the things in life that we have in common. It is our belief that shared interests are one of the things that provide the glue of our conversations.

Our philosophy drives our functionality which includes immediate/scheduled videochat, user search, internal messaging system and groups/forums/threads. STC is available on PC and mobile. We currently have 33 languages available at three levels of fluency (fluent, intermediate and beginner) and there are a 101 interests to choose from (you can choose as many as you like).

We are very interested in hearing people’s feedback about www.SpeakTalkChat.com. Feedback to date has been very positive especially in relation to our philosophy. However it is clear that we don’t do language learning in terms of grammar, exercise, games and so on. We feel there are other places to find these.

We decided to focus on what we feel is one of the core things to languages which is chatting with people with whom we have shared interests. We sometimes call STC a ‘social chatting media’ because of our focus on socialising and chatting together.

We have an interest in minority languages and you’ll see a number of these available in the profile section. You’ll also see that the site can be viewed entirely in English or Welsh or Irish. We hope to have the site available entirely in many other languages over the next while and as you can guess we’re always looking for interested translators.

We have a wide variety of interests to choose from. Some would come under hobbies like painting or gardening but we’ve also included ‘heavier’ interests like climate change and human rights. We’ve done this because we also hope that STC can be a platform for discussing some of these pressing issues.

Many thanks for taking the time to read this post and any feedback, comments or suggestions are very welcome.

Aodhán Ó Duagáin (Aidan Duggan)

4 thoughts on “SpeakTalkChat: Linking Language Enthusiasts and Learners

  1. One thing I would say that needs to change immediately from a web design perspective: There is no list of languages accessible from the main page. In fact, I can’t find a list of languages anywhere on the site until the registration process. There should be an easy-to-find tab that you can mouse over or click on to see the available languages. Nobody wants to start signing up before they even know if their preferred language is available. From a user standpoint, this would be a great source of frustration and is a barrier to user signups.

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