How do you find someone to practice with?

[GingerCat]

I don't really have anyone I can converse with in French right now. I would ideally like to find someone semi-local so that we could meet up and have conversations.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to try and find someone?

[LeesaJohnson]

You can find someone using social networking sites to start your conversation in French. 

[Simon Marion]

Hi GingerCat

It depends where you live of course, but usually if you live in a big or even medium city, you should be able to find French speakers somewhere. I was reading an article on how to find language partners, and the guy suggested mobile phone applications to find language partners like Tandem, Speaky, Hello Talk... I've tried them and they're really good, my favorite being tandem.

It connects a person who is learning one language and is fluent in another, with another person whose languages are reversed so that you can mutually exchange your language knowledge. Like if you know English fluently and you want to learn French, you will be connected with someone who knows French fluently and who wants to learn English.

In fact, if you want my opinion, Tandem and Hello Talk are really similar apps, but I personally prefer tandem because it has a great system of selecting thier users. They basically analyze your profile before validating your registration, and if you don't show enough motivation or good reason to join the app, they won't accept you. Indeed, if you only put one word to describe yourself without any picture, you're most likely not really interested or motivated to converse with people.

It's a pretty big app, so I'm sure you can find people who speak French not far from you, so you can always organize face to face meet up.

Otherwise, I don't know if it exists in your city, but I've been living in Paris for 4 years now (I am from Brazil), and something I really enjoyed was going to a multilingual café. The guy talk about it in his article as well, it's called Polyglot Club and you can basically register in their website before a meeting the café organizes in the evening with people speaking all kinds of languages. You can make good friends and practice with them, then keep in touch with them...

I'm sure you must have these kind of events somewhere where you live, and you'll always find someone who speaks French, it's such a common language. Of course it's not easy at the beginning, you need to step out a bit of your comfort zone, but come on, if you really want to learn French, you gotta speak it right? So go for it.

Anyway, I hope I could help you a bit, good luck to find your French conversation partner!