The MyIntercambio Story

As many things that have come before, MyIntercambio was borne out of frustration.

My frustration was not being able to find a language exchange partner that fit me, even though the Internet is just awash with social language learning sites.

The problem for me was that all those sites were either chock full of teenagers dabbling in every single language or dodgy people looking for something other than a language exchange. Worse, it seemed that most of the members on those sites were more interested in racking up points and amassing friends than seriously trying to improve their language skills.

I noticed that some sites were better than others though, offering a profile and some context about the person, while others were straight out of the 90s. One site restricted their members to communicating via an internal messaging system (in an effort to protect your email address from would-be harassers) but would then send out email notifications using only your language exchange partner's first name in the subject line:

"You have a message from Juan."

Now which of the 15 Juans that I've received emails from would that be? I hope it's not that persistent Juan again. Or that Juan that overuses exclamation points at the expense of all other punctuation marks. Oh wait, it's a new Juan! (rimshot)

But seriously, I really do have at least a dozen Javiers.

Instead of sending myriad feature requests to those language learning sites only to routinely be ignored, I decided I would just develop my own learning community and address all of my frustrations.

You Are Who You Are

One of my priorities for the new site was to create a community of real people with a real interest in hitting their learning goals. On MyIntercambio, there would be no silly usernames.

Keeping it Real

Another top priority was to encourage people to meet for language exchange in the real world. Putting them both together made perfect sense: real people, real interest, real world.

Multilingual Is So Last Year

I decided that MyIntercambio should be bilingual (English and Spanish), not multilingual, so that people who seriously wanted to master just one of those languages could easily find each other.

In addition, making the site bilingual only was important because it makes the feedback system much more valuable. Not only do you get feedback from native speakers of the language you're learning, but you're encouraged to reciprocate. "Paying it forward" by helping a total stranger is nice, but reciprocity is what builds relationships and grows a community.

Welcome to MyIntercambio.