Regular text chatting helped me personally to develop confidence and basic communicative competence in Swedish.

I have also been using it as part of a strategy to give my Mandarin students opportunities to transfer learning from the classroom to the real world. This, in turn has resulted in obvious motivation boosts for many students. I have, however, noticed that the more confident ones tend to prefer moving to audio and video MESSAGING after a while in situations where that’s appropriate. This still isn’t 100% real-time communication, in the sense that f2f conversations are, so just like text chatting it is great for developing complexity and adds the element of pronunciation-related practice and feedback.

Anyway, your post is absolutely spot on Olle, and I would definitely encourage learners of any language to make use of non-real time (as well as real-time) chatting for the multiple reasons and benefits you’ve included here. It is an easy and fun way to make language learning an integrated part of your life.

Thx,
Angel

Great article! Chatting allowed me to learn a lot of new vocabulary. I suggest ‘Hello Talk’ app on iPhone for that. It allows English speakers to chat with Chinese natives – and there are TONS of them! You’ll soon have too many chinese friends who want to chat with you. I really give 10/10 to this app and I’ve been using it everyday. It support hanzi to pinyin and also translation, so learning new vocab is extremely convenient.

Another option is italki.com, which also allows you to chat with chinese people and get them to correct your written texts.

I suggested some ways in this article: Language is communication, not only an abstract subject to study