As a New Yorker, it’s not always easy learning French. Sure, one can very easily stroll through the French neighborhoods of New York such as Greenpoint, Williamsburg and the areas surrounding Carroll Gardens, littered with their bilingual schools, French-accented cafes and boutiques. But hoping to bump into a French American and asking “Où est le plus proche metro s’il vous plait?” without hearing a snigger is a mean feat.

Why do I want to learn French? Well, working in the city as an accountant has its perks, but when a job opportunity to transfer to Paris recently came up, I jumped at the chance. I imagined fresh buttery croissants every morning and glorious views of the Eiffel Tower from my office window…!

And so I began to plan my déménagement, squeezing my entire life and apartment into small cardboard boxes, ready to be shipped off. But my biggest challenge wouldn’t be a physical one: how would I be able to learn to French in a couple of months? I trawled through Craigslist for cheap French classes, chucked a few textbooks into my Amazon cart and hoped for the best. I managed to develop a fairly good grasp of the grammatical basics but I couldn’t yet speak the language. That was, until I discovered SpeakShake.

For those of you unfamiliar with SpeakShake, it is a website for finding language exchange partners online. Like other social media platforms, each user creates an account and profile in order to get access to the other users. I would scroll through a list of French speakers wanting to practice English, and choose someone I wanted to exchange with. Each conversation would last half an hour, 15 minutes in English followed by 15 minutes in French. What’s great with SpeakShake is that there is a lot of cultural content on the site so that you can discuss many different topics with your partner, avoiding any awkward silences. There was an integrated translator and I could save all the new words and phrases I had learnt to my “Notebook”  –  things that proved very useful. But what I found extremely valuable was the feedback I received from each of my language partners at the end of our conversations. They would help me perfect my pronunciations (for example, “un œuf” is pronounced “un-erf” but “des œufs” is pronounced “dez-err”) and point out my grammatical mistakes.

A few months later, I’m now a lot more confident in my speaking abilities and feel finally ready to cross the pond.

If you’re looking to improve your French for whatever reason, I would definitely recommend giving SpeakShake a go!