You use tandem? Can you tell us about your experiences using the app? Do you like tandem? What are the good things and bad things about using Tandem?
Buntaro,
Yes, I do use Tandem! (well, sort of)
I like Tandem sometimes, but sometimes I don't like it too much. I enjoy that it's very very easy to find natives, and that you can control the level of interaction you're comfortable with. I wish they would provide the feature of letting you find a native near you for free, but I guess they have to make money somehow, so it costs money to do that. It seems that (just like on other social language learning apps) there is an elevated amount of users who are trying to pursue love interests, so unfortunately, it decreases the chance that someone of the opposite gender will respond to you. Also, I didn't like that I was required to show pictures of my face to join the service, but I can understand why it has to be that way (prevention of bots, etc. and it seems to be working very well).
As for getting to actually conversate and practice language with people, it is quite difficult to get a response out of people that I try to message. It may just be me, but a majority of the people don't answer when you send a message, so you have to message ~10 people to get 1 or 2 responses, and the conversation may not last longer than greetings.
The system is also a bit flawed, because you have to specifically make yourself offline, with a switch in the settings, to be able to notify others that you aren't on the app. Many people still have a green online status indicator but have not used the app for days, weeks, even months or years... Luckily, it will tell you when they were "last active", but I feel like this might be flawed too, because it doesn't make sense with the amount of people that are not responding; it feels as if many of those people who are active "minutes ago" couldn't seriously be ignoring your message for days... I feel like it might consider "active" just turning your phone on at all
but I'm not sure exactly how it works. Overall though, the app is pretty decent and allows for some learning and friendship at the same time! I feel the app would best suit those who already have the basic foundation of the language, and just need to keep talking to people to improve. Personally, I'm not quite there yet...
So I've decided to focus mainly on learning more so I can read more than 50% of any given text, and so I can understand informal/casual phrases better, which Discord helps me with. Yesterday was the birthday of a fellow DTMer in one of the servers I'm in, and most people said 「おめでとうございます！」/「おめでとう」, but one person said 「おめでとうでやんす」, which led me down a rabbit hole of finding out about でやんす!
Just a side note I guess, but I think Discord is really good as well! With Tandem though, it is much easier to find a Japanese person who knows English well enough to conversate in both English and Japanese. With Discord, it's more like real life in the sense that in Japanese servers you'll pretty much find 99% of people are just speaking Japanese, and English is banned in most cases, while if you try to find a bilingual Japanese person in an English speaking server, it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack... So Tandem is really good with that too!