Yesterday I decided to go back to my old Tandem account, refresh it a little bit and see if I can find someone to practice japanese or spanish with. I must say, I have a sort of toxic love-hate relationship with this app.

On one hand, it's quite popular app that gathers people from all around the world, willing to practice languages and share their culture, exactly what I'm looking for to step out of my comfort zone and improve my active language skills, so I can finally stop sweating like Mariusz Pudzianowski trying to move a whole lorry each time I have to speak during English classes.

For now, it may sound perfect, but let's move to "the other hand". So, there's a massive amount of people that, apparently, cannot see the difference between "Tandem" and "Tinder". But a bunch of naked torsos instead of life-changing cultural and linguistic exchange isn't the biggest problem, neither is a one message from a Turkish man that you have literally nothing in common (no common interest in a particular language or culture, no common hobbies, n o t h i n g). But the things start to get quite overwhelming when it becomes a massive attack of messages of random people clearly interested in "finding a polish wife" or "talking to a beautiful girl" (I did not invent it, these are actual quotes from their profiles), and almost nobody interested in learning things. Sometimes it's depressing not being seen as a language exchange partner, actual human being who wants to learn new things and expand knowledge. It just repulses me. But sometimes the attempts are so awkward that I cannot resist laughing. Like this one I saw yesterday. What was that even supposed to be?

Making jokes of somebody's appearance. That's a new level of starting a conversation 👍😄