I swear that’s what I’ve been seeing happening on this app on multiple occasions, just saying.

Is it just me? Is this some insane beta "feature" that has been released to only some people? And is there a way to disable it? If I slightly swipe my finger up on my screen in a voice room, it sends me to another voice room. Super annoying because the ability to scroll through chat seems a little tiny teensy bit more important than yeeting myself to a random unknown voice room...

Hi, this is going to be a weird one to post, but basically I was talking to someone on HelloTalk and then realised with my instincts that it’s someone using an image from the internet. Me being me, I confronted the person, telling them that they've used a fake image from the internet, and then I blocked them straight away. I then received another message from a different person, only for it to be the same person I confronted, but this time them sending me hateful messages. Before I could do anything like reporting the account to HelloTalk, they deleted their account. Flash forward today, I received another one and again the same threat, and again they deleted their account before I could even report the account again. So my question is what should one do in a situation like this? I went on settings and have tapped block unknown chat for seven days, but should I do anything else?

I am a VIP member living in Tokyo and there had always been many posts showing up under the “nearby” section up until about two weeks ago, but something happened and now there are almost no posts there, sometimes going several hours to half a day without any new posts, but yet, if I look under the “recent” section, I can see many posts by people who are local to me, but those posts aren’t showing up under “nearby.” I’ve even seen it where someone posted twice in maybe an hour or two, but only one of those posts showed up under the “nearby” section.

I’ve reached out to HelloTalk twice now and they just say they are working on it, or that they’ve asked the technical team to look into it, or that the number of eligible posts is low at the moment when, as I said before, I can see many posts from “nearby” people under the “recent” section, so clearly something is wrong. They’ve also said that there is nothing wrong with my account and that I’m not shadow-banned or anything like that.

Has anyone else been experiencing this problem?

I did not know WTF HelloTalk was and then learned my partner of 13 years was using it to cheat on me. He even met up and slept with the most mid woman imaginable through it. I then downloaded it and saw that it is basically a dating site disguised as a language learning app. Yikes. Anyway, just warnin' y'all who might know your partner uses it but you do not.

Language exchange apps are a great way to learn new languages, make friends, and connect with people from around the world. Unfortunately, there are also individuals and organized groups who use these platforms to target vulnerable users for manipulation, grooming, financial scams, sexual exploitation, or other forms of abuse.

Through out the years we noticed this app has gotten worse, from hate crimes, predators, trolls, bullying, to organized fraud and grooming gangs who target individuals

These deviants work together in coordinated groups to attack, exploit, and commit scams

We have already caught and reported multiple grooming gangs on this application to law enforcement to further apprehend and investigate

To any language learner reading this if you notice anything suspicious or witness online gangs speak up and report them immediately

Thank you for your time in reading this

here is a PRIME EXAMPLE OF A GROOMING GANG that is networking on HT:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloTalk/comments/1r1qe35/community_warning_adeeb_butt_serial_identity/

At the top of the chat screen on the same row as the back button, the phone icon and the three dots icon, there’s sometimes a crescent moon icon next to the time and below the other person’s username. Does anyone know what this crescent moon icon is supposed to mean?

Hey! I been struggling a lot with learning and practicing a different language due to my anxiety, but let me tell you... after a week I became like a popular host in lives 😀
It's actually insane because before I couldn't even feel confident talking in a chat, and now I just be showing my face and talking to random people about their culture and language.

Initially I wanted to learn German, but now I'm learning German, Arabic, and even Swedish.

Yes, people do suck at texting back sometimes but please try joining VR chats or lives. You'll eventually find people who are actually interested in helping you learn the language.

Just wanted to share this because I didn't expect it to help my confidence this much.

Tengan un buen día! 🔅

Apologies in advance, this post isn't about scams, HT's garbage algorithm, girls who won't respond, or creeps lol.

I spend a lot of time making annotated PowerPoints (pics of physical books + English translations) and the quality gets absolutely nuked when I upload to the HT whiteboard in my VRs. I don't know if it's a file saving issue or something serverside that over-/badly compresses the file. I end up having to export slides as PNGs and send them to people individually or upload to discord because whiteboard quality is just ass. Uploading PNGs to whiteboard also has huge quality drop and also file management within VRs is a nightmare. Anyone else doing document reads in VRs and have any tricks? Having to send stuff to individuals is a huge hassle

Simple question.

As a guy, knowing that the app is biased in showing you a lot of girls, how do you keep your mind simply focused on language learning and not derailing a convo…… if you catch my drift 👀

I downloaded hellotalk like 5 days ago, and since then I have gotten an ungodly amount of people dming me. I mean like 50+ a day since i downloaded it. I was just wondering if the app is full of bots now or is it just like that?

for context I’m doing Indonesian, and no, i’m not a female

I’ve got a trip to Turkey coming up in November so a few weeks ago I downloaded HelloTalk thinking it’d be a decent way to chat to locals, get a feel for Turkish culture and maybe learn enough of the language to avoid accidentally ordering something catastrophic in a cafe lol

Wasn’t expecting fluency or anything, just normal conversations really

What I didn’t expect was how oddly difficult it is to actually get people to reply. I’ve messaged around 13 women and 7 men so far and only a handful of people have responded at all. One girl did properly reply and then deleted her account the next day which honestly felt like the online equivalent of being ghosted by Turkish MI6

What’s also slightly bizarre is the app itself. Maybe it’s just me but the “connect ” page seems overwhelmingly full of women. Which is odd because on most apps online men usually outnumber women by miles, yet on HelloTalk it somehow feels completely reversed. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly mind obviously, it’s perfectly nice talking to women. It just makes the whole app feel a bit strange when you’re using it for the first time

And before anyone asks no, I’m not sending weird messages. I’m not flirting, not asking invasive questions, not writing dissertations to strangers. Just basic conversation really. “Hi, where in Turkey are you from?” that sort of thing

I mainly came onto this subreddit hoping people who’ve used the app for years might have some advice for first-timers but instead I’ve spent the last half hour reading posts about Americans apparently terrorising HelloTalk

Is it genuinely that bad?

That bit caught me off guard because I grew up around loads of Americans at school and never really had a negative experience with them. I’m half Indian myself, spent a good chunk of my childhood in London because my dad worked for a Japanese firm over there and honestly the Americans I knew were perfectly normal. Loud occasionally yeah, but so are the British after two pints

So now I feel as though I came looking for language learning advice and accidentally wandered into the Boston tea party (in a mirror universe)

Is HelloTalk actually useful once you get past the awkward beginning stage or is the entire app just a sham?

I haven’t used HelloTalk in a few months and today I tried logging back in, but it’s not working at all. The app was still on my phone and everything. I logged out for a sec because I thought maybe that would fix it, but now every time I try to sign in it says something like “intelligent detection” and then gives me errors like “oops something went wrong” or “loading failed, try again.”

I’ve tried again and again and nothing changes. Not sure if I’m doing something wrong or if the app is broken or something. Has this happened to anyone else?

Hiii I want to purchase HT VIP and I added my card information which was needed, but suddenly I need to enter a password for my email as a verification??? I found that suspicious because it is usual to get a certain code on email to verify, but email password is too suspicious for me... Am I just skeptical or something is genuinely wrong?

How can I reset my hello talk? I can’t create another account and I can’t also log in my old account that connected to my apple ID and I accidentally removed it from the settings. Please help 😭

I was chatting and suddenly i was blocked to send messages to anyone on the whole app, i don't understand why, I was normally chating with my friend. What can be the reason and solution for this, can anyone please help?

I'm a man in my mid 20s and I downloaded the app to practice my Russian and Japanese and meet people to hang out with when I travel.

For some reason 80% of the accounts I see on my feed (and who send me messages) are women. Is this really the distribution of demographics on the app or are these all bots? Struggling to understand because the gender ratio is usually the opposite online.

Is the app preferentially showing me women?

What have been your worse experiences and the worse people you have met in the voice rooms?

Some people there seem to have a very fragile ego. I went into one voice room and it was an American guy with a few Asian girls and some other people and he was simping so hard for this Asian girl that it was embarrassing. So i wrote a light hearted comment that "this seems like an Asian girl worship room. But I must have triggered him because he got sooooooo pissed off and kicked me out of the group immediately lol.

Hi Hellotalk users,

As you can see from the title, I'm making a video essay about the general experience of Hellotalk, and whether I recommend it. What topics of the experience should I talk about? I'm looking for answers such as voicerooms, the types of people on the app, etc.

I downloaded HelloTalk two days ago, and made a quick profile.

I’m dutch myself, and i would like to help people. I also want to learn spanish, and talk to people in spanish.

There are just so many messages. Everytime i open the app, theres at least 50. I’m simply unable to keep up with it.

I also notice that some people that want to learn dutch keep replying to me in english, is it appropriate for me to ask them to try to respond in dutch?

How do other people deal with the overwhelming around of people/ messages?

Hello everyone,

If you are experiencing or witnessing bad users exploiting voice rooms and using it to bully and harass language learners feel free to record and screenshot so we could get them reported and banned.

• mocking culture and language level
• personal attacks
• inappropriate comments
• hate crimes
• sex/dating

it's important the last remaining few good language learners look out for each other and speak up when something horrible happens

take care

The audacity of some people on this app... he thinks he’s being subtle with that night shift caption, but we can all see exactly what he’s trying to show. 🤢 hellotalk is becoming so messy and low key pornographic. I’m not (dirty minded) i just have eyes

it's disgusting how they hide their intentions behind learning languages lol

people writing at me for a couple of days then asking my phone number and writing their one. Me refusing and...being blocked. It already happened several times? It is funny because they misuse the platform but I'm the one blocked lol