I’ve been meaning to try learning mandarin for quite a while now, as it would be useful for me at work, but I find duolingo to be annoying and focusing the least on what actually enables me to remember anything. Especially since I don’t have much use for written mandarin.

Privacy depends how it is done. I for one would probably not be comfortable with a video call. An audio call of some sort would be better, as it can be done reasonably anonymously.

I’m not sure what sites or apps specifically you have in mind, but if you’re THAT worried, you could always also just stick to text chat, which I believe most apps support as well.

I’ve been doing that for German for a while now with a small group of regulars and none of us have ever seen each other’s faces and we’ve only used voice chat a couple of times, but it’s still more fun than talking to an AI, and it feels good to be able to help people, even if it’s just minor stuff like getting their grammar right.

If you often feel lonely and/or have difficulty making friends IRL, I would definitely recommend giving it a try.

If the privacy concern is a geographical one, are there other countries that speak those dialects, or maybe even immigrant communities in a given country? If so, maybe you could look for people from those places instead.

And about anxiety more broadly, usually talking to people helps loosen the person gradually, if that’s your issue, so maybe worth a try? Had heard even that language learning kicks off when the person is no longer afraid of making mistakes when trying to learn or use what he/she learned, so another reason for me to recommend.

And as MacNCheezus said, maybe start by text chat? Been doing that this past year for Spanish, which I had ignored a lot in years prior and had grown rusty as consequence, and speaking to someone fluent in it helped me a bunch even on speech.

I do tend to think it’s worth some amount of privacy loss to connect to people. That’s a very individual call though. Personally I’m OK with putting my picture and first name on some apps. It’s a tradeoff - what you give up, you get to see about other people.

The one I’d tried was called HelloTalk, and I intially refused, hard, when it required a real picture and some other info. Later decided to go for it. It’s weirdly set up almost sorta kinda like a dating app, making you show what you look like, share interests, and even seeming to more often show people of opposite gender. The rules say not to use it for that, though, and the interactions I had there never got weird. Also, the apps nags constantly about subscribing to premium, and throws tons of junk notifications. That said, it did do a good job of showing me lots of seemingly interesting people. Not everyone responds, but a few I had really fun conversations with.

Language exchange as a concept can be a little hit or miss. There’s always the questions of ‘which language to talk in’, ‘how often to switch’. If you aren’t careful, it will push to one language or other and you’ll rarely get practice.

Most value I got out of it I think was just connections, more than language practice. Not strong connections, because I keep people a little distant, but casual acquaintances where I could ask this or that about the languages I’d want to speak or the places I planned to visit. Also got some good music and food recommendations.