I'm curious if anyone here has had much success just randomly contacting local groups of people from a country that speaks your target language.
For example, in my case I would like to find spanish speaking groups from Latin America or Spain here in Houston to try to join up with from time to time now that my spanish is relatively advanced, but a quick google search turned up fewer good results than expected (I guess I'm also a little more interested in dialects that I'm a little less familiar with, so that may have played a role as well). It seemed easier to find meetups of and specifically for a bunch of other language learners, but that just sounds excruciatingly slow and boring to me.
Ultimately, I'm curious about the experience of people who've done something similar and what they've learned in the process (such as how to find such groups, how to best contact them...).
Thanks in advance for your input.
Have you tried putting an ad in Craig's list for finding a language exchange partner in Houston? Austin's c-list is very active. If you put in an ad to teach even a few immigrants at a time to speak English better for a half an hour if they chat with you in Spanish for a half an hour you could meet at a restaurant or a library. Right now Skyping with folks here on Italki is better for me but I've had to mostly stop doing that even recently, but I was hoping to try out what I'm suggesting to you when my time is more open and I feel sufficiently up to speed in my Spanish to do that. If you're not interested in Mexican Spanish of course in Texas it's going to be harder to find folks but there are quite a few programs I know for Spanish folks to go to Houston so there might be more dialects than you would expect. Houston is a large city with a diverse immigrant population isn't it? Meetups will be mostly people that are learning Spanish getting together but my local library did have a group with native speakers to practice Spanish.
If you come up with other ideas or try the idea I suggested please let me know how it goes!
Buena suerte. :D
For finding people I think facebook is better. When I want to find such groups, first I search for a people with some special features that I want ; and follow what she has followed on facebook. Most of the time it helps...of course it is possible to search for people are from spanish and live in houston:-)
You've really motivated me Mike to lineup things for when I get the time. It's motivating!
I found on meetup.com 2 interesting groups here in Austin. One does Buddhist meditation only in Spanish and another is a group of Spanish speakers that are interested in health and fitness. Both those groups will be 100% in Spanish. :D
I just found this in Austin. Perhaps Houston has something similar?
I'm going to eventually (like a year from now) be looking for something similar myself for Korean, and one option I'm considering is, even though I'm not religious, going to a Korean church and getting involved. It would be a situation where there would be groups of people speaking Korean, but since churches are open to the public, it wouldn't be at all like the Spanish dude Dorothy mentioned who was just butting in on a social group he happened to see in public (that's creepy).
If you find any better ideas than faking religion, I'd love it if you could let me know!
