As much as you might enjoy reviewing your SRS flashcards, watching foreign movies, reading your foreign language books, or whatever you do to learn Chinese and/or Japanese (or any language for that matter), you can’t learn it all on your own. You need some friends to help you.

In theory you could learn everything on your own, I think, but you’re just making life harder for yourself that way. Remember, this is all about trying to immerse your self in a new language. If you’re always speaking and listening to English then you won’t learn Chinese. This is something obvious, but some people try to ignore this simple aspect of learning a language.

Sometimes people feel more comfortable in their normal settings and feel too intimidated or shy to try out what they’re learning. I saw this a lot when I was studying in China. People would come to China to learn Chinese but they almost never spoke with Chinese people. Those people were only crippling their speed at which they could learn the language. I don’t have some fancy statistics to present about how interacting with native speakers will help you learn more at a faster pace. It’s just obvious. So, you need to go make some friends who you can practice speaking with. There are tons of opportunities to interact with native speakers.

When I was in China, the best way I found to make Chinese friends was to just go to a public place and sit down somewhere by myself and wait for a few minutes. Somebody would almost always just walk up and start chatting with me. Even if it was just somebody trying to sell me something, I got to practice speaking. The best places I found to go were the universities though. I met some of my best Chinese friends just with simple chats that randomly happened somewhere.

You don’t even have to be in a foreign country to do this though. For example, about two years ago, back in the United States, I decided to find some new language partners. All I did was print out a simple advertisement in Chinese and Japanese describing that I wanted to have a language exchange and included my contact information. Then I just distributed it to my university’s language lab where all the foreign students take their English classes. Within a few days I got a huge response to this ad, which took about ten minutes to create. I had too many requests that I couldn’t even handle them all.

Even if there aren’t any native speakers that live close by, you should find a pen pal/online friend. Just having email and instant messaging conversations is also great for practicing the language. You should definitely try to do this too, whether you have friends near you or not.

This part is easier than most people might think. There are usually lots of people who’ll be willing to talk with you. Especially in China! Go make some new friends, but just be careful not to forget about your old friends too!