[foobarian]

I have a teen who's been using DuoLingo for French for a while but hit a ceiling with spoken language. I suggested to him to look around for voice chats with French speakers like maybe on Discord but it's a desert out there. Wonder if you have some experience with using these paid options to recommend. Would be neat if there could be something without a rigid course-like structure he could join occasionally for low-key conversation practice.

[duothrowaway99]

Some Alliance Française outposts offer online classes, and italki has a number of great tutors. It always depends on the teacher you work with ofc, but I know someone who had great experience with both.

There are also a number of social media influencers (who probably were language tutors in a past life) that run online paid communities aka you pay to be part of their language community, and then have access to classes, zoom calls, etc.

They're harder to find / it's more difficult to immediately parse which ones will be good. But you can get a preview of "how they are" by consuming what they publish. For instance, for Canadian (Quebec) French, these are great:

https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench

https://www.youtube.com/@maprofdefrancais

https://www.frenchwithfrederic.com/

I'm sure there are equivalents for French from France, and other languages. Searching "Learn {language name}" on YouTube/Instagram would be a good start.