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Voice chat is great for improving your speaking skills in a foreign language. These days, you don't even need to download software to do that. For example there's Shared Talk, www.sharedtalk.com which is a web-based flash application that allows you to have a voice one-on-one conversation with a student learning your native language in exchange for the language you are learning (in this case English—but it can be any number of different languages). Of course you can always use skype which is really popular now for voice chat and also yahoo messenger and msn messenger that work really well too. Bear in mind that in order for you to have a successful conversation, a headset is highly recommended. If you don't have one, you can always resort to regular headphones and a microphone. This greatly improves the sound quality as you won't get the echo or delay effect that is common when using loudspeakers and a microphone. Another important thing is having a broadband Internet service although that is not indispensable. In my experience, as long as one of the parties has a broadband Internet connection, you would be able to carry out a conversation successfuly. Let's hope that Englishbaby! adds one of these apps so this amazing English-learning community doesn't have to go elsewhere to practice their conversation skills.
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