The best way to learn a foreign language is speaking and practicing. Through phonetic communication, pen-friends who speak different mother tongues can have more chances to hear how the native speakers talk and to get familiar with their accents and slang. And most important of all, you can employ more natural and fluent oral speaking. Meanwhile, you can learn how to pronounce words accurately, how to make yourself understood and how to talk decently. Those on-line courses we offer here can act as the materials of phonetic communication for Chinese learners.

Before the phonetic communication begins, what you should prepare are as follows:
1 . Evaluate your level of the foreign language.
If you look forward to communicating through phonetic facilities, then you should be up to the secondary level, that is:
You have mastered the fundamental knowledge of the language including the basic vocabularies, grammar and pronunciation etc.
You may still go for some simple talks even though a few grammatical mistakes or some misunderstandings of words or phrases exist in your conversations.
Get the general idea of what the native speakers say when proceeding with a daily talk.
Be able to understand 40% to 70% when chatting with the native speakers in a relatively low speed. (If you are a beginner, you can use text chat at the very start)
2 . Suggestion is that choose a pen-friend whose level of the foreign language is quite the same as yours, so as for mutual improvement.
3 . Look for a proper pen-friend.

Notices about the Phonetic Communication are as follows:
1 . Properly arrange the communicating contents with regard of the learning purpose on both sides.
2 . Take care of the need of your partner when chatting in your mother tongue.
3 . Focus more on the process of communication rather than invariably correcting the grammatical mistakes.
4 . More respects and considerations of your partner.
5 . It's better to talk about one or two topics with two languages in turn while using phonetic communication.

Common Use of the Software for Phonetic Communication:
SKYPE is a free downloadable, real-time voice and text chat communication program. We recommend it because it has perhaps the best voice quality available anywhere (very important for foreign language practice!) The quality is better than that of telephones and is perhaps the best of any Internet voice program
It works with any firewall.
It is available in 17 languages: Danish, Dutch, Estonian, English, Finnish, German, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Swedish.
It is very easy to install and use.
Using SKYPE, you can have private simultaneous voice and text chat with up to four other people. SKYPE requires a Windows 2000 or XP computer. Mac OS or Linux computer or a Pocket PC.

For more information or to download a free copy of SKYPE, please visit the SKYPE website here.
Besides, you can also use the software for instant phonetic communication like Yahoo Messenger.