HelloTalk Reviews

The idea of an application for language exchange is good, the problem is most of the people are using it as a free alternative of Tinder.
On the web there are tons of stories of couples that have met in Hellotalk. Go on youtube and search "I'm Marrying my Language Exchange Partner" to watch one of them.
Developers ask to report people that are using the app for dating purposes, but it's not always possible since the real problem is that people don't write or replay to your messages, if you don't match their requirements, as it does happen in any other dating app.

It's not easy to find serious partners to practice with. If you are a boy you will have one replay for every 50 messages you send; if you are a girl you will have a hundred of messages every day even from people that speak a language you are not interested in.

The developers should develop the application in a way that it can't be used as a dating app, for example not showing profile picture, age and gender to the users, in this way the real purpose of the app comes out, also the possibility to have random voice calls will be great.

Apparently this App is discriminative against people from some countries in the world, especially the United States. It seems to be controlled by a certain political party. I submitted my application to become a host for a chatroom, but they never responded. Meanwhile, some other users from China got approved in no time. This is a politically oriented APP. Simply because I advocated animal rights, they denied my application. I never even mentioned anything political. Users beware. There are many language learning APPs out there, choose yours wisely.

I have been a Hellotalk user since 2017 because I wanted to improve my Chinese and Japanese, and I could meet many good people and with some of them I met in Japan and we are still friends. But since 2019, the number of fake profiles and of scammers who ask your whatsapp number after just saying hello has dramatically increased, those scammers have fake profile photo, usually a Chinese model photo downloaded from some chinese site that I can recognize in 2 seconds and want to ask you to invest in bitcoin, etc. When I said I do not have whatsapp they blocked me and that resulted with hellotalk team sending me a warning message because I was blocked by someone, one day I met 5 scammers, they all blocked me when I saw I do not want to exchange whatsapp and then hellotalk banned me, so my account was gone, and I could not complain. Well, from that time, I became able to recognize those scammers and when they ask me whatsapp I directly block them. Now I can recognize them even without chatting with them, you can do it too by controlling : location always in UK or Usa even if they claim to be Japanese and to be in Japan, their time is not japanese time and their native language is English, if you speak with them in Japanese they always reply in google translator English, so I just block them when I see their profile. But there is another bad thing: I never bought VIP because of the fact that if some scammer does not get what he wants, he blocks you and you will be banned, and I tried to use modded app, I always used modded apks until last month when (with version 4.6.6) hellotalk team sent me a message like this: "dear user, we found that you are using an app downloaded from a non-official store. Please download the app from an official store (Google Play Store) within 7 days or you will be not able to send messages and to post moments anymore" What????? they found ?? their system found? they monitor my device, that's extremely bad,

The HelloTalk customer service is terrible. Even if you are a paying customer (VIP), you can expect notably poor treatment from this Chinese company.

My username was mistakenly reported as being offensive. It definitely is NOT offensive, and I have used it over several different social media platforms for years without any issues.

They disabled my usage of the app until I changed it, and, when I appealed it, clearly explaining how it was not offensive, the Chinese company clearly did not read my message whatsoever and replied with something like "we will enable your account when you change the username". How frustrating.

It was a pretty big deal for me because my username is how my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc. followers find me on new platforms such as HelloTalk, and I lost that vital marketing link due to a mistake, or perhaps my username was a Chinese curse word (?), to be honest I couldn't find anything out when researching it, and I gave up trying to get any kind of explanation out of the HelloTalk customer support team after three attempts. The whole ordeal was pretty abysmal and demotivating, especially after paying for Lifetime VIP (£100+) just a couple of days prior to this incident.

Aside from my offensive username issue, you can expect blunt replies in broken English.

It baffles me that such a successful company can settle for such inadequate customer service, which is notoriously detrimental for customer retention.

It's a real shame because the app itself is pretty good and a useful language-learning tool, and a small investment in English-speaking customer advisors could go a long way, especially considering that the majority users of HelloTalk are either English/American speakers looking to learn a foreign language, or vice versa.

Very very poor customer service even though I have been buying VIP account every year.

This app is amazing for meeting hot girls. I've talked to 1000+ girls all over asia on here. And had a lot of fun ;). Problem is hello talk is way too strict now. So you gotta be secretive, and pretend you're a "language learner". Give me a break hello talk team. Nobody comes to these apps to learn a language lmao. It's obviously for socializing, and flirting. Just leave people alone and let them flirt with each other. Geez. Stop ruining the party.

I tried this app in order to improve my English. I wrote to a guy which lost his motivation about learning Italian in a few days, simply because he used to waste his time here. I wrote to other users, but nobody answered to me. If you want to add a language, you should pay. Many people here ignore you, too. Avoid this app, it's better for you.

The app is too slow and has a lot of spam

I've been using this app to find several English native speakers and keep chatting with them for months. I have to say it really helps me a lot in my English learning. With millions of users in the app, it's not difficult to find a language partner. And it has many useful functions such as in-app translation, text to voice, etc. I bet you guys will love it once you have a try.