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Wouldn't it be good if Duelingo hooked you up with native language speakers so you could try to strike up conversations in text and voice?

It's great to learn words, phrases and so on in isolation but actual conversations in a new language are where the real learning happens. You've got to be on the ball

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They do offer real classes done through independent teachers, they are typically group lessons, but they are at a pretty reasonable price! http://classes.duolingo.com

I was super interested, but the link highlights they are unfortunately shutting this down Classes next month.

Oh man, I hadn't seen that! Super disappointed :(

For what it's worth, I use Duolingo (the app itself) as just another way to practice at the moment but feel that most of my real progress comes with a tutor that I found through Preply and eventually started private lessons with. Group lessons were a cheap way to get some more practice in though with other speakers.

According to that page, Duolingo classes is "going away" on January 18.

HelloTalk does this (chat/voice/video, with language corrections as a first-class feature). It's aggressively monetised, but I'd still recommend it.

I've heard good things about Tandem, but haven't used it myself

https://www.hellotalk.com/?lang=en

https://www.tandem.net/

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