Looking for Finnish penpals

[darkzero]

Hello,

my name is Nicola, I'm a 24-years old boy from Italy and I live in Helsinki with my girlfriend (who is Finnish) since December 2007. I have been studying Finnish for all this year, I also have attended two courses and I got very good results. However, I need to practise as much as possible (in theory, as of June 2009 I should speak Finnish at level C1 at least - that is, one-to-last level in European system - so that they'll let me study at the University of Helsinki), so I'm looking for native Finnish speakers for e-mail conversations in Finnish.

I like mathematics, music (especially jazz), drawing, writing, reading, playing piano (I'm not that good at it, though), science fiction, computers and videogames, so there's chance we have something to discuss about
Should someone be interested in learning/improving his/her Italian, I can be of help (and my girlfriend too could eventually help as she can speak Italian pretty well. She also studies it at the University of Helsinki).

If anyone is interested in this, please send me a private message!

[panic]

Hmm... yah this is really old but I found it from searching the forum.

I'm wanting to meet more Finnish and Scandinavian penpals also.

I have a few online Finnish friends from JuJu penpals and also Orkut (kinda too big) but am wondering if there are other "popular" sites that Fins use.

Cheers.

[Jukka Aho]

I have a few online Finnish friends from JuJu penpals and also Orkut (kinda too big) but am wondering if there are other "popular" sites that Fins use.

IRC-galleria (not to be confused with IRC itself) and Habbo (previously known as Habbo Hotel) are two widely-used and popular "social networking" sites among the younger populace.

You might want to try out the actual IRC as well. It's a text-based, real-time chat system which was in use on the Internet already before there were web browsers or websites. Finns mostly hang out on IRCnet and QuakeNet servers. To access IRC, you need to install a program called IRC client and configure it to connect to the IRC network of your choice. There are several IRC tutorials both on the web in general and YouTube in particular.

Then there are Finnish-language Usenet newsgroups (the so-called "sfnet" newsgroup hierarchy). To access those, you need a Usenet newsreader (NNTP client) such as Mozilla Thunderbird and an access to a Usenet server (NNTP server, news server) that carries the "sfnet" newsgroup hierarchy. Alternatively, you could also use the clumsy web-based interface to the Usenet provided by Google.

You might also want to check out Suomi24 which is a large web-based discussion forum, matchmaking website and chat service, and there is of course a myriad of smaller Finnish-speaking discussion forums for various topics and special interests.