Yeah trust me even if there is a such thing as a "California" accent which as a native English speaker from the USA I can tell you there's not, that's not what you here in Hollywood movies it just depends on where the actor is from. I know what you are trying to say though!

Honestly the most successful language partnerships on Italki i've had are when you both decide on a topic to talk about before you call or text or whatever in whatever your target language is. It makes it more like an interesting exercise and you don't feel forced to come up with topics at the moment. For example you could determine to talk about your favorite vacation you've ever taken, or the strangest food you've ever eaten and have your partner correct you when you make mistakes or things like that and you can do the same for them. Its cool to kind've make a game out of topics even like asking someone to describe a plot of a movie or something in only the target language. Anyways to me having some sort of plan makes the partnerships much less akward 😂😂 and way more productive!

This is a really good question it is so hard to continously improve your language skills once you know all the basic grammar/features of the language. What I have been doing for a current target language of mine (Hindi) is making sure I listen to a lot of it at work to continue to surround myself with it but it can definitely be challenging still trying to find good solutions.

Also a lot of people on here simply want to learn English for business to be more employable etc. But for native English speakers like myself being on Italki is more about learning a language/languages that you are actually passionate about. Unfortunately there aren't that many people really passionate about learning languages in general 😂 so they aren't on this site. So I think that accounts for the shortage because the only native speakers you get here are just the ones of us who actually are really interested in languages!

Yes! It is really challenging for me for some reason but I think it is a really important language to know in the United States especially where I live haha. I think the hard thing about Spanish for me is depending on where people are from they speak really differently have completely different slang and even speak at completely different speeds. Still it is a really fun language and I like that it shares a lot in common with English.