I discovered Slowly back in September after seeing it on the homepage of the app store. I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of penpals and writing letters to people although this would have been a logistical nightmare since my country’s postal service is notorious for their penchant to lose mail.
Slowly is not your typical networking or dating app.
We’re bringing the traditional pen friend experience to your smartphone.
The app is created for those who yearns for meaningful conversations with people in the era of instant messaging. We hope to connect people around the world at a slower but better pace – one letter at a time.
Meet a new pen friend, seal your letter & place a stamp - start connecting with the world on SLOWLY!
Letters actually mimic the amount of time it takes for snail mail to be delivered in the real world. So for example, my letters to Germany take a day to deliver while those to Brazil take two days. Whereas countries nearer to where I am, like Thailand and Taiwan, take only a few hours.
I’m the worst textmate ever since I take forever to answer and this is why I find Slowly so great; it takes away the pressure to reply quickly. I’ve also found my conversations to be more meaningful and since the app matches you with people who share the same interests as you do, you immediately have something in common to talk about.
So this is how my profile on Slowly looks like. As you can see, your profile photo isn’t a picture of yourself, but rather, a cartoon avatar. There are loads to choose from and they even have an option for individuals who identify as non-binary, which is super cool.
Another thing that I really like about Slowly is that you can add as many languages as you want, which is helpful for those looking for language-exchange partners like myself.
Finding penpals is extremely easy on Slowly and you can even use their auto-match option. I’ve used auto-match a couple of times, but I honestly prefer to explore manually.
Since I primarily use Slowly to practice my language skills, I filtered my matches to show me users living in countries where my target language, and any other languages that I’m interested in learning, is spoken.
Slowly lets you save your letters as drafts so there’s no pressure to finish it in a single sitting. I normally take a couple of hours to compose my letters since I try to write in my target language.
I think that feature also makes the experience more meaningful because I actually have time to think about what I want to say and how I’m going to respond. I’ve definitely had more sincere conversations on here as compared to other language-exchange apps like Tandem and HelloTalk.
I mean, no offense to those apps. I also love using them, especially HelloTalk, but I’ve found Slowly to be an avenue where I actually get to hold conversations and learn more about a person, as opposed to simple small talk and correcting each other’s grammar.
You can also add stamps to your letters, which makes the writing part more fun. There are stamps specific to your location and any other new stamps that you receive from your penpals immediately gets added to your collection. There are also limited edition ones like a Christmas tree stamp for Christmas and a Grim Reaper stamp for Halloween. They also recently opened the Stamp Store where you can purchase stamps with cool designs on them, but I’ve never used it since they cost real money and I’m a broke university student.
Slowly lets you have up to a hundred penpals and you can also delete those who are inactive, have deactivated their accounts, or those you aren’t interested in talking to.
Right now, I have about four with whom I’ve been talking to for a few months now. It’s great because I love conversing with them, learning about their experiences, their culture, and what they’ve been doing on a daily basis. I’ve also received lots of book and film recommendations, which is super nice.
It’s been a couple of months since I first started using Slowly, but I still get that feeling of excitement when I see letters arriving or when a letter from my penpal has been delivered. This is definitely one of the best apps that I discovered this year and I highly recommend it, especially to those looking for language-exchange partners or those who are simply interested in learning about different cultures and walks of life!
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