Make international friends online, free

Two places. The General room is everyone at once; walk in and the flags tell you who is there. And the 1:1 country filter, a Premium preference, aims the text or voice queue at one country; free users match worldwide.

The site's interface is in eight languages: English, Hindi, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, Filipino, Spanish and Turkish. The chats are in whatever the two of you choose, and on a voice call that is often English with a lot of goodwill.

This is the part people get wrong. You cannot make friends in Australia from the UK at 9pm GMT, because it is 7am in Sydney. The table shows the pairs that work: countries whose evenings overlap, or whose evening is your afternoon.

Each country page has a full hour-by-hour table: India, USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan.

• Ask about the place, not the person. 'What is it like where you are right now' is a question everyone can answer and nobody finds intrusive.
• Ask what they think of your country. People love to be asked, and the answer is always more interesting than you expect.
• Trade one specific thing: a song, a dish, a word in their language. Small and concrete beats big and vague.
• Voice is faster than text for this. Accents are the conversation, not the barrier. Use the whisper box for a word you cannot spell.
• If they are practising English, help; if you are, ask. The practice English page has the etiquette.

A 1:1 chat on HearMe ends when either person leaves, and as a guest that is that. To keep someone, both of you need a free account: an email or a Google login, nothing more. Then one sends a friend request, the other accepts, and you have a DM thread that persists. Nicknames stay nicknames; you do not give up anonymity to have a friend. A lot of people keep a regular in another time zone this way, someone they call once a week when both evenings line up.

Registering is free and never required: guests meet new people without any daily limit. The account is only for keeping the ones you liked.

If you want to meet a country rather than a person, go into General in that country's evening: at 9pm PHT it is Taglish and fast; at 9pm CET it is German with English on request; at 10pm BRT it is Portuguese and up late. The room is a text stream, and you can read for as long as you like before you say anything. Like everything here, rooms have no daily limit.

Usually it is one call a week at the hour that works for both, and a DM thread in between. A student in Lahore and a nurse in Manchester who talk on Sunday evenings UK time. Someone in Manila on a night shift and someone in Toronto after work. It is not the kind of friendship where you know each other's surnames; it is the kind where you know what the other person's week was like. The site is built to make that easy and to stay out of the way: no feed to perform on, no photos to compare, just the thread and the call.

It matters to say this plainly. HearMe has no profile photos, no swiping and no matching by looks. The gender preference in text chat is a premium option described honestly as a preference when available, never a guarantee, because the pool is often mostly men. If you are here for friends in other countries, you will find them. If you are here for something else, you will be reported and banned, and bans hold by account, device and network.

The same rules apply everywhere on the site: 18+ only, an under-18 safety check on every message, reports read by a person, bans by account, device and network. Across borders add one habit: be slower to share details, because you cannot verify anything the person says about where they are. Anyone who asks for money, however good the story, is a Report. Anyone who wants to move to another app in the first ten minutes is usually a Next.