Literary Discussions

I made friends with a college age fellow in Germany who was in Paltalk religion chats trying to improve his English (which was pretty good actually). I gave him some lessons. I wanted to send him some mp3 files of what we were practicing. He had me join http://xfire.com which is a chat program for GAMERS but it allows someone to quickly transfer HUGE files.  He was the only person on my friend's list because I just can't find any pleasure in any games. But his profile showed the latest online games he had played and how many hours. Paltalk.com is free and has excellent quality voice chat rooms. I was SHOCKED to see that there are over 50 Kurdish speaking rooms.  I spent a year visiting Catholic Talk (that was the name of the room... you could name them whatever you like) ... the man who founded it was a college professor of religious history. He constantly smoked and drank. You could hear the lighter and hear him puff and hear the tinkle of ice in his glass. He described himself as a "maintenance drinker" just sipping enough to keep himself at a constant level of intoxication. He was a brilliant man. I learned a lot from him especially about Hans Kung. It was amusing that the young German atheist would hang around in religion chats to practice English. He was clever and knew that if he said the wrong thing he would get bounced and banned from a room.  There are about 5000 people on Paltalk at any given time, but VERY VERY few chat rooms are about intellectual or academic subjects. The ONLY room that was mind-boggling was the VIETNAMESE room where Vietnam speakers around the world were practicing their English. They ALWAYS had 30 to 50 people in the room, including trained moderators and they were always strictly business, about grammar, pronunciation, etc. Another room was entitled "Why I am Not a Muslim" and it was run by Arabic speaking Coptic Christians who knew Qur'an and Hadith INSIDE OUT IN ARABIC and they would debate with Muslims who knew far less about Islam than the Copts did.  That was an informative room to be in because one learns a lot about Qur'an and Hadith.