Free online sex chat at five in the morning: a report from the wrong hours

The argument, stated plainly

Free online sex chat is a room whose contents change completely with the clock. Between about nine at night and three in the morning in whatever country supplies most of its traffic, the label on the front page is roughly accurate. Outside that window it is not, and nobody updates the label.

That leaves a large stretch of hours in which the thing is a different service with the same address. Quieter, older, overwhelmingly people who are awake for a reason. And nothing about the site tells you this, because a site cannot advertise what it becomes when its own marketing stops being true.

Which matters mainly to one group of people, and that is the argument. If you are learning a language, those are the best hours available anywhere, for reasons that have nothing to do with language and everything to do with what people are doing with their hands.

Why I was up at that hour at all

Not virtue. My Spanish had gone from decent to embarrassing over about a decade, classes were expensive and slow, and I had an infant who had decided that four in the morning was the beginning of the day. So I had an hour, every day, that was no use for anything else.

Lima, a greenhouse, before dawn

A man in a greenhouse on the edge of Lima, working a shift that started before light. He propped the phone against something, and for most of forty minutes he was drawing — I never saw what, the pad was below the frame — while we talked about his tomatoes and my terrible verb tenses.

Talk while I finish this. I'm not in a hurry and neither is the plant.

the third thing he said, roughly, and the best language lesson I got that year

That sentence is the whole thing. Somebody whose hands are busy is not waiting for your sentence. The silence while you assemble a clause costs them nothing, so it costs you nothing, and the single hardest part of speaking a language badly — the pressure of the pause — simply isn't there.

You cannot buy that. A teacher waits for you attentively, which is worse. A conversation partner has scheduled the hour, which is worse again. A man potting seedlings at five in the morning is the only person on earth for whom your slowness is genuinely convenient.

What the hours actually contain

Here's the shape of a day as best I could make it out. I'd rather describe it than invent a count I never kept. The hours are given in the local time of whoever you're meeting, not yours, which is the part everybody gets backwards.

The pre-dawn block is the one worth knowing about, and it's consistently the smallest. Fewer people, far longer calls. On any service advertising video chat without registration — which is to say every no signup video chat there is — that window is where the missing sign-up pays off: nobody's performing for an audience that isn't awake.

• Say in the first ten seconds that you're practising. It changes everything and costs nothing.
• Ask what they're doing, not where they are — at that hour they're always doing something.
• Let the pause sit. Filling it with English is the one mistake that ends the call.

What those hours taught that a class didn't

One thing, and it took months to notice. A stranger will not correct your grammar. They will correct you only when a mistake changes what you meant — when the wrong verb makes you rude, or the wrong word makes you say something absurd about a tomato.

That is a different set of corrections from the ones a class gives you, and it is precisely the set a class cannot reach, because a class has no stakes in what you meant. I remember maybe six of those corrections. I don't remember a single one of the hundreds I got on paper, and that's really the whole argument I opened with.

Try it at an hour nobody recommends