So you have been penpaling for sometime and want to have friends across the globe whose language you do not know. The chances still are they know a bit of your language, for instance English. A ray of hope here is that you and your penpal got a common ground, one language.
Penpaling has been accredited as an effective method of cross-cultural exchange especially for language learning. Your purpose of having a language penpal could be to learn a foreign language, improve your foreign language abilities, study foreign culture or simply have a penpal across the globe.
The essential ingredient to all the above motives is to have foreign language penpal and lots of patience. Whatever is your purpose, the crucial fact here is that you are not dealing with a friend who is well versed in your language and vice versa. So it has to be a mutual effort to understand and educate.
The manner in which you communicate with your penpal can be decided at the very outset, if the purpose is language exchange. Or the two of you may develop ways to write (e-mail) which results in workable communication.
Essentially these exchanges can be of the following forms. You could...