Some time ago I had a website to help learning German. Especially done for Americans. I had many young friends in the U.S. and many of those, who chose German at school, had even German names, like Speer, Wollenberg, and Mueller. By these personal contacts I came to know many of the views of life of American youths and of their fears and burdens. One I lost because she died at the incident in Littleton, that bad shooting. So I came to know American real life very close.
Funny was when a girl sent me here long text which she needed for the next morning at school. She was sleeping while I checked it (daytime is different here than there) and so she had it in the morning. I told her that it may be too perfect for a student. She wrote that she altered something to have it not to appear to perfect. ;) She got a good mark.
She stopped wrting due to disappointment as we were not able to meet when her class came to German. They went to the south of Germany which was to difficult for me to follow. They actually stayed no longer than half a day in one location. So it was quite useless going down there. But she took it quite emotional. For her going to the south and seeing Neuschwanstein and stuff was best. I live more in the middle west.
I began creating websites due to the fact that a 13 year old (M'Lyn from Louisiana) created one in honor of me. Calling it: "To my German friend Hans". I thought: "If a 13 year old can create a website I can do so as well." I did, with Geocities, which was quite fine in those days with good online software. Today Geocities belongs to Yahoo and the restrictions make it no more appealing to me. I use real software and own domains and about 300 MB webspace.
International contacts are very interesting, educationing, amusing, and teach one the real life of others. There efforts to learn our language are thrilling.