Weekly small-group language exchanges, in person, with native speakers at every table.
Furamori came out of a problem I ran into myself.
After a trip to Japan, I thought that once I was there, practising Japanese with native speakers would be easy. It really wasn't. There were obviously plenty of Japanese people around me, but finding people to practise with regularly, in a setting where everyone genuinely wanted to talk, turned out to be surprisingly complicated.
And when I got back to France, I ran into exactly the same problem.
There are apps like HelloTalk or Tandem for finding language partners. But you can spend a huge amount of time looking for the right person, starting a conversation, waiting for a reply, and then finally realising that the other person isn't really there to learn a language.
There are also meetups and international events. But there too, something is often missing: structure. You arrive, you don't know anyone, you try to join a conversation that has already started… and that isn't always easy.
That's when I found the situation quite strange.
In almost every city there are exchange students, expats, travellers and people learning a language. There are French people who want to practise Japanese, Japanese people who want to practise French, Spanish speakers who want to learn English…
They all have a reason to meet.
But they often stay on their own side.
And sometimes the problem is even clearer.
At many international meetups, the shared language naturally becomes English. That makes sense: it's the language a lot of participants have in common.
But it also means that if you want to practise a more specific language, finding the right people becomes much harder.
In Japan, for example, there are people learning French, who love French culture, and who simply dream of getting the chance to speak with a French person. For them, meeting a French person isn't just “meeting a foreigner”.
You are exactly the person they wanted to meet.
And it works both ways.
Even for less widely spoken languages, there are people somewhere who want to learn them, discover their culture, or simply talk with someone who speaks them.
That's what Furamori is trying to create: gatherings where the language you speak isn't an obstacle, but precisely the reason someone wants to meet you.
And I think the problem goes beyond language learning.
We spend an enormous amount of time behind screens to meet people, while the people we could genuinely connect with sometimes live a few kilometres away.
The hardest part is usually crossing the first barrier: going to an event, arriving alone somewhere you know no one, and starting to talk.
Once that barrier is crossed, things get much simpler.
We asked our participants what had almost stopped them from coming. The answers were clear:
Both fears come up again and again, and they are almost always unfounded. The large majority of participants come alone, just like you. And your level matters far less than your curiosity.
Furamori runs weekly small-group gatherings, in person, in cafés, with native speakers at every table. Some sessions bring two languages together, others are multicultural and gather people from several countries around the same table. The common thread: you meet through the languages you speak.
That's exactly what Furamori is trying to do.
Not replacing real meetings with an app, but using an app to make the meeting itself easier.
You don't need to spend weeks looking for a partner, or turn up alone at a meetup with no idea who to talk to.
Furamori simply puts you around a table with a few people who want the same thing you do: practise a language, meet people and have a good time.
Launched in 2026, Furamori has already brought together more than 200 participants.
Today, Furamori is starting in Paris with French and Japanese.
But the idea goes well beyond those two languages or that single city.
In time, I'd like Furamori to work in many cities and for a great many different languages.
Because everywhere in the world there are exchange students, expats, travellers and locals who want to learn a language or discover another culture.
Furamori exists to bring them together.
