JapanNewbie

Exchange Journals with Native Speakers of your Target Language at lang-8

Posted on 17. Dec, 2008 @ 10:40 am by harvey in Language Views: 323

I just found out about this lang-8 website via Nihonhacks. It’s a service that hooks you up with native speakers of your target language so that you can exchange and correct each other’s journals.

One of the techniques I have used in the past with teachers is to write a journal, give it to the teacher, and the teacher hands it back with comments. This technique is great for language learning because you see what you have written twice, and the “exchange” aspect of it gives you motivation to never quit.

In fact, just the other day I was talking a Japanese friend at my school into trying this with me. She wanted to improve her English, and hey, why not improve my Japanese? We’ll see if we can actually get it going.

I just started trying this lang-8 web-based version, and so far I’m impressed. Whenever I publish a journal in Japanese I immediately get people offering corrections and comments. The system is also set up so it is easy to break up someones journal into sentences, and give color coded corrections as necessary.

One thing though, since all the correctors are just the native-speaker average joe (or should I say, average Taro?) sometimes I get conflicting correction suggestions from different people. It’s alright though, just shows that there is more than one way to say something that will sound correct to a native speaker.

I think I’m going to keep this up.

Someone on Nihonhacks also mentioned Livemocha, a similar site for language exchange. Anyone tried it?

- Harvey