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Do you use Lang-8 regularly? | ||
Tags: Corrections | Writing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4883 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 1 of 30 07 December 2012 at 7:26am | IP Logged |
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I would like to know if anyone is currently using Lang-8 regularly, or on occasion, or has quit using it. Any experiences with Lang-8 that you would like to share?
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| Travis.H Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4492 days ago 59 posts - 91 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, Sign Language Studies: French | Message 2 of 30 07 December 2012 at 8:25am | IP Logged |
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I typically go in spurts where I use Lang-8 frequently, or don't use it at all for a
month or two. From personal experience I've found Lang-8 to be a fantastic resource for improving output. If you take the time to really go over the corrections that people write for you and then rewrite the entire piece, or at least the parts with mistakes, you'll notice much more improvement than if you just sort of glance over it. With Japanese I found the comments I got helpful in making me sound more natural. Since most of the people on there aren't Japanese teachers and won't give you specific grammatical rules, they'll just tell you it sounds off or feels weird. This helps you learn which of the three words you learned for "situation" sounds best, or what's the best way to order this sentence to connect ideas. One piece of advice I got for my writing in Japanese was to put anything time related near the beginning of the sentence. As I'm sure you know from studying Japanese, as long as you have the correct particle, you can generally move things around in the sentence and still be grammatically correct. Being grammatically correct and being natural aren't always the same thing. I've also used Lang-8 to have my speaking corrected. I recorded a video, put it on youtube then linked it in my post and asked if anyone would give me feedback on anything strange they noticed. I got one or two really good comments that helped my intonation / pronunciation. If you get creative, there are tones of uses for Lang-8. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4909 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 3 of 30 07 December 2012 at 10:05am | IP Logged |
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Have been posting there every day in December so far. 1,3,5th etc. in Japanese and the
rest in German. Only one of my German entries received any correction at all, but the Japanese are more active on Lang-8, thus I kind of like that site, thus my Japanese entries has always been corrected. I think I will continue using it during TAC 2013, but I'll only post once a week in each language. (1 German + 1 Japanese entry per week) Edited by stifa on 07 December 2012 at 10:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4883 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 4 of 30 07 December 2012 at 2:07pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the input. Yes, I try to post there when I have time. It can be very helpful, but sometimes I get many corrections on the same sentence, and it is hard to decide which correction to use.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5568 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 30 07 December 2012 at 3:33pm | IP Logged |
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I found lang-8 to be enormously useful when I was a bit above B1, because my French was full of errors: Missing adjective agreements, confusing over when to use ce sont, and stuff like that. These mistakes are easy for a native speaker to correct, especially when I rarely wrote more than 100 words.
By the end of my 30 days of intensive lang-8, though, I made far fewer grammatical errors, and I was writing longer essays. My corrections said things like, "Huh, I wouldn't say it that way," and "That sounds really weird," and "There's a much more natural way to say that." These sorts of corrections demand far more of the reader, and I generally only receive them from specific friends that I met on lang-8. So I think that lang-8 is terrific when you're working on B1 or B2, but it becomes more difficult to use effectively as your writing improves, because it's much easier to correct a 100-word essay full of blatant errors than a 400-word essay that sounds clunky and unnatural. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5417 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 30 08 December 2012 at 2:27am | IP Logged |
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I've used it on and off for a few years. I'll write nothing for a while, then a lot in a short while. I believe I used it
for Japanese, German, Esperanto, Finnish (and maybe Spanish). I think it's particularly popular in Japan so it works well in that language because there are lots of users, but that's not the case in all languages unfortunately. I've had texts be read by 100 people in 2 hours, then another will be read by 5 people over 2 days. Always a bit of a gamble. But it gets easier if you help people and establish relationships. With Japanese people, always go back to comment or write a thank-you note, at least. That's just how it's done. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4737 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 7 of 30 08 December 2012 at 3:48pm | IP Logged |
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I used lang-8 for 2 years and have quit it when my posts received no longer any corrections other than for the style.
IMHO, emk is right in that it becomes kind of obsolete once you hover around B2, because there won't be many errors left, just strange formulations - and those are fixed best by a lot of immersion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6506 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 8 of 30 08 December 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
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I have used lang-8 beyond B2 for French, writing essays on social issues. I agree that
there are fewer native speakers who correct these, because correcting isn't as straight- forward, but in my experience there are still enough native speakers who will correct you, for French at least. I do think it's important to write and to receive corrections, especially at C1/C2 level, because I have not seen natural correction happen there as much (it's easier at the lower levels because you encounter issues more often). Having majored in French Studies at university, I have probably read more classics of French literature than the average French person, and a fair amount of academic writing, but my writing was still full of mistakes and unnatural phrasings. Lang-8 has been a help there. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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