I need more speech output practice. I am taking weekly private lessons, juggling N2 prep for December with novel reading material and conversation, my teacher setup a daily voice memo challenge w students where we send a 30 sec-1 min voice diary entry, which is cool but still not enough, and I still feel like my conversation abilities are way, way behind any other aspect of language learning.
I’ve come to rely on Anthropic’s Claude for N2 grammar and reading comprehension practice, it does a decent job in correcting my mistakes when I produce sentences, and I started a writing diary which I also feed to Claude and it gives me suggestions on grammar and style - all good!
So - my social media feeds have somehow picked up on this and I’m being peppered by ads from tools like Nora, Langua, etc. that promise to be great AI conversation partners, but some come at a relatively steep price. I’ve been wondering about people’s experiences with AI conversation partners and if any one of them is any good? I tried using LangoTalk about a year or two ago and found it unimpressive (conversation seemed bland and it couldn’t understand a lot of what I said), but tech must have improved since then!
I don’t have an answer to your question, but…
I’m wondering how you prompt Claude to get that kind of feedback - do you simply say something on the order of “I’m learning to write in Japanese, here is an example of my writing, please check my grammar and readability and give suggestions for improvement”, or something else?
Pretty much so. Ok full disclosure - I am also exploring writing and diarying as a relaxation and self reflection practice, and I am additionally curious about stoicism as a philosophy, so I decided to combine all three.
I input something in initially like this as a prompt:
I am an intermediate Japanese language learner working towards the JLPT N2. I am also interested in starting to practice daily stoic journaling in Japanese, both for language practice and for mental health. Please suggest ways to get started
It gave me quite a bit of good pointers and suggestions. Then, every day I enter
This is my diary entry for today. Please correct grammar, check for naturalness and suggest language improvements.
Ideally I’d have a native Japanese speaker double check that it’s doing a good job but it’s suggestions and corrections seem reasonable