I’ve been studying Japanese for a while now and the aspect that I find I need to strengthen the most would have to be writing (well perhaps just writing with the opportunity to practice new and more complex grammar, as I write all the time otherwise). Quite luckily for me I work in a Japanese company in London, so it’s rather easy to practice speaking on a daily basis. However much like when foreigners speak English, it’s not commonplace for you to correct their grammar mistakes if you can understand what they’re attempting to say. So while my colleagues do correct me every now and then it’s not that often. This is the Japanese plateau I’ve been stuck on for rather a while. While I can make myself understood, it’s pretty hard to advance past that as I don’t have a frame of reference of when I’m using a grammar point correctly (when I’m speaking or writing off of the top of my head, so to speak).
I heard about lang-8 a while ago and thought it sounded absolutely perfect, however they currently aren’t accepting new users unfortunately, and are only promoting their app HiNative (which while good, is far from being the same sort of resource). Does anyone know of any useful software, online programs or such that are similar? Or perhaps a way around lang-8’s new user block?
I’d be very much obliged to any insight anyone may have. I would point out though I’ve used apps like HelloTalk and Tandem etc and I really can’t stand them. With huge time differences and busy lives conversations on their are repetitive and slow and tend to wither easily (however that’s just my experience). I have plenty of Japanese friends around the UK and in Japan so I’m not really looking for anything to find language exchange friends. More something where I can practice writing and have it critiqued and corrected.
Italki can be good for receiving feedback on your writing. There are two main types of posts you can do there - questions, for if you want to ask something like “What is the difference between X and Y grammar points?”, and journal entries, where you write anything from a sentence to a few paragraphs and then post it to receive corrections from native speakers.
I’ve generally had good experiences there with people providing helpful insight on any corrections they made, and giving additional details when I ask for clarification regarding any grammar points.
Hinative is not bad. I got useful responses and suggestions when I tried to write sentences in Japanese. Sometimes it would take a while to get a response though so there is that to consider I guess.
My bad. I guess I did not read very carefully… I am interested to hear what people come up with, though. I am not nearly at the point in Japanese where I can really write longer things though so I will have to save any resources for the future.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, I meant for blog style posts. Posts which have a considerable amount of content. HiNative does indeed work very well for what it is, but what it is, is merely a reliable “quick fire” question and answer app for language learners. It’s really valuable if you just have a small question and no native friends to ask but aside from that the app is pretty useless, or perhaps limited is a better way of putting it. In any case, thank you all the same though!
You can post writings of a decent length on italki. I’ve found it to be quite useful, though I haven’t really gotten the kind of back and forth that SleepyOne mentions.