Creative Writing In Japanese

Japanese Language
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Recently I’ve been wanting to get into creative writing in Japanese in order to give myself more practice with creating more complex sentences, and using more of my vocabulary. I looked, and there doesn’t seem to be any talk about this, so I’m curious if anyone has tried it before and what it was like. I’m not looking to write a novel or anything, just short writing practice or exercises.

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Dogen talks a little about creative writing in his article for Tofugu “What I Use To Study Japanese” - Dogen—scroll to third section. He mentions Lang-8, but I think that was shutdown in favour of HiNative, but I saw LangCorrect recommended recently—looks pretty much just like what Lang-8 was.

Also, I’ve heard the Tobira workbooks contain writing prompts with the grammar you learned, at the end of each chapter, if you’re looking for something like that.

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Thanks, that’s really helpful! I have the tobira textbook but I’ve been meaning to look into the workbooks for some time now so I may pick them up. It’s interesting to hear Dogen’s perspective on it!

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I am doing writing exercises once in a while. Stuff like essays and short stories.

How it was? Difficult it was :laughing:

I am usually writing something and then reviewing it with an iTalki tutor.

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I mean this is a pretty broad topic. In the ensuing years since I’ve learned Japanese I’ve done some writing and poetry classes. But a little more to your point, back when I was using textbooks, any time there was an open ended question, I’d use that as a writing prompt.

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You can check out this site that allows you to share your writing to create and create a collection of easy text that could make good reading practice for beginners. From what I read they even have teachers that correct you. I have never really used it but I think that is a genuinely good idea.

https://honbun.bg/en

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Although I’m not studying creative writing at the moment, I’ve been writing some basic essays to consolidate my knowledge. I’ve started off with Minna no nihongo’s やさしい作文 textbook (two volumes) where each unit will have a different topic, a sample essay, and how to structure it. It even has questions for you to complete and answer to start off with, and it really helped in terms of learning how to plan the essay first before writing it. The most creative one I wrote was もしわたしがふたりがいたら Probably worth checking out, as it might be a good place to start :smiley:

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