Sorry if this question belongs in an existing topic. So I’ve got a native speaker friend that I made on twitter; we talk every so often about netrunner (a nerdy cyberpunk card game). They’re not very confident in their english, but lately they started posting in english occasionally, presumably to practice. It’s perfectly understandable, but obviously unnatural in several places. Now they don’t really ever offer me any corrections on my japanese, but I would like to help them feel more confident & make progress with their english, presumably by offering corrections. Now I know my way around politeness to some extent, but I think I still mess up nuance every so often, and am kinda afraid that like even offering corrections at all might imply “yo your english totally sucks”. How does something like this sound?
Once in the past another native speaker offered me corrections with something like ちょっと指摘させていただきます but いただく feels like maybe “too much” for somebody I’ve already known for several months? idk.
I missed the boat on signing up for lang-8 and never used any similar service so have no experience navigating these kinds of conversations…!
Modelling may be better in this case than correction if you can manage it without stultifying the convo.
Modelling is where you would make note of your friend’s errors and use the grammatical points/vocab correctly in your replies - easily done with little kids by reflecting their statements in questions: “I goed to the shop with Mummy.” “You went to the shop? What did you buy?”
I love when people do this for me in Japanese (rather than trying to explain why/how I’m wrong), and I try and do it for non-native speakers (and kids) using English too.
I think it’s highly individual. Some people are more proactive in their language learning and they want to know when they’re making mistakes so they can work on them, while some people just want to get a bit more comfortable using the language and corrections interrupt the flow.
I know next to no Japanese, but if I were in your position I’d say something like “Hey, I noticed you started posting more in English! If you ever want any help with that, let me know!”
That way you open the door for him to say that he’d love to get corrections and ask questions, but at the same time it’s unobtrusive enough that if he doesn’t want anything he can just say thanks and ignore it
Yeah that’s a good idea; only problem though is that it’s twitter where most of the posts are not directed at me specifically, and I don’t often have anything to say in reply besides corrections. So it feels all the more unsolicited.
Yeah now that you mention it, my original phrasing kind of leaves no room for a “no thank you”, huh?