I used to be a regular user of lang-8 but hadn’t been there in a while even though I’m still a subscriber. It seems their “temporary” shut down on new users has continued for months. I just went back, planning to restart posting and found this link from an upset user: http://polyjot.com/
Any insight into what is going on? I made some good friends there and will be sad if it withers away. Plus it is(was?) a great resource for writing and getting corrections from native speakers.
I can’t comment on why they aren’t taking new users other than I think they are promoting their new mobile app. But I’ve been hanging out there and posting a bit and it still seems very vibrant. I don’t think that is anything to worry about. They also said somewhere that lang8 isn’t going anywhere.
Never tried lang-8. Is there any benefit of using it compared to HelloTalk?
Didn’t know Lang-8 team was also the owner of HiNative.
I also read the article. HiNative won’t reach it’s full potential because there isn’t enough good reasons to subscribe to the premium version. No money, no cool things happening. I do love the free version though.
I don’t know, but I really wish they would start allowing new users again. I didn’t even know about it until after they shut down signups, but now I’m annoyed that I never got a chance to make an account because it sounds like something I’d be really interested in and I haven’t heard of any other resource designed for writing like that. There are plenty for speaking, but I’d honestly rather try writing as a stepping stone to speaking, if that makes sense. I very much prefer writing to speaking in my native English as well, and I think it would help me get more comfortable using the language before I try to jump into real-time chats with strangers (something I’m not super comfortable with in English, let alone Japanese). Very frustrating.
From what I can tell, HelloTalk is a mobile application as opposed to a website like lang-8. lang-8 lets you post any amount of text in any language, and anyone can go in and correct and critique it. HelloTalk says you can “Use Moments to share and ask questions about language, culture, or travel for all native speakers to see and comment on.”. That kind of sounds like HiNative’s thing, but I haven’t used it before.
Personally I dislike typing on my smartphone or tablet and would vastly prefer to use a real keyboard, especially for Japanese. Also I find that I am comfortable with the anonymity of lang-8. Anyway, yeah, it is really too bad they stopped allowing new users. That part definitely sucks.
It’s not similar to HiNative at all. It’s more like Facebook, where your news feed is full of posts from your target language’s natives (pictures, text). There’s a tool to translate the text and there’s another to correct the language they’re targetting. Check the picture below. Can you see people doing the corrections down below? ^^
I think there’s a limit on how much characters you can write, but it’s pretty big. Unless you’re writing a big article, you’ll be fine ^^
Then, you can also visit someone’s profile (like fb) and message them (like fb messenger). I use HiNative you get quick corrections about something, as doing a post about a sentence on HelloTalk would look a little spammy.
Luckily my account still exists, though I’ve not been active in ages. It’s a shame they have a moratorium on new users, but we’ll just have to see what happens.
