There are better resources for practicing writing, especially HelloTalk, because then you are conversing with a native speaker, who can easily make corrections for you.
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One can probably also add #5: people that are interested can already join JP discord servers which will fix the issue if “what do I talk about?”
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Personally I have the skill (I got a degree in Japanese), but I just don’t have much interest in writing in Japanese. I mostly just want to read books. If I ever move to Japan, or a predominantly Japanese area where it may actually be of some use, I will reconsider
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I feel called out (；・∀・). But that’s okay because this is an important conversation to have. Anyway, my post in the Japanese Only (Advanced) thread wasn’t really a call to action to revive the thread, it was more of a lament about how quiet the Japanese production side of the website has become. I’ve been here a lot longer than my level suggests and I remember when those threads were a lot more active.
Currently I have a very small Japanese chat group with couple of acquaintances where we just talk about whatever comes to mind. Though I am no better than a beginner, I had a lot of fun typing out random thoughts/puns/memes/facts I found and I was surprised how much I could say with just my Wanikani knowledge and most of Genki I. That’s why I was surprised why nobody was doing something similar here.
People here have made a lot of good points about the site not being focused on production, people preferring to interact with/be corrected by natives, people whose goal is to consume content, and people having other servers/communities to engage with. There are also people who (understandably) find production daunting or taxing. As for me though, I have a lot of fun just writing anything in Japanese. It’s nice to test how creative I can be with using only grammar and vocab I know. I also find myself being able to throw in recently learned WK items into sentences which feels really good. Most of all though, I just like writing my thoughts in Japanese. Even though I know my grammar is all wrong and its not really active study because there’s nobody knowledgeable correcting me, it’s still really fun.
If anyone is hesistant to write because they feel they aren’t at the point where they can write without making a bunch of mistakes, I recommend doing it anyway. Even a string of nouns and adjectives is often enough to convey a lot of ideas. It’s also fun to see the limits of what you can express–sometimes I’ll write a sentence I think is clear and people misinterpret it (because of my bad grammar), which tells me what I can and can’t say yet.
Anyways, on Wanikani, @WeebPotato made a good point about the Japanese Sentence a Day thread being a lot more active, which I quite frankly had forgotten about. I’ll post there soon (my mind won’t let me till I at least skim the 4800 earlier posts). Reading this thread, I’m glad my fellow WK’ers have found their own communities for whatever their language goals are too. I’ll definitely revisit HelloTalk, LangCorrect, etc. I abandoned them before because the last time I looked through one it was kind of dead (Looking at you Lang-8), but it looks like people are finding good things there now.
Whatever your goals are for Japanese, I wish you the best. As for me, you’ll probably find me babbling away incoherently in the forums from time to time.
This got too long sorry everyone. Looks like the babbling has begun already.
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There are more posts in Japanese than just the one in that particular category.
I do agree though with the sentiment that beginners talking to beginners is usually not the most productive way to learn, unless a teacher is there to guide them.
I spend hours of any given day communicating in Japanese, and I’m not particularly seeking more when I go to study or hang out online.
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Just no! That doesn’t make any sense. Why insist on reading really old posts of random statements? ^^; I wouldn’t even skim over my old posts in the thread before making another attempt, because it makes no sense to do so. Just post away in that thread, talking about just whatever, is fine.
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I will of course join Discord if I know of one. The more active, the better. Need for some kind of listing or referral, perhaps.
However, I actually stopped using Discord for a while. Not really in my native language, but just in English.
Any source of interesting social isn’t easy to find. Not even Facebook.
Though, if it is too hard for my level, it can be done, I will 興ざめ at some point.
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I can share the Eng-Jpn exchange after work! You have the choice to message only in Japanese if you want. I haven’t participated much but it seems fine to me.
I just spend more time on Japanese JoJo Twitter and HelloTalk
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Eng-jpn discord server. Given how nice the link is, I’m going to guess it’s a public community 
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I don’t think the audio channels are active, but I am in a JP TNO server and Mahjang Soul has JP channels on their server.
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I never really joined audio channels anyway. Also, I am not really a gamer. If anything, I might be interested in Soulworker, but I am not really actively playing it.
Oooh, interesting. I might join it myself. Thanks for the link!
I’d say it’s essentially this. I’d go even further: it’s like being in an echo chamber. Even for those of us who are very advanced, there’s only so much we know. There may be moments when it’s not clear how best to say something, and even if that weren’t true, and all the mistakes/strange expressions people produce on the forums were corrected, there would be common usage or ideas that a native speaker would bring into the conversation that we might not think of. This doesn’t mean that practising with a non-native speaker can’t be beneficial, but it probably won’t lead to as many discoveries and learning opportunities as speaking to a native speaker, unless that non-native speaker is at the native level.
I think another problem is that, because there’s such a huge diversity of levels here, it’s hard to know what level to pitch conversations at? More advanced people might say something and perhaps have it misunderstood, or perhaps someone – advanced or not – will make a mistake and confuse everyone without meaning to, and conversations might go all over the place until someone realises that there was a miscommunication. I think that in moments like that, being willing to ask each other questions in English (or another common language) is important, but even then things may be unclear, or mistakes may persist. Also, the need to pitch conversations at a certain level may feel quite frustrating: a given level might be limiting for more advanced learners, and hard to understand for less advanced learners. That aside, since I’ve offered corrections and advice before, let me just say that sometimes, I wonder how far I should go, because I don’t want to be discouraging, but I also know that if I don’t say anything, even if I’ve understood what was intended, mistakes will persist in another person’s usage, and in some sense, it’s my fault because I didn’t point them out. That’s not a great feeling to deal with, especially when lots of mistakes come up and you don’t want to keep breaking the flow of conversation.
To sum it up, I guess it’s just… rare (?) for conversations entirely in Japanese to flow on the forums, and if we add in corrections and explanations, it can get kinda tiring. Since so much of language is about imitating patterns we’ve seen before, knowing that they’re natural – even if there’s still a creative process, of course! – I think it’s probably easier/better to be in an environment that allows us to absorb such patterns through observation. There’s nothing wrong with early output, but when I see the mistakes that some of us make (myself included), possibly due to bad/incomplete translations of grammar unaccompanied by explanations… I feel like we might want to spend a little more time on observation and study. That or many corrections will be needed, some of which will not be fully assimilated before more correct usage is observed (I don’t subscribe to the input hypothesis, but I do feel that sometimes, you have to have seen enough correct examples in order to know that something feel viscerally wrong with an incorrect one), once again leading to a disruption in the flow of conversation. That, to me, is the biggest issue: if conversations don’t flow naturally, people aren’t going to enjoy having them, and that’s the point where such threads go quiet.
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The thing is, even when you want to sign up for a language course and get access to Japanese teachers, at least in the language school nearby I checked (and it’s not small actually), a lot of them were non-native speakers, even at N3 level. So one would have to aim for a class or interactions with a native specifically, probably online. If there were native speakers here on WaniKani, that would’ve been absolutely amazing.
Regarding speaking to non-natives, I think I’ve seen around 4-5 people on WaniKani whose contributions are definitely appreciated 
.
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It might better to join an already started conversation, perhaps. And reading the atmosphere is important too. (And I might not be too good at this sometimes.) This is different from two-people’s forced chatting as language learner partners.
Also, correction or propriety might not be explained and some people might not even notice it. Asking may help sometimes, but not always. It’s not easy to ask, nor easy to tell all you have noticed.
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I mean it depends on your scale and I know I’m a bit harsher than most, but I don’t even know if there’s more than a couple people on here who are very advanced at producing japanese. I think if there were, we would probably see more japanese on the forums.
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Well, I mean, you won’t necessarily learn very little from a non-native speaker. A teacher has to be qualified, after all. However, I’m just saying that I think most of the time, native speakers’ experiences will allow them to bring something else to the discussion. It’s possible to reach a point where one wouldn’t learn much even from talking to native speakers, but I don’t think many of us here are at that point yet.
That too, and I think that even for those of us with the latent ability to produce a lot of coherent, natural Japanese, doing so might not be something we’re comfortable with yet. Understanding a lot is one thing. Producing Japanese comfortably for everything one would typically like to express is another. I’ve been having some very long exchanges with Japanese people via text messages lately, and even though I was told (when asking for corrections and comments after quite a few messages) that nothing needed to be changed (I did use a weird expression a few days after that message that did need to be swapped out though), I know there are things I really need to think about before I can say them in Japanese, and I spend a lot of time looking up words even while sending messages in order to learn the right patterns to use when I’m not sure. I really don’t have a habit of producing Japanese.
(Another thing to think about is that a lot of my Japanese conversations lately have involved fairly technical subjects like explaining English grammar in Japanese or World War II, so they’re probably not run-of-the-mill situations either. I’ll probably have more trouble dealing with a domain I’m not familiar with.)
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Since you’re going to find out eventually, “there’s nothing you need to change” usually mean’s something more along there’s no glaring grammar issues at best or just that they don’t want to correct you. I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but having natural japanese beyond single sentences is a pretty tall order. One of the hardest parts of getting natural japanese is finding people who are willing to set the bar high enough for you. Trust me, I’ve been there already and complain about it to leebo all the time while we play rocket league. I’ll show the same 20+ sentence paragraph to two natives and one’s correction will be saying I can optionally omit a particle in one spot if I want and the other persons will be rewording parts of 10 different sentences. It’s just the way it goes. And I know they’re not being too strict because its always apparent the changed version sounds better. With texting its even worse because people don’t wanna interrupt the flow of the conversation. In my whole life I’ve managed to get like 5 corrections over text despite asking for it. Its just shouganai.
I’ve gotten the most success out of just rereading my own messages and when I notice the slightest bit of 違和感, I just ask them how they personally would have expressed that exact idea in their own words. And, if you wanna check how natural your japanese really is but don’t have anyone else to check it but the people who will hit you with the “oh yeah its all good nihongo jozu”, write a long paragraph about something and send it to them. Say you found it online and say you want their opinion on if the author is a native or not.
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In previous years, there was a trend of someone from the Tofugu staff (either Mami or Kanae) regularly starting discussions in the Japanese Only category, then correcting and replying back to the people who participatte. Those threads were pretty popular from what I remember, and I posted a lot in them. It hasn’t happened recently though, which is a shame.
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I have been know to post in those types of threads before as well, when I’ve had energy to spare. it never really felt like a full on conversation, but having someone give you corrections really was helpful. 
Maybe we could lobby for the Tofugu team to put more energy into those types of threads?
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That would be nice. I figured they’re all busy working on new stuff (sttill praying for EtoEto during my lifetime). The Japanese Only posts and WaniKani Wednesdays were one of the best parts of the forum.
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