nope, i have no interest in helping anybody that hasn’t helped me on lang-8

^ Pretty much what I was thinking.

Who’s talking here about only correcting others and not posting anything on their own? o_O

@Kaona: missing is right, you’re wasting your time correcting posts and not having others correct your own posts. My first lang-8 post sucked balls, but I still wrote it, I still learned from it. The mistakes I made in my last one are cringe-worthy now, but I learned from them, and you should do the same. JFDI, as is Koichi’s slogan. I mean yeah, it takes time and motivation to write, but you can just use the time you *would* have spent correcting English to work on your Japanese.

I have found it to be fun and rewarding to correct posts on lang-8. I also talk to a number of people on there and have made a few friends. I not only correct blog posts but I also talk to directly to the writers themselves. :-)

Latetly, I’ve decided only to correct postings from people who also write corrections. Preferably, the correction/wrting ratio is kind of matching. There are quite some people around having many written entries but never or hardly ever corrected anything.

@Gigatron
I once had a similar concern to the one you’re describing. I decided to make the best out of the words people choose themselves. They probably learnt something they try to phrase now. I usually use blue to correct, I don’t like red that much ;-) Depending on the level people are writing, I also write the sentence down, as I would write it, and why I would write it this way. Thus, they have a choice and might learn something. Lerners writing in my native language, for them it wouldn’t be normal not to make mistakes ;-)
Learning foreing languages or correcting other peoples sentences makes me understand my language better, I found out!

@Kaona
Write one or two sentences at the time, maybe once every two weeks. The first sentences, I wrote were just a complete mess. Actually, my English translation was the problem not the Japanese, I’m not proud of it at all. I won’t make the same stupid mistake again. But I’m sure, I make others. I think, that’s the important thing about learning.
You didn’t get any weird (unwanted) mails at lang-8 so far? I’m just asking, because you publish your age in numbers rather than kind of disguising it in words.

I enjoy editing other people’s posts, but what I enjoy more is when the errors/questions have something to do with a semi-advanced concept, something I have to take time for, in order to come up with a good explanation. I will admit that there’s a tendency for me to correct other people’s posts as a way of procrastinating, though.