Slowly but surely I’m clawing my way further through Season 4. I also signed up on Lang-8 and started typing the most basic entries applying much of what I learned from TextFugu in the wild. I even managed to make some friends who are learning the English language so we help correct each others mistakes.

It is a little depressing given to the sheer extent some of my entries get corrected (Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that my mistakes get pointed out!) It’s nice that so many people chip in to help but what tends to cause confusion is that every person making a correction has a slightly different take on how my entry should be written. It makes it a tad difficult to choose which one to focus on. Everyone is also kind enough to leave a comment but since my Japanese is still very basic I can’t understand their advice and reasons for making a correction.

*Sigh*, nice to get that off my chest. Right, I have a new set of Kanji to learn :)

The thing about lang-8, whether you’re a native English speaker, or a native Japanese speaker is people tend to make unneeded corrections. For example I’ve seen Japanese people say something like:

“Because I was hungry I made dinner.” and then someone will correct it to be “I made dinner because I was hungry.” because that’s how the English speaker would have phrased the sentence. They don’t bother to explain this either. So some poor Japanese guy goes around thinking he can’t start a sentence with because. That one is pretty obviously silly, but I’ve seen it. Usually it’s a bit more subtle, which makes for an even worse problem.

I always make a point to justify my corrections, so the Japanese person understands what is a suggestion, and what is a true correction. I’ve found by doing this that the Japanese people who tend to correct my work will return the favor in kind. This dramatically increases the value of the corrections I get.

Another thing I do is if someone makes a bone headed correction, I’ll let the Japanese person know that their suggestion is valid, but the original sentence was also fine. This also increases the chance of a Japanese person letting me know the same kind of thing in future.

My final tip is to not get fancy. Early on I would try sentences that I felt weren’t fancy, but I’d still get serious corrections on them. When I looked back at them I realized that even a small change outside of what I was explicitly taught dramatically increased the chances of getting a correction. Sometimes it’s good to push the boundaries of your understanding, but doing it too much will turn all of the corrections into noise. You’ll get more out of it if you can have a post that only has one or two corrections, compared to a post with ten.

I find it’s best to focus on practicing the grammar you know, and less important to try and tell a story about yourself. If I do write about myself, or something I am doing, then I don’t worry if I say something that isn’t true.

I also find it’s better to keep your posts about 5 sentences long. The reason why is more people will want to correct your post, especially if it’s 5 sentences full of mistakes instead of 25 sentences full of mistakes. That’s a turn off for them. Also, if you make a few mistakes in 5 sentences you can spend more time focusing on those couple of mistakes. If you make 15 mistakes in 25 sentences you’ll have less time to focus on each mistake. Shorter posts increases learning. Just make sure you dedicate time to thinking about the mistakes, if it’s a real mistake instead of a suggestion, and how you can avoid it in the future.

You’d taken 6 college courses of Japanese and only knew a handful of kanji? Is that just because you’d forgotten a lot of them or was it because your teachers were all terrible and thought learning kanji wasn’t important? :P

Yeah Kanji is totally important. The more I learn the more I think they should teach it sooner, and sooner.

Hey hey! Don’t think I’ve seen you here in a while :D

Kinda assumed they were about the same level seeing as you took them almost a decade apart :P If it was just “conversational Japanese”, did you even learn the kana? What sort of stuff did you learn? Just curious to see how that kind of course would differ to a regular one. Most people could do with learning kanji but I guess if you just want to be conversational, it’s not so important (though if you want to be read things *too*, you’ll have to learn them at some point).

There’s a YouTuber known as “Benny the Irish Polyglot” who’s recently started learning Japanese from scratch and his only goal is to be able to be conversational – he says he doesn’t care about reading books or newspapers or what-have-you, he just wants to be able to speak to people, so he’s not bothering with kanji at all (he did the same with Mandarin). I can’t say I share his goal but it’s interesting to watch his journey anyway.