Alternatives to HiNative

Japanese
#1

Hey there, are there any alternatives to HiNative? I used to love the platform when I could ask questions in long form, but now there is not only a limit to the number of questions I can post (which I’m okay with since I don’t ask a lot), but also a new, onerous restriction to fit it into the size of a tweet…

I can’t even fit the content I want to get translated with that restriction!

For context, this is what I was going to ask (feel free to answer or ask others!), so please let me know if there are any platforms that would allow me to make such posts…

How would you convey this in Japanese?

I miss my work from home days. Lately, the more I have to work in person, the more I feel like my soul is being wrung out from me. I especially feel this when, despite not having anything better to do, I have to look like I’m working. In those moments, I can’t even use my time productively at the office for self development by doing things like reading a book or exercising, because as I soon as I do that, I’ll get a stare from my boss as if to say that actually using my time wisely is somehow prohibited. I’ve really been wrestling lately with the thought of whether this is all there is to life.

I actually wrote the English after I wrote the below Japanese sentences. I’d be grateful if you could correct my Japanese, but I’m more curious about how to convey these kinds of feelings than I am in accurately translating my English sentences. If you’ve ever felt similarly or have other ways of expressing these feelings, I’m curious about other ways you might word it in Japanese. My English version might have packed a bit more emotion into it, so any suggestions on how to enhance the emotional impact of my written Japanese is very welcome! (And of course, I do not assume my Japanese sentences are correct, either, so again, I welcome your corrections.)

テレワークをしていた頃が寂しい。今のところ、本人で会社で働けば働くほど、まじで魂が搾り出されるように感じるんだ。特にそう感じるのは、別に何もすることがないのに働くような姿を見せかけるしかない時だ。そんな時に本を読むとか、運動をするとか、自己成長をする行動も禁止されるような視線が上司から必ずきて困る。人生ってこんなものになるんだろうかと最近精神的に取り組んでいる。

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#2

The subreddit r/LearnJapanese has a daily random questions thread that is pinned to the top of the subreddit. The response rate is pretty good for smaller questions of usage.

However, for very nuanced questions that relate to prose style and paragraph-long narratives, I don’t think there’s a free option, and that includes HiNative, that can meet your goals satisfactorily. I took a look through your post history (sorry!) and saw that you’ve written about your difficulty using the platform before:

My problem is that when I write on HiNative, I ask to get corrected, and I am grateful to receive the corrections. Usually, I fully understand the corrected sentences and recognize that they sound natural. However, what’s been especially frustrating is that I almost never understand what causes certain aspects of my original sentences to come off as unnatural.

And just to be clear, this happens even when there is not a single piece of grammar that is out of place. It’s frankly demotivating to get corrected and not know what was the impetus for the change, nor even to know whether the original was at all acceptable. What adds fuel to the fire is that I am already taking an immersion-centric approach, so if that is going to be the solution, then I’m already doing it (and just happen to be stuck in the long web of intermediate trouble).

Getting a tutor for as low as $10 an hour off of iTalki or similar websites can solve this problem — you can go over your writing together and they can explain your errors in detail. I know you’re going for an immersion-first approach, but even the most hardcore immersion-first guides generally recommend using a tutor when it comes to working on your Japanese production (which is distinct from Japanese comprehension).

If there is a very strong reason why tutoring is off the table for you, then using self-study books like Japanese Writing for Higher Proficiency, Intermediate Japanese Composition Writing, or Logical Japanese Academic Writing can help you develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t work in natural Japanese prose. You can also read prose style books intended for native Japanese speakers, like 悪文伝わる文章の作法 or 文章力の基本. But getting feedback from random internet commentators on your prose seems like an excruciatingly roundabout way to tackle what is otherwise a pretty straightforward learning process.

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#3

Wow it’s crazy to look back at my mental state at that time. You can see this time I was actually interested in seeing other ways of expressing the idea, instead of being so attached to my way of expressing it. I’ve come to desire the variety so that I can draw from my subconscious repertoire when I write myself.

Turns out what I needed was the advice of, “immerse in material harder than you’re going to need.” To that end, I’ve been reading physical novels and finished my first one recently, and progress has felt great. I curated a set of 10 novels that escalate in difficulty (according to learnnatively rankings). I figured that if I haven’t even read 10 legit novels, I haven’t earned the right to be frustrated at my lack of verbal facility with Japanese. I don’t even read novels in English, but I’m actually enjoying doing it in Japanese, and reading fiction again has unleashed greater creativity in me that has even helped me in social situations.

I really appreciate that you didn’t just take my negative nelly mentality from back then and just assume that I was asking for alternatives to a resource I didn’t even believe in. And you even went above and beyond to provide other windows of opportunity to further enhance my journey with writing!

I will finish my reading goal first and then probably do journal + italki + look at some of those dedicated writing resources - great suggestion! I can’t imagine following this approach and not achieving significantly greater understanding and verbal facility in Japanese after having done it.

In general, my big mindset shift has been to create plans in chunks that are guaranteed to bring results, and only deviate from those plans after checkpoints. This provides a good balance of flexibility and adapting my approach without falling into the trap I found myself prone to, of changing paths so frequently that I never felt like I could convince myself I was accomplishing things.

Hence, physical novels. I can literally point to them when I’m done. And I’m using jpdb.io to pre-learn the words I don’t know so I can read uninterrupted.

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#4

I’m actually using same strategy that you’re taking, as I’m currently reading a series of Akutagawa Prize winning novels to structure my learning.

I would say there’s no need to wait for your 10 novel benchmark to get a language partner—the best time to start speaking with somebody in Japanese is actually right now, exactly where you’re at. For my part, I discuss what I’ve read so far in my novels with my tutor every week, which helps solidify and retain the vocabulary I’ve gleaned from the book through summarizing the plot. I also type up three to four page long reports with opinions/analysis on the book once I’ve finished, which my tutor corrects, red-pen style. In other words, getting a language partner can only help you achieve your reading goals, and make your learning journey more efficient.

I would also caution that for best results you should break up your novel reading with other books; some examples I’ve read recently include a book-length collection of columns from Asahi Shimbun, an issue of the Japanese magazine Sekai, an essay collection about being a mother, and a pop history of yakisoba. For complex historical reasons Japanese prose norms varies wildly between different written formats, from newspapers to blogposts to magazines to novels to academic writing, so in order to properly study Japanese style through input you need a very broad sample of contemporary Japanese writing.

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#5

My reading list gets longer by the day but this sounds quite fun. Are you just reading all the prize winners from roughly the most easy to the most difficult?

#6

Not all the prize winners, just the ones I’m most interested in!

Right now I’m reading 『破局』by Tono Haruka, and I hope to move on to Usami Rin’s『推し、燃ゆ』and Ichikawa Sao’s『ハンチバック』next. So far, I’ve only completed Murata Sakaya’s『コンビニ人間』. Before that, I was just reading random novels and non-fiction books, but I decided to concentrate only on Akutagawa Prize winners after coming across a blog where a guy tries to read and review them all in chronological order. His reviews are very useful to browse and select the ones that sound good to you!

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