I think it’s a good idea. There are enough high(ish) level learners that can correct the majority of small mistakes. And it might be an easy way to fix some bad habits before they become too engrained. If no one knows the correct answer, one of us can ask a native.
People should treat it as a forum though, and not a service. (I.e not spam Japanese all day long and expect correction after correction)
I only gave this a 2 because I don’t see the point of banning English from a thread, especially when an English explanation could further the understanding of a point where a contributor has made a mistake.
Furthermore, if you want corrections from an immersive perspective, it is much better to ask a native speaker. HelloTalk is my favourite app, but there are many more out there where you can get a correction almost instantly from native speakers. However fluent we get, we will never understand the language from a native perspective, not even if we get to super linguist level (whatever that is haha).
Of course, you’ll see me regularly helping people on here by correcting their sentences (usually accompanied by an explanation in English) but I never pretend to know it all (I’m not saying anyone on here would!) and before I post, I usually check with someone sat next to me to make sure it’s accurate.
As a final little point, when I was at university, I tried talking to my British friend in Japanese (we were both pretty fluent by this point) for a couple of months… but during that time, honestly it felt really weird. It just felt so unnatural and we spent most of our time cringing haha.
That said, I’m not really sure why this thread was created. It’s a free forum, so if you think it’ll be useful for you, just create one and see if it takes off. You don’t need to conduct market research beforehand… if it works, great. If it doesn’t, well at least you tried.
I got very similar experience with my wife (she is native both in polish and english). We can speak with somebody in English no problem, but speaking to each other is ultra weird. Even if I have to explain to her what I just read in English I would much rather put effort into making awkward translation that speak to her in English… She is native but reacts exactly the same for some reason
I wonder why ours brains works this way. It is ultra strange if you think about it
If you want to test the waters, just test them. The people who can respond in Japanese and want to will do so.See how it works out. It might get interesting or it might be quiet. If it’s popular, a new forum would be a natural extension.
I thought it was hilarious (though that had to do with the fact I wasn’t 100% sure whether you were serious or not lol)
My first impression is that some people would be very interested in doing this. However, I can imagine there would be different types of users that have different goals:
- Someone who wants lots of practice and wants lots of corrections.
- Someone who wants lots of practice but only wants general corrections – ie. just wants to practice communicating back and forth and is less interested in correcting each sentence.
Probably some kind of marker (“need help – please correct everything” or “just practicing – only major corrections please”) would take care of some of those differences.
Of course, users getting corrections relies on enough knowledgeable users to spend time to correct others. And without native Japanese, it will be difficult to get help with more nuanced grammar/meaning.
And, as some of us have seen on sites like HiNative, sometimes different people have different viewpoints on the “correct” sentence.
Also, there would need to be a way to separate different topics, so that the ワンピース crowd is not competing with the 日本経済 crowd.
As mentioned above, just try and see.