Lang-8

Difficulty:  ☠ ☠

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

This is another one of those simple concepts that are well executed! The basic concept is that you sign up choosing the language you speak, and the language you want to learn. You then write out essays anywhere from a sentence to a couple of pages in the language you want to learn and native speakers will edit and comment on it. The more essays you edit, the higher your rank, the more likely your essay is to show on other peoples’ home pages.

This concept of give and take keeps the community pretty active, and it’s also very easy to end up editing for people from countries aside from Japan. I’ve gotten to talk with Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Mexican, Brazillian, and more and I have to admit I found it quite addicting for a while.

The two qualms that eventually turned me away from the site were a) it was a little too slow for my liking as you write a long text, and someone edits it, and b) the site DOES crash from time to time. Thankfully one of my friends on the site eventually led me to a new app that I still use to this day which will be reviewed next!

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