Hello everyone!

This is the first post that I'm writing in English because I am using Journaly mainly to improve my German skills and of course to help others improve their Portuguese. I am writing now in English because I actually think it's important to practice all the languages we speak (even our own language), otherwise the quality of our texts can decrease. My main goal here, however, is not to get corrections, especially because this text is very long and I can totally understand that it would take a long time to correct a text like this, so if I don't get any corrections, it is ok. However, if you feel like giving me suggestions feel, free to do so, especially if I mix up the British and American English because my goal now is to focus on using only American English, which is actually the version that I want to speak. Another reason why I am writing in English is because I can express myself much better in this language than in German (If I were to write such a long text in German it would take ages, my level is simply not good enough). The other option would be to write in Portuguese (which is a language that I am actually planning on writing texts as well but I haven’t had the time to do so), but if I wrote this post in Portuguese not too many people would understand it.

But getting back to the topic of this post, I am writing to talk about how I correct other journalers' posts. Well, first of all I would like to say that there are very few users who correct European Portuguese, therefore I always try to make sure that I don't miss any grammar mistake, spelling mistake, etc. because, while for instance, on my own posts in German several users help me (and I would like to use this opportunity to thank each one of you, who have corrected my [very bad] German, I am really thankful for your help and you have helped me so much to improve my skills that I can't thank you enough!) but as I was saying, I really try to give my best to correct everything properly because, if I gave some wrong information, no Portuguese person would comment and add their opinion or correction), so I always try to research first if I am not really sure about something. So right now, when correcting a text, I apply the following steps:

1 -The first thing I do is read the entire post before correcting anything so that I can understand exactly what the user wanted to convey with their post, this helps me understand some sentences that could be a bit difficult to understand because of their construction and avoids that I have to edit correction comments when I actually realize that I got the idea of what the person wanted to say wrong. (Although when I am not sure what the person meant, I do ask what the person actually wanted to say, because I think it is better to have a proper correction than to change the person's sentence to what I think the person meant).

2- The next thing I do is start reading the text again slowly from the beginning and start correcting mistakes one by one, carefully researching everything that I'm not sure, I often try to give the person examples and links to sites that contain explanations on the topic that I'm correcting. Sometimes I also try to understand if the person is transposing some expression or structure from their native language (L1) to the language they're learning (L2) because that way I can explain the person that Portuguese is different on that aspect. This obviously only works if I speak or at least am learning the person's mother tongue. This is also important because sometimes when I translate the sentence that the user wrote in Portuguese literally to the person's mother tongue I can understand better what the user actually wanted to say.

I have actually accidentally found a very interesting dissertation on transposing, while searching the Portuguese university websites for dissertations that compared the Portuguese grammar, syntax, phonetic, etc with the German one, in order to better understand the differences. This dissertation talks about how sometimes native German speakers transpose German into Portuguese when learning Portuguese. I found this dissertation very useful for me because it actually compared things like grammar and phonetics of both languages, which was what I wanted to do in the first place, and it also explained what in Portuguese could be a challenge for German speakers, which is also helpful because I love language exchanges and I love to improve my ability to explain Portuguese for someone who is learning it as a foreign language. So here is the link to the said dissertation: https://estudogeral.uc.pt/bitstream/10316/85517/1/AnaRCRodrigues_2011150588_Tese%20vers%c3%a3o%20final.pdf

(This dissertation is written in Portuguese)

3 -The last thing I do is read the text again after all the corrections that I have applied to see if I missed something and to add some more feedback or some more explanation or examples if I think are needed.

So these are the 3 steps I now take to correct a text the best I can.

At the moment I also try to avoid selecting too much text when correcting, for instance if a person has forgotten accentuation, I usually just select the letter and write it with the correct accent, to prevent the text from being too marked in blue unnecessarily.

What can also happen is that sometimes I start to correct a text and then I am interrupted by something because I often try to use the free gaps of time that I have to correct the texts. I hope it doesn't bother the other users too much when I am unable to give them the feedback all at once.

So, I hope that you liked my “method” and I would really like to hear your feedback and suggestions, especially those whose texts I have already corrected, to see if there's something that you would like me to do differently.

I would also like to hear any special methods you have for correcting texts or any other suggestions.

I will use this post as well to give a special thanks to Linda (@ LindasLinguas) for all the corrections and useful comments on my posts, I have learned so much German with Linda that I am really thankful (it was Linda who corrected my first post here on Journaly and I was really nervous to write in German, so her feedback and nice words were exactly what I needed as motivation to keep on writing posts in German!). One thing I would also like to add is that Linda’s posts are also very useful for all the other users and her contribution to Journaly is huge. I highly recommend, anyone who is learning Portuguese, to check her post about the difference between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Which is really well structured and easy to use as guide: https://journaly.com/post/1774.

For anyone who has read my text this far, thank you very much for taking your time to read it!

I would really like to hear any suggestions about correcting Journaly posts and if you thought my “method” was good or bad. Your feedback is important for me because I really would like to be as useful and helpful as I can to the Journaly community.