Hello everyone!

Yesterday I wrote my first post in English here on Journaly, and I just loved writing in English so much that I'm doing it again! In my previous post, I talked about the method I use for correcting posts on Journaly (in fact, yesterday I was so excited to hear the opinion of other users, about correction of posts, that I even ended up not re-reading my text well enough before posting it and therefore made "dumb" mistakes in English. This time I'll try to write better [and maybe fail miserably and make even dumber mistakes.]

So, today I would like to share with you how I use other Journalers' posts to learn German (in my case I'm learning German but this "method" can be applied to any other language you're learning).

I'll explain exactly what I do below:

1. When the user’s hasn't gotten feedback

When the user’s post hasn’t had any, I read it and try to see if I can find any mistake. Why do I do this? Because in this way I’m training my brain to pay attention to German grammar rules, I could do it by reading native speakers' (and I actually do that as well) but if I read a newspaper, or a book, or anything written correctly by a native speaker, I usually end up not paying so much attention to the details of the grammar and so on. On the other hand, this also allows me to check if I can tell when something sounds correct or not in German, because sometimes I can already tell that something just sounds wrong and that is important for improving my German. (For instance if someone uses “mit” and then uses the accusative I can immediately tell that it sounds strange, although it unbelievably doesn’t prevent me sometimes from making the exact same mistake, when I’m tired or distracted.)

When I do this process of trying to spot errors, and I think that I've found one, I don’t write anything down because I usually remember the things that I thought were wrong, when I get back to the post (but maybe it would be a good idea to write things down if a post is longer).

What I do next is wait for a native German speaker (or someone who knows German better than me) to correct this user’s post, and I go back to reading it again to check if the things that I thought were wrong, were in fact wrong. Sometimes I see that I actually managed to spot a few errors and got their correction right, other times I’m wrong and I use it as a chance to correct some gap on my grammar knowledge, and it can also happen that I even notice that some mistakes that the user made were things that I would write exactly like he did (especially when the error is something that has to do with transposing from English, because when I am writing in German sometimes I still have difficulty in “thinking” in German and therefore I think in the language I speak that is more similar to German which is English).

2. When the user’s post has feedback already

If the post has already received feedback but the user hasn’t applied it yet, by correcting his text, I do the same thing I just described and try to see if I know what the correction of the errors will be. (Except obviously the part of trying to find the errors because they are already in “blue”). I then just click to see what the person, who corrected the post wrote, to check if I got the solution to the error right.

If the corrections have already been applied by the user I just read the text and click on the comments to learn from the people who have corrected the texts. I find this very useful because many times, the nice user who gave feedback to the text, gave some explanation or even added different ways that a sentence can be structured, I usually write this information down in a notebook to study later. Sometimes I use others’ posts also as a chance to find vocabulary related to the specific topic that the Journaler is talking about.

Another reason why I think using other learners’ posts to learn is useful, is because in this way if the user is not very advanced, we have a chance of reading a simpler text in the language we are learning, sometimes containing basic sentences that we would like to express but weren’t sure how to do so, and if the user is very advanced or even a native speaker you can also learn to construct more difficult sentences. So depending on one’s level, it might be a good idea to read texts from users on the same level, because probably you will want to write simpler texts when you are a beginner. (Although it is also a good idea to read more advanced texts, just as long as they are understandable to you, because usually our level of comprehension is better than our level of writing or speaking).

To sum things up, I think one can learn a lot from others’ posts and from others’ mistakes, that’s why at the moment I add a vocabulary list to my posts and I use a table to organize it. The idea of using the table was actually Linda’s (@LindasLinguas ) [yes, Linda I am mentioning you again on my posts!]

By the way, after doing everything that I have explained, when I see other users’ posts, I always clap for the user’s post and many times leave a comment, and I also thank the person who corrected the other user’s posts, (by clicking in the small heart) when I find the comment particularly helpful.

Another thing that I would like to add is, that the comment section of Journaly can obviously also be very useful to use to learn, because not only we can practice writing by answering the other users, but we can also learn many sentences with the native speakers (sometimes even very interesting colloquial or dialect expressions).

Everything that I just wrote goes to prove that you can learn a lot on this amazing platform, not only to improve your writing skills but also your reading and now even speaking and listening skills (check Eduard’s - @edufuga, post if you haven’t done so yet: https://journaly.com/post/16840.

So, I hope that you liked the ideas I shared on this post. I would also like to thank all the users that write in German here on Journaly, (and all the other languages as well by the way) because we can learn a lot from each other, and your posts have helped me get better, and I am sure that they also help other users. This post actually turned out to be much longer than I had planned, so thank you so much for reading this far. I really appreciate it. I would really like to read your suggestions and comments.

Have you ever used other users’ posts to learn? Do you have any specific method of doing so?