Good morning y'all, I hope you're doing great today. I'll be honest, I didn't know what to write about so I thought, "Why don't we write a thank you post?" and then I thought, "Fucking genius." So here I am! If I find something interesting to write about during the day I'll come back, no promises though.
I've tried a lot of times to practice output, failing in all of them. I downloaded Tandem, but nobody answered my messages. I downloaded HelloTalk and I made a native friend! But we stopped talking. I tried Discord, I felt nervous as hell. So at the end I gave up on trying, I was wasting precious time that I could use studying the language. I had already heard about Journaly at that time but I really didn't pay any attention to its premise, I thought it was just a generic online journal. I decided that I would improve output by correcting myself, what a smart movement! But after two days I realized that I wasn't noticing any mistakes because I was the one making the mistakes. And then I decided to give Journaly a try.
I installed it out of despair, I couldn't sleep and I didn't know what to do (hence How I ruined my sleep schedule).
And I'm grateful for that! Journaly is a place where I can write about whatever I want without any social anxiety, time pressure and still get corrected! Thanks to this page I realized how much I suck at output, and how much I can still improve in English. I know there's something similar called "Italki Notebooks" and tbh I've tried it but it's literally Journaly but nobody corrects you (or at least that's been my experience). And Journaly has a lot more features!
So I just wanted to thank y'all for being part of this community where we help others and are helped by others, I hope we all reach our desired language level and continue to learn new things!
I'm really starting to fear what will happen after running out of ideas. I don't want to write about my dreams all the time, and I don't have any special knowledge that I can share with y'all here. I'm already seeing all my future posts called "Let's write a post" where I just write about whatever comes to mind. I don't want that! I want something interesting! Well that's a problem for the JJOA of the future, not mine (I hope).
Hi JJOA,
Maybe we can give you some ideas on what to write about. I just saw on your profile that you're from Colombia, and for me, it would be interesting to read something about your country. To be honest, I actually hardly know anything about countries in South America.
Other ideas: memories from childhood, anime recs, any interesting travels, show and tell of favorite object, family dynamic, instructions on how to do something (your posts don't always have to be narratives), weird food that you ended up liking. You're doing great.
@Linda oh yeah, I don't know how writing about my country never came to mind haha. I'll make it a future post then, thanks for the advice!
@JG well now I have a lot of posts! I'm very interested in memories and anime so I think I'll do those first. Thanks for the ideas!