Lang-8 is a unique social network service started by a young entrepreneur Youyou Ki who lieves in Kyoto, Japan.
Language Exchange SNS Lang-8
It works in this way.
1.First join to the service.
2.Then write a diary in the language you’re learning.
3.Native spekers of that language who are aslo users of Lang-8 will correct your diary. This normally would not take more than 24 hours.
4. In return you will check other one’s diaries written in your mother-tongue language and correct them.
So the cycle of good will are turning around by volunteer works of users.
Ki Youyou was born in China and when he was 4 years old he moved to Japan and grew up in Japan. When he became a university student he visited China for a year and there he found his Chinese was not natural as natives.
He started to write diaries in Chinese and asked his room mates to correct to imporve his language skill. This experience turned to the idea of Lang-8.
He asked to his friend to develop Lang-8 and made it by customizing OpenPNE, an open source social network service platform. They launched the service in the summer of 2006 and now more than 100 thounsands users are joining to Lang-8.
There are many free web services struggling to make benefits but Ki is quite optimistic for the future of Lang-8.
“In Lang-8, many talented users are joining. Many of them are bilingals so if you need someone to hire who can understand and make a communication between certain languages, Lang-8 would be a good to place to seek the one.”
Hiroumi Mitani