I fairly strongly disagree that 25% is too much time to spend writing journals, especially when they are getting corrected by native speakers. One only has to look at the progress Icecream and Kazelee have made to see their effectiveness. I get tons of input reading English journals from Japanese users who include their original Japanese draft. I get pretty good Japanese history and culture lessons reading them also. Most of the comments and explanations on entries are written in Japanese as well. I myself feel I gain incredible knowledge from the corrections by Japanese users.

I don't consider it a myth that most Japanese people (who are studying English) are good at reading English. I haven't met an example in real life where this is the case. They get all kinds of input from American and English media.

Eikaiwas do work. I worked at one in 2007 and the progress from students was dramatic, especially considering many of the students had six years of English study in school and still could barely speak when they began (according to the records I went over before their lessons). I would not encourage anyone to pay for one as they are really pricey (eikaiwas mostly work with a small profit margin though) and there are cheaper methods that will get the same results.

i have recently started posting journal entries to lang-8. Should I integrate the corrections into my original journal entry, or just take heed of the corrections and try to do better on the next journal, without making changes to the journal that the corrections were made on?

I am currently editing the journal as i get corrections, but i have noticed that many people do not do this.

I have also been taking the approach of not trying to brutalize someone's writing, but only making the most necessary corrections. If a sentence is technically "ok" but it could be written in a different way to sound more natural, i write how i think the more natural way to say it is, and make a comment to them that tells them that is what i am doing, so that they know i'm only trying to help and not saying what they did was wrong.

Overall i have been extremely pleased with lang-8 and look forward to using it more and more as my vocabulary increases and it doesn't take me an hour to write a 4 sentence journal entry -_-

I feel so guilty for not doing anki reps instead of writing journals...I don't know what to do...

And friends on mixi are also bombarding me with messages. And before replying I have to have the replies corrected on lang-8....takes time.

A very fun way to output...

http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.c...-your.html

I wanted to link this because it looks useful.

I'm working around an output approach right now and lang-8 has become a key part of it. That said, I usually combine input and output to some extent in everything I do. I would say it's 50% lang-8 right now, but I roll new vocabulary through there, grammar study and twitter (and my new project Cinch recordings) through it. The rest would be real life writing (re-writing lang-8 corrections to post up on lang-8, etc.), shadowing (TV/Podcasts), reading out loud from manga and talking to myself with SRSing vocabulary making up 15% or less (which is debatably passive only as I do production cards for verb endings and I'm thinking about reading out loud all of my vocabulary - but that would probably get annoying after a bit.)

Will this work for me? It's mostly experimental, but I'm sorta done with mostly passive learning (it's a bit boring for me and doesn't hit the spot, really) and active learning, although a bit time consuming, is effective for me.

Having found an abundance of Japanese friends at my university, I don't use lang-8 as exclusively as I used to, but I still use it regularly. I learn by srs(ing) the corrections. The things I find most useful are the rephrasing corrections, which are usually the more easier and natural way to say things. One interesting notion about Japanese in the intermediate-advanced stages is you tend to forget the easy way to say things since a good portion of the vocabulary you are learning is either uncommon or used only in writing.

I post my corrected entries to a Japanese blog I'm running, so every now and then I re-read my old posts to get more exposure to correct Japanese. It also helps with motivation because you should be able to, eventually, read all your corrected entries from start to finish and understand everything after corrections.

It may also be a benefit if you can make friends from lang-8. Most users use skype or windows live and would probably love to chat live though the only obstacle would be finding a suitable time when they are most likely to be online, which depends on where you live in the world. It's usually morning or night here in the U.S.