User:Dimitar77atanasov/Lang-8

Lang-8.com

Lang-8 is a language exchange social networking website. The company is based in Kyoto, Japan. The idea of creating the site was on the Japanese student with Chinese origin Yangyang Xi after his experience in Chinese language study. Initially Lang-8 website was lunched in August 2006 as a research project from Yangyang Xi and Kazuki Matsumoto with auditory limitation to the students of Kyoto University. Between the April and August 2007 the website was restructured and on June 29 2007 Yangyang Xi establish the Lang-8 Inc. company. Since then the site was expanding rapidly to include many people from different countries in the world.

Features

The site offers the visitor to create a user profile, with the unique feature of selecting native language, and target language/s of study/interest. Then additionally to the typical social networking sites features, the visitors can write journal entries in the target language, and have them checked by native speakers of this language. This allows the user to improve their writing skills in the language of study. In return the user is obliged to check other people journal entries, written on his/her native language. There is very quick response time of the Lang-8 community on the articles written by users. Currently Lang-8 supports user interface in 15 different languages.

Lang-8 provides opportunity for contact between people, who study each-other native language.

Recently, Lang-8 added a Review Section where members can practice their writing skills by writing a review or rating different products from their country found in Amazon.com.

Community The website currently has over 56 000 registered members, from over 120 different countries. Below are the major groups distribution based on the native language:

Japanese – 27% English – 20% Chinese – 16% Taiwanese – 10% Korean – 10%

Lang-8 community provide very Quick response on the posted articles – some of the articles are checked in the matters of minutes

Team Yangyang Xi — CEO Kazuki Matsumoto — CTO

References

^http://http://lang-8.com/help - Oficial help section of lang-8.com

^http://jselect.net - The secret language of online study” by Harvey Beasley – Jselect magazine vol 36. No3,

^http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20070918a1.html/ - "Lang-8 puts networking onto a linguistic level" By Kendall Manlove ^http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/23/infinity-ventures-summit-launch-pad-in-japan-part-2-the-best-of-the-rest - Review by Serkan Toto on May 23, 2009