Ok, I know the Idea of having tutors reading students writing has been on the LingQ burners for a while. I think Steve even talked about it a little when we all got together in Tokyo.
I did a quick web search, and I couldn’t find any service which offers to have your writing read and recorded by native speakers. I think that LINGQ could easily be the leader in this field. But I know there is complications on how to set this up from the administrative side.
Also, in my case, not only do I want my writing read to me, but I have imported a lot of Japanese newspaper articles and blog entries which I would love to hear read. What I have been doing is asking my students here in Japan to read something for me in Japanese, whereas in return I will read and record something for them in English.
So after reading Marianne’s post this morning, I was thinking, why don’t we simply set up a reading-recording exchange here in the forums. Basically in the form we can write a post with a title like
“English speaker-Japanese Reading Wanted”
or
“日本人ー英語を読んでほしい”
something like that… So if a Japanese person want something to be read in english and an english speaker wants something read in Japanese, they can find each-other in the forums. Then they can read and record each others writings. That way both people have their writing recorded by native speakers to study.
One advantage to this is that we can listen to our writing spoken by many different people. One disadvantage could be the quality of some of the recordings might not be good.
But setting up an exchange in the forums might be a good start towards in getting native speakers read our writing.
What do you think?
