Lang-8

lang-8.com

URL	www.lang-8.com
Slogan	Let’s share our language and culture
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Social Networking Website
Registration	Required
Available language(s)	Japanese, English, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Korean, Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Tagalog, Indonesian, Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, Vietnamese, Thai, Finnish, Polish, Norwegian, Turkish, Malaysian
Owner	Lang-8 Inc.
Launched	August 2006
Current status	active

Lang-8 is a language exchange social networking website. The company is based in Kyoto, Japan. The idea of creating the site came from the Japanese student Yangyang Xi after his experience in Chinese language study. Initially Lang-8 was launched in August 2006 as a research project from Yangyang Xi and Kazuki Matsumoto and was limited to the students of Kyoto University. Between April and August 2007 the website was restructured and on June 29, 2007 Yangyang Xi established the Lang-8 Inc. company. Since then the site has expanded rapidly^{[citation needed]} to include many people from different countries in the world.^{[citation needed]}

Features

The site lets the visitor create a user profile, allowing them to select a native language and target language(s) of study/interest. In addition to a typical social networking site's features, the visitors write journal entries in the target language and have them checked by native speakers. This allows the user to improve their writing skills in the language of study. In return the user should check other people's journal entries, written in his/her own native language. The response time is typically short and some of the articles are checked in a matter of minutes. Currently the Lang-8 user interface supports 15 different languages.

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

As of July 2009, the website had over 63,000 registered members^{[citation needed]}, from over 120 different countries.^{[citation needed]}

As of March 2011, the website currently has over 250,000 registered members, according to a general member count. The site states its goal as being 100,000,000 registered members on a blog post last year.

Team

• Yangyang Xi — CEO

References

• Official help section of lang-8.com
• The secret language of online study by Harvey Beasley – Jselect magazine vol 36. No3,
• Lang-8 puts networking onto a linguistic level By Kendall Manlove
• A review on TechCrunch by Serkan Toto on May 23, 2009