Remote Spanish writing help

March 17, 2020 6:02 PM

I'd like to do some writing several times a week in Spanish -- how could I find someone who could read and correct this for me, and how much would it cost?

Now that I've got some extra time on my hands (thanks to no physical commuting/telecommuting!) I'd like to ramp up my brushing up of my Spanish.

One of the things I'd like to do is to write a couple of times a week. However, I'd also like to get corrections and feedback, mostly of the grammatical/vocab error type -- i.e. things like you used the indicative but you needed the subjunctive, you used ser but you needed estar, this phrasing is awkward because you directly translated from English, etc.

I'm not looking for edits of the "literary" variety; this is going to be pretty mundane subject matter (e.g. Ayer mi jefe me dijo que a partir de hoy trabajaría en casa). I would anticipate writing somewhere from 200-400 words at a time.

My questions are:
- How can I find someone to do this, and what would be the most typical setup/arrangement? (remotely/digitally is 100% OK and indeed desired, especially given the current circumstances. Given that it is writing, I do not need real-time feedback)
- How much would this cost? I'm completely willing to pay whatever is the going market rate (if it's too much for me, I will reconsider this plan) but I have no idea what that is.

I am in the US. My Spanish is probably about a B1 overall, with much stronger comprehension than production (in part because I have much stronger French).

posted by andrewesque to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

There are a lot of exchange sites where you can get corrections from native speakers in exchange for making corrections for learners of your language, if that's of interest. Obviously folks may not have perfect grammar or be professional proofreaders but they'll typically be able to correct awkward phrasing or conjugation errors.

A couple options I've used are Lang-8 and Hellotalk.
posted by geegollygosh at 6:32 PM on March 17, 2020

You can engage tutors on iTalki for $4-80 USD per hour. Prices are lower for community tutors, who are speakers of the language without taking credentials and higher for those with tracking credentials. Most for Spanish seem to be in the $8-20 range. You can also submit writing to the general community forum and have others on there correct for free. Using your native or fluent language skills to correct others' writing is a nice way to balance that.
posted by carrioncomfort at 7:34 PM on March 17, 2020

I would highly recommend reaching out to ASLI: http://www.spanishincuernavaca.com/contact/
I had the pleasure of studying there a few years ago and have been doing weekly Skype classes for over a year. My classes are $25 per hour and they are totally flexible about the format (I’m sure they could accommodate the type of feedback you’re looking for). Also, they are really struggling suddenly (like everyone, sadly...) because so much of their income comes from study abroad programs. I have class on Friday and I’m looking forward to it now more than ever.
posted by leastlikelycowgirl at 8:47 PM on March 17, 2020

Seconding italki. The general community forum is free, and I've always gotten a response when I post there.
posted by Shadow Boxer at 7:57 AM on March 18, 2020

Agreeing with iTalki; there's also The Mixxer, which I like because it's run by a university and has explicit prohibitions against people using it as a dating site:

https://www.language-exchanges.org/user-search

One thing you can do on The Mixxer - and probably on other sites as well - is find people who speak Spanish and would like to learn English, and contact them directly to ask if they'd be interested in regular language exchanges - they correct your Spanish, you correct their English.

And here is a list of sites for language exchange - a few might be conversation only, but I bet most of them do community writing corrections, and may allow for direct, ongoing language exchanges:

https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2943

¡Buena suerte!
posted by kristi at 8:23 AM on March 19, 2020