TL;DR: I think that writing in your target language everyday is a great way to improve your writing skills! So much so that I’m working on an app to help with that. Check it out at writescribir.com.
I think that writing in your target language everyday is a great way to improve and to keep your new language on your mind, especially when you don’t live in a country where your target language is spoken (or primarily spoken). You definitely don’t need my app to do this! Check out any of the /r/WriteStreak subreddits for a community of people who are doing this (eg r/WriteStreakES). So there’s clearly at least some people who agree with me that daily writing is worthwhile!
I’ve been teaching a free English class for Spanish speakers for a few years now, and I’ve been trying to get my students to write more consistently, even if it’s only a few sentences a day. Of course there are a lot of ways to do this, but I want to make something that will be easy to use, simple, and provide some provide some useful features. So I’m starting on Writescribir! The goal with Writescribir is to offer a simple prompt, everyday, to get you to produce some writing in your target language consistently. I added a few features, and I’m working on more, to make it more useful than just using Reddit, a prompt generator, or a journal. For example, I’ve already added automatic translation of your writing, and an automatic AI based correction bot to correct any new answers as they are posted. I’m hoping to add a way to save words and phrases so they can be exported into a spaced repetition system like Anki, and some type of text to speech so you can hear your writing read back to you / practice pronunciation.
If you have any other ideas for features, please let me know!
Technical Details
Writescribir is a Next.js app, which is a React framework that I really like and have been learning. It’s hosted on Vercel. The backend is Convex.dev, which is another new platform that I was excited to test out. Convex provides a document database, and you can easily write serverless functions and actions in the same project that can access / modify the database. It’s also possible to run serverless functions as cron jobs to run actions on a schedule. Actually, I’m using that approach to generate the daily prompts for Writescribir! Everyday at 0:00 UTC, a cron job runs a serverless function to request a prompt from OpenAI. After a bit of tuning, I was able to get it to generate some pretty good prompts. I’m also using the OpenAI API to generate the automatic corrections for the user’s writing - it works well but it’s still sometimes making unnecessary or wrong corrections. The automatic translations come from DeepL API, which also runs as a serverless action. I’m using the free version with a limit of 500,000 characters per month - hopefully should be more than enough for my purposes!
Styling on the front end is something I’m still working on. I’m using TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui for some components, but honestly I’m still learning design / UX / UI stuff.
Conclusion
Check it out, and let me know if you have any suggestions. Either way, I hope you practice your English or Spanish everyday!