I did not get the idea directly from there, no, but indirectly it's not impossible that it influenced the thought process (I don't think I've been on that forum in over 10 years now).Ser wrote: ↑26 Apr 2020 21:57I think it would be good to elaborate on the purpose of personal threads. Did you grab that idea from the UniLang forum? At UniLang, there is a difference between personal threads and conversation threads, but it isn't clear to me whether you're replicating that here...
At UniLang personal threads, people post questions they have about the L2 (in the L2 or English) to get answers/opinions, and also journal-like entries of one-three paragraphs for which they welcome corrections (including thorough/detailed corrections if someone has the patience for that). The advantage of allowing people to post questions in these threads is that they can get answers/opinions in English, and also some people just feel more comfortable asking them here than in general question threads.
Meanwhile, in conversation threads, people only speak in the L2, generally about any topic (including, sometimes, people's questions about the L2 or observations people of make about grammar/vocabulary they see in chats/newspapers/etc, and such metalinguistic things). In those threads, corrections are usually kept low. Also, conversation threads usually have lower activity than personal threads and general question threads (not sure why, maybe some strange things about comfortable feelings again).
I think that your descriptions fairly accurately depict what I had in mind with the thread types. It's probably also a good idea to specify this better in the info thread!
As so often with new forums, it's a bit of an experiment and not entirely set in stone yet! This is my attempt to merge the spirit of the Other Languages section into the Main section, to see if something new can grow out of it
I can relate to this, to a certain extent. Although (sadly) I associate it more with linguists than with conlangers, personally. My impression is still that a lot of conlangers, and members on here, do study languages quite a bit (the Language practice thread has had quite a diverse amount of contributors over the years). But I also get the impression that many of our members do their language learning elsewhere, and don't really see this as a place where they could practice and get help. Which is a shame, because we have quite a lot of competence on that matter. For instance, I've always preferred having conlangers or linguists to help me out with foreign languages, because they're actually able to explain things in a more technical way. Trying to get the same information out of native speakers with no linguistic interest can often be quite frustrating, by comparison...Ser wrote: ↑26 Apr 2020 21:57That said, I've noticed conlangers in general tend to not actually learn languages much, probably because general typology is much more important for the hobby than depth in one language or a few languages. I sometimes feel like a bit of a stranger in conlanging chatrooms or such groups because I actually try to learn various of the languages I give examples about... There's a thread on the ZBB for practising languages, and at any given time it is usually the same relatively few people that participate.