There are lots of Internet forums and online communities related to the English language that are similar to ours. How many of them have you tried out? Here is an overview of those sites I know:
This one is very popular. (Google PageRank 7) Its members are language fans and they discuss how to learn European languages or how to translate words. Of course they have an English language forum which is called “English Only”. Wordrefernce was launched by an American who created a variety of free online dictionary which are available on his site. So the Wordreference community started because lots of people were using the online dictionaries.
Englishforums is what I’d call a “stand alone forum”. This means, its founders got the forum started by initially “talking to themselves”. They did this until their daily forum posts reached a “critical mass” and from then on the forum started growing daily. I’d say that about 95% of the contents on Englishforums are “user generated”.
At usingenglish.com you will find a number of ESL exercises, idioms, expressions, blog entries. So they started their forum as an additional feature to their site.
Josef Essberger is probably one of the “Internet ESL gurus” and he launched his famous EnglishClub back in the mid-90ies. The EnglishClub forum is especially popular among users from Vietnam and China.
The American English teacher Dave Sperling was the first person to start an ESL Internet site and his forum used to be extremely busy in the early days when there weren’t many others of this kind. I think about 85% of the contents on Dave’s site are user generated.
Very good materials. Any comments regarding their forum?
The two German founders of this site live and work in Leipzig and I think their forum is mainly used by school students.
OpenEnglishWorld.com
Pretty interesting forum although it’s not too busy at the moment.
I like the dictionaries at WRF. They have just added Russian and German. I also like the fact that several language forums can be found on one site. They don’t much care for incidental chat, though, which is a pity; it’s often the most useful part of a thread for a learner.
A couple of my students from Germany brought some “correct” sentences from Ego4u.com and asked me to explain them. I couldn’t explain them, because they didn’t make any sense. My students looked shocked and told me that site was one of the most popular ones in Germany for ESL learners. They asked me to look it over.
What I found was that Ego4u.com contains a lot of nonsensical English. The creators of the tests provide a lot of sentences that have no grammatical mistakes at all, but that native English speakers would never say in a million years, and it’s sometimes hard to figure out what the sentences mean. I think it’s a site to be avoided.