推敲・the craft of revising your own writing
Your writing hasn’t kept up with your reading.
Suikō is a daily writing practice with an exacting editor. Write one short page a day and it marks exactly what’s off: the particle, the word choice, the register. It tells you what to use instead, and leaves the rewrite to you.
Your first three rounds of correction are free.
No card, no placement test.
What feedback looks like
最近、心が動いた出会いについて書いてください。
The three switches above are the ones in the app: ruled paper or blank, writing across the page or down it, marks drawn as a highlight or as an underline. Set the sheet the way you’d write on it.
Unnatural
起業のことについて
After a noun like 起業, the こと is padding. 「起業について」 is the natural form.
use this起業について
Incorrect
よく分かれなかった
Potential-form confusion: 分かる is already potential in sense, so it never takes 〜れる. You want 「よく分からなかった」.
use this分からなかった
Unnatural
情熱を見て
Grammatical but flat. Being moved by someone's passion is rendered with 触れる: you touch it, you don't watch it.
use this情熱に触れて
The plateau is an output problem.
You’ve done the input: thousands of Anki cards, the novels, the meetings you follow without (too) much effort, maybe an N2 or N1 certificate in a drawer. And your own Japanese still comes out stiff, translated-sounding, a register too low. The gap between 分かる and 使えるdoesn’t close from the input side.
Ghostwriting feels like progress.
Paste your paragraph into ChatGPT and it comes back perfect, in words you wouldn’t have reached for. You read it, nod, and none of it stays. Producing the sentence is the part that teaches you, and it just got done for you.
“Sounds unnatural” isn’t feedback.
A verdict without the fix leaves you exactly where you were. What you needed was the actual collocation, 好評を得る, and not a hint that one exists somewhere.
A tutor is worth it, once a week.
The one person who can mark your writing properly has an hourly rate and a calendar. So the writing waits for the lesson, and something that should happen every day happens on Tuesdays.
書く。朱が入る。自分で直す。
Write. Get marked. Fix it yourself. It’s the same loop a Japanese editor runs on a manuscript, or a calligraphy teacher on a student’s sheet.
一 書く
One page a day: 200 to 400 characters against a real prompt, with grammar patterns to reach for if you want them. At least one N1 among them every day, so on the days you want something harder, it’s already there.
二 朱が入る
The editor marks your draft in vermilion: every problem anchored to your own words, naming the word, particle, or pattern to use instead. Typos get one line, not a grammar lecture. And it can’t rewrite your entry. That rule is built into how Suikō works, not a politeness the AI might forget.
三 直す
You revise, and it checks whether each fix landed, round by round. It tells you when to stop, once another pass would only turn up preferences rather than mistakes. Corrections become cloze cards, exported as a real .apkg for Anki: double-click, review tomorrow.
And once an entry is finished, written and marked and revised, you can reveal a native version of it. It’s there after the work, not in place of it.
A year of writing should look like a year of writing.
Every entry you finish is bound into a monthly volume: pages written, characters written, searchable forever, every word your own. A year from now it’s a record of your life in Japanese, with the marks that made it better still in the margins.
And it stays honest. The editor never rewrites your entry, and every draft you send for marking is kept exactly as you wrote it. So when you look back at January, you see January, and how far you’ve come since.
今日も一枚。
One page today. A life in Japanese.
Your first three rounds of correction are free: spend them on one entry driven to done, or three first drafts. Then it’s $9 a month.