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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
The Power of Writing for Language Learning
So, how does writing in your target language benefit your language learning?
If you start trying to write in a language you’ll soon find out that there is a lot you still don’t know. Is that a benefit? Hmm. Okay, you might think you know how to say something, but until you write it down, you may not realise that, actually, you don’t. You will have to look things up. This can be anything from individual words, to specific phrases, to difficult grammar points. And you will end up doing this over and over again for the same things. What is this doing? It’s giving you repetition of certain facts about the language. You may not have them fixed in your brain the first time you look them up, but by the time you’ve done it five times, you’ll have a much better level of knowledge. The thing is, doing it this way, where it has a purpose, will make learning the language much more organic than simply trying to work your way through a grammar book, or a vocabulary list, which rarely works. That’s a two for one there. Learning grammar and acquisition all in one nice little bundle.
You will end up discovering things about the language that you didn’t even know could be a thing. No matter how good your app, or book, or teacher is, you will never cover everything there is to know about a language - it would be almost impossible to do so. But, when you’re writing in a language, you can focus on things that are of interest to you and by doing that you will discover a lot of things you didn’t know. Of course, this is most likely to be words and phrases that are more relevant to you and your ambitions with the language, rather than grammar, but the grammar might get a look in, too, as a side effect of the words and phrases, when you think, why the heck do they say it like that? Yes, that happens to me quite a lot. Set phrases rarely follow all those so-called rules that you’ve learnt. That’s why they are recorded as specific phrases. If you could work it out by yourself, no problem, language would be easy.
You know that thing of writing stuff down by hand to help you remember it? Well, that is a subject that is being studied to see how ‘scientifically’ true it is, but we all know it does work, don’t we? Don’t we? There’s some connection between writing by hand and long-term memory. However, I’d argue that, although writing by hand might be better, typing something has a similar effect. It’s the act of actually committing it to something ‘concrete’, if you can call a computer page concrete, with your own hands. So, writing in your language, even if it’s not specifically meant as a studying tool, is likely to have the same effect. I’m certain it does for me, but I’m no scientist, so you’ll have to work that one out for yourself.
Writing is fun! No, it’s not like being at school. You should be writing something that you enjoy writing about - if you don’t, you won’t get very far. Okay, so now we’ve established that, if what you’re working on is fun for you, you’ll be learning without realising it. Need I say more? Alright, even though you might have to look up a tonne of things, especially when you first start, if what you’re writing about is enjoyable for you, you won’t notice how much you’re doing that. Let’s call it passive studying. It has a means to an end, but there’s no pressure to ensure you remember it, because, as we’ve already discussed, you can look it up again if you forget. Focus on the fun and not the learning.
So, there you go. Grammar consolidation, general language acquisition, fixing things in your memory, and studying without realising. What could be better?
That’s all for this season of the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. I’ll be back in September. In the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, adiós, hwyl and bye for now.