How to write in a foreign language (even as a beginner)

I'm going to be honest with you and I think a lot of you can relate when it comes to language cloning I'm much more of a reading and listening than speaking or writing type of person so with languages like English Spanish Korean at least at some point in my life I did take classes so I had no choice but to speak or write if I were asked to do so but the situation is very different when it comes to languages I have studied completely on my own and my Italian is a prime example of that I have to admit I have really neglected output and when it comes to learning Italian and as a result at this point I can comfortably read contemporary novels but if you ask me to speak or write I can barely string a couple of sentences together with Greek the language that I'm focusing on right now I did not want to find myself in the same situation so I decided to start writing despite being a beginner who hasn't even reached A1 yet so today's video is going to be all about the writing routine that I've developed so far and that I think works really well for me let's first look at the tools that I use this is kind of random but I thrifted this 2019 planner a couple of months ago and I decided to use it for my Writing Practice somehow it works perfectly for me because it has sections for every day of the week and I can use one every single time I sit down to write and then it also has this section right here which is really important for my process and later you're going to see why I also usually just use a black pen and a couple of highlighters to highlight new phrases that I use in my writing so that the next time that I'm writing something and I want to use that word or phrase that I had to look up specifically to write something a couple of days ago it is much easier to find that phrase highlight it and another thing that is really important even though it's not really a writing material or anything like that is any type of resources that you use to get input at this point I'm basically convinced that you cannot produce language unless you also consume it so I use my books I use YouTube videos and any other online materials just basically to get a inspiration for topics and be an idea of what vocabulary and grammar I can use and the last thing is a dictionary or a translator in my case most of the time I use deep El as a translator and then gloss b as a dictionary and now that we've covered the tools let's look at my process so the first thing I did after getting the notebook is compiling a glossary of most important vocabulary and grammar that I know I will be using a lot the way you can set it up is by dedicating a couple of pages specifically to that glossary or by putting information that you need from week to week on a sticky note that we'll be traveling with you from page to page and the reason why I do this is so that I don't have to look up those words when I sit down to write I don't mind looking things up and that's why I keep the glossary in my notebook but I just don't really want to get distracted by picking up my phone or by flipping through a physical dictionary to find that one word that I'm looking for some examples of the kind of vocabulary I write down days of the week as I've already said sentences describing whether names of the months time related phrases for example from this time to this time or today tomorrow now then and things like that of course the type of vocabulary you'll be using totally depends on you what kind of things you choose to write about what level you are as you have noticed I am still a beginner in Greek so there's a lot of really basic vocabulary that I'm not comfortable with yet and so I have to write those things down hoping that at some point I will memorize them and I will not have to use the help of my little glossary so because I use a literal planner as my notebook you might think that what I do in it is journaling but in reality it's not really the case the truth is I don't really have a specific goal or format when it comes to what exactly I'm going to write and it basically differs from week to week it might be journal in one week talking about human emotions the next week then describing my daily routines or daily routines of the people that I know and so on and I feel like this approach allows me not to get bored by writing basically the same thing every single day which is something that would happen to me when I try journaling in Italian my vocabulary and my knowledge of grammar was not really good enough to describe a lot of different things in detail so my journal entries looked like oh today I did this I ate this I went there and now honestly it wasn't really fulfilling in any case of way so now I basically try to avoid that by not committing to any type of format unless I'm really sure that that's what I want to do so how do I choose what to write about them glad you asked instead of deciding on a topic every single day what I do is I just choose one topic for the whole week this might be connected to a chapter in my book that I'm currently working on such as jobs or daily routines or things like that it might also be based on just content in Greek that I listen to or watched or maybe even read for example I recently watched a video about how to describe emotions in Greek and then I basically dedicated a whole week to writing about this topic and no matter which topic I decide to go for I always use this little section that I talked about in the very beginning of the video to write down important vocabulary and grammar that I'm going to be using throughout the week if the topic is based on a textbook chapter I will just go through the vocabulary and grammar sections in the book and then I will copy what I consider relevant and if the the topic is based on an article or a video I will just write down phrases and usage examples the nice thing about it is that throughout the week I will have seven different opportunities to use all of that vocabulary and grammar that I just wrote down so in that sense I don't really feel the pressure to Clump them all together in one entry I've mentioned this already but I just want to double down on this I have noticed that writing for me is the hardest if I try to do it without exposing myself to content in the language first so if for example I neglect my textbooks or I don't really watch any videos in Greek for a couple of days even and then I sit down and I try to write something chances are it's not going to work as smoothly as it does when I first receive some input and then I sit down to write do I use dictionaries and translators so most of the time I'm okay with looking up new vocabulary here and there and using it in my writing but I cannot really say the same about grammar also because there's really not a lot of good dictionaries for Greek I often use translators so let's say I need the verb to drive as in to drive a car I look it up and if I see that it doesn't did look like a verb because I've been exposed to the language already and I have an idea of what verbs look like in Greek I'll use it but if I were to look up a phrase and then I saw that it had grammar that I don't know I would not use the phrase and I would just try to simplify the idea that I have and the reason for that is that looking up new words is quick and easy but if I want to use a certain grammar structure I actually want to understand what it is that I'm using and my writing time is reserved just for that for writing not for understanding learning new grammar structures I have my textbook time for that so in that sense it's just me trying to not over complicate things and keep this habit sustainable because most of the time I don't really spend more than 10 to 15 minutes per day on writing and I feel like it's partially why I have been able to maintain this habit for over a month now despite not really being consistent with writing ever in my life when it comes to what I'm writing about I am not at all afraid of repetition the way I see it is I have a week to perfect or Master a topic obviously according to my level because I'm still a beginner so I won't be able to write something very complicated but because of that I think it's totally fine to write about the same thing every single day for a week for just a week so for example last week I was learning to talk about myself and so every day I would just do that but each time I would change some things here and there I sometimes would add new vocabulary or grammar sometimes I would just make the structure more coherent or simply add things that I didn't think of the day before and needless to say I was the most satisfied with my writing on Sunday because I had the whole week to polish my writing on that topic the writing process was also much smoother because by that time I have already memorized a lot of the vocabulary and grammar that I had to use in my writing and so I didn't really feel the need to look up as many things or to double check if I spelled them correctly something that I don't do however is expect that my writing will be of the same quality every single time for me obviously the quality of my writing depends on the topic how familiar I am with it how many times I have practiced writing about it but also more often than not it just depends on my energy levels and if there's a particular day when I feel like my energy is really low what I will do sometimes is I will just copy somebody else's text sometimes I will find something in my textbook sometimes I will go online and see what simple text I can find on the topic that I'm writing about so for example recently I wanted to write about human emotions and it was a little bit hard because the topic is kind of abstract and then I accidentally stumbled upon this children's book that explains two kids in very simple terms what sadness is and so the first day of my writing practice that week I just copied that text amid in some things that were too complicated for me because I didn't know the grammar and then what I did the next day and the day after that was I basically wrote about other emotions that were not Sadness by using that text about sadness as a template and I think that worked really well for me even though I'm really proud of myself for being able to stick with my right and practice for as long as a month or a little bit more than that I also recognize that in the grand scheme of things I haven't really been doing it for that long and there's still a lot of things that I could improve about my process for example one thing that I would like to do in the future is to start typing up my texts and then potentially uploading them onto websites like high native or journally or learn correct to get Corrections from native speakers I also want to try to reread my older entries and see if I can spot any mistakes with the knowledge that I have right now compared to let's say the knowledge and the skills that I had a month ago but for now even thinking about those things is a little bit overwhelming for me so I choose to focus only on my writing and then once the writing process itself gets easier I will consider improving my routine so basically what I'm doing right now is just keeping it as sustainable as I can so that I can keep doing it consistently and not get overwhelmed and just stop doing it all together because I couldn't make this routine perfect okay so now I've told you about the tools that I use I've told you about my process and I wanted to discuss some of the benefits that I have noticed already I definitely am better at spelling right now compared to when I started writing Greek specifically is not really that hard when it comes to spelling it's nothing like English for example but there are some tricky aspects for example there are six different ways to spell the sound e and so write in words and actively thinking about how to spell them really helps me with memorization I also Now read faster especially when it comes to my own handwriting in Greek because I'm not gonna lie in the beginning it was kind of a struggle and I think this is part because I'm getting a lot more exposure to the language but also part because my handwriting in the process has become a little better so obviously since I've been practicing writing hopefully I am a little better rating but I've also noticed some improvement when it comes to speaking because I think those skills are pretty much related and then the main reason why I wanted to practice writing was to consolidate the information that I was learning instead of just passively going through chapters in my books which is something I used to do with pretty much all of my languages I feel like the practice helps me both with memorizing new vocabulary and grammar and with being better at noticing blind spots or things that I find difficult because a lot of the times I'll just go through a textbook chapter and I'll be like okay I understand this I understand that but when you actually sit down to write you're like wait a minute no I I guess I didn't really understand that because I will have to look that up again so yeah writing definitely helps a lot in this area but this is pretty much everything I wanted to talk about in this video I am super curious to know if you guys practice writing and if so how do you do it how do you come up with what to write about how regularly do you write do you Journal do you write about something else please let me know in the comments below and as always thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you in my next one bye bye foreign

Channel: Tanya Benavente

Views: 300,520

Keywords: language learning, how to learn a language, foreign language, language learning tips, polyglot tips, how to write in a foreign language, writing in a foreign language, writing practice, learn to write in another language, write in another language, writing, write in spanish, write in english, write in french, practice writing english, practice writing in korean, learn greek, learn english, learn spanish

Id: dnwdIl0vkiQ

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023