Language Journaling

I have heard about journaling as a means of language practice, but had never tried it out until recently.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found it to be a helpful and creative outlet as well as a great practice tool that I will be continuing to use for myself and recommend for my students.

Even if your goals only include speaking or reading, I’d still urge you to consider writing.

While speaking is a major and important goal to strive for, both speaking and writing trigger similar brain muscles that will get you producing the words you want.

When speaking, struggling to come up with words or rules can be very tough and discouraging, but with writing you get the same practice without the time constraint. Write as fast or as slow as you want. Then make sure to proofread.

I also enjoy reading my entry out loud as vocalizing the language – whether from speaking or simply reading – is extremely important to getting comfortable making the sounds of your language.

Great question!

At the beginning, you may say you don’t really have much to write about.

But if you think a little harder, you will find that you’ve got plenty to talk about!

Write about the reasons for your language learning!

Write about children, partners, friends, and pets!

Write about your day, week, month!

Write about your goals, your dreams, your regrets.

Write about your history – where you were born, grew up, went to school!

There are countless things you can write about.

And when you run out – Write a short story! Here are some prompts.

I’ve found that a nice paragraph – maybe 5-7 sentences – will suffice to cover a small subject. As you progress with your learning and vocabulary, you can grow the entries as you wish.

Here’s the fun part – with new tools at your disposal, checking your work has never been easier!

• Review your writing with your teacher
  • With resources like italki at your disposal, you can easily have your work checked by a teacher or tutor and use that as a prompt for your lesson
• Upload your writing for review by native
  • Here’s a website to upload your writings and have it reviewed by native speakers.
• ChatGPT – Use Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • This one is very cool! You can simply copy your prompt and ask for corrections and suggestions and you’ll get very thorough and quite accurate corrections.

If you do go with ChatGPT (which I highly recommend), I’d still suggest reviewing with your teacher to confirm the accuracy of the AI – it’s still learning!

Get started journaling today and in a few weeks, you’ll be blown away at how far you’ve come with your learning!