Can Journaling Every Day be a Key to Fluency?
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
If you have ever tried learning a foreign language, you probably have noticed that it is not a very straightforward task. Student books often trick their readers that all you have to do is follow their instructions. Then, why do I have 3 different types of Portuguese student books and I don’t yet speak fluent Portuguese? The answer is simple: it’s not that simple.
Mastering a language is not the same as finishing a C1 or C2-level student book or graduating from an online course. Yes, they can be helpful, but to put all of your dreams into one basket is a recipe for linguistic suicide.
That is because most of the student books are heavily grammar-oriented, which often helps with accuracy but not fluency.
Fluency refers to continuity, rate and smoothness in speech production. Accuracy, on the other hand, demonstrates your ability to use vocabulary, grammar and punctuation correctly. A high-level foreign language user needs both, but unfortunately, student books are not a magic pill that the learner can take and turn into a master. To do that, he has to use additional tools and materials.
An Italian polyglot Luca Lampariello in his book “10 Essential Rules for Smart Language Learning” advocates investing most of your time into listening and reading. These activities help you to develop a wide passive vocabulary and understanding of the language. For this reason, they are called ‘passive skills’ and are crucial not just for beginner but also for advanced learners.
But what about the other half of the pie? Language mastery does not come only from listening and reading, right? True. A rich passive vocabulary is essential for comprehension, but to communicate effectively we need to activate it. Here’s where active language skills come into play. In order to transform our passive vocabulary into its active counterpart, we need to speak and write. In other words, we need not just to understand language but to produce it as well.
For most people, speaking a language fluently is like putting a cherry on top of a cake. It shows that your cake is not just ready and served, but that it is also delicious and attractive. Nonetheless, if the bottom layers of the cake are wobbly, the cherry on top might make it cave in - the cake will not hold its weight! We need something to stabilize the structure and hold it together. That’s where writing comes into play.
Actually, writing helped a friend of mine - another Italian polyglot, Antonello Zanini - to finally master English. In a podcast that we had last year, Antonello explained that writing 100 words a day helped him to make a transition from A2 to C1 in a year. Antonello understand the necessity of finding ways to activate his passive knowledge and writing every day was for him a total game changer.
As Antonello explained, writing every day does 3 things:
It makes the newly learnt vocabulary and grammar stick;
It helps you think about how to express yourself more clearly and make yourself understood;
It forces you to start thinking in sentences rather than in lone words.
For those who are just starting, writing 100 words a day might sound like a colossal task, and in some ways, it is. For this reason, it is better to spend the first year or so really honing in on those comprehension skills and then beginning to spend more time activating them through speaking or writing. Speaking most likely is the best way to do that, but unfortunately, sometimes we don’t have people around to talk to. In this scenario, there is no one better to speak with than a white sheet of paper and a genius holding the pen. Make this into a habit and I believe that your language level will sky-rocket in 3 to 6 months time.
Thanks for reading!
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