Welcome to the five week linguist show. So week four of your course, we’re going to learn to talk in new languages, output. Right? Learning new languages through speaking and writing. Oh. I want to start with a writing. Writing is often the skill we develop last in languages, whether that’s your own language or a foreign language. And if you don’t believe me ask a high school English teacher. Or if you went to college, staring at either a white screen or a piece of paper in a typewriter, you need so much input and practice to master writing. It’s hard. But the good news is when you’re learning a new language and you’re an adult, you’ve already got literacy skills. Right? You already know how to read and write.

You can use these skills to develop your skills in a new language. And so the method is actually really simple. You just have to write really regularly. And I can’t stress how important this is. If you don’t have a real context in which to communicate with other people like a pen pal or something like that, don’t let that stop you. So you can learn how to fill in your gaps in your knowledge, by practicing speaking, and you do the same thing with writing. And it works at all levels and all languages. Writing at a very basic level, is just copying. Right? As an absolute beginner, you want to get communicating soon. So just understanding, listening, and combining it with speaking, will really accelerate your learning. And when you read and you write, it’s going to really help you develop those speaking skills.

And I just want to talk about a few little places to start, and I want to start with one that a lot of people have worked on and it’s flashcards. And so writing and creating your own flashcards is a really active way to build vocabulary. I really like to use a notebook. I really prefer that to flashcards, but I know a lot of people like… They really find flashcards effective, especially when you can… Once you’ve learned something, you can put it aside. So do whatever works for you. And when you write your cards or your notebook, it’s going to help you learn how to read in a new language. Right?

For example, if you were learning Korean script, copying those down, copying down all those strokes or Kanji for Japanese is really going to help you become literate in that language. And you’re going to have to take the time out to do it, if you want to learn how to become fluent in another language. So I really like to do everything in themes, themes and tasks. So when you sent your learning around talking about certain themes, and then you break them down into tasks and then all that vocabulary into chunks, that gives you everything that you need to learn. So themes could be food, for example. And it could be really simple, just the names for foods or how to order foods up to a very long and involved critique on a restaurant and everything in between.

So think about those themes and then think about the tasks that you want to learn how to master. So if you want to learn how to, we’ll stick with food here, learn how to return something at a restaurant, all in the target language. You can take a notebook and you write down everything that you need for that task. It’s a great way to learn language when you don’t have a teacher with you. It’s completely free. It’s low stress. And another thing that I really like to do is pick different ways to draw, different things to draw as a beginner.

And think about… I’ll stick with food here. Since we’ve been talking about that. Let’s say, I want to learn all the words for common vegetables. I might draw a salad that has all of those vegetables and I would label it.