Should You Focus On Writing In A New Language?

When you start learning a new language you may wonder if it is a good idea to do a lot of writing.

Focusing on writing can certainly be beneficial and will help you a lot as you progress, but it is not enough by itself.

To focus only on writing would be foolish and I will go through why it should not be your only approach to learning a language, but how it does need to be involved in some way.

You Should Wait To Focus On Writing

When you start learning a new language you should really wait to start writing.

The reality is that you do not know any of the language, so what exactly are you going to write?

You need to spend some time actually taking on board some of the language. You are going to do this best by focusing on input, which is reading and listening. If you do not do this, you will never be able to write. You need this before you can even think about writing.

However, after a while you will have a basic grasp of the language and at this point you can begin writing and you can start to focus on it much more heavily. 

How long you wait to do this is down to you, some people will try and start writing fairly quickly and others may wait until they have a very strong understanding after a lot of input.

(You can read more about – The Input vs Output Language Learning Methods)

A Small Amount Of Language Goes A long way

You could argue that a little of the language goes a long way and even if you only focused on input for a short amount of time, you could still use that to do a lot of writing output.

If you learned the pronouns, 10 verbs and 10 adjectives you can make a lot of different sentences from this.

This argument becomes even stronger when you realise that although languages are huge, they really don’t really use every word. You will find that most conversation only uses about 1000 words, even if there may be 10,000 words available in the language.

You could easily learn the 1000 most common words in any language and then just really focus on writing and mastering the use of these words. This would actually be a much better idea than learning all 10,000 and never writing a single thing. 

This is why focusing on writing can be so powerful. You can easily learn a small part of the language and practice it a lot and appear like you are very good, of course your knowledge will be limited, but it should be enough to allow you to do a lot.

(You can read more about – Writing Resources For Language Learning)

You Can Only Write What You Know

As I’ve already touched on, the main issue with writing is that you can only focus on what you know. 

You will never learn anything new; it is much more like practice. This is exactly why you need to focus on input in the beginning, so that you end up knowing more things, which you can then actually practice through writing.

Writing Helps You Master What You Already Know

Writing is like a type of repetition and this is very good for helping you master what you know.

If you write a lot you will strengthen your knowledge of the things you have already learned. You will be forced to continually recall things from your memory so that you can write them down. The more you do this, the quicker and easier it will become for you.

You will basically get comfortable with producing the language and it will start to feel like an automatic process after a while, which means you have pretty much mastered it.

Of course without further input you cannot develop further, but being very good at what you do know is always very helpful and can make adding more information to your memory less daunting.

(You can read more about – Memory Tricks For Language Learning)

Speaking Is More Important Than Writing

Speaking and writing are fairly similar, they are both a form of output and they use a lot of the same systems in the brain. However, speaking is actually easier.

I know a lot of us are more scared about speaking, but in reality it is easier. You can get away with a lot more when you speak compared to when you write.

When you write everything needs to be perfect and there is actually more things to worry about, which is why it is actually harder. For example it is much easier to say a word than to spell it. This is even true in your own language. You probably know how to say a lot of big words, yet can’t spell most of them.

It can often be better to focus on getting really good at speaking, before actually trying to really focus on writing. If we think about this, this is how children learn. Kids learn to speak and then they go to school where they learn how to actual write.

You Shouldn’t Avoid Writing For Long

A lot of people wrongly think that writing is not important and that you can ignore it, which is understandable. I have spent a lot of this article saying that it is maybe not the best thing to focus on.

However, this is wrong, and while you can certainly avoid it as a total beginner, you can’t avoid it forever. We need writing both for general communication purposes and to just increase our ability in the language.

As soon as you have had some basic input and covered the basics, you should start writing. We use writing more than we think and we can’t ignore it.

(You can read more about – How To Practice Writing In A Language)

Conclusion

Focusing on writing is not important for a total beginner, but as you can see, it is still important and it is something all language learners should be doing, especially once they get to grips with the basics.

Writing is something that can help you progress in your language, but that does not mean you should ignore reading, listening and speaking as they are all equally as important.

For the best results you should focus on everything, this will allow you to be well balanced in the language and will allow you to get to the level where you want to be.

(You can read more about – How To Improve Your Writing Skills In A Foreign Language)