Hi there,
I would like to know how you started your writing activity in a foreign language?
Do you use any technique like scriptorum or sentence shuffling (FLR / laoshu)?
I find that sentence shuffling is a very difficult activity, but it seems to help a lot!
However, I also tried copying texts from my textbooks and that doesn’t seem too rewarding. I still have tremendous problems with spelling afterwards, and I find it boring to copy texts. I know many people like to do it for learning, and there might be some benefits, but I don’t seem to see them.
I tried to copy a list of vocabulary for Chinese, and afterwards went through a dialogue with better understanding, so it seems to help for vocabulary acquisition / understanding.
My question is: what do you do, if you want to write in the language? Apart from input, is there anything that helps the process? Thanks
Sorry but the only universal answer is readings.
After that it is very language specific and also do you want to handwrite or are you happy with typewriting only ?
I only typwrite. I think if I wanted to write chinese, I would learn the unicode of each character and would write everything with alt+unicode - maybe I would understand this to be a bad idea but I cann’t say since I am not into writing chinese at all, for now and the next future.
For french learning some grammar is very usefull to write correctly. There are also a lot of mnemonics that natives use. For example to know if a verb ends with é or with er you put another verb from another ending group Je vais manger and no je vais mangé because when you put partir in stead of manger you hear that je vais partir sounds correct when je vais parti does not. Ses vs ces ses is possessive when c is demonstrative where you show things and if you show something with the finger of your left hand you see some kind of a c in your fingers at least more so than any s.
In german I know that accusative comes first and dative later (a before d). So mich or dich that come before mir or dir are the accusatives when mir and dir are the datives. There is also the c in mich or dich this c is in accusative not in dative and the t of dative is close to the r in mir and dir
It isn’t correct!
Ich schreibe dir (dat) einen Brief (acc)
Sie gibt mir (dat) einen Apfel. (acc)
Now about writing - yes, writing is connected with reading.
If you read a lot, you’ll write better.
But don’t try writing a long text in a foreign language without the good adoption to it !
Firstly it’s enough to write 3-4 sentences, not more.
And only if you are at the intermediate level, you can write gradually more and more.
Keep a journal and write daily… even if it is a single word/expression describing something you are doing… or maybe do it on social media if you prefer. Use on-line resources to make sure your words are correct. At some point you will naturally want to expand to a few sentences.
However at the beginning stages and for learning spelling and overall basic pronunciation and relation between words, I often write out my lessons by hand from books such as Assimil. Then the next day, when I do another lesson, I type the previous lesson on the computer.
Whether this works, not too sure. I feel it helped me a lot in Spanish and French, but with my current Korean studies, it doesn’t seem to be helping as much.
I did not mean that accusative comes first to dative in sentences. I meant it comes first in dictionary because A comes before D this is a mnemonic the accusative dich coming first to the dative dir too.