My new regular writing exercise

Open Forum
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I have gotten to a C1 level with reading thanks to LingQ but my spoken output lags. I meet an hour a week to walk my dog and speak with a young French college student here in California who needed an odd job and misses HIS dog. It’s great! But I find myself short of vocabulary with which to tell my weekly stories and news, and that felt like an area to work on.

So I have started regularly writing short vignettes about things from my week, like I would tell a friend, just 4 or 5 sentences. I do this without looking anything up.

Then I allow myself to look up vocabulary that’s missing because I forgot it or never knew it.

Then, with a nod to Hinative and LingQ langage exchange, I open up free ChatGPT, paste in my paragraph, and ask if it sounds natural. ChatGPT is very effective at correcting work! It explains what’s wrong and why, which is powerful immediate feedback.

Finally, I paste the corrected paragraph into LingQ to create a little lesson, and I study the vocabulary through LingQ.

This is fun and it’s already helping my conversations on those walks!

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What a great idea. Thanks for sharing!

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Great idea! Thanks for sharing.

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A language learning success story then. It’s awesome that you’ve made it so far and still want more.

I think we are at a similar level in our studied languages. Finding words has become increasingly easier, but finding the right word or phrasing it correctly is still problematic. Less so when writing as I tend to correct my earlier self when writing anyway.

I really like your approach of asking if it sounds natural and seeing examples of better ways to write it, it feels like one of the final stages to mastery which is quite exciting and makes it real.

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I’m taking a similar approach to the same problem, writing WhatsApp messages to friends who are native speakers, instead of writing separate vignettes. And I encourage these friends to correct my attempts.

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