An Excellent Exercise to Improve Your Vocabulary and Grammar

One of the four pillars of learning a language is also an excellent exercise to improve your vocabulary and grammar.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are four pillars of learning a language.

Reading
Writing
Listening
Speaking

In that post, I explained how you can improve your listening skills.

Today's post is about writing.

Get Feedback for Your Writing

When you're learning a language, writing texts and having your texts corrected by a language instructor is one of the most effective exercises you can do.

If you have a language instructor, seize every opportunity to have your texts corrected by them. If you don't have one, consider hiring one.

Use LanguageTool

At this moment, Learn Practice doesn't offer an automated or manual text correction service. Therefore, I recommend a third-party open source solution: LanguageTool.

LanguageTool is not a full-blown text correction service, but a spellchecker that also gives some style tips.

Unfortunately, it doesn't offer some grammar checks like articles and inflection of adjectives.

For example, it doesn't find any mistakes in the following sentences.

Hij is een groot man.
Het man is groot.

The correct versions of these sentences are as follows.

Hij is een grote man.
De man is groot.

It highlights the typos, which is great when you are learning Dutch.

Take a Quiz Now!

The Free Version Is Good Enough

For Dutch, the paid version doesn't add more than an MS-Word plug-in and a higher character limit. So, you can go ahead and use the free version.

Installing LanguageTool as a stand-alone program is possible but not necessary. To do that, you need to install java first if you don't already have it.

If you have a Windows machine, you might need to write a simple batch file to start it with a double click. Click here for how to do that.

You don't necessarily need to install LanguageTool on your machine to use it. You can always use the online version.

Conclusion

Writing texts and having them corrected by an instructor is an excellent practice to learn a language.

If you have an instructor or not, you're better off using a spellchecker like LanguageTool.

In either case, don't forget to solve quizzes on Learn Practice for 15 minutes a day because vocabulary and grammar are the foundations of the four pillars of learning a language.

If you need reminders to solve quizzes on Learn Practice, click here to turn them on.

Stay tuned for more tips on how to improve your reading and speaking skills.

Burak Bilgin,
Founder of Learn Practice