Now, again, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and how it applies to language learning and the sixth habit that Covey has is ‘To Synergize’. He talks about combining the strengths of people through positive teamwork so as to achieve goals that you couldn’t achieve on your own. As I said in my introductory video, in language learning the synergy comes from doing all of the different skills or all of the different language tasks. There’s no point in saying I can speak, but I can’t read or I can read, but I can’t speak and everything we do contributes to the other skill.

Reading, for example, is not just about reading. Although, it’s a wonderful way to learn about a culture, it’s a wonderful way to accumulate words. If you accumulate words, you have more confidence when you’re speaking. When we read we often sub-vocalize, so reading is a way to improve our pronunciation. As we sub-vocalize, we become aware that there are words we don’t know how to pronounce and so we might become more attentive and listen more carefully to those words when we’re listening.

I find, for example, if I listen without having the text I have trouble remembering the word. I really need to read and then I can associate a written, depending on the language. It could be characters in Chinese, it could be simply an alphabet in Russian or Korean, but that I associate this sound with these words and that reinforces my ability to remember it. Writing, if you have the discipline to do it, is a great way to get started in output. There’s no pressure on you, so you write.

I find that when I write in a foreign language, basically, I just write as if I were speaking. In English I can have sort of a literary style and a more casual style, but when I’m speaking a foreign language, unless it’s maybe French, I don’t really have a separate literary style. It’s essentially my spoken language written down. Writing reinforces your speaking ability, in my opinion, and your speaking ability reinforces your writing ability, so it’s a good idea to practice all skills.

Even though, as you know from my videos, I prefer to spend the bulk of my time on input for the longest while to build up my sort of potential capability, then I need more and more opportunity to speak where I take advantage of what I have built up through these other activities. All activities, in fact, work with each other so you do have lots of synergy when you are learning languages.

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