I kept my first English journal as a university student. Not for a class, not for practice — just because I needed somewhere to put my thoughts, and English felt like a different kind of space. I wrote about my day, vented about people I was annoyed with, tried to describe how I felt about things I was reading. Sometimes I’d reach for a word I’d seen in a textbook and realize I actually knew it. Not recognized it — knew it. It came out.
That’s the thing no one explains clearly enough: there’s a difference between knowing a word and being able to use it. Most of the English you’ve studied sits somewhere in the first category. You can recognize it, you understand it when you hear it — but when you need to speak, it doesn’t come. The gap between those two things is where most intermediate learners get stuck.
There’s a difference between knowing a word and being able to use it.
Writing in English every day — even a few sentences, even imperfectly — is one of the most direct ways to start closing that gap. Not because it’s good “exposure.” Because it forces you to do the thing lessons rarely ask you to do: produce the language, under your own steam, without a prompt.
What journaling does that lessons don’t
In a lesson, someone asks you a question. The topic is already chosen. The vocabulary is often pre-taught. There’s a teacher ready to step in if you stall.
When you write in your journal, none of that is there. You have to find the word yourself. You have to build the sentence from scratch. And when the word doesn’t come — when you know you want to say something but can’t quite get there — you notice it. You look it up. You write it down in context, in a sentence that actually means something to you.
That moment of reaching and finding is exactly what moves a word from recognition into use.
Journaling is low-stakes speaking practice
Here’s something that surprised me when I thought about it: writing about what happened today is, in a quiet way, rehearsal for talking about it tomorrow.
If you write I ended up staying late because the meeting ran over today, that phrasing is more likely to come when you need it in a real conversation. Not because you memorized it — because you used it. You put your actual thought into English, and your brain filed it differently than a word in a vocabulary list.
This is the part that trips people up. They study English. They learn new words. They do the exercises. And then they get into a real conversation and freeze anyway, because study and use are not the same thing. A journal is one of the simplest ways to start building that bridge — on your own schedule, without pressure, with subject matter you actually care about.
Learning and use are not the same thing.
What to write about (when you have no idea)
The most common reason people don’t start is they don’t know what to write. So here’s a simple starting point: write about your day in the past tense. One paragraph. What happened, what you thought about it, what you’re still thinking about.
That’s it. You don’t need prompts about your five-year plan or your ideal morning routine. You need to write about something real, in English, in a sentence that’s yours.
When you hit a gap — a word that won’t come, a sentence that feels wrong — don’t skip over it. That gap is the work. Look it up, write down the better version, and keep going. Over time, you’ll notice the same gaps appearing less often. That’s not just vocabulary growth. That’s the language becoming more available to you.
One thing worth knowing before you start
You don’t have to write perfectly. In fact, writing perfectly isn’t the point at all. The point is to use English to think — to let it carry a real thought, not just a practice sentence. The messier and more honest the entry, usually the more useful it is.
Some days you’ll write three sentences. Some days more. The length doesn’t matter. What matters is that you showed up in English — not to study it, but to use it.
That’s a different relationship with the language. And it’s one worth building.
If you want to improve your spoken English and you’re not sure where to start, my newsletter is a good place. I write about the gap between understanding English and being able to use it — and what actually helps close it.
Sound More Like Yourself in English
