Speaking VS Writing

 Is speaking or writing more important when learning a new language? Or it doesn't matter? This was one question many of my friend asked me, and I even asked myself. However if we look back
when we were young learning was so easy, all because we had so much fun and we didn't care about mistakes. Today we feel the pressure of being perfect and want to learn things as fast as possible, Am I saying that Speaking it is more important? No.

In fact there isn't a way to compare these two because both are different ways of communication, perhaps we think writing and reading is useless if all you need it's to understand when and talk when talking to someone in their language. But it will be really hard for that person to achieve a high level of proficiency in a short time if he/she only speaks. In the other hand writing has another "public" and it does help you a lot, even tho you write and understand like a native speaker you might wont be able to help someone who's lost, (that may be asking you for an address) or yourself when you are hungry in a foreign country you might just point to the menu( that's another option).

So I asked my friends to try a new method called Speaking VS Writing, so I asked a group(4 people) to only speak the language they were learning for 1 week only, no writing allowed, they could read if their level in the language let them do it. To another group of friends only write and write, no skype calls allowed, no pronunciation practice, 0 repeat after me for the same period of time( 4 people too). And last the 3rd group will do both (4 people).

At the end of the week the first 4 people were able to have a better pronunciation and learned new words, but they mostly forgot half of those words. They could notice their understanding got better, learned new phrases that would help them in daily life and they weren't afraid of making mistakes or feel stupid after the 4th day.

The second group learned many new vocabulary and their writing skills got better, they also felt like writing essays or reading books they weren't able to do before, they also felt like grammar was a lot easier and got better listening to others.

And in the end the third group improved a lot in both skills, and felt like it's was easier to remember not only new phrases, but also new words and pronunciation. It might be because they used more time of their lives to learn something in different ways, they also learned how to stay focused and to listen to understand and not to talk, because they were talking also writing those new things on only one week they could notice the difference.


How long they were suppose to speak/write? in the new language for 5 hours a day minimum.

They used pomodoros not to feel stressed and other techniques I recommended.

They were all at different levels of learning and divided by skills in the different groups, however this could change depending on the person and the difficulty of the language. The main purpose of this challenge was to prove that both are different skills and important as well.

This girl is talking about how different skills speaking and writing are.

She is a language learner, but she wasnt part of the challenge( random person I found)