Writing is a great way to practice using the Chinese you’ve learned without the time pressure of speaking. If you feel comfortable reading Chinese at an intermediate level or above, you are ready to start writing! Whether you want to write a letter, a blog post, an essay, or a book, you need input from the same type of material to know what to do. You can’t write a book without reading one first. The idea behind this method is to get input from sources that discuss the same material you want to write about, then rewrite the topic in your own words. When you are first starting, you may use this method to write a simple message or letter, but as you advance, you can use it to write more advanced pieces like a short story or an essay. In this example, I am going to write a journal entry, which I would consider to be of moderate difficulty, but this is the same technique I use for writing my much more complex blog posts. When you first start writing, you should start with something simple and work your way up. If you choose a topic that is too difficult or try to write in the same way you write in your native language, you will be frustrated by how much time it takes. Don’t compare your writing in Chinese to your writing in your native language. You’ve had a lot more time to practice your native language, so it’s not comparable. You should start with topics that you are familiar with in your native language and that will be relevant to you. Fluency comes in pockets, so you want to practice the stuff you need the most first. This is a great way of learning new words and phrases relevant to your interests. If you find this technique is too difficult for you, practice reading some more and come back to it later.

Not sure what to write about and looking for a prompt to use this technique with? Below you will find lots of different prompts to practice your writing. Choose a prompt about a topic you are familiar with. How much you write will depend on your Chinese level. It’s ok if you can only write a paragraph or two, that’s still infinitely more than nothing at all.

What You Will Need

Besides a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you will use Reverso Context, a Chinese-English dictionary, and ChatGPT for this method. Have these websites open in separate tabs as you write so you can reference them at any time.

You will probably also want to use some of the reading assistance tools talked about in the article below if you don’t use them regularly already. This will make understanding what you are researching much easier.

Journal Example

First, you need to choose the topic you want to write about and Google it. If you don’t know how to phrase the topic you are looking for, use Reverso Context or ChatGPT to help you. In this case, I want to write a journal entry about my day, so I want to see examples of other journal entries in Chinese. I’ll start by googling “journal” and opening a few sites to see if they have what I’m looking for. Here, I’m going to skip the first one because it doesn’t look very useful. The second link looks promising, but I’m going to do another search that’s a little more specific.

Googling journal example returns more promising sites, so I’m going to open a few into new tabs and read through them.

While not all the sites were very helpful, kenei.net has a lot of examples of daily journal entries written by all kinds of different people. Since I’m learning Chinese, I think examples written by grade school children is a good place to start.

Here I found this great example of a student’s Saturday helping their mom sweep up fallen leaves in the yard. The example is relatively short and has a lot of good grammar patterns I can follow in my own writing. The writer also puts their own twist on it in the way they complain about the leaves being uncooperative. While this one will serve as my main example, I also have a few other examples I like open in other tabs.

Now, it’s time for me to start writing my journal entry. On one half of my screen, I have my Word document, while on the other half, I have my example text. This is easiest on a desktop, but you can do this on a phone as well. I recommend choosing one reference to use as your outline, while the other references will serve as sentence reservoirs. You should use the sentences in the example as outlines that you can put your own information into. In this entry, I decided to write about my day picking vegetables from my garden. If you read through the example entry and then read through my entry, you should see where I pulled sentences from and where I changed things. I try to keep direct copying to a minimum unless it’s a common phrase. This will make my writing sound more unique and help me build stronger writing skills.

If you need to look up a phrase or word to use in your sentence, both Reverso Context and Weiblo will give you a bunch of example sentences to help you find what you are looking for. In this case, I wanted to say that I worked diligently. After scrolling through some example sentences, I decided that the best way to say this would be 认真的工作. There may be many different ways to phrase what you want to say, so just go with the one you think is best. You’ll see how to correct your writing later.

If you really aren’t sure how to phrase something, and Reverso and Weiblo aren’t helping, you can go to ChatGPT and ask it how to say what you’re looking for. ChatGPT is extremely useful, but it needs to be used as a tool, not as a translator. If you rely on it too much to translate everything for you, your Chinese will not improve. You should only be using ChatGPT for support. If you get really stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to give you an example of journal entry in Chinese, but only use what it gives you as an outline, don’t copy anything directly.

Once you’re done writing your letter, you’re going to put it into ChatGPT and ask it to correct what you wrote so it sounds natural. It’s important to ask ChatGPT to make it sound natural because it tends to make your writing sound stiff and formal if you don’t. To ask ChatGPT to correct your writing in Chinese, you will write, “请将这翻译成自然流畅的中文.” Then copy the text you’ve written into the chat box and press send. It will immediately send you the corrected version of your writing. If you would like it to explain the changes it made, you can write “请解释一下这个语法.” If the Chinese explanation is too difficult, you can also ask it to explain the grammar in English.

Next, we’re going to compare the corrected version of the journal entry to our own. Don’t just copy what ChatGPT spits out and make that your entry, instead go over it one sentence at a time to see what it changed. In my case, most of the changes it made were word choice and phrasing. It changed some words like 一下一下 to 一颗一颗 since that is the proper way to refer to picking vegetables, and it changed some of the phrasing around like 更热 to 越来越热。

For the last step, you are going to type out the corrected version of the letter by hand. Typing it yourself will help you remember the corrections much better than just reading it. You may also write it out on paper by hand if you would like to do so, but that’s not necessary. Once you’ve written out your final letter, that’s it. Congratulations! Now all you need to do is keep practicing, and you’re well on your way to writing in complex, natural-sounding Chinese. This will also help with your speaking and comprehension since you will pick up new words and phrases along the way. You can use this technique to write anything you want: dialogues, stories, articles. All of these are great for practicing your Chinese! I recommend starting a blog, journal, or social media page in Chinese where you can track your progress and store your writing. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your writing ability improves.