M E M B E R S O N LY

2016

SEPTEMBER 09
INNER CIRCLE
THIS MONTH

HOW TO WRITE 1000 WORDS

IN 5 MINUTES A DAY –
THE DAILY DOSE DIARY
 Use This Simple Tactic to
Wow Your Teacher
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Welcome back to the Inner Circle, listeners. First, the cold hard numbers… my goal for the month.
What was it?
Last time, you learned about the benefits of speaking
about someone else. We covered how applying that Promised Goal: 17 minutes of German conversation
tactic allows you to speak longer, and lets you use by September 30th, 2016.
sentence structures you already know in new Result: 13 minutes.
situations. In this Inner Circle, we’re talking about how
What happened?
to write 1000 words of in your target language...

This month, I focused a bit more on writing. So, while

...in just 5 minutes a day.
my conversation was only 13 minutes, it was actually at
a much higher level than before- high enough that I
So, in this Inner Circle lesson, you’ll learn:
wowed my teacher!
1. How I Used This Simple Tactic to Wow My Teacher Want to know exactly what I mean?
2. The Language Learning Benefits of Writing
Let’s get into today’s Inner Circle lesson
3. How You Can Apply it
 Just to make it clear, the 1,000 words of German is the result of a
month-long process.
Now, as mentioned, I didn’t hit my speaking goal. But, the quality of
the conversation I had was much, much higher. You’ll learn more
about that in just a moment, but first, let’s look at the tactic.

USING THE DAILY DOSE APP

How You Can

If you don’t already have the Daily Dose App,

CLICK HERE TO GET IT FOR THE IPHONE, IPAD

Use This
OR ANY ANDROID DEVICE.

How does it work? Each day, you get a mini-lesson delivered

Simple Tactic
right to your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. That’s it.

SO, HOW DID I USE THIS APP TO WRITE IN GERMAN THIS MONTH?

to Wow Your
Now, the app doesn’t exactly teach you to write. What the app does is
set a different theme for each day of the week. For example, Saturday
is German slang, Tuesday is “German words of the week,” Wednesday

Teacher
could be a grammar lesson and so on.

I wrote about those topics. And yes, I wrote them out by hand.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• For example, on the first of this month, the topic was Johann
Sebastian Bach. And with my 5-minute a day self-imposed limit, I
would a write a few sentences – about 1 or 2. So each day I was
doing about 2 sentences. Sounds easy?
In principle, yes. But it’s actually a little more complex.
Let me explain. I wanted to write about Bach, but what I
wanted to write took me time to research. I had to
research the vocabulary, the grammar and of course his
songs. Yes, I did listen to some them.
The sentences were:
● Bach was a great musician and composer.
● My favorite piece is the St Matthew Passion.
Again, it seems simple. But, if you think about it, there’s
the past tense in there. Then there are the vocabulary
words – musician, composer — and I had to find the
name of a Bach song. I’m wasn’t just writing “Bach was a
musician.”
The bonus to this is that I’m also learning about German
culture. So, my new cultural knowledge serves as a
talking point with my teacher.
The result? I have more things to talk about, in greater
detail.
Now, this is just one day. I did this for almost the entire
month of September until I reached 1,000 words.
And if you take a look at it, the idea isn’t that unrealistic. I
wrote for 28 out of the 30 days in September (I needed
the final two days to write this, do the audio lesson and
send you the email, of course). So, divide 1,000 by 28
and that’s about 35 words a day. Not so hard. On some
days, I wrote more and on some; I wrote less.
Now, about writing.
Let’s move onto the second point.
 How did it help?

This daily writing routine allowed me to construct and write

2
much more complex thoughts. On top of that, everything that I
wrote out – the newly learned grammar, vocab, phrases and of
course, the sentences – I remembered much better because I
wrote them out.

And many people agree that this is true, that writing improves

The Language
memory.

It’s how I learned Japanese kanji. I would write them out one by

Learning Benefits one.

of Writing
So I did the research online. Then I’d handwrite everything.
Then I would make it digital – I’d type it up, send to my teacher
and the teacher would make the corrections

AND THIS IS WHERE THE “WOW” CAME IN.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• “My favorite piece is the St. Matthew Passion” is a bit more
advanced than “It’s sunnytoday.” The teacher wasn’t expecting
that!

And this is what Daily Dose does. It gives you incredible talking
points and topics. What I did was simply expand upon them
through a self-imposed writing exercise.
 3
● Download the Daily Dose of Language App and each day; you get a new topic.
● Write a few sentences out based on that topic.
There are cultural points; there’s slang, new vocab, and outside of
the app, there are many great tools out there to help you construct
your sentences. I was actually using google translate to get the 2
sentences and see how close my German was to Google’s version.

● Be sure those sentences are interesting and deep.

If you don’t have a Premium PLUS teacher, you can send it to a
friend, post it online somewhere or share it to get feedback – which
is the most important step for improvement.

USE IT.
Finally, when you have that perfect sentence, use it in a conversation.
And again, “My favorite piece is the St. Matthew Passion,” is much
more interesting than “It is sunny today.”
So, this month, I focused on this particular tactic. As an Inner
Circle member, you too have free access to the Daily Dose
App. So get that App right now and start your Daily Dose
diary today.

Download the App for free at the link below:

http://www.innovativelanguage.com/dailydose

Alright, let’s talk goals.

I slipped and am back down to 13 minutes. Let’s shoot for 17

minutes again, by October 31st, 2016.

Listeners, have you ever kept a journal in a foreign language?

Why don’t you send us a sentence or two!

Shoot me an email at
inner.circle@innovativelanguage.com

See you next month

To your fluency,
Peter Galante
Founder, InnovativeLanguage.com