G'day, how're ya going? Today, I am going to talk about why writing English diary is too early if you can hardly peruse English books due to lack of grammar and vocabulary. I do understand people want to jump into a more practical training rather than always studying tedious grammar and vocabulary. But nonetheless they are extremely important for English learners to master them prior to embarking upon more practical trainings such as writing an English diary. Why is that? Let's explicate!
To put it simply, you can't really write an English diary in a proper English manner in the first place
Obviously, you will look up words in English-Japanese or presumably English-English dictionaries, which is fine. But, if you rely heavily upon the dictionaries, your sentences will probably be strange or wonky as somehow direct translations from your own language might interfere. English and your own language cannot be interchangeable in terms of grammar, ways of expressing yourself and the nature of collocation and word-choice. That is, a meaning in your language doesn't necessarily mean exactly the same in English. As long as you have sufficiently mastered English grammar rules and vocabularies, you should be able to write basic proper English sentences freely without a heavy supervision of English dictionaries and literal interpretations.
Second, you've already got used to the ways of using wrong grammar rules in your English diary, and it's going to be quite difficult to get rid of this bad habit
Practise English writing a diary or blog is definitely a good way for English learners, but it is prerequisite for them to master basic grammar rules. Otherwise, you will hardly notice grammar mistakes, which has an adverse influence on the development of your English ability. Learning grammar and writing an English diary at the same time is not effective at all from my perspective, because it often tends to be a waste of time. I know just learning grammar is boring, but grammar is not huge volume than you might ponder. Once you've done one text a couple times and comprehended it thoroughly, the vast majority of grammar rules could be in your head as a long-term memory. And, you'll be alright when you write an English diary. You can flexibly formulate any sentence structure whatever you want to say.
Third, word-choice and collocation errors occur quite often if you haven't mastered basic vocabularies
To be effective in writing an English diary, ideally you should be able to utilise basic 5000 generic and academic words freely. Lack of basic vocabularies leads to the frequent occurrence of collocation and word-choice errors when you write an English diary. Trying to resist writing a diary and instead trying to read aloud basic words and write a short sentence using them are a good start of English learning journey before you dive into a kind of advanced learning style such as an English diary or blog. Learning new vocabularies is anything but boring. Please have a look at the below link and learn all of them. It might take a long time, depending on a person, but it's really worth getting used to them for your English diary.
Last but not least, you can hardly improve your writing and speaking skills if you lack basic English grammar and vocabularies
This is a radical opinion, but it's unfortunately true. You've got a drastic change when it comes to learning English. Many people tend to underestimate the paramount importance of English grammar and vocabularies. No good am I learning grammar/vocabularies and practising writing at the same time. There is no doubt that mastering grammar/basic vocabularies is your first priority, and then you commence writing your English diary or blog. Otherwise, it will take by far longer than you expect. Writing equals speaking. That is, if you do learn both grammar/vocabularies and writing simultaneously, your speaking is also improving much slower. Mastering grammar and basic vocabularies is not a big deal. I reckon it might take 3 to 6 months to complete, so you can decide whether you want to finish up boring stuff quickly and completely, and then jump into more exciting output training. I assure you that doing this way makes your English learning journey so much easier and smoother.
That's all for today. Thanks for having a flick through!
Have a good one!