August 4, 2026
Writing Letters When English Is Not Your First Language
By Sander · 5 min read
A large majority of the letters on this site are written by people in their second, third or fourth language. If you are one of them and you find it intimidating, it is worth knowing that most of the people you are writing to are in exactly the same position.
Here is the practical version of how to do it well, and what genuinely matters as opposed to what you were told at school.
What native speakers actually notice
Not what you expect.
Fluent readers do not notice missing articles, wrong prepositions, or a verb tense that is close enough. Their brain repairs those before they reach conscious attention. What they notice is:
- Whether the letter is interesting. Overwhelmingly the main thing.
- Whether it answers what they asked.
- Register that is much more formal than the situation — "Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to introduce myself" to someone who signed off "cheers, Tom".
- Sentences so long they lose the thread. This is the one real comprehension problem, and it is a structure issue rather than a grammar one.
That is the whole list. The grammar you are anxious about is essentially invisible.
Short sentences are not simple sentences
The single most useful change for anyone writing in a second language: one idea per sentence.
Many languages — German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Arabic among them — support long, subordinated sentences far more comfortably than English does. Written English prefers to break them up. When a second-language writer builds a sentence the way their own language builds one, the result is grammatically defensible and hard to read.
Compare:
Although I had been planning to visit my grandmother who lives in a small village near the coast where I spent most of my childhood summers, which I remember very fondly, the weather forecast, which predicted heavy rain for the entire weekend, made me decide to postpone the trip until next month.
versus:
I was going to visit my grandmother this weekend. She lives in a small village on the coast, where I spent most of my childhood summers. But the forecast said rain all weekend, so I've postponed it to next month.
Same content, same vocabulary. The second one reads as fluent and the first does not, and no grammar was corrected.
Do not translate. Simplify, then write.
The instinct is to compose the sentence in your own language and translate it. This produces the long-sentence problem, plus vocabulary that is technically right and idiomatically strange.
Better: decide what the point is, reduce it to something you can say with words you already own, and write that. A letter written entirely within your existing vocabulary reads as confident. A letter reaching constantly for the dictionary reads as translated, even when every word is correct.
Save the dictionary for the one or two things you genuinely cannot express another way.
On machine translation
Use it as a checker, not as an author.
Running your own English through a translator back into your language to see whether it still means what you intended is genuinely useful. Writing your letter in your language and pasting the machine output is not, for two reasons: your pen pal cannot correct it, because the mistakes are not yours; and it removes the practice entirely, which was presumably the point.
There is also a tonal thing. Machine-translated letters read as slightly flat and oddly formal, and experienced correspondents can spot them. It is not a moral failing — but it does make the letter feel less like a person.
Ask for corrections explicitly, and specifically
Most native speakers will not correct you unless invited. In many cultures it would be rude, so they read your letter, understand it perfectly, and say nothing.
So ask. And ask for something bounded — "please correct everything" produces either nothing or an overwhelming page. This works better:
Could you pick out two or three things I got wrong — the ones that sounded most unnatural — and show me how you'd have said them? Don't worry about the small stuff.
Then use them. Deliberately build a sentence with the corrected structure in your next letter. Corrections you merely read are gone in a day; corrections you use once stay.
Our guide to language exchange by letter covers the full method if you want a proper tandem.
Register: the thing school got wrong
School teaches formal English, because school teaches exam English. Personal letters are not formal.
Some quick calibration:
- "Dear Anna," is fine. "Hi Anna," is better for anyone under about sixty.
- Contractions are correct. I'm, don't, it's, I'd. Writing "I am" and "do not" throughout makes a friendly letter sound like a legal notice.
- "Best regards" is a work email. Try: best wishes, all the best, take care, or just your name.
- You do not need to apologise for your English. One line at the start is fine if you want; a paragraph of apology in every letter becomes something your pen pal has to keep reassuring you about, which is a small job you are handing them each time.
The advantage nobody mentions
Writing in a second language makes you a more careful correspondent, not a worse one.
Because you are choosing words deliberately, you tend not to pad. Second-language letters are often more direct, more concrete and more surprising than native ones, which drift into idiom and cliché without noticing. Several of the best letter-writers on this site are people who describe their English as "not very good".
And an unusual turn of phrase — a metaphor from your own language, an idiom translated a bit literally — is very often the most memorable line in the letter. It is not an error to be ironed out. It is the thing that makes your letters yours.
If you are the native speaker
Three small courtesies, if your pen pal is writing in their second language.
Do not simplify to the point of insult. Write naturally; they will look up what they need. Do avoid dense idiom and phrasal verbs stacked three deep.
Answer the question they meant. If a sentence is ambiguous, take the generous reading rather than the literal one.
Correct only if asked, and gently when you are. Two or three per letter, with the natural version and a short reason. And say what they did well — a person writing to you in their fourth language is doing something you are probably not doing back.