How to Write to Someone Who Doesn't Speak Your Language

The most common reason people give up on international pen pals isn't distance or time zones. It's the quiet assumption that they need good English first.

They don't. But writing across languages does take a slightly different approach than writing in your own.

Write shorter sentences than feels natural

Machine translation handles simple structure well and complex structure badly. One idea per sentence survives the trip. Three clauses stacked with commas usually don't.

Compare:

Although I had been planning to visit my grandmother in the countryside, which I do every summer since I was young, the trains were fully booked and I ended up staying home, which turned out fine.

versus:

I usually visit my grandmother every summer. This year the trains were fully booked. I stayed home instead. It turned out fine.

The second one carries the same meaning and arrives intact in any language.

Avoid what doesn't travel

Idioms. "It's raining cats and dogs" becomes nonsense or, worse, literal. Say it's raining hard.

Sarcasm. Tone is the first thing lost. If you write "great, another Monday," there's a real chance it lands as enthusiasm.

Puns and wordplay. They're built on one language's sounds. They can't cross.

Heavy slang. It ages fast and translates badly. Some slang is fine and even fun to explain — just don't build a whole paragraph on it.

Keep culture-specific things, but explain them

This is the opposite of the advice above, and it matters more.

Don't flatten your letters into generic English. The specific things — a dish your mother makes, a holiday nobody outside your country celebrates, a word that has no equivalent — are the most interesting part of an international correspondence.

Just add one line of context:

Yesterday was Chuseok, our harvest holiday. Families travel to their hometowns and the highways are jammed for ten hours. My grandmother made songpyeon — small rice cakes shaped like half-moons.

Now it's translatable and worth reading.

Use translation as a tool, not a wall

Most people who write across languages do one of three things:

Draft in your own language and translate. Fastest, most natural. Your voice survives because you weren't fighting vocabulary while thinking. The risk is you never see what actually got sent.

Write directly in their language. Slower, more errors, and genuinely good practice. Your pen pal will almost certainly find the effort endearing rather than annoying.

Send both. Your original and the translation together. This is the most robust option — if the translation garbles something, the original is right there, and over months the person starts recognizing patterns in your language.

That last approach is why some apps show original and translation side by side by default. On Lettie, every letter and reply translates across 16 languages and both versions sit next to each other, so nothing gets hidden behind the machine. A lot of people report picking up their pen pal's language gradually without ever deciding to study it.

When something lands wrong

It will happen. A sentence arrives colder than you meant, or a joke reads as an insult.

Say so plainly:

I think my last letter came out wrong. What I meant was…

Almost everyone in an international correspondence has been on both sides of this. Naming it directly resolves it faster than anything else, and it usually deepens the friendship rather than damaging it.

What you gain

Writing across languages forces a kind of clarity you don't practice otherwise. You say what you mean, once, plainly, because you can't rely on tone to carry it.

People often notice their writing in their own language gets better too.

And the friendship itself tends to be sturdier than you'd expect. When two people keep writing despite the extra effort, both of them are choosing it deliberately every time.

Start with four short sentences. That's enough.