How to: The First Letter To Your New Penpal
Hi there! After helping someone out to write their first letter to their first penpal, I thought I could use some of my penpalling experience to give away some ideas on how and what to write on your first letter to your new penpal. These ideas are, of course, far from perfection, so any extra suggestion will be highly appreciated!
1. First of all, you can write a brief letter introducing yourself and your life situation (are you a student? do you have a stable job? do you live alone? do you have pets? what are your plans for the near future? anything interesting that happened to you lately?).
2. Attach a visual description of yourself and your interests. This will make your penpal remember stuff about you easily and it will come handy when they write you back. Here’s one I made last year for one of my penpals:
3. Finally, you can write some questions for your penpal in a separate paper. This is really good to break the ice between the two of you and get to know some information about your new penpal that actually interests you. For example, I’m really into books, so some of the questions I’d ask would be:
- What’s your favorite book?
- What’s the book you disliked the most? Why?
- Do you feel related to any book character?
If you still feel creative after doing all of these, these are some extra gifts you can add in your first letter/package:
a picture or a drawing of the place you live
a postcard of your hometown or from place you visited recently
a map of the place you live with some notes written on it
a picture of your pets
a picture of your favorite anime character
samples of your favorite washi tapes
one bag of your favorite tea
a small card with book/movie/song recommendations
a small souvenir from your country, like a keychain or a magnet
Hope this helps! ♡
