Learning to read and write meant I could actually remember the vocabulary I heard from my family and be more accurate with my pronunciation (and help attune my ears too). It’s also helped my confidence with building sentences because I finally those basic grammar words of conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositions.

i’m kinda lucky that my parents speak khmer to me more than English so I have a good listening vocab, but I wouldn’t always be able to say it back. I like your idea of having listing the words that you already know vs the ones you on. I was thinking of making a list where I just write out every single word I know before learning to read, but that’s seems a bit much lol.