Do you keep some sort of journal to micromanage or measure your progress? Meaning, do you write sentences in your target language that you hear, perhaps write down questions that you want to ask, or anything to help you stay organized?
I’ve watched videos of people saying they do this. However, I keep progress checks in my head and I don’t worry to much if I don’t write down a cool phrase or word that I saw or someone told me. Is this doing me a disservice? Do you think being really organized would help you get the most out of learning?
I am the organized messy type of person. If LingQ didn’t exist with their convenient statistics, personal word database, I’d wonder what my progress would be like.
For my personal language study, I keep track of the time I spend. I keep notes of things that are interesting to me. I keep track of resources I use and my commentary on those resources.
I use evernote to organize my learning material, things that I like., My 1-on 1 language exchange note, motivation quotes and mp3 recordings of my own voices. Please look at evernote tutorials on you. I will now explain how I use evernote.
At lingq you can find at teach or some one to have a 1-on-1 conversation with. Before the conversation I write what I am going to say in English. Lets say that I want to talk about what I have been doing this week in my life. I write my ideas into evernote, as bullets points, In English. I have found that is works well for me. After I have finished a conversation, the teacher will sent you back a reported of the mistakes that I have made. When I receive the report, I get a native to record the text as a mp3. Also I record the report that I have received from the tutor. I find it useful to write in English how the conversation went…
In evernote, One of my note books is called Motivation and the other is called forecast. I will explain how this works. In my forecast notebook, I have four notes that I have divided the year into quarter. I run my language studies as a business. Q1, q2 and so on.
Q1 Start from jan-March
Q2 Start April - Jun
Q3 Starts July-Oct.
At the first q1 The first quarter of the year, I review where I am with my language. I have a review report card RRC. This is like a performances review. I ask myself a list of personal questions, that I plan to work towards for the next few months. One question that I ask, How can I, what can I do. I would recommend, that you have a list of question, that you review every month. EG If you go is to write in your target language, add that as your goal/target for the next few months.
If anyone has got any questions about my method, please do ask me and I would be happy to answer you questions. Please watch the video it explain what I have said.
I do keep records. I don’t even have a record player actually. I have those tracks in a more portable format anyway
On the language learning front, I’ve loosened up considerably. My first couple attempts at learning Korean were dismal failures. I think deep down I KNEW I wasn’t approaching it the correct way but somehow had my head in the sand for months on end. During those days I would track quiz results, keep stats on how many flashcards I knew without flipping them over…
However since I began consuming large amounts of input rather than filling out worksheets, I’ve started to care a lot less about any precise stats. My Korean study is also a lot less structured than it once was.
My current stats that I look at are: hours listened (now that I’m on LingQ it tracks this for me which is nice), words read (once again LingQ helps here). Those have the most direct ‘value’ to me since they indicate how much exposure I’ve had.
I use Memrise for flashcards and I never bother to look at my accuracy or stats other than how many words it says it has introduced me to. (Like most learning systems, it sells itself on big numbers and I know my actual ‘long term memory’ may disagree with the volume of information Memrise claims my long term memory contains).
However I think what you’re really getting at is: is there a reasonable way to track ones improvement in a language?
I’m not sure there is some easily measurable way. However I am hoping that in the future I’ll be able to:
Look at my older journal entries (since I write semi-regularly) and see how far I’ve come.
Revisit older material (on LingQ if I am still using the service) and understand more of it. I’d like to see that all the words in it (at least) are lighter than they used to be - indicating they are all more familiar (hopefully many have since become known).
