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Time logging | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3881 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 31 28 November 2014 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||
If you've developed the habit, then you're good to go. That's where I always falter. The extreme time tracking is borne out of both an interest in the data itself (so the few seconds it takes to punch in an activity is trivial to me and a pain to you) and as a way of making sure I'm doing what I set out to do. I don't do it because I'm a masochist and I certainly don't do it to try and impress people. It's just a tool/process that I found helpful in university and a habit that has followed me through language learning and other interests. I wouldn't track it for 20 years! That would be crazy. I usually delete/reset my stuff after a few months and start from scratch again. You could apply your reasoning to people who count calories, who log their daily runs, and so on. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 18 of 31 28 November 2014 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Well that is true. I, for example tracked my commute times for about 90 days to see what my average travel time was. But I have an app called Tasker which wrote to a file each time my phone disconnected from my home wifi and connected to my work wifi (and viceversa) then I parsed the logfile. But because this logging was trivial to setup (about 30 minutes) and worked automatically I could use the data. My problem, I suppose, is because the on/off tracking thing is manual I would forget to do it, and then I'd be frustrated because the data wasn't accurate. When I was running I did apply my reasoning to it. I had a running schedule which increased x% per week until I got to where I needed to be to run a marathon. I wrote it on a calendar and if I was supposed to run 3 miles that day, that is what I did. I didn't bother tracking my gps location, or number of steps taken or anything. My system only required a couple of mapped out paths from my house for 2,3,5,7,10,15,20,25 mile runs. When I was young I did this with a car and a map. Now I use WalkJogRun but it works out the same. Plan your route, schedule your session, do your session. This simple method works for my language learning too. But everyone has a different mentality and methodology for everything they do. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3881 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 31 28 November 2014 at 12:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Once you've developed the habit of tracking things, it takes care of itself ;)
I may get bored of doing it and it's likely I won't continue past Christmas. Once you settle into a daily routine the tracking becomes mostly useless because every day/week/month is very similar to the ones that precede them. But I am still bouncing around quite a bit following jobs, travelling, and moving to different cities and so on so it helps give me some control in an otherwise chaotic time. Any way, back to Platiquemos for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4638 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 20 of 31 28 November 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I used to do time logging at university, but nowadays I do not find it useful. The reason I did it back then was that I spent maybe eight to ten hours a day on languages (including studies of linguistical theory, phonetics, history of languages etc), and I would normally work on three or four languages in parallel, so I wanted to know how I distributed my time on the different languages and subjects throughout the week.
Today my only "serious" language study is Russian, for my other languages it is more about maintenance and slowly improving in vocabulary and outpot. Therefore, I really can't find a purpose for spending time on time tracking in a busy day. As long as I can squeeze in some time on intensive Russian study, and spend a few hours (it varies greatly) on reading in different languages every day, I am fine with that. I do not need to know whether I spent 35 minutes more or less on Russian this week compared to last week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5206 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 21 of 31 28 November 2014 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Same, plus for me it would remind me too much of my job, where we have to use a time-tracking system like that for every task. Having some sort of data on how many hours I've spent per language and per activity would be quite interesting just for curiosity's sake, but I'm not sure how it would actually help my language learning. To use the example from my job again, the tracked hours are used for billing and for performance tracking, comparing estimates to actia; time taken and so on; for languages, where progress isn't really quantifiable, I'm not sure what use the figures would be. I have experimented with the Pomodoro technique in the past, but I've found that if I have enough motivation and enough free time then things tend to take care of themselves. Similarly, I did a half Super Challenge a couple of years ago (100 films), and I just found that I was tracking things that I would have done anyway. It was nice to know that I had watched that many films, but it didn't change my motivation or my progress. Maybe the unquantifiable nature of language learning progress is the reason why so many people are keen on time-tracking, because it gives them something that they can measure and that helps with motivation? I don't feel the need for it, but if it helps you then that's great! Edited by garyb on 28 November 2014 at 3:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 31 01 December 2014 at 9:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I can't see the point in time tracking. If I study a Russian text while watching TV in German, which proportion of each hour should I then accord to each language? If I just watch TV without doing anything else should I then count 'short' hours because I'm lazy? Is an hour of wordlisting more worth than watching TV from Serbia? Is reading an article in Serbian more worth than listening? I probably need oral activities more, but I feel I learn more from studying a text, and in my opinion it would be unfair to accord the same amount of efficient study time to two activities when they clearly aren't equally efficient.
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| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3881 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 31 01 December 2014 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
That is one of the main reasons I'll be giving it up soon. It doesn't really quantify learning, only that you've committed hours to trying to do so. Trying to get through a certain number of books or films would be less onerous. More of a macro approach rather than micro. Now that I've developed better habits, I can give it up entirely. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4307 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 24 of 31 01 December 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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My main reason for being so anal about the hours is that I want to accrue some data about my language learning. I want to know whether it's worth the
bother to study intensively, or whether it's better to spread out the learning. I want to know about what works for me by trial and error: to do that I need to be able to compare data and not only to compare my own subjective memories which may be unreliable. Right now I can only compare two languages and come to limited conclusions, but for future languages the stats will give me some empirical basis for how I decide to study. With trial and error I can reflect on what seemed to produce better results in the long run. Also, I don't see any downside. Counting the hours also keeps me consistent. Sometimes the counting is fuzzy, like when I sit at a table for two hours, not really understanding what is said, and only occasionally talking, I may decide to count 2 hours of actual time as one hour of "Conversation." But most things I do are readily quantifiable. I don't watch a lot of TV where there are long stretches of time without any language. When I do, I tend to only count half the time to compensate for this. My system used to be with tally-marks, counting the hours with each mark, but this had the effect of encouraging me to work at one task for one full hour at a time, which I don't think is the best approach. Instead I now vary my activities and work no longer than 15minutes on one activity, which keeps boredom at bay. I now log one hour as a small box (each edge represents 15 minutes) with five such small boxes arranged symmetrically in order to neatly represent a five hour chunk, in the same way tally marks represent five marks neatly. This is an example from my current scriptorium volume, which currently logs almost 300 hours. You can see that I started the volume with tallies but switched after about 30 hours. 
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