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Time logging | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 25 of 31 01 December 2014 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thing is, I have no idea how much time I spend on language learning. Most of my learning is in small intervals of a few minutes here and there, as well as learning on the bus/train/tram, etc. I wanted to know how much language learning time I can fit into each day. So far, I've been surprised to learn that I got about as much language learning done on a weekday as on the weekend, even though I had no other activity planned on the weekend. Stray surfing and watching some English-language programming took up lots of time and I only got about 4-5 hours of language learning done. Today, I had three hours logged by the time I got home from work, though a fair amount of that was litening to Portuguese lectures on YouTube in the background while I was working. An hour of it was Anki, though.
It's also interesting to see the proportions. A lot of the study time is watching TV (the great Brazilian sitcom Toma lá dá cá) and some reading. Putting words into Anki also accounted for some time and of course Anki reps is about a quarter of my total study time. I think I want to spend more time reading in the long run, but right now I'm still struggling slightly with decoding, so the sitcom is probably time well spent. Basically, I'm not doing this because I expect to get some great benefit from it. I'm doing it because it's fun. HOWEVER: 1: I do feel a bit of pressure to cut the stray surfing short because I know the clock is ticking (as it is now). 2: It would be interesting to log every minute of study time from the start of learning a new language, to see how many study hours it actually takes to reach a certain level, and maybe compare it to the FSI estimates. EDIT: That's 21 minutes of surfing! Time to get back to the sitcom! Edited by Ari on 01 December 2014 at 6:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5129 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 26 of 31 01 December 2014 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The way I go about logging things (in my above-mentioned DB), I only keep track of four things:
* The date * The activity, of which I've limited my choices to: Course, Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking * The number of minutes * The Language I have an optional field for a description where I normally input course name, what I read/write, italki, etc. too. At the end of the month (or sometimes week) I take a look at the percentage split between activities and adjust accordingly, if needed. The charting features of my DB do all that automatically, so I don't have to worry about setting things up for that. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4081 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 27 of 31 02 December 2014 at 2:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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I use toggl.
It also allows you to manually add the times you studied, in case you didn't have a gadget at hand to access the program. I like it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3824 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 28 of 31 02 December 2014 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm going to tackle Iverson's post. :) According to the book "How to Become a Straight -A Student " by Cal Newport ( link here ) , quality study time is when you dedicate your mind to one task at a time. So based on this definition, doing two tasks accomplishes quality time in...neither .
Both TV and wordlisting would be equal if you are straining to catch every word and structure you're familiar with when watching TV, and learn new ones. I do watch anime in Japanese, but I find that no way can I pay attention to the language if it's a new episode to me; if I'm familiar with the storyline already, then I can pay attention to the spoken language. Well, those are my thoughts regarding time-keeping and studying, at least. :) 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 29 of 31 02 December 2014 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If Cal Newport thinks quality study time only can take place when you dedicate your mind to one task at a time then he is simply wrong. And I can prove it simply to pointing to all the things I have learned while watching TV or listening to music. The crux of the matter is that I would have become bored or restless much earlier if I hadn't had something running in the background. And in that case I would not have learnt much.
It's probably a very individual question how much and which kinds of diversions you can tolerate (or profit from!), and the level you are at in a given target language and the character of your study activities also play a big role here, but claiming that you only learn efficiently when you concentrate all your attention on one thing is an extreme claim without foundation in reality. The comparison between TV watching and wordlisting is also problematic because these activities not only are very different, but also play very different roles: if I I watch TV in for instance Spanish or Serbian I train my ability to keep following the speech without letting unknown words or unclear passages stop me. But if I try to recapitulate exactly which words and expression I have learned I doubt that there would be much concrete learning to point to - the lingustic benefits I get from watching TV are more a longterm effect on my comprehension skill, an improved 'ear' for the sound of the language in question plus some cultural background (at least with some kinds of programs). In contrast the things I pick up from wordlisting or other kinds of intensive study are very concrete, and they are mostly of the kind where I can specify exactly what I have learnt. Both kinds of activities are necessary - but the balance changes along the way: more intensive study in the beginning, more extensive fun and relaxation at the later stages. But at long last I reach the stage where I can discuss politics, history, science or cultural topics freely I have been through both phases ... and at that point I have totally lost track of my time expenditure (and couldn't care less). Edited by Iversen on 02 December 2014 at 11:49pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 30 of 31 03 December 2014 at 2:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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In general, I don't track my time. Anki and the http://learn.lingvist.io/ do it automatically. I'm interested in how much time I spend, but I'm not interested in tracking it. That's where computers come in handy. I also make mental notes about the duration of audio, etc. I don't have a "global tracking system" though. If my GPS told me I'd spent, say 2000 hours doing some kind of French work over the last couple of years, I might get discouraged. Rather, I just do what's in front of me.
Where I do find time tracking handy is in things like comparing Anki to the Lingvist for stockpiling vocabulary, or noting how much time I've done FSI drills, even if it's an estimate. These things help me frame the immensity of learning a language to the level that makes me comfortable. I can't imagine learning Russian or German on top of my existing goals. There just isn't enough time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6150 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 31 of 31 03 December 2014 at 10:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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I tracked my time as part of various TAC’s (2008,2009,2010) and my 1,000 hours challenge (2010,2011). It’s worth doing at the start, as it helps you identify all the small dead times in the day you can use for study, as well as incentivising you to study instead of other non-critical activities. E.g. relaxing in front of the television. The main issue though is that you become time obsessed over study quality. This means you’ll favour low intensity non-taxing language activities over high learning tasks that require effort. The high learning activities are more enjoyable but they can’t be sustained. E.g. Playing a sport or music is more rewarding than watching or listening, but you can’t do it for as long. As an aside, just looked at Lingvist last night and it’s weirdly addictive.
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