Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 1 of 2 12 January 2008 at 8:29pm | IP Logged |
Have you found it useful to set short-term goals within the study of a language,
other than hours to spend on various high-level tasks? If so, what are they?
Do you consider it worthwhile to think of achieving goals short of fluency, on
a shorter timescale, as part of the path to fluency?
On a similar note, your plans for a polyglot academy mention evaluating progress
after the first year. What type of evaluation are you considering? Do you consider
evaluation useful in the progress of an auto-didact, and if so, how do you recommend
doing it? To what extent do you do so yourself?
I should probably clarify: by short-term, I mean anywhere from a few weeks to quarterly
or even yearly, in contrast to daily/weekly or long-term goals.
I ask the above questions because I am wondering about incorporating this type of goal
into my language study over the next while. I would like to know if you consider it useless, or not, and if not, to hear any advice you have on formulating useful goals of this type.
Regards;
Volte
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 2 of 2 13 January 2008 at 8:57pm | IP Logged |
I personally have never set short-term goals, but I generally do prescribe them when working individually with students. I suppose this is a double-standard of sorts, but frankly that is just the way it is: if you have high enough degrees of discipline, commitment, know-how, and long-term perspective, then they are unnecessary. If you do not, then setting and keeping short-term goals is a good way to maintain your rate of progress. Apart from self-evaluation as to whether it is advisable to even continue with a certain language or activity, I do not see much purpose in evaluation for independent auto-didacts. In a more formal learning situation, however, they are certainly necessary. I would like to keep considerations about the academy in the body of my own main post there, but since it has come up here, I will say that I would evaluate effort first and foremost by the accurate keeping of records or logs, such as the one I have recently provided, and then results by attainment of the ability to be intellectually functional in the languages studied within a set time frame after taking them up.
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