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Short-term goals?

  Tags: Goals
 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery Post Reply
Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6199 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

1 person has voted this message useful



ProfArguelles
Moderator
United States
foreignlanguageexper
Joined 7016 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.
2 persons have voted this message useful



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