How I use my language journal | Language goals update & plan with me �

[Music]

[Applause]

hello everybody

long time no language update today's

video is going to be super fun we're

going to have a chatty video i'm going

to tell you all about

how my language plans have changed

what's been working

what apps am i using what new habits am

i trying

and we're gonna do something together

which is reviewing the last week

of my language learning reviewing the

last month and planning ahead for the

new quarter

even though we are already one month

into the quarter

it's gonna be a long video but get some

tea get some popcorn get yourself comfy

and uh let's have fun talking all things

languages

let's talk about how it has been going

i'm gonna start with

a review of quarter one for more

um in-depth goals you can definitely

check out my twitter thread where i've

pinned

my goals for each quarter so i update

the thread every three months

let me get out my handy dandy language

journal

which has gained one more sticker i feel

like a child but

it makes me happy so at the back of this

journal

i have started to do a monthly

reflection

as well as a quarterly reflection so on

these pages here i do

a month reflection where i write down

all of the languages i focused most of

my energy on

what i was doing and what worked my

march reflection was quite ra

my march reflection was quite long and i

wrote it in french

and then my q1 goals has a page here

where i go through

i'm just evaluating what i've achieved

first of all some things that have

changed regarding the format

of my language journal if you've been

following the videos about my language

journal you'll see that

right at the beginning of the year i

thought that i could write a journal

entry

every sunday this is definitely doable i

do have time for it and i started

writing entries in both

hungarian and tagalog at the start of

the year

but halfway through quarter one if

you'll see on my twitter thread

i decided it's probably not the best

idea to be writing these

journal entries every week because it

wasn't so beneficial

i got more than enough reading and

writing practice

doing homework for my language lessons

on italki

and i found that because my tagalog is

still very beginner

i wasn't able to write a lot so even

though i think writing is

an amazing skill i don't think it was a

good idea for me to write

as such a like below a1 beginner in

tagalog

because i spent most of the time

scratching my head like what can i even

write about

i do acknowledge that once you get a

little past that

slight beginner hump uh once i got to

oh gosh i haven't taken a level test in

hungarian but

i'm definitely better at hungarian than

i am in tagalog once you're at a

comfortable level where you can

at least think in full sentences that's

when you can start writing so long story

short

i stopped writing journal entries

because i also write hungarian essays

for homework and for practice throughout

the week i also

tried to experiment with new things that

i could do in my planner

such as writing the apps that i use

instead of telling myself what app to

use planning beforehand

i just kept a log of which apps i

naturally gravitate to

uh with language learning so that i

could see okay these are the ones i

really enjoy using

and maybe i can start scheduling these

in and then i discovered toggle

i am definitely not sponsored by them

but i should be because i talk about

them so much

toggle is not necessarily meant for

language learning i think it's for like

freelance work where you can track

billable and non-billable hours anyway

i've been using toggle for a while to

track

how much time i take learning languages

previously i said uh it's not worth my

time to track my time

because then i would feel stressed i

would feel pressured but

this started out of sheer curiosity for

um

wondering how much time do i really

spend on language learning

versus how much time do i think i spend

i wrote a blog post about different ways

to track your language learning

so you can check it out on my website at

lindybuttons.com where i go into much

more detail on

different ways that you can track like a

journal or using toggle

but anyway the interesting finding i had

was i actually spend

more time learning languages than i

thought i did

i also go through some phases where it

feels like learning one language

is a lot more fun and motivational for

me and other languages sort of take the

back seat

right now tagalog is taking a little bit

of a back seat

because i'm focusing most of my efforts

on hungarian

i also have a newfound interest in

french and spanish

anyhoodles uh back to how i use toggle

for my language log

i've started to just draw out the amount

of hours i spend on each language in a

week

so that i can see which languages are

taking priority

and the overwhelming majority is that

hungarian is definitely

well except for this week it was spanish

the majority of the time hungarian is

the language i spend the most time on

so what we're going to do first is go

through the last week

i'll show you how i summarize my week

review then we're gonna do my monthly

review

and then we're gonna plan for quarter

two all right let us dive straight into

the review for the past week

okie dokie let us begin here i have

my language tracker journal and i also

have my regular journal which is where i

track all the things i have to do during

a week just like my scheduler

so first of all i just make a list of

the

languages or activities i've done in a

week

it's definitely not been as good as the

previous week so i've done

a lot of reading a lot of hungarian

french

and we have espana spanish

and nihongo japanese

hungarian has been oh embarrassingly

only 56 minutes

reading i spent 46 minutes not counting

ebooks

french 22 minutes spanish 16 minutes

and japanese about 10 minutes compared

to

uh when was that really good yeah two

two or three weeks ago

i spent six hours doing hungarian

an hour doing tagalog in an hour doing

spanish

any hurdles hey we're not competing

against anyone

we're just doing what works for us

sometimes

i might do a little like bar graph so

one block is one hour so

i mean i'll just say i did an hour of

reading

a little more like an hour of hungarian

22 minutes for french 16 minutes for

spanish and like

10 minutes for japanese that's not

fantastic

it's always good for me to see how it's

been going the other thing is i was off

sick

for three days that's why i don't have a

lot of time

uh don't worry i didn't get

what's been going around in the world i

don't want to say the name because i

think youtube like blocks the word but

anyway

uh so like three or so days i was just

uh sleeping

in bed for a lot of time you know what i

do with these weekly check-ins is just

sort of look at what were the factors

that

affected my productivity and see

um is was it something i could control

was it not and so forth

uh for instance last week there was um a

big increase in in my spanish compared

to my hungarian i spent three hours

doing spanish

one hour doing hungarian the reason for

that is

for spanish i had sabado de espanol

intercambio which is

about two hours of spanish speaking and

i had a spanish lesson and prep which

was about

one hour so that contributed to the

spike in my spanish

then the previous week uh the week

before that actually

hungarian was six hours so if i look

here

i was um reviewing my notes quite a lot

there were

one to two or three days when i was

studying in a cafe with my friend

and during those study times i would

review my notes i also had

a hungarian lesson and an hour of

studying and shadowing

after my lesson and then i had two

tagalog lessons so tagalog is about an

hour

the reason i have this planners as well

is because

as i have mentioned to you guys before

i do track my mood and my emotions so

this is something that i can look back

on

and see for instance today or this week

27 28 29 i was feeling sick

i didn't learn any languages i can go

here to april and i can see

26 27 28 the little black dot means it

was not a very good day

an open circle or an open circle with

three dots on top means it was a really

good day

so i can also sort of go a bit easier on

myself and say hey

it's okay if i didn't do a lot because i

was

off sick essentially that's it for my

weekly summary i keep it really simple

i used to write you know all the apps i

do i have these to-do lists

i reflected on how the week went

uh usually now i've stopped doing

weekly reflections uh because i found

that just looking at

toggle gives me a good oversight of

where my time has gone

and that's a reflection in itself

and then the last thing i do is sort of

plan ahead for the next week

so i'm just taking a look at my italki

lessons here so i have

one spanish lesson coming up and i do

know that i need to be uh booking

more uh hungarian lessons so i'm

definitely gonna do that

and i'm just gonna fill in what i'm

doing so my interview in hungarian is

on sunday saturday it is a

salvador day and i have a lesson here

seems pretty good i guess i'll have a

lot of time to focus on work and reading

because my

most important language activities are

only three days a week during the week

i'll fill in stuff here

and then after the week i do the

review on the right page

okay now it is time to do the monthly

review and see how it went

for april as a whole let me first give

you a little oversight on

how i do my monthly reflections it

changes every month i don't have an

exact template

for january i just wrote the languages i

spent the most time on

so that was french hungarian and tagalog

and i also write sort of other things i

did related to languages

such as podcasts or interviews for

february i had a little

section here it's pretty personal but

lucky you if you can read korean you can

see my my secrets there uh something

happened here and then i didn't spend as

much time on languages

and again the section of what else i've

been doing

related to languages for march it was a

bit different

i spent a lot more time on french so i

wrote my entire

um end of quarter one review summary

in french and my friend ali corrected it

for me

merci beaucoup then for the languages

that i focused on in march was hungarian

japanese tagalog french and spanish and

whatever else related to polygon

conference or podcast interviews i just

write whatever comes to mind like

okay i only did one or two italki

lessons or you know there were some

solid study sessions i feel way more

comfortable to talk

and then here is the evaluation of my

quarter one goals

i set myself some goals at the beginning

in here about the

amount of essays i wanted to write uh

the

uh well i go to i go into a lot more

detail about this

in my language goals video from january

so you can take a look at that

not going to talk about that now but i i

kind of look at what my goals were

and then how i performed so i wanted to

do two chapters every month in my

tagalog textbook but

i didn't do that because i was too busy

and that's okay

i wanted to write two hungarian essays

per month but i actually wrote six

essays so

i'm very happy i wanted to start some

books and textbooks but i didn't

i'm seeing a flaw in my plan i think i

have like very lofty goals about the

textbooks and the books i want to use

so that's something i should think about

when planning then

throughout the middle of the quarter i

did change my plan so

like i said before my weekly diary

entries changed into monthly and weekly

reflections which were

going steady that's all of these

um spanish lessons i'm

okay this has changed for this quarter

so last quarter i didn't take

any spanish lessons on italki i only

used the busu and speakly apps

whereas now i've restarted my spanish

lessons on itaki

i also wanted to read one korean article

but i didn't do that

however i am subscribed to a design

newsletter called

and i've been reading every single one

of those so i guess it kind of counts

and i've also summarized the amount of

hours i spent on italki

which was 9.7 hours not a lot for an

entire month

uh i'm sorry not a lot for three months

but i think it's still worth noting and

it's interesting for me to see where my

time goes and for april 2021

all the time that i have checked in

toggle

uh let's go back to

april 1st to april 30th

i had 24 minutes i'm sorry 24 hours of

reading studying and website so i've

just written down these

times here a majority of my time went to

hungarian

which is good because that was my number

one goal for quarter one

spanish which is interesting because i

didn't list it as

my goal for the quarter and tagalog

only one hour oh i'm sorry i got

confused this is just for april

that's fine uh it wasn't for the entire

quarter one which i've already done

here all right i think things are

looking pretty good

not bad oh my gosh my book can you not

all right things are looking pretty good

okay time to continue writing uh my

reflection for

april not sure why

gosh what did i write here not sure why

what not sure why

well i don't know guess i have to think

of something to fit into this sentence

that's weird

i'm not sure why but i'm

much more into

reading books

if you're wondering about these symbols

the heart means yeah it's good this is

related to my goal

the shin character in japanese or

chinese means new

so like reading books is a new entry

into my logs and my blog is like a new

thing that i'm tracking

and these lines mean well i didn't aim

to do french or japanese

this quarter or this month but it still

came

up on my schedule and so on and so forth

there's really nothing much that goes

into this

just a reflection on what i've been

doing and how things have been going

you can do this in any way that you want

these stickers are not excellent but

just makes it fun just brightens up the

page

emoji smiley faces i love this one this

is like

my favorite emoji one more heart

i wonder if i should like the amount of

time i spend on italki that would be

interesting

not that it's some kind of a competition

i just really enjoy

looking at i don't know hours and

comparing myself to

myself let me see

my lessons got to see what i did in

april so not may

i need to write this down 45 minutes

hungarian okay 350 minutes which is 5

hours and 25 minutes

wow that's a lot compared to the

previous

quarter impressive okay five hours

really really five hours

if my math is wrong i'm gonna be really

embarrassed but anyway

um 350 minutes

which is 5 hours and

25 minutes

[Music]

now that we've done my weekly and

monthly review let's take a look at my

goals for the next quarter

and i'll show you how i go about

planning and ideating for that

i think i wrote this last month and i

wanted to focus on hungarian spanish

tagalog

and chinese things have changed i'm not

really feeling a lot of chinese

uh just because i want to focus a lot of

my efforts on hungarian

i'm just gonna scratch out chinese here

and not sure i'm gonna do anything for

tagalog

i should probably um review my lessons

and catch up on my textbook

and then the other two languages number

four and number five

is french

and spanish i'm pretty casual with how

i set um goals because it's better for

me to focus on small daily habits than

really big lofty goals obviously because

i'm not finishing my books any hurdles

so for hungarian we're going to just

continue what we've been doing

which is lots of italki lessons

i'm going to be on hungarian radio soon

so that's a milestone

and i want to continue let's say three

essays

one a month for spanish

i want to do weekly

um inter

gambio language exchange

and i want to do daily

uh busu app tagalog

review all

italki for french i would like to have

at least

two times language exchange

or conversation with my friend ali

and i want to do speakly

app daily

for spell oh i wrote spanish twice no

wonder i was like why do i have five

languages here

let me just get some white out this

doesn't mean i'm so

rigid in the sense that like no japanese

or oh that reminds me you have to add

japanese

no korean is allowed i kind of just do

what i feel like

so i'm going to add japanese in here

as you can see i'm really casual with

this there's no rules

any hurdles uh nihongo and all i'm gonna

do is

poompo one chapter

daily i'm so sorry if you guys think

that i am a really organized person

because that couldn't be further from

the truth

i'm all about authenticity here so i

know that

at the beginning of this quarter i

actually wrote my goals on my twitter

thread so i'm going to look at that

and uh see if my ideation here is

aligning with the goals that i set out

in this quarter because we're already a

month

in into q1 so for q2 i

said i want to attend all the italki

lessons i booked yes that's that's in my

plan

uh finally start the spanish short

stories yes let me get the book i'm

talking about

i've read one or two stories in here

which have been great

but i haven't actually like start to

finish read the book so

i mentioned this in my spanish resources

book uh

i'll put a link in the description if

you're interested in getting it it's

really awesome

because there are some questions like

comprehension questions at the end

there's vocab lists

and the stories are really funny and

interesting so that's what i mean by

starting this book like from start to

finish

i should probably put that in here i'm

i'm cautious of

putting that in because i didn't do it

in the first quarter that was my goal

for q1

but now that i'm really way more into

reading

and i'm tracking a lot of my reading on

goodreads also because my

like emotions like my feeling towards

spanish is

just much better than previously i can

also add it in here and

i should likely do so let's do short

stories uh read one article a month

i mean that's very doable it doesn't

take very long to read an article

but uh i'll see how that goes i'm not

gonna write it down right now

then i have some hungarian goals what

did i feel comfortable enough to do the

radio interview yeah this is happening

next week

uh i'll let you guys know how it goes

with that and continue my cadence of

writing two articles a month okay

uh two essays a month well here i've put

three essays

uh so we'll see what i get done um

continue attending weekly or

bi-weekly lessons yep we got italki

lessons it's definitely at the core of

my learning

and finished two chapters in my textbook

i don't think i'm gonna do this

i'm really really struggling with my

hungarian textbook

it's so boring i think what i'm going to

change

instead of finishing my textbook i want

to do

weekly podcast

from cc it's way more fun

and finish two yeah not doing that

tagalog goals i definitely didn't finish

my textbook

uh so i'll try and do two chapters a

month

not a week and learn all my verbs

i'm not sure if i'm gonna do this

because spanish

and french have definitely taken the

seed of tagalog here

we'll think about that like i mentioned

this is a very

iterative and fun process nothing is

really set in stone

as for new habits that i'm trying these

are small

bite-sized things that i want to see as

a test if i'm able to do it every day

so what i'm trying is to do a little

habit tracker of just

uh four apps that i want to use for each

language

don't judge me on the first one it is uh

duolingo for hungarian only because

i haven't found any other app that is as

good as duolingo for hungarian

i know duolingo gets a lot of hate but i

find their hungarian course to be

pretty okay i would definitely not

recommend them for asian languages like

korean japanese or chinese

not duolingo but hey for french and

spanish and hungarian

duolingo's not that bad anyways i don't

have the free version i don't have the

paid version or anything but

i do want to do at least one duolingo

lesson in hungarian every day

uh then for spanish i'm using busu i've

done

one review video for busu like a year

and a half ago

a lot of things have changed and updated

with the app it's fantastic

none of this video is sponsored i'm just

sharing with you what i enjoy using

so boso for spanish then my most recent

video review was for

speakly which i still hands down is the

best language app i've used

i'm using speakly for french also

because the audio

listening exercises are fantastic i am

such a big fan of speakly uh so that's

for french every day and then i still

want to complete the boompo

app which i also have a review video

about which i'll link

somewhere for japanese i'm working

through all the jlpt levels

i'm currently finishing up n4 and then

i'll move on to

and three so just these four apps that

i'm doing daily

i figured um after doing all four of

these it takes me about

half an hour to 45 minutes it's very

minor and short

but i want to see if i see any benefit

through doing this every single day

because i know small incremental

progress

is much better than spending hours in a

week

and then leaving the next few days to do

nothing

by the way for curiosity on my home

screen uh this page is where i track all

my small habits so you'll see my daily

habits are these apps weekly duolingo

busu and boompo i put those apps on the

right over here

and then other activities that i do

either weekly or

um daily that's how it's been going oh

yes as for the languages i am focusing

on this month

the new ones to me are hungarian tagalog

has taken a little bit of a back seat

like i mentioned

and the rest are japanese french and

spanish

i haven't done any korean this year and

something i also wanted to mention

is that the more advanced and the more

fluent you get in the language

the slower you will forget it so tagalog

i know

that i'm still a beginner so my

forgetting curve is really really fast

i need to go back and make sure i review

all that i've learned

before i sort of get back into it but

with korean

it's been 11 years in the learning and

speaking

uh during high school and university

i've spoken almost every single day

of my life not doing any korean this

entire year

is absolutely fine sometimes my tongue

feels a little rusty like i might speak

with a

weirder pronunciation than i used to

vocabulary and understanding it's pretty

much the same as it has been for like

the past

five or six years so something to keep

in mind uh

that hungarian is the only really really

beginner language

and then in order of uh beginner to more

fluent it's uh spanish

uh french and japanese so sort of

focusing on languages at different

levels that are not overwhelming myself

or making it too easy well that's it for

today

thank you all so much for watching uh oh

i have one more thing to thank you for

your absolute incredible generosity with

your kofi donations

i told you in a few previous videos that

my sound quality is

not great so if you have been commenting

on that i'm very sorry

but i decided it is high time for me to

buy a microphone

haven't gotten the microphone yet but we

did reach my

savings goal and i want to say thank you

so much to all of you who

generously contributed and today i'll be

looking for a new microphone

so hopefully my next videos will sound a

lot better thank you all so so much

one more thing i started a newsletter at

the

bottom-ish middle section of my website

homepage

you can find a form where you can

subscribe to lindy's

monthly language roundup if you haven't

subscribed i generally send it out in

the last week of every month so you can

expect the next one to come out

in the last week of may what lindy's

monthly language roundup email

is all about is um just sharing some

content i've posted in the month like a

summary

some things that i've learned answering

faqs

uh sharing an interesting resource or

app i'm just having a little chat with

you it's completely free

uh so if that's something you're

interested in please do subscribe and

you'll get

uh the next edition of lindy's monthly

language roundup

alright that is it for today thank you

if you've watched until here

you guys are amazing and i would love to

hear as usual

how it's going with your language goals

so send me a tweet

at lindy b on twitter or leave a comment

on this video with your goals

thank you guys so much for watching and

i will see you in the next video

bye i feel like i'm out of breath from

talking so

much bye