All of that is telling me that I'm getting better.
And this is encouraging when you're at that stage where you often feel
that you're not getting better.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here today and today I wanna tell you don't set
long term language learning goals.
That's the subject.
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So very often, you know, people have, I think, a vague goal of what they
wanna achieve in learning a language.
They wanna be able to speak comfortably.
They wanna be able to travel and talk to people.
They want to understand movies.
They wanna read a book.
They want...
could be any number of things.
Maybe they need it for professional reasons.
So at some level we do have this long term vision of where we want
to get to in a language that we're learning and, uh, people know that.
So if you buy an Assimil book or a, you know, a Living Language,
they'll say, you know, when you finish this book, you'll be at B2 on
the European, you know, framework.
The trouble is and, and, and I have done this before and I'm, I'm making
this video because I've started into another 90-Day Challenge in Persian so
I was thinking of what are my goals, what do I wanna achieve in 90 days?
And I realized that in the past, I've set sort of a goal for myself
of what I wanna achieve in 90 days.
And I'll say, I wanna be able to understand Arabic podcasts, or I
wanna be able to understand movies.
And, and typically it's a fairly ambitious goal.
I want to achieve this level in the language at the end of 90 days.
The problem is that I never achieved that.
In fact very often I have no real measurement of how
far I come in those 90 days.
I just realize that I'm better than I was 90 days earlier.
So these longer term, you know, I want to get to this level type of
goal, very difficult to measure.
And there's one thing I've learned in language learning uh, and I think which
should be applied in schools is it's very difficult to sort of compare people,
grade people based on their achievements.
The only thing you can really measure is their level of activity.
That's what I would do if I ran a classroom, I would say, how much
are you people reading my students?
How much are you reading?
How much are you listening?
How much you are you engaging with the language?
If you are active, some will do better some will do worse.
Some will do better in some aspects, some will be, will do better in other aspects.
So if that's what I would demand of people, you know, who, if I
were teaching someone, I feel I should do the same with myself.
So in this 90-Day Challenge, I'm not gonna say, I want to be able
to understand Persian movies or, uh, read Persian poetry.
All I'm saying is that I am going to set myself very short term goals
of what I want to achieve every day.
So every day I I've set in our, when you sign up at LingQ, now this
doesn't just apply to LingQ, it could be in whatever program you're
in, give yourself short term goals.
In the case of LingQ, we're asked to set, you know, whether we want to go at
a leisurely pace or an insane pace, an insane pace at link is 400 coins a day,
which is actually not very demanding as I will show you on my graphs.
So I said, okay.
400 coins a day.
Bear in mind that we have now sort of brought all of our
various activities together.
And so you can earn coins by listening, by reading, by saving LingQs, by
speaking, any number of activities will contribute towards that coins total.
And that's why I'm, that's what makes it very easy to achieve that 400 coin level.
If I listen for half an hour while doing the dishes, I'll pile up a bunch of coins.
If I read through a lesson and save some new words, uh, or move some
words to known very quickly, I, I accumulate these 400 plus coins.
So I said, okay, that's a relatively easy goal to maintain, keeps me going,
but I want a more specific goal.
So I want to add 50 new word known words to my known words, total,
because here again, if I do that for 90 days, that's 4,500 more known words.
So I'm now a little over 10,000 known words in Persian.
That'll take me closer to 15,000.
How much is that gonna help me?
A lot of those words will be lower frequency words that
don't show up that often.
Am I gonna understand Persian movies?
I don't know, but I'm gonna focus on those very sort of concrete goals
because in chasing more known words in chasing more coins, I'm forcing
myself to engage with the language.
I'm forcing myself to read more.
I'm forcing myself to listen more.
And in doing that, I will gradually get better in the language, how much better?
I don't really know.
And I wanted to make sure that, um, I set myself a goal that was realistic.
So I'll show you on my graph here.
I had a look at my, at my last 30 days, uh, both in terms of coins accumulated
and in terms of new words added.
So I there's some mountains there up and down, becasue I wasn't forcing...
forcing myself sort of daily to hit a certain level.
So by looking at that, I'm comfortable that I can easily get 400 coins a day.
And, and by pushing myself a little bit, I can reach 50, a new known words a day.
And that's what I've been doing for the last couple of days that now
that I'm paying attention to it.
So normally just by listening and reading and going through text,
moving the odd word to known, I'll probably hit that 30, 35 new known
words per day level, but to push it up to 50, sometimes I have to force it.
And so what I then do is go to my vocabulary list find all the status three
words, you know, I can sort by status three words, filter by status three words.
And then if I am 10 words short, I'll go through those and find
10 that in fact, I already know.
Now a couple of caveats, so I can measure that known word number,
but what does it really mean?
We don't really know, uh, some of the words that I claim to know, I may
later on forget, so they slide back.
Um, people criticize the word count at LingQ because we count every form
of the word as a different word.
So run, running, runs is three words.
That's not fair.
They say you should count word families, maybe.
But, uh, then it raises the question of what is a word family?
So if I take the word, like we talked about activity, so act, react, action.
Are those, uh, a reactor?
Are those different words?
Are they forms of the same word?
Um, I don't know.
Spoil then you have a spoiler on a car.
Uh, spoils the spoils of war.
Uh, I think even sort of deciding which words are part of a word family
and which words are in fact new words is also somewhat arbitrary.
So I prefer to go with a way we count them at LingQ.
It doesn't mean anything, you know, objectively, you can't say I know
more words than you do, or I know more words in this language than in
that language because of the number of forms of words is gonna be greater
in some languages than in others.
But what it does tell you is if that known words total increases, then
you know more words, you have engaged that much more with the language you
have been active with the language.
And so it's an indication that you are moving forward.
This is particularly important as when we're at the level that I'm at now, which
is sort of the intermediate where I often have the impression that I'm not getting
better, but if I can look at my statistics and see, and hopefully after 90 days I'll
have add if not 4,500, at least 4,000 or so new words to my known words total.
Probably that's gonna mean that there are fewer and fewer blue words, in
other words unknown words in my lessons.
It's probably going to mean that there are more and more white words
on my lesson page, fewer yellow.
All of that is telling me that I'm getting better.
And this is encouraging when you're at that stage where you often feel
that you're not getting better.
Now, how much will my spoken Farsi improve?
I don't know.
I'm going to have a conversation with my person tutor and I'm gonna record it.
I'm gonna ask her to provide subtitles.
And that will also be sort of like a starting point.
And then at the end of the 90 days, I'll do that again.
And we'll see if either you or I can notice any improvement.
So once again, it's fine to have a long term vision that
we would like to be fluent.
And we would like to be able to have intelligent conversations in a language
or understand movies or read poetry.
It's nice to have that as a vague goal, but in order to push yourself
in that direction, you should not focus on the long term goals.
You should focus on short term, possibly as much as possible measurable goals
that you do every day that nudge you, that push you, that keep you going so
that you eventually get closer to that a little more vague, uh, vision of
where you'd like to get in the language.
Now I have spoken about goals before, so I'll leave you with a couple
of videos on a similar subject.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.