How To Track Your Immersion Study Time  

Tracking your immersion is something I think is really important. Basically you will get a lot of information about what you are doing and having this is actually quite helpful at keeping you accountable and on track.

We all want to make progress in our language, and taking the time to track what we are doing will help us with that so I will go through how you can do this.

(You can read more about – Why It Is Important To Track Your Language Immersion)   

Tracking Doesn’t Need To Be Complicated

Tracking your immersion can be …and should be very simple. I think most people avoid tracking their immersion as they think it’s too complicated or takes too long, which it really doesn’t need to be.

If you keep things simple it literally takes a few seconds.

The best thing you can do is get a spreadsheet with two columns, one with the date and the other with how much time you did that day.

All you need to do then is pay attention to what you are doing and make a note of it, that’s all you need to do.

If you watched a movie that was an hour and a half, write 1.5 next today’s date.

I don’t understand how you could even make it more complicated, you are literally just tracking how long you spent watching or reading in your language.

If you wanted to make two columns, one for reading and one for listening, that would be fine, but again it’s not complicated, just write down what you did for that day next to the date.

How To Count The Time

I think some of the problem people find is how to actually count the time, which again, doesn’t need to be complicated.

People seem to count in two different ways, those who measure everything to the exact millisecond and those who basically just lie about what they are doing.

Both of these are too extreme and you need to find yourself somewhere in the middle.

If you are watching a movie and its 1 hour 28 minutes …just say you did an hour and a half. It’s okay to round up or down a little. Over the long term it will average out.

However, some people take this too far and watch 1 minute and round it up to an hour. If you are doing that you are just cheating yourself and you may as well not bother. I am not too strict, but I am still fairly accurate.

Measuring In Blocks

To make my life easier, I break my immersion into time blocks.

I personally use either 30 minute or 1 hour time blocks, but you could break it down to 15 minutes blocks if you wanted.

I do this simply for my spreadsheet and making it easy to input the data. If I want to add 37 minutes to my spreadsheet, that’s going to be difficult. I am sure there is a way, to work it out,(see below) but I am trying to make things simple.  

If I had watched 45 minutes, I would just add 0.75 to the spreadsheet. I’m hoping you understand maths enough to understand that these are both the same and it’s also why trying to add 37 minutes for example is too difficult to work out.

15 minutes would also be 0.25 and 30 minutes is of course 0.5 …I only like to use full hours, or half’s to make it even simpler for myself.      

In the example of the 37 minutes, I wouldn’t round up, I would just try and find another video that is around 8 minutes long and actually watch it …and then I will have actually watched 45minutes and I would record that.

Basically my inability to do maths forces me to immerse more, and mainly so that I don’t have to put a strange decimal number down. It’s always either 1 hour, or 0.5 hour. That’s how simple I like to keep it.

Being More Precise

If for some reason you really want to be precise you can change the format of your spreadsheet cells to “time” and then you can input 0:37 for the 37 minutes.

You can also still make the spreadsheet count it all up and you will have exactly the time you have spent.

I’m happy enough sticking to either full hours or half hours and forcing myself to find my material to make that work, but it’s your tracking, do what you find easier.

Preplan Your Immersion To Make Tracking Easier

Something which I find very helpful is to plan out my immersion material in the morning along with a goal.

I will usually say something like “okay, today I want to watch 1 hour of stuff in my language”

I then spend a few minutes finding things to watch and adding them to my watch later playlist. You can see how long the videos are so you can quickly add the times up and see if it meets your target.

Let’s say I find some videos and the times are 40:21, 13:45 and 8:09 …to me that’s an hour… of course technically its 62 minutes and 15 seconds, but why make it complicated, just say it’s an hour.

Now all I have to do is just make sure I get these videos watched by the end of the day and my goal will be met.

This takes a lot of stress off me as I don’t need to time anything. I it’s already been counted as such.

This also means if I pause something it doesn’t matter. I can come back to it whenever and as a long as I complete the list, everything is good.

What Happens If You Don’t Watch It All?

Failing to watch everything you planned for isn’t a problem, as you have the video saved in a list and you can see if you didn’t watch it or not.

Let’s say I didn’t get to watch the last video on my list from above, the 8:09 one. Well I can either adjust my spreadsheet to take some time off what I recorded, or I can just watch it tomorrow morning. I will tell myself I owe myself 8 minutes and then just catch up in the morning before setting my new watch list target for that day.

This doesn’t really happen to me as I always hit my targets as I make them realistic and I am good at managing my time, but if you are finding this happens a lot then you may need to change what you are doing and lower your daily target.  I know how much free time I have so it’s easy for me to work out how much I can watch in a day.

What Happen If You Watch More?

If I reach the end of my list and realise I have more time I can either just stop for the day, or carry on.

I usually plan my day out so that I finish my immersion just before bed, so usually by this point I’m tired and happy to stop. However, occasionally I do carry on. If that happens, I just take note of what I’ve done and add it to the spreadsheet the next day.

As I like to block things, I will try and find 30 minutes worth of videos then I can easily add an extra .5 to may spreadsheet.

There are also times when I don’t record it. If it’s just a short 5 minute video I wouldn’t bother. I have probably rounded down my time on a few videos in the past, so I feel like this 5 minutes sort of counteracts that.

As I said the times usually balance themselves out over time and sometimes not recording sometimes helps with this.

Just remember there are no rules to this, you don’t need to be super strict. It’s just a rough guideline for what you’ve done, not an Olympic record attempt.        

Just Set A Timer

If you are not into preplanning, or if what you want are watching something that is not so easily organised, you can just set a timer.

This again doesn’t need to be too complicated. Look at the clock and take note of the time, now start watching and once an hour is done, stop.

If you find it easier to use a stopwatch, or a countdown timer do that, but don’t get too worried if you have to pause for a minute or something, so long as you roughly know how long you have been immersing for it will be fine and you can record it.

Pauses In Speech In Immersion

I think some people get very caught up in timing exactly how long they are hearing their language for and they try and stop the timer every time someone is not speaking.

Maybe you are watching a movie and there is a huge fight seen and no one talks for 5 minutes …that’s okay.

Everything you listen to is going to have natural breaks in the language and that’s okay. Just put the time that the video lasted.

The only time you should maybe think about this is if you are watching a movie and there is maybe only 3 lines of dialog in the whole thing.

If you end up watching a video like this, just don’t count it. You have to see it as non-immersion. See it as some sort of cultural experience, since it is probably linked to your new language in some way, so it’s not a complete waste of time.

I would say you are kind of lying to count these type of videos, but luckily they are very few and far between. Pretty much everything you do watch should have enough speech in it and its okay if there are pauses.  

Conclusion

Tracking your immersion shouldn’t be complicated. Just do what works for you and you also don’t need to be too strict.

The whole point of it is to give you some rough information about what you have done. You don’t need to go into extreme detail or over think it. Do the immersion and record how much you did, it’s that simple.

Once you have been doing this for a while you will be able to add up what you have done and you will find this information very useful. You will actually get a picture of how much effort you are putting in, which is very valuable to have.  

You can also want to read – The Only Study Plan You Need To learn A Language (For Complete Beginners)