Why It Is Important To Track Your Language Immersion

Tracking the time you spend immersing may seem over the top, but it’s very simple and more importantly it will give you some extremely useful information.

Tracking the time you are spending with a language is going to make sure you actually do enough, which will of course make sure you reach your goals.  

If you are not tracking your studies already, then it really is time you started and I will go over why this is so beneficial. 

(If you don’t know what immersion is, then you need to read –  What Is Learning A Language By Immersion?)

Languages Are Measured In Hours

In general, we can say that learning a language is measured in hours. 

This measurement of “hours” makes more sense when you look at studying over a longer period of time. Let’s say we both study for 30 days, which is a decent length of time, but it isn’t very clear what we have actually done.

What we each do within this 30 day time frame could be drastically different and this is why it is more important to measure in hours.

Imagine that you study for 10 hours a day and I only do 10 minutes.

At the end of the month you’ve studied for 300 hours, I’ve only done 5 …That’s quite the difference and it’s only going to become a bigger gap if we spread that out over a year or longer.

Simply knowing you have a daily streak is not enough. It’s cool to say you have done 30 days in a row, but what does that really mean? 300 or 5 hours? …or somewhere in between?

Measuring in hours is just going to let you know exactly what has been done and this can then be compared to how long it roughly takes people on average to learn a certain language. (For example it should take you around 600 hours to learn French)

You Will Actually See What You Are Doing

Understanding that languages are measured in hours now makes tracking how much you are doing actually useful.

If we take the example above we can actually see what we are doing. We can see that you are absolutely smashing the study with your 300 hours in 30 days and I am having a disaster with my 5 hours.

If we didn’t do this, we would only know that we had both studied for 30 days. Your progress is going to be so much better than mine and I may put that down to “I guess I’m just not designed for languages” and give up.

The reality is that I simply have not done enough and I need to change what I am doing and be more productive.

On the other hand, you may think the opposite. You may have found 10 hours a day too much and while 300 hours a month is a crazy impressive number, you might think about slowing down. Either way, you have the information now and can make a decision based off it.

If you are not tracking, you don’t have this information and can’t make a proper decision!  

You Will See Long Term Patterns

I think it’s also important to note that note everyday will not look the same. Some days you may do more study and others you will do less, so tracking allows you to see the pattern over a longer time, such as a month.

You can look and see what your average is for the month and then use this data to decide if you are being productive enough or if you want to change anything going forward.

Tracking Can Give You Accountability

One of the best reasons to track your time studying is so you can become accountable. This usually related to setting a goal and the tracking will help you stick to that.

If you tell yourself you want to be doing 100 hours of immersion a month, the only way you will know if you have actually hit this goal is to track it.

Some of you may think this is too much effort and it’s easier to just say “I will do what I can”. While that can work for some people, it doesn’t work for everyone and this general attitude of doing what you can usually results in you not doing a lot.

You will find that if you set a goal, you will actually work towards it and tracking the time will help keep you accountable while doing it. 

It Gives You Something To Aim At

Tracking can also help give you something to aim at. If we go back to the point that languages are measured in hours, we can use our tracking to see how we are doing.

For example, it takes around 2200 hours for an English speaker to get good at Japanese.

That is a lot of learning, but tracking can help you get there. Every month you can see your total go up and up and get ever closer.

Of course it must be said that these times scales are only estimated averages, so nothing is guaranteed, but you can certainly use it a helpful guideline.

I am still fairly sure that if you could dedicate 2200 hours to Japanese you would see some results. I am sure you would still have a lot to learn, but you should be happy with yourself and the fact that you could reach such a big milestone in regards to how much time you put in.      

(You can read more about – What Is The Optimum Amount Of Language Immersion?)

Tracking Can Motivate You

Sometimes we can be tired and lacking motivation to learn our language. This is completely normal, especially if it we are suffering from a plateau and feeling like we are not making progress.

However, I have found my tracking spreadsheet can help overcome this and it gives me motivation.

I know that if my total number keeps going up, I will improve. I trust the process and I know that if I can add another hour it helps me get closer to the goal. Seeing my spreadsheet total not moving motivates me, it makes me want to go and study so I can update the data and increase my number.

Maybe I am too focused on the number, but if it gets me studying I don’t think that’s a bad thing. More immersion will make us stronger.

It’s Makes A Nice Record Of Your Progress

I think recording the time you have spent studying is a really rewarding thing to look back on. You can see how much you have put in and how much you have achieved with the language.

One of my favourite type of videos on YouTube is seeing peoples language progress reports. I like when they say how much they have studied and then show their abilities.

You always see a clear correlation between the time spend studying and the skill level achieved. It really is as simple as the more time you put in, the better you will get. 

Being able to actually quantify how much you have done is also helpful to people watching, they can see what the results of a 1000 hours of study looks like for example.

While you probably will not make a youtube video on your progress at least you know and if you ever speak to anyone, you can always explain to them exactly what you did to get to the level you have achieved.  

How To Track Your Immersion

Many people avoid tracking their immersion time as they think it’s very complicated. The reality is that you can keep it really simple and it doesn’t take much effort at all.

If you want more information on how to best do it, you can read about – How To Track Your Immersion Study Time.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see that tracking your immersion is extremely beneficial. Language learning is a long and slow process so having some sort of data on how much you are actually doing is really important.

This simple information is really going to keep you on track and I really don’t know why you wouldn’t want to know exactly how much time you are putting in. Time is key in language learning, so start recording how much you are doing to make sure you are doing enough.

If you are studying with immersion then you may want to read – The Only Study Plan You Need To learn A Language (For Complete Beginners)