One thing that is certain about foreign language study is you have to learn about many different types of things: reading, writing, grammar, conversation, culture, etc. If you are taking a formal language class at a college or similar place, the teacher will guide you to to a proper balance between all these topics through lectures, choice of study materials, and homework assignments.
But if you are like many of us and don’t have an opportunity to take a class, it can be tricky to juggle these things, and even if you find a great textbook to study on your own it can be difficult to remember when to study and stay motivated.
If you are diligent you can maintain a document or spreadsheet of things you want to study, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that helped you track the different components of language study?
This just happens to be one of the main features of the website I created, Language on Track, where you can create your own custom personal language goals. When you create a language goal you can assign it to a general category (like ‘Grammar’, ‘Conversation’, ‘Culture’, etc.) and organize related information like how long the activity will take and how often you want to achieve it.
For example, let’s say you wanted to read Japanese children’s books twice a week, for one hour. You can create this language goal with a few simple clicks and then it will be displayed on your home page. If desired, you can also get email notifications for your goals scheduled for each day.
Once you complete each instance of a goal (say you said 1 hour of a certain children’s book on Wednesday), you input that information into the site along with related information, like how difficult the goal was and what you learned from it. You can even put in vocabulary words that you learned and add them to your personal dictionary for later review. And the goals that you create can be shared with other users so they can be inspired to try new ways of studying.
I gave Japanese as an example, but you can use this site for *any* foreign language: Chinese, Russian, Italian, even English!
So please check out the site if you are interested. Since it’s still relatively new I’ve decided to make everything free for the short term, and of course there are no ads or spam.
If you have any questions about the site feel free to post responses to this thread.
(Credit: featured image of arrow and target taken from: https://openclipart.org/detail/13234/target-with-arrow-by-anonymous)