As I've mentioned many times before, consistency is critical to achieving language fluency. And as I've also mentioned several times, we at Refold think habit tracking is a fantastic way to achieve that. In this video, I wanna walk you through how I actually use habit tracking every day, and how you can implement it starting now.
Well, after this video. Habit tracking is the act of planning the habits you want to do every day or week, and then keeping a visible record of whether you did those things each day. The habits that you track can literally be anything.
If you've ever crossed off days on a physical calendar, you've tracked a habit. if you've ever kept up a streak in Duolingo or another app, you've tracked a habit. keeping a record of what you've done and accomplished does several things.
First, it makes it a little more engaging. The desire to check the box and see the number go up gives you an actual feeling of accomplishment. It feels good to say "yes, I did that today.
" Secondly, it gives you something concrete to look back on. When you're doing something like language learning or exercise, it takes a long time to see tangible results. But if you're able to look at your schedule and say "I've stuck to my practice and my method and I'm proud of myself", that means a lot.
One of the many reasons immersion learners like to track hours is for that exact reason. You can look behind you and say "wow, look how far I've come", even if it doesn't feel like you're exactly closer to the end. And finally, it helps you not forget things.
It sucks to not do something just because you forget about it. I'm not sure about you, but I've had more than one weekend where I have plenty of free time to do something but it just slips my mind. My daily reminder to check things off has saved my butt on more than one occasion.
Okay, that's the why, let's look at the how. I'm going to walk you through the two apps that we recommend, one is for iOS and the other is for Android. I'll start by showing you my actual habit tracking that I've been using for a while, and then show you what I do if I were to set up habit tracking from scratch.
Both apps are very simple at their core, so watching how I use the app should make it fairly easy to do yourself. But, feel free to customize. So here we are in the IOS app which is called Habit Tracker, I think they have a less generic name but I've always just searched for "habit tracker" and it always comes up.
This is basically the only page I look at, it is all my habits in a simple list and shows my streak for each one. That's really all you need. I think my habits are mostly self-explanatory; but, as you can see, I don't only have language learning stuff here.
I've been learning for such a long time that certain parts of my routine are such strong habits already, like reading before bed every night. But whenever I want to build a new habit, I put it in here. The current habits I track that are related to language learning are: reading aloud, gold listing, and the 1K deck that I'm currently doing.
I'm also trying to learn to draw a bit, and improve at chess, so I have a short lesson and sketch something every day. The 10 push-ups are just to remind myself to move around at least once a day. And finally, what I think is the most important piece, is the "Check the Box" habit.
"Check the Box" is essentially the "meta habit". To build the habit of tracking your habits. The entire habit is literally just opening the app and swiping to the right.
That's it. And the reason this is important is that actually tracking your habits isn't a built-in habit, you have to learn it too. It also forces you to acknowledge those days that you didn't do something.
Sometimes you'll miss something, but you can always, always, check the box. The only reason you can't is maybe if you don't have your phone in a whole day, like if you're on vacation or you've planned an event; but, you can plan for that event to keep your habits alive anyway. The final reason "Check the Box" is important is that it's the only one I set a reminder for.
I hate getting excess notifications, so I like to have just one in the evening to remind me to check everything off that I've done. Over in the other tabs on this app, I can see my stats, my averages, my number of perfect days. This app also lets you invite friends, but I've never used that.
And finally, it has a cute little weekly, monthly, and yearly look at your different habits. This can allow you to set challenges for yourself that you can try to beat. Pushing yourself to maintain and add longer and longer habits and streaks is a great way to ensure your success.
Before we go look at the other app, let's add something new on this app. Go to the bottom left on the main tab, and tap the "+". I like to add a custom habit and set things up for myself but feel free to try out their built-in ones.
So, I tap "Custom Habit", give it a name, icon, color; and I like to turn off the memo. If you want a notification reminder, add that with this "+". Now, it's important to also have a mental idea of what completing a habit looks like.
And I recommend that you keep it very very simple. For example, I'm making this habit "target language YouTube"; and, in the description, I put "I watched five minutes of my target language on YouTube. " For this example, I'm making the habit "target language YouTube" and in the description I put "I watched five minutes of YouTube in my target language.
" I like to keep it in the first person past "I watched", so it's very easy to answer the question of "did I do this today? "; because it's a yes or a no. Let's hop over to the Android app called Loop Habit Tracker to show you how I'd set it up.
As you can see, it's very simple looking. But that can be a good thing. Let's hit the "+" in the top and add our "check the box" habit.
All of these are going to be "yes or no" habits, measurable habits are only good for people who already have base habits in place and are looking to scale up. Now, we'll call this first one "Check the Box", choose the color, add the question — remember I like to have it be in the first person past tense — keep the frequency as daily, and then add a reminder if you want one. I will add one for check the box, but not for anything else.
We aren't going to add much else at all. When building a habit, we want things to be simple and achievable. Once you have the base have it built, you can always add more.
For now, I'll assume that this is for someone who's working on getting to the intermediate stage. I'll add in "Daily Anki" and "YouTube" as the only two other habits. I wouldn't recommend trying to add a bunch of habits when you're just starting out, that can feel overwhelming and adds too much complexity.
Add one or two habits that you can do each day, ideally you already do them most days but just want to become more consistent with them. Once you're up to a point where achieving all your daily habits is easy, you can add a little more. A trick I like for that is making multiple entries for the same habit.
For example, we could add "YouTube 20 min" and "YouTube 60 min" as additional goals. That way, if you don't watch YouTube for a whole hour one day, but you do manage 30 minutes, it doesn't feel like you completely failed. You still hit the "YouTube" and "YouTube (20)" goals.
That's all I have for you for the Android app. But, before I finish up, I also wanna mention that there are tons of other habit trackers out there. Habit Tracker and Loop are just the ones that we use and recommend.
I've heard that some people love Habitica since it makes their tracking feel like an RPG video game. If that sounds motivational to you, check it out. Thanks for watching this video, I hope that it was useful to you.
And, if you're the kind of person who likes sharing your wins and cheering on your fellow learners, make sure you're in the Refold Central Discord server. There's a "wins" channel, as well as one for progress updates, so be sure to let us know where you are with your language learning habits. Check out refold.
link/join to get in there; and, as always, happy immersing!
