How and why I use a language planner | Hobonichi weeks flip through

something that I love almost as much as I love languages is stationary pens notebooks planners stickers all that good stuff and after watching about a million hours of Planet related content on YouTube I thought why haven't I still made a video about my planner particularly the one I use for tracking my language learning progress so here's the video it's going to be a long one so sit back and enjoy so the notebook that I have is this 2023 hobonichi Techo weeks the very first page is the year at a glance you can see 2023 as

well as 2022 and the next year which is 2024. I guess what you could do here is Mark down important dates that have to do with language learning like the date of your language exam or maybe things like traveling to the country where your target language is spoken but I don't really have anything like that so what I do here is I just basically use it to see which language I was focusing on for example in 2022 the first six months my main focus was Japanese then in July August and in the first half of

September I was focusing on Italian and then you can see that in the second half of September this was when I went to Poland polish became my main focus another thing to mention is that I don't do this in terms of my intentions I do this in terms of time spent for example I started learning polish here and in October I spent the most time on polish but then for example in November polish was still my number one priority but I was watching a lot of media in Spanish and this is why Spanish became the

number one language in terms of time both in November and in December in December I was also starting to learn Italian it became a main focus and it lasted until April where I switched to Greek as my number one priority and then this page again you can see the year at a glance and I think a lot of people use this as habit trackers which is kind of what I did too I keep the colors for my languages pretty much the same throughout the whole notebook I did change the color for Greek at some point

just because it was too similar to the one I used for Italian but overall I use this blue for Italian this turquoise I guess or Spanish and then this pastel purple for Greek here I was just trying to track whether I studied a certain language that day or I didn't and you can see that I have been for the most part really consistent with my Italian and then for other languages you can kind of tell how my priorities have been shifting because in the beginning of the year I was consuming a lot of media a

lot of audio books a lot of shows in Spanish and then that kind of fizzled out and Greek started becoming a priority for me so this notebook starts in December of 2022 and ends in December of 2023 but I bought it in the second half of January which is why I had a lot of empty space including this monthly layout for December so what I did with this layout is I basically used it to figure out how I would want my monthly layouts to look like and what exactly it is that I would want to

track for example you can see there's a lot of blue here and that's because I wanted to color code my language learning activities and I felt like I didn't really like what it looked like so I kept experimenting in January 2. for example here I was using different pen colors depending on what type of activity it was but I didn't like how it looked either it was just too many colors and too confusing so in February I settled on this system and this is pretty much something that I still use so what I started doing

is I just leased all of the language learning activities I did that day and then I just put a little dot in the color that corresponds to the language and another thing that I was doing here is time tracking so I usually time track using toggle track which is an app that I have on my phone my computer and my iPad and I have a video all about how I automate time tracking so let's say every time I go and do a lingo to study Greek the time that I spent on Duolingo is counted towards

Greek and I do not need to make this time tracking entry manually so you can watch that video if you're interested but here I was just taking the information from toggle track and writing it down here and the reason why this is highlighted in blue is because I was trying to track only the time that I was spending on Italian since it was my main focus in the second half of the month I actually stopped doing that but this is pretty much what my monthly layouts look like this one is a little bit more underwhelming

I guess but I'm still pretty much doing the same thing also if you're wondering what this letter is this is basically the first letter of my Greek tutor's name so I just put it here for the days when I was having classes with her and the same thing here by the way I have an accountability partner slash study buddy and we try to meet every two weeks or so and on the days we do have our meetups I put this little sticker with the first letter of his name so yeah pretty much the same system

across the first quarter of the Year and may you will see that some of the entries are highlighted and I do that when I start something new like for example here I started a new book in Italia this is basically how I make it a little bit more obvious how much time reading or watching something took me I think May has been also a little bit more elaborate because I started putting short sentences that describe how the week went overall or sort of just highlighting one certain thing that happened this week and also here I

just list all of the media that I watched list into or red and then here I just put little highlights for example for Spanish I started this phonetics book that I've had for years now and I hadn't touched it before in the month of May I also finished my first grade it Reader in Greek and started a new Greek textbook and now on to the weekly Pages which are basically the staple I guess of this notebook as I've already told you the planner starts in December and I got it in mid-January so I had some

spare Pages here for December that I just decided to fill randomly with different things so here for example I have all the time that I spent on language learning each month in the form of this little pie chart so I can tell which language I was focusing on it's really fun to look back at for example here you can see that I spent less than two hours on Greek in the month of January while here and here Greek is my number one language in terms of how much time I spent on it so this page

is where I made notes on a video I think it was by Luca lamparielo I kind of wanted it to use as my study guide for 2023 and then here I was sort of adding my own thoughts and ideas about the content of the video you and as you can see there are different pens and pencils and that just means that sometimes I go back and I'll add something and which is really cool also to see where my mind was when I first watched the video and then how my ideas on language learning or what

languages I want to focus on evolve over time or just how inconsistent I am in general with my plans again I had some more spare pages so I just filled them with lyrics from songs that I like in Italian I now have a separate notebook for that and I think I've shown it in one of my videos but I started doing it in this notebook just to see if I enjoy the activity of dissecting lyrics of songs that I like so More lyrics and then here I was using it as my sort of Master page

for tracking my Italian progress and the way I track it is I just put resources that I have or that I am planning to use and then I break them into this might be chapters for example for the Italian course on Duolingo I broke it down into intro to Italian which I finished Italian foundations one and Italian foundations too and I think this works really well because I did finish the intro but I didn't finish foundations one or foundations too because I just felt like it was too boring but I still get to cross this

one thing out whereas if I just wanted to finish the course I wouldn't have any achievements on this page same goes for clothes master I think the full Italian course has 25 000 words and I am now somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand articles I wanted to read a hundred I definitely read over 50 at this point but I think at some point you start reading so much that you just stopped tracking and this is exactly what happened to me some books that I read or wanted to read songs that I wanted to translate

videos that I wanted to watch were platforms for video content and then some podcasts and then here I have a wish list for Italian which just has basically two textbooks and some directions to explore for example I was thinking about practicing shadowing for a certain period of time I was also considering getting a book on pronunciation and seeing if that helps my pronunciation better so just some ideas of what directions I can take my Italian in and then here actually the weekly spreads start because that was the week I purchased the planner and the layout

is very similar week to week but some things do change one thing that you will see on every single page is this little habit tracker that I have let's just just to show you that it's basically there every single week and then what I put here and here does change sometimes what you can see here is basically me tracking my progress for the resources I'm using for example here I was doing the intro to Italian course on Duolingo and I guess I finished it on this day because I started Italian foundations one same goes for

here for example I hadn't been using closed Master for a while so I needed to finish my reviews before I went on to the 4 000 words Benchmark here I was listening to an audiobook in Spanish and here was when I started reading a children's book in Italian so for these I guess what I was doing is just writing what I did that day which I stopped doing and the reason why I stopped doing it is because I decided to practice actually writing in my target languages and I did it in Spanish a couple of

times and then I just switched to Italian practice my writing in Italian and I stuck to it for quite a while you can see that all of those entries are in Italian in a very broken Italian because my writing is terrible just like my active skills and Italian in general here again I was using my habit tracker I was also tracking my progress across the media or the resources that I was using and then I was just also like writing down my Reflections as well as this little pie chart that shows how much time I

spent on Spanish versus Italian and for Italian since it's my main priority I also did this little breakdown of what exactly it is that I was doing for example listening active study or reading and I think I did that for a couple of weeks too I also tried doing something like this tracking the number of hours I was spending on language learning every day but I kind of found it redundant because I have the same information in my toggle track and there it's actually tracked automatically while here it's kind of a hassle to draw this

every single week here I started writing down my actual plans because this again was just my little journaling practice for Italian this is a media or the resources that I'm using right now and then I started actually adding plants what it is that I wanted to get done that certain week I also started writing down this little thing that I called the menu which is basically a list of all the resources that I have that I can use throughout the week so instead of planning that on this day I'm doing this I kind of let

myself choose in the moment what I felt like doing and that didn't really work for me to be completely honest because I feel like for me to be able to do something consistently I need to make as few decisions as I can because otherwise it just ends up draining too much of my energy I haven't always been consistent with this notebook as you can tell so a pattern that you will see a lot is that I tend to be pretty good during the work week week and then on the weekend I just don't touch the

notebook I don't sit down at my desk to write things so a lot of the times there's actually nothing and because of that there's also no weekly results because that's something that I used to do on Sundays and I guess also because Italian started being a priority I started experimenting with the stuff that I was put in here for example here I do have one entry in Italian and then later it's just Greek words that I was learning that week here same I was just practicing some dialogues in Greek again dialogues in Greek I did

do a weekly report here and you can see that I am now much more active when it comes to Greek then I decided to start being a little more serious about this notebook again because I really like being able to look back on my language learning journey and kind of see how my ideas my thoughts my priorities were changing over time so this decided to switch this up again I think I got inspired by Luca lamparia Logan in one of his videos he shows Google doc that he has where every single day after his study

session he will put exactly what he did and how it made him feel in terms of like was the material too easy was it boring was it entertaining and things like that and so I started doing something similar and then here again my habit tracker no matter what the Habit tracker is here then I also had a plan for what exactly it is that I wanted to be doing that week and because I was filming my video where I replaced my screen time with language learning I also kind of just jot down the tools that

I wanted to be using or how I wanted to proceed about filming the video and then hear a weekly report with a breakdown specifically for Greek since it's now my number one priority [Music] and that's about it for the weekly pages and now let's look at these pages so in the end of The Notebook what you get is about 70 I guess pages that are just blank where you can put whatever you want and I use them mostly for tracking things so here is something like a goals page even though I literally have a video

about how I don't really have study goals and how I prefer language projects as a measure of my progress but I guess I just wanted to fill this page with something so for Italian for example I felt like I was somewhere between B1 and B2 for reading and I wanted by June of 2023 to have B2 in both reading and listening and B1 in speaking and writing and I can tell that I am definitely there in terms of reading but when it comes to speaking and writing I'm not even close I think I'm pretty much

still somewhere between A1 and A2 I think this page is actually helpful to see how delusional I can get when I make these kind of goals and here I was also just visualizing what it would look like if I was fluent in Italian so here for example I was trying to imagine what it would be like to learn Greek through Italian because there's a meal textbook which would allow me to do that it's also kind of funny to see how flaky I am because here I wrote something like by the end of 2023 what would

my Italian be like if I made it my main focus until the end of the year and then a couple of months later I went back and I was like well you know alternatively I can shift my focus between Greek and Italian until the end of the year which basically means that I wasn't really able to stay consistent with focusing solely on Italian and then I have pretty much the same thing for Greek here's my level at the beginning of the year and I would love to have a two for all of my skills so

you see in Italian I would be happy to have a level that is lower than my reading and listening whereas for Greek I want to have about the same level for all of the skills here's a tracker for podcasts that I was keeping for a while before it became kind of unmanageable because they started listening to way too many podcasts to be able to track each of the episodes that I listened to and my goal initially was to listen to 50 episodes but I think I went over this number a while back and I was

just writing down what podcast it is and the title of the episode I was also trying to track how difficult it was in the beginning but then I kind of realized that most of the podcasts that I was listening to were just the right level for me that's also partially because I'm only listening to podcasts that are aimed at Italian loaders even if it's an advanced level podcast it's still made by an Italian teacher who speaks really clearly and tries to adjust their vocabulary and grammar and things like that so I stopped tracking the difficulty

level I think I have another page where I was yes continuing this tracker and then these pages are kind of a failure because I started tracking chapters in Italian textbooks that I had but these two textbooks are actually books that I got from the library and I didn't even like them so I returned them back to the library and never looked back so I am 100 sure I'm not going back to these particular books this book however makes more sense because it's a textbook that I actually have and I've made some progress with it it's

this textbook if you're curious and then the closed Master is fast track to fluency is also something that I have been tracking so I think I'm now in between five and ten thousand words I haven't really used clothes master in a while but this is actually something that is somewhat helpful this was me trying to come up with monthly goals for my Italian what I was focusing on it but I wouldn't really say that this was helpful I kind of just forgot that this page existed because it was so far from my weekly pages that

I didn't really care too much for it and then here's just my notes on a video that I was watching I think it was about video by this Australian woman who learned French to a very high level and her pronunciation is really good so I was just trying to get some ideas from her to see if I can work on my Italian pronunciation because I feel like I can't really get the intonation right it's either I'm overdoing it or I sound very Spanish if that makes sense here are some more Italian books these are books

that I actually own but I'm not really the biggest fan of either so I'm not really sure how much progress I will make by the end of 2023 and another video by Luca lamparielo this one is about how to remember new words the idea is to eventually go back and add my ideas depending on where I am in my language Journey right now what problems I have or what goals I have what's bothering me and things like that and then here I have the striker for the Greek resources that I'm using which are the language

transfer course I think it has about 120 episodes and I've done about 43 so far and then it's my textbook called elenikaya sauce which I've done seven chapters out of 25 in and then communicating Greek which is a newer textbook that I got I only did two chapters here and I'm on the third now and then my graded readers I only put the graded readers for level one I do have more but I think since I only finished one out of three I will just be adding more stuff as I go and that's pretty much

it for these blank pages I also have a list of Polish songs I want to translate whenever I'm back to polish and it only has one song on it this is more of a social anxiety thing rather than language thing I wanted to order food or drinks whenever my husband and I go out at least 30 times I think I've done it more than just five times but I just stopped tracking I can't say that it gets easier I don't know for those of you who have social anxiety do you have anything that actually helps

I feel like I was born with it and I'll just die with it at some point there's a also this favorites page which I will fill I guess closer to the end of the year I don't really think it makes sense to put things here now and then another layout that this planner has is one called my 100 and this can be a list of 100 anything I'm pretty sure I'm not going to read 100 books by the end of the year but I just started putting whatever it is that I was written in languages

other than English and Russian I do have this little key here so N means novel for example here is my first novel in Italian I also have C for children's literature again read a couple of children's books in Italian G4 graded readers here's my first grid graded reader a for audio books I mostly listen to those in Spanish and again the colors correspond to languages and then this tracker here reflects which language I was focusing on exactly for each day of the year so I guess the idea is very similar to this one it's just

that this one is a little bit more detailed and again this is not about my intentions this is about how much time I spent on languages a certain day and for example even though Spanish is not my priority and you can clearly tell this by the fact that there's only one circle of this color on that particular day I spent more time on Spanish than any other of my languages so this is why it's here I really like to go back and see the change because you can tell it was all Italian and then Greek

started making appearances and then it started being my number one language more often and this is pretty much it for this notebook I do have some other ways of tracking my progress and I go through phases I had a notion phase for a couple of years definitely also now because I have my accountability partner we track our progress in a shared spreadsheet so I do use several different ways of doing things I also have a video as I've already mentioned on toggle track and how I use that for time tracking so if you want to

see and know more about how I track my progress and the time that I spend on languages you can check the description and I will link all of the videos that I have about the topic and I will probably be making more videos in the future because it's something that I really like doing but thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you in my next one foreign