How you measure progress in statistics and breaking down goals

[Touchstone57]

Hello,

 

Looking for other peoples opinions and experiences - I would like to do some sort of spreadsheet, with a daily tally of how much time I spend on different activities. As my studying becomes more intense and I work towards my own goals I release it would be good to actually write it down and get some good solid statics out of it to see how much time I'm exactly putting in.

 

Some I'm wondering, does anyone use anything at all similar? Do you note down the hours you put in to speaking/reading/listening etc? I know there are a lot of powerful things you can do with a spreadsheet, but I always find it hard to get started and figure out what exactly I want, so I'd be grateful for ideas or an example of something similar.

 

So far I've fleshed out a very simple spreadsheet, tracking activities everyday. e.g - Monday: TV (2 hours), Listening (30 mins), Sentences drilled (40), SRS time (30 mins), characters reviewed (5). You can then calculate weekly and monthly progress etc, and add individual notes about material studied for each cell in case you need to review it later. 

 

It is not meant to be used to as an assessment of Chinese ability, but just a way to measure your time spent on different activities, it can help set yourself goals and motivate yourself.

 

I'm sure people here are motivated by different things, but getting a green light when you've achieved your goal for the day or week can be quite motivational! I've decided I should take a more structured approach for measuring my progress which should in turn help me break down my goals and further my studies. 

 

So I'd be grateful if others could share anything similar that has helped them on their journey. 

[imron]

My advice would be not to worry about having statistics that are too detailed. It's very easy to get distracted by managing all the statistics.

Anything more than about 5 mins a day is probably overkill.

Consider using something like http://dontbreakthechain.com/ or 100% (which I developed) to track and manage progress.

[character]

My advice would be not to worry about having statistics that are too detailed. It's very easy to get distracted by managing all the statistics.

Along those lines, studying Chinese is hard work, and I've found it easy to be distracted by things related to it which aren't actually studying Chinese. Anki generates statistics automatically, and a growing pile of finished textbooks is also an automatic indicator of progress.

Perhaps pick a real-world metric such as HSK practice tests or graded readers and measure your progress every few months by trying one?

[li3wei1]

Note also that there's a difference between measuring effort, which you seem to be doing, and measuring progress, which the HSK practice tests would do. If your goal is to put in the hours, or do the reps, then you won't be as incentivised to make the hours as efficient as possible, and do the right reps rather than just a lot of them.

[imron]

Perhaps pick a real-world metric

This is also really good advice.

A few years back set myself a goal of reading one book a month. I had previously bought a year's worth of books, and it was great to watch books go from the unread to the read pile.

All books published in mainland china also have a character count so it's easy to tally statistics on how much you've read.

[philwhite]

Anki generates statistics automatically

 

Unfortunately, most of Anki's statistics and graphs seem to be more about input effort. The only useful output/result measure seems to be the number of mature cards. However, Anki doesn't show a graph of progress in terms of the number of mature cards. So I've started recording, once a month, the number of mature cards in my main character writing deck (RSH1).

[Shelley]

I hope you have a column for how much time is spent organizing and updating spreadsheets

[shuoshuo]

When I was studying Chinese in China I would normally just put the TV on in the background (to a Chinese channel that I found interesting) e.g. 爸爸去哪儿 or 爸爸回来了. I'd also try to spend as much time as possible with my Chinese friends, especially those who would talk to me in Chinese.  30 minutes of listening is nowhere close to enough, especially if you're living in Shanghai and Shanghainese is not the dialect you're trying to learn.  It's not like Beijing where you can be at the subway and you'll hear clear Chinese spoken all around you.

 

Spreadsheets: no.  I figured out a long time ago that would never work for me. Neither does time-tables.  These things are just really good at making me feel like a failure, because if I want to spend the whole day at Starbucks drinking coffee and reading an English book that's what I'll do.

[roddy]

You could try having a few 'reference' pieces of real-world target materials to judge progress against. Say your six-month goal is to be able to read articles in the Southern Weekend and follow a CCTV news broadcast. 

 

So you take a handful of SW articles and maybe with something like Imron's text analyser you work out what percentage of the vocab you know. Then a month later you check against the same articles, and so on. You should see the percentage tick up. Note you don't actually read these articles - the point is they represent random, unknown pieces, not ones you've already read and studied. 

 

With the news broadcast, sit with a clock and a piece of paper. Every thirty seconds, you make a subjective call - do you understand what is being said. If so, make a tick on the piece of paper. If not, don't. After 30 minutes, count the ticks. 

 

None of these are ideal. But they give you a rough guide, and hopefully a bit of a motivation boost. You can't get too caught up in these things, but I always found it useful just to break things down into manageable chunks and set achievable goals. Ok, two months ago I understood 45%, one month ago it was 55%, this time was 62%. Let's aim for 70% next time. 

[Guest realmayo]

OP: unlike the other replies, I think what you're suggesting is a good idea. The title of your post may be a bit misleading given you don't seem to be suggesting charts full of how many characters you've learned in the past 10 days etc etc.

 

In terms of recording and identifying how much you're actually doing of what you want to be doing, that can be very helpful for some people, myself included, other people (clearly) not included.

 

I can think of two elements: first is, as I said, to see how much you're actually doing. The second is to motivate yourself to stick to your goals.

For the latter, try http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/42480-gamification-of-your-chinese-learning/