While learning a language with an immersion method, the main reason people quit learning is sheer lack of motivation. After the honeymoon phase meets its inevitable end, and learning becomes slow, the single most important factor that will determine whether or not you'll actually reach fluency is whether or not you can maintain high levels of motivation. And the best way to do so, is to turn your learning experience into a series of small winnable games.
(Sure, discipline does play a big role, in fact of the thousands of people who eventually reached their goal, none of them were JUST motivated. But no matter what, forcing yourself to do something without actually wanting to do it won't do you any good.)
Perhaps the most common/tangible way to do so is having some form of statistics. Something you can look back at, something that feels tangible. For me, it's tracking the time I spend studying/listening/reading. Building a streak, seeing the numbers grow can be an invaluable tool as it allows you to know just how much you're doing. It allows you to push past your limits. However, I've always felt that having to juggle multiple apps and multiple devices while immersing will inevitably cause you to waste precious time. That's why I decided to create my own add on. (That, and the fact that I just wanted to create my own addon for once ;D).
At its core (and for now!) it's just a time tracking tool. It allows you to measure the time you spend on each task, assign tags (e.g. Study/Listening/Reading/Speaking etc) and see the resulting statistics. Obviously you can also manually input the time you've spent immersing.
HOW TO USE:
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when you first install it, a pop up window will ask you to select time tracking tags from a list (or add yours). Because this addon has been made with the goal of helping immersion learners track their time, the list includes a number of immersion activities, but feel free to customize it. (Of course, you can add new tags whenever you want using the stopwatch function and writing the new tag in the textbox)
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to use the addon go to Tools/Time Tracker. There you'll find three options:
- Track Time
- Merge Tags (I created this just in case you wanted to merge the stats for multiple tags, just remember that it's PERMANENT!!!)
- Show Time Stats
Going forward, I'd like to implement a bunch of features. But for now, I think that's enough.
NB. It's my first time trying something like this (actually, it's my first time coding. Period.) so there may be some issues with different anki versions. I was able to fix most of them on the 25.07.5 though
[thank you youtube and chatgpt btw]