Restarting Exactly The Same Goal for Language Learning

Akrasia
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It often happens that when I create a new goal, I happen to choose the same name as a previous, long forgotten goal. Usually the topic is the same, but the way I want to ensure progress has changed.

Today, when this happened, I duly went to my archived goals gallery, and found the goal with the intention of renaming it to make space for the newcomer.

It turns out that the old goal was exactly the goal I was about to create. The old one was about daily practice of French, started in July 2017 and archived in April 2019. So I’ve restarted it, and witnessed the delightful torn-paper edge that we now show on the graph.

In this case, it’s tracking a collection of potential activities related to language learning, using my bmndr.daily script and a custom aggregation method of truemean to effectively record the ratio (%) of activities I did on a particular day.

I settled on 5 categories of activity this time:

  1. reading, whether a novel or a newspaper
  2. writing, whether for work or in my journal
  3. listening to or watching content, whether a video, podcast, or movie/series
  4. speaking, ideally in conversation with someone
  5. using a language learning tool like clozemaster or languatalk

My current tools for language learning

Like a lot of folks, I started off using DuoLingo and indeed have several (retired) Beeminder goals about keeping on track there. That was a long time ago, though — it used to be that you could reach the end of Duo’s lessons, and I’m not sure that it’s possible now.

Fun fact: my first DuoLingo was English for Dutch speakers, because they rolled out the ESL courses before helping English speakers learn most other languages. I also completed French for English speakers, English for French speakers, French for Dutch speakers, etc.

Now I primarily use two tools:

  • ClozeMaster which has several modes for its spaced-repetition sentences. My comprehension and grammar was helped by listening to a sentence and typing out the whole thing. Now I’m speaking the sentence out loud, forcing me to dig the missing word out of the mess of vocabulary in my brain. I’m a lifetime Pro subscriber, which is something they offer every now and again (e.g. Black Friday).

  • LanguaTalk which is the best of the several AI conversational bots that I tried in summer 2025. It lets me save vocabulary and use it in flashcards or stories or actual interactions with human-sounding fictional friends. Super-helpful to take the edge off before going into a meeting. (If you’re interested, I can send you a signup link that gets you 25% off and me about $1.60. Update: added the affiliate link to the fine print of pjh/french)

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