In 2001, 17 software developers met and wrote a manifesto describing a lightweight software development methodology known as Agile. In the following decade, this methodology had a huge impact on the software development world. It was a departure from the typical methodologies of the time. It emphasized individuals, working software, and collaborating with the customer to ensure that changing ideas about what the customer needed could be taken into account so that the right thing was built the first time. You might wonder what the heck that has to do with language learning and you’d be right to. You see, I think that many of the same philosophies and ideas that are the cornerstone of Agile Software Development can actually be adopted by the individual language learner. I also believe that they represent the best method for organizing, tracking, and verifying both the learning process in general and the individual skills language learners need to develop to achieve their goals. Here is my manifesto for Agile Language Learning:

Value people and interactions over process and habits, processes and habits over goals, and goals over materials/tools.

What does this really mean? It’s an inversion of the usual way that people approach language learning. Most people, and you will see this a ton on the Internet, focus on making sure that they have the “perfect learning resource.” Then, they set their goals and get to work. 12 weeks later, if they have not already given up or gotten completely sidetracked, they are burnt out and simply don’t see the improvement they expected. Just like the crowd of people that gluts every gym in January, three months later almost all of them have quit. It didn’t happen in a single moment where the person just looked in the mirror and said, “I’m done.” In most cases, it happened over a series of weeks. Motivation waned and due to a lack of accountability, that waning motivation eventually turned into no motivation at all.

Most of these people never bothered to engage with even a single native speaker of their target language. Or, if they did, the experience was 10 weeks in and they were astounded that they not only couldn’t understand hardly a thing the native speaker said, the native speaker found it just as hard to understand them. The learner is left asking herself, “What the hell did I just waste all of that time for?” There is no better way to kill your motivation or your self-esteem.

People and Interactions First

We don’t have the space to go into motivation as a skill in this article. Suffice it to say that I believe forming relationships with tutors, language partners, and other native speakers is crucial to staying committed to your learning. It’s these interactions that will keep you going when your motivation inevitably wanes.

Recently, I had a nine-month period where I did almost nothing in the way of real learning. Work was ruining my personal life. I was working 55 to 65 hours a week and, when I got home, I had no desire to do anything that was more difficult than watching TV. My relationship with my language partner is what kept me in contact with the language and was also what helped me to see that I was losing my edge. Without that relationship, I am certain that I would have completely fallen off the wagon.

Learning Processes and Habits Next

Another thing that can help you get through valleys in your motivation is establishing habits that relate to learning your target language. These might be rituals that you perform like getting a cup of coffee and drinking it while you review your SRS work, studying before you allow yourself to watch TV, or going for a walk on your lunchbreak while using Glossika. The important thing that is that you manipulate your life in such a way that it seems to be easier for you to do these things than it is not to do them.

One thing that I’ve heard from people in different fields, not just language learning, is that you should commit to doing just 5 minutes of something every day. For example, you might commit to just doing 5 minutes of reading in a magazine or book per day. When you get home and you’re tired, you have a wedge to use to get yourself reading: it’s only 5 minutes. Once you start reading, it’s really easy for 5 minutes to turn to 10 or 15. The problem is the feeling you have before you get started, once you’re past that, though, it’s easy to keep going.

The Rest is Just Icing

Let’s face it, a cake without icing is not really a cake. It may not be the most important component but it’s still pretty much essential. So is goal setting and so is having high quality resources. But, even without setting goals, if you have strong relationships with native speakers and you have put learning processes and habits into place in your daily life, you are going to make progress. How many people have we seen who spend time setting goals they never actually achieve or waste time searching for the best resources when actually using the decent tools they already have could have gotten them past the beginner level?

Themes and Tasks, Challenges and Sprints, and the Bullet Journal

The fundamentals of this methodology are simple. There are two classes of things that you will worry about: the linguistic skills you want to improve and the time you are going to use to do the improving. These are then broken down into strategic (broad) and tactical (detailed) sets to make them easy to manage. We will use the bullet journal as the management tool to keep track of our time and the tasks we wish to accomplish.

Learning Themes and Tasks

Themes are strategic, meaning broad, learning goals such as improving pronunciation/accent reduction, mastering verb tenses, or understanding news broadcasts. Themes should not be things like “complete 25 exercises form X grammar book”. That would be a learning task. If I have picked “mastering verb tenses” as a theme, then I would have individual exercises from grammar books that I will use to accomplish my theme. A really good set of themes could be taken from the CEFR levels. In short, themes are skills and tasks are the things you are going to do to develop those skills.

The Challenge

A challenge is a strategic time-box in which you will put your highest priority learning themes. A challenge should be no longer than 16 weeks and no shorter than 8 weeks. In my experience, 12 weeks is generally optimal. The purpose of having a challenge versus just having sprints is that it allows you to prioritize your learning themes. You can say to yourself, “For the next 12 weeks, I am just going to work on these 3 items and I’m going to into a lot of depth on them.”

Sprints

Sprints are smaller time-boxes (one to two weeks) in which you will put the tactical-level learning items that you will perform to complete the themes you have selected for a given challenge. Sprints are periods of intense, focused learning. This is why you need to keep them short. If you take on too much over too long of a period, you will only get burnt out. You need to have time to plan, build/gather your tools/resources, and evaluate your learning. It is also important that you keep sprints short so that you can react to changes you might need to make in your learning process.

In the week before the sprint begins, you should gather your material. Everything should be ready when you start (see Retrospectives below). Once a sprint has been planned and started, you must stick with the plan for the duration of the sprint. You may not start using a different book that you just got in the mail, for example. A resource being boring is not a good excuse to go off plan. It’s only two weeks! Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we are being honest, most progress is made through daily mediocre effort and not through herculean spurts of perfect study. A resource containing many errors, however, is a good excuse to break the sprint.

Once your sprint is complete, you will need to look back on your efforts and decide what worked and what didn’t. This time of thinking, planning, and collecting resources for the next sprint is called a retrospective.

Retrospectives

A retrospective should be roughly ½ the time that you spend in a sprint. You need to use this time to evaluate your learning over the last sprint and also to plan your learning for the next sprint. I have historically done this by self-testing using CEFR based exams. You will still be performing your bare-minimum learning (discussed in the Getting Started Section) and you can read and watch TV for pleasure but your study load should be a lot less in this time period. Make sure that you are reflecting on what you have been doing and how it is working. Try forming new ideas about techniques and strategies that you can use in the next sprint. Then you should begin planning it and gathering any resources and tools you will need before you get started. You should not select anything for a sprint unless the resource is available and ready to use before the sprint starts. The sprint is no time for you to be trying to figure out what to do because the book that you ordered didn’t arrive on time.

Here is a simple retrospective template.

The Bullet Journal

I’ve never been able to organize my learning in a way that I could sustain in the long-run. Either the systems that I used were too complicated or they didn’t really provide a good fit for how I liked to learn and study. I began using an approach based on Agile about a year ago but I ended up falling out of the practice. In the software engineering world, they use sprint boards (software or real) to visualize the flow of work being done and to help signal roadblocks and bottlenecks in the work they do. For an individual learner, this is likely not going to work as it’s geared towards teams, not individuals. When I first started trying to implement this methodology, I tried using post-it notes like this on a board but it was physically cumbersome and too time consuming to maintain. Then, I tried to plan my sprints by printing material and putting it in a folder for each day. This didn’t really work for me either because I had a lot of learning tasks that did not have physical artifacts like exercise sheets. Some of my tasks were things like transcribing news broadcasts or listening to a podcast and then writing a summary. A folder didn’t provide me with a good method to organize all of the types of learning tasks I might be doing. Using a standard calendar or day-planner was far too restrictive. A day planner could not handle the ideas I had developed about learning themes and sprints. Enter the bullet journal!