💡 Notion Tour: My Language Dashboard
How I use Notion to track language course progress and organize language resources.
I use Notion for many different things. During my university studies Notion served as a place to keep track of courses, assignment deadlines and research papers. I have pages for my creative practices such as painting, illustrating and writing. As I mentioned in my post about why I started a language learning newsletter, I shared that I use Notion to draft my newsletters.
One way I keep track of my resources and language learning progress is through my Language Dashboard on Notion.
💡 My Notion Language Dashboard
I gave a summary of my language dashboard when I shared how I time track, log, and plan my language studies. Today I’ll be going a bit more in-depth into the different pages in my language dashboard on Notion.
⭐ Active Languages + Goals Section
The top of my dashboard is a gallery view of the languages I’m currently learning. Within each language gallery page are my 2023 language goals for that specific language. I rarely had language goals in the past and if I did, they were not specific. Storing my goals here allows me to easily see my goals and adapt them if necessary.
🎯 Target Language Resources
Below my goals section are toggle headings with the name of my TLs. ASL is not one of my target languages but I had a brief moment when I wanted to learn it so I made a page to store resources. I’ve considered making dashboards for each language but for now this is how I’ve been using it.
For each language, I usually have a page for general resources. Since Mandarin was my only TL for many years, I have the most amount of pages for it. I have pages to save books I'm interested in reading, vocab lists, songs, and podcasts.
Most of these pages are messy and disorganized but they serve their purpose!
📝 Reading + Course Trackers
The next two sections contain databases to track my reading and the courses/textbooks/decks I complete. Both of these databases belong on separate pages but I have linked them to my dashboard for easy reference.
📚 Reading Tracker
This reading tracker was originally just for Mandarin, however, I’ve started using it to track everything I read in my TLs. I can use filters when I only want to see books that are in a certain language. On this page, I have a filter set to only show my current reads.
✏️ Course Tracker
Although I call this my course tracker, I use it to track more than just courses. I track my language textbooks, and vocab decks here as well. The visual progress bar and percentage show me the progress I’m making in my language resources.
📝 Language Study Tracker
The final section is my language study tracker. I used to use this section to log my language studies. This is what the tracker looked like when I started using it.
In the notes section, I set a filter that only showed me the entries where I had written notes. If I learned any new words that day from my immersion, I would add them to the specific language page on the calendar. I set reminders using Notion’s reminder feature to remind myself to review the words. My method was similar to the Goldlist method where I would review every 2 weeks. As you can see below, I’ve missed a few reviews since I no longer use this tracker. I now prefer to track my language studies in a digital planner.
❓ In what ways do you use notion?
Thanks for reading!
I had a language learning dashboard on Notion, but I find it hard to check it out often when I’m busy with other things. Instead I use a general backlog database with all of my tasks and goals. Honestly, this is making me want to revisit my language learning page though, it’s so well organised! Just like you, I went back to a planner that feels a bit more customisable (paper 😁). My favourite thing is seeing how your system is evolving to fit your new needs and study methods. Would love to see updates if you change it!!