A Week of Time Tracking

Language Learning Through Games, Movies, and Hobbies

📅 Week 27/53 | Study Log 2026

If you missed it, yesterday I shared a recap of my June studies, my plans for July, and a mid-year check-in on my language goals.

A Mid-Year Language Check-In

🥐 French

It's been a full week of tracking my language study! The 75 Fluent Challenge is going well, and one goal I've been consistent with is studying for at least one hour every day.

Looking back at my tracked sessions, it's interesting to see how my study time is distributed throughout the week.

One thing that stood out after categorizing each activity was just how much easier it is to accumulate input than output. Listening alone takes up a large portion of my study time (43.6%), while writing and speaking only make up 11% combined.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, as it’s just much easier to get input whether it’s through watching a movie, listening to a podcast or even playing a game.

Instead of forcing myself to write every day or complete five minutes of speaking just to check a box, I think I'd rather focus on making sure I get meaningful output practice over the course of a week. The challenge is supposed to be fun, and I’ve been enjoying trying out different things each day.

This week I watched the movie Monsieur Papa and started playing A Plague Tale: Innocence, a game that was originally developed in French. During my first playthrough, I picked up a few new words:

• une frondre - a slingshot

• un festin - a feast/banquet

• un vacarme - a racket (loud noise)

• un fléau - a plague

I was surprised by how many of these I remembered when I looked back at my notebook, especially since I had only written the French words without any English translations. I think remembering the scenes where I heard each word gives me enough context to recall its meaning.

I also read Christina’s newest article about 20 study sequences to use when you don’t know what to study. Using a spinning wheel, I landed on sequence 18: translation and back-translation.

I translated one of the short stories from a workbook I'm using, and in a few days I plan to translate it back into French without looking at the original. Translating from French to English was fairly straightforward, but I can already tell that translating it back into French will be a great exercise for grammar and output.

The more I think about it, the more I realize this is the type of output activity I enjoy most. It's still challenging, but it feels much more meaningful than forcing myself to write or speak when I don't really have anything to say.

Migaku Stats

• French Total Words Known: 3,155 → 3275 words

• L’Étranger Part 1 Deck: 56 → 109/446 cards reviewed

✨Language Wins of The Week

• 🎥 Watched a French movie.

• 🎮 Started playing A Plague Tale: Innocence.

• ⭐ Bought the 50 Chinese Coffee Breaks book. It should arrive in a few days!

📅 Next Week’s Plans

• 🥐 French: Back-translate the French short story I translated

• 🧧 Mandarin: Do one exercise in the 50 Chinese Coffee Breaks book

• 🍜 Japanese: Do one lesson in my Japanese textbook

Thanks for being here! See you next week.