How To Use Your Bullet Journal When Learning a Language

Preparing yourself to learn a new language is a motivating process that creates all the initial energy to start acquiring new words and grammar patterns. Personally, I love the planning stage before learning a new foreign language. Nevertheless, I’ve discovered that consistency is the key to master whatever you are studying. Using a bullet journal makes you feel more inspired, and also helps you to keep consistent.

I love using a bullet journal to organize my monthly calendar, my daily tasks, to track my habits and plan my budget. And although I also use it to track my Korean study, I haven’t thought about other ways to use bullet journal in order to learn a foreign language, until now.

As BuJo is something many people, including me, use daily, I think it is the perfect tool to keep track of your improvement in relation to a foreign language. It is also a simple way to keep motivation whenever you are not in the mood to study or learn. In this post I will give you some ideas for you to use your own bullet journal and master your favourite foreign language at the same time.

If you love learning languages and your dream or goal in life is to be a polyglot or even a bilingual, this post is perfect for you. You will discover new usages for your bullet journal, identify the best ones for you and apply them in the system you already use right now.

As I will also show you some pictures of the ideas I propose to you, you can get inspiration to create your own and personalized tracking system. I also encourage you to search for more ideas on websites like Pinterest. I have two boards that can help you with that.

See my Bullet Journal Organization board.

See my Language Learning Organization board.

This is almost the same as with other kinds of tracking systems on Bullet Journal. Just create some grids or drawings that you can fill with pencils or highlights. Every night, pick up your bujo and open the studies tracking page. Reflect on your language studies that day. Did you study Italian, German or whatever language you want to master? If you did it, fill the empty space with color, if you didn’t then leave it like that.

Read my post: How to Organize your Notebook For Learning a Language

If you want to be truly consistent and acquire your learning studies as a habit, I will recommend you a super useful strategy I heard in the Lavendaire Youtube channel: Whenever you can to acquire a new habit, stick it to an old habit you have already acquired. For example: If you meditate every day at 6 pm, you can start learning languages after your meditation routine. As meditating is something you already do, studying a foreign language can become a new habit faster.

You can make the same as before, but instead of tracking if you studies or not, you can track how much you have improved. You don’t have to do it every day; choose specific days to track your progress on your target language, for example, once a week, twice a month, every two months, etc.

Read my post: 7 Tips on How to Organize and Improve your Life Using Bullet Journal

You can track the level you are in relation to the overall view of your knowledge in the language, or individual aspects such as listening, writing, speaking, reading, grammar, fluency, vocabulary, etc.

You can leave a page every month to write new words you have learned. If you choose to learn a new vocabulary word every day, try to stick to it. You can also write one word in your daily pages so that you can review it during the week. At the end of a week, you’ll have learned 7 words and at the end of a month 30 or 31. Just imagine how many words you’ll learn in half a year…

Something like 182 words! If you want to go faster, you can learn three words or more a day.

Read my post: 5 Tips on How to Organize Yourself to Learn a Language

Another idea you can do is to create a goal setting page for each month. You can do it at the beginning so that is together with your monthly calendar; that way you’ll be able to arrange your weekly schedule thinking about your goals. Some of your goals can be:

• Being able to communicate for half an hour with a foreign person.
• Understand three of my favorite songs in my target language.
• Watch a full episode of a tv show without subtitles.
• Write a full page journal entry.
• Find two penpal friends and talk to them ONLY in my target language.
• Learn all the basic grammar rules.
• Learn 500 new words.
• Improve my accent.
• Finish a book in my target language.

Read my post: Use This Checklist to Study Languages Every Week!

You can write these daily language tasks in any page you decide, or you can include them in your daily tasks. When you plan your day in relation to your job, groceries shopping, friends meeting, romantic date, etc., you can also plan your learning tasks. Make sure to also include those tasks on your monthly calendar, so that you have an overview of the whole month. When I started doing that, I realized how less of a procrastinator I can be if I just make sure to plan everything ahead.

Ok, maybe not everything, but most of the things I should do.

These are some tasks you can include in your daily routines.

• Read two posts written on my target language on Instagram.
• Watch a five-minute video in my target language on Youtube.
• Review some grammar patterns and create two examples for each one of them.
• Study a chapter of a book to learn my target language.
• Analyze my favorite song in my target language and search for new vocabulary.
• Search for five new words in a dictionary or online dictionary.
• Review Flashcards.
• Study 30 minutes with an App.

Read my post: Create your Own Language Studies Curriculum Right Now

As I told you before, creating a schedule for your language studies routine is one of the most important things you should do when you want to make a habit out of it. If you are a forgetful person, you may write your schedule everywhere. Do it in the monthly calendar of your bullet journal AND in your wall calendar (if you have one), write it on your cell phone and set an alarm, write it on your daily checklists and whatever another way that comes into your mind.

Anyway, if one day you feel like not studying for any reason, don’t push yourself to do it! This is something I always tell to people. I also have to remind it to myself, because I tend to push my limits until I face a breakdown. So be kind to yourself and don’t forget to rest (also, write that down on your calendar: RESTING)

If you really are into languages, you should take a look at my first ebook. It is called Sweven: Practical Workbook to Learn Any Language.

This is a practical workbook that is like a notebook for your languages studies. You can use it instead of a notebook or together with it. This workbook is for all of you who desire to learn a foreign language but don’t want to take classes or pay for online teachers to help you.

This is for you to download and print as many times as you want so that you can study more than one language if that is what you wish to do.

What does the workbook contain?

• Pages to plan your language learning journey.
• Goal setting page.
• Basic grammar and vocabulary pages.
• Pages to learn vocabulary that is useful for you.
• Create your own self-introduction pages.
• First oral presentation planning.
• Review pages.
• Different activities for each content.
• And more!

As I told you before, you can use this ebook instead of a notebook because it will guide you to every step you need to take when learning a new language. You can use it in whatever level you are but is most useful if you are in the beginner stage.

You can print it or write on it from your technological device if you want to. You will also need internet connection or a dictionary/book of your target language so that you’ll be able to complete all the information that is required for you to study.

Is like having a notebook already made for you to start working on it. Doesn’t it sound cool?

Are you struggling to practice a foreign language? Check out my language study course!

I really hope this post was useful to you. I am glad to have you here reading my content because I truly want to help the most I can with my tips and pieces of advice. If you are learning any language, just let me know in the comment section below. Tell me how are you accomplishing your goals and tasks.

Have a beautiful day,

Namasté.