As a language teacher, I often get questions like: "How do I progress in my target language? How do I improve fast? What's the best method?"

In turn, I ask: "Where do you want to get?"

While some have a clear focus and well-defined objectives, most of the people I talk to are rather vague on this point.

"I just want to speak better."

"I want to sound like a native."

"I want to be fluent."

Those goals are not wrong per se, but they're too generic to help you build a strategy. Because there are tens of ways to progress, but not necessarily at your pace and in the direction you'd want.

Enter OKR: Goal-setting made easy

I recently read a book about a management framework developed at Intel in the 70s and rapidly exported into other industries, and still valued as extremely useful and productive in many big companies and institutions, notably Google.

At first, I wasn't sure exactly what was so cool about it.

The idea is simple: you need to set goals for your company. Then, you need to specify key results that allow you to measure if and to what extent you're progressing toward your goals.

"That's it?" I thought. "Isn't that just…sensible?"

But the devil's in the details. Namely: the way you select your goals and tie strategic key results to them. And that's what helps with languages.

Some other aspects of OKR matter mainly in companies; here, I'll only focus on what's relevant for learning.

Choose what drives you

I know you've heard about "smart" goals. Measurable, specific, time-bound, and all that. But if you want to learn a language, measurable goals are hard.

How would you measure if your listening comprehension has increased by 30%?

And does it really make sense to fixate on learning exactly 12 new words a week? Why not 15 or 8?

That's what makes goal-setting in language learning so hard, and that's where OKR is helpful.

In OKR, objectives must first of all be related to your end-goal, your mission. If achieving them doesn't improve your experience as a language learner, then they're inaccurate.

If you look at it this way, "studying Japanese half an hour every day" immediately stops being a useful objective. Because you can do it for a year, but simply doing it gives you no guarantee you'll come closer to your real goal. And what's that?

Fluency comes in different shapes and forms

If you're thinking: "But my end-goal is becoming fluent!" ask yourself: why?

If you want to be fluent in Germany because you're going to move to Germany, your goal can be broken down into the kind of situations you want to be able to handle:

  • informal interactions in shops, offices, the doctor's, and so on;
  • conversations with neighbors and acquaintances;
  • work-related and informal interactions with colleagues…

While your end-goal is "be fluent in my daily life in Germany," your temporary objectives (to be revised every few months) will be related to each of these frequently occurring scenarios.

If you're working on "conversations with neighbors", the selections of topics, vocabulary, grammar structures, and input you'll focus on will be specific. You won't devote much time to watching sci-fi TV series or drilling a verb tense that's only used in written language.

If instead you want to improve your French before visiting Paris in six months, fluency might still be the end goal, but your priorities are going to look different:

  • to develop listening skills good enough to understand basic interactions you may have during your holiday;
  • to learn vocabulary related to food, accommodation, emergencies, tourist attractions, and local events;
  • to have a decent pronunciation so that people understand you when you talk.

These are three objectives for a six-month period. There shouldn't be many more than that, or else your efforts would be too dispersed.

This step may sound obvious, but in my experience, not many learners sit down to decide what they are going to be working on before worrying about how.

Also, cool thing: goals are not set in stone. You notice your goal is not improving your experience, and suspect the work spent on it would be better devoted to a different language skill or activity? Cross it off and start again, at any moment. No guilt, no judgement. No rigid routines.

Make it hard, not impossible

Failure is a vital part of learning. I could say that learning a language just means you failed enough times to finally get it right.

Yet, failure sucks. And the idea of setting goals inevitably brings with it the possibility of missing them, and losing motivation and confidence.

That's another cool feature of OKR: you're not supposed to reach all of your goals.

You're supposed to fail some of them, either because it takes longer than you thought, or because life gets in the way, or because you find out they're not good goals after all, or it's not the right time to pursue them.

Maybe you decided to work on Italian past tenses in the next two months, only to find out you need to review the present tense first.

Whatever the case, the idea of a "stretched objective" puts failure in perspective: let's fail, let's do it fast, understand why it happened, and move on to the next goal.

But how do we prevent this from becoming a sort of "free pass" for setting ambitious goals and then regularly failing to reach them?

By evaluating what you do. If, at the end of a pre-set period, you've attained 70% of a gigantic goal, you've probably made more progress than you would by reaching 90% of a more modest goal.

And how do you measure that? Enter the real game changer for language learners: key results.

What makes a difference: strategic key results

"KR" in OKR stands for key results: the indicators that allow you to check whether you're making progress.

Now that's what I find particularly useful for language learning.

Hear me out:

  • "Studying ten minutes a day" is not a good KR. Because it doesn't allow you to monitor whether you're progressing toward your goal of "learning vocabulary" or not.
  • "Listening to a podcast in my target language every day" is not a good KR. It's input, yes. And it's surely useful. But it doesn't help you check whether you're getting closer to your objective.

What are good KRs, then?

For instance, if your goal is to understand basic interactions for your trip to Paris, then make it a point to listen to authentic dialogues set in holiday contexts online and check how many of these you manage to understand partially, fully, or not at all.

If the fraction changes over time, you know you're improving your understanding of these situations.

That helps you get to your goal.

It's not only about being specific: you can be very specific and still end up nowhere near your objective. It's about formulating your KR in a way that makes it evident whether you're progressing or not toward that specific goal.

Why is this so useful for language learners?

Too much information, everywhere, all the time

If you're learning a language, resources are being thrown at you from all over the Internet. Online courses, 1 to 1 or group sessions, personalized courses, conversation groups, tandem partners.

And then old-fashioned books, ultimate how-tos, high-quality YouTube videos, apps, and now a variety of AI assistants.

It's almost like it's impossible not to learn a language.

Yet, with all of that to choose from, learners get confused. Where should I start? How do I do it all?

An overwhelming choice. The only question helping you sort this mess out is: where exactly do you want to go?

If your current objective reads: "Being able to face a job interview in Spanish," you'll focus on:

  • orally describing your competencies and work experiences, and using AI to correct your mistakes;
  • watching videos of job interviews and preparing to answer the most common questions;
  • reading articles relevant to your work field to become familiar with the vocabulary you might need.

Of course, if you find yourself stumbling into verb tenses when you practice, you'll have to revise them. But rather than this becoming an endless side quest that distracts you from your current goal, you'll keep it short and focused so that you can come back to your agenda.

You've basically stopped "learning" and started "self-teaching" and "self-coaching."

And this laser-like focus is going to help you with yet another significant challenge.

The time-management nightmare

I know there are tens of strategies to learn a language. And I am intimately sure all of them are good.

Everything you do works, eventually, if you stick with it.

But sticking with it is damn hard. We work full-time, have families, commitments, loads of laundry, and our attention is stretched too far.

Yes, we can all find "ten minutes a day" to practice a language. But if you don't know exactly what to do with these ten minutes, they'll be over before you know. And then a week, and then a month.

Having a clear objective and key results doesn't help you "find the time". But it helps you avoid wasting it.

Because you can monitor where you are and know exactly where to direct your efforts today.

This way, you don't feel like endlessly running in circles, completing activities for the sake of doing it, and wondering if you are even making progress.

It's going to take some time and iterations to get the knack. But the next time someone asks you where you're going, you've got an answer ready.

Final take

If you struggle to stay focused and stick with your learning plans, you might think, there's no reason why this one would work for me.

Except OKR shouldn't make you feel like you need more discipline to stick with it. In fact, it should make you feel like you need less discipline.

Because you no longer deal with the ambitious and vague objective of "learning a language", made up of grammar, comprehension, conversation, vocabulary…but are rather confronted with a simple task: do something that helps you progress toward that ONE goal.

And when you're done, set another goal and work toward it. One step at a time.

Give it a try, and let me know where it takes you!