The first 30 days
Exactly what I did in the first month, week by week.
⏱ About 3 min read
The goal of the first month is not to get better. After 30 days I still understood very little.
The goal is to build the habit and the toolkit, so the following 11 months run without needing thought.
Week 1 — Build the system
| Day | What I did |
|---|---|
| 1 | Install Anki and Ddict |
| 2 | Pick one listening source and one reading source, then stop searching |
| 3–5 | Every day: 20 minutes active listening, 10 minutes reading |
| 6 | Start reviewing a ~2000-word foundation vocabulary deck |
| 7 | Sit down and ask: what made me want to quit? Fix that specific thing. |
Pick material you actually enjoy
I once picked a very "worthwhile" economics podcast. Three days in I was bored and dropped the whole study habit with it.
The next time I picked something I genuinely wanted to watch. Less "worthwhile", but I stuck with it for months.
You will quit from boredom long before you quit from difficulty.
Week 2 — Increase listening volume
I pushed active listening up to 30–40 minutes, and started background listening in spare moments.
Two things I took away from this week:
- Relistening to the same material 2–3 times beats constantly hunting for something new. The second pass always catches what the first one lost.
- No Vietnamese subtitles. I tried it and found my eyes were only reading the subtitles while my ears did almost nothing. English subtitles are fine.
Week 3 — Start making my own cards
This is where I started creating Anki cards from sentences I met while listening and reading. The specifics are in Vocabulary & Anki.
Ten cards a day, maximum
That week I was enthusiastic — some days I made more than 40 cards. It felt very productive.
Three weeks later I opened Anki to over 400 cards due. I closed it and did not open it again for a month.
Since then I have kept a hard limit of 10 cards a day.
Week 4 — Change nothing
This week I deliberately added nothing new. No new app, no new source, no new technique.
The only job of week 4 is to prove that the schedule I set is a schedule I can keep.
At the end of the week I answered three questions:
- On my busiest day, how many minutes did I still manage?
- Which task did I avoid the most? Why?
- Which material do I genuinely want to go back to?