There have been a couple of good recent discussions on how to stay motivated while learning a language. For myself, I think I have part of this story worked out, but not all of it.
I think I've figured how to stay motivated for self-study, by developing a lesson plan with daily activities I can mark "complete". However, while that is a great way to measure participation, I don't have a good way to measure progress. I only have my subjective impression of how good I am with French, and that varies from day to day. Some days I feel "good" about what I've done, and some days I feel frustrated, but I would love to be able to assign some ratings to different skills and see them improve over time (I'm a sucker for measurement). I have thought about trying to have someone like an instructor help me with mock DELF tests and the like, but even if I could make that work, it would only be practical to do that once in a great while. Ideally, I would like to be able to prove week-over-week improvement.
So, does anyone do anything special to measure their increasing skills with their language?
