Listening walks instead of listening apps
I had three apps on the phone for listening practice. All three had a streak counter. My longest streak this year was nineteen days and my total listening hours were, I eventually checked, under four. The streak was the product; the language was the by-product that happened occasionally.
In September I deleted all three and made one rule: one podcast episode per day, walked, no subtitles, no quiz at the end, and a pocket notebook for anything I want to keep.
Why walking turned out to matter
Forty minutes is longer than any app session I ever completed. The reason is not discipline, it is that walking makes long listening tolerable in a way sitting does not. My hands are busy, my body is doing something, and the episode ends before I get the urge to check whether I have earned enough points for the day. The session length grew by itself.
There is a worse side, which is that walking is not quiet. I miss more now than I did at a desk, especially in the first minutes before I settle. After two weeks the misses stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like normal listening, which is what actual comprehension in the real world is like anyway.
The notebook replaces the quiz
The pocket notebook gets one thing per episode, sometimes nothing: a phrase I want to steal, or a point the speaker made that I disagree with. That is the whole review. No transcript study, no vocabulary import, no flashcards created from the episode. I tried all of those with the apps and none of them survived a busy week.
What I actually got
Between four and five hours a week, which is more than the previous year. Two episodes a week now go by without my reaching for the notebook, which I take as comprehension getting easier rather than me getting lazier. The first comprehension test I sat since switching was the best score I have had, and my guess is that it is because the material is normal-speed speech about a topic, not isolated sentences about ordering coffee.
The thing I would keep if I had to choose: kill the streak counter. A number that resets when you are ill teaches you that the language is a thing you can fail at, and that is a very efficient way to stop doing it.