Day 3: A Sentence, a Spiral, and a Spreadsheet

DAEMONIC01

July 7, 2025

Day 3: A Sentence, a Spiral, and a Spreadsheet

It starts with a short sentence: "I have been learning English for...".
But do I have to use "have been" or something else? Is this okay? Too simple or too complex? Does this fit the context? Should I use another word? Is this British or American spelling? Maybe the "seems" would be better than "looks like", or not? Okay, fine - it's done!
Oh, wait... what if this is wrong?
Hey, no translator, no Grammarly, or any other stuff. Simply accept the possibility of making mistakes and write another sentence.
But...
No, it's just a little practice with a few sentences, so stop overthinking.
Allright then, it will be wrong again and I have to fill another line in my error logger Excel sheet. It will be our fault.
If you say so my friend...
I don't even know how I've got past the "I have a cat." phase...

So it starts with a sentence, ends up in an overthinking spiral, and will be buried into an Excel sheet, which is a complex analyzing tool of my progress. It has columns for sentence count by date, errors by types, and calculated values, like CSR (Correct Sentence Rate). There are people who only need to do something, and that's it. But not for me. I need plans, methods, goals, systems, feedback, progress bars, graphs, and charts for everything. That's me, and this over-thought self-reflective nightmare is my usual method for anything, but sometimes it works fine. Or not...

introductionenglish

en 1

Correct

Corrections

Doing_my_best

Day 3: A Sentence, a Spiral, and a Spreadsheet

It starts with a short sentence: "I have been learning English for...".

But do I have to use "have been" or something else?

One would typically use "have been." The learning English was taking place in the past, and is still taking place.

Is this okay?

Too simple or too complex?

Does this fit the context?

Should I use another word?

Is this British or American spelling?

Maybe the "seems" would be better than "looks like", or not?

Okay, fine - it's done!

Oh, wait... what if this is wrong?

Hey, no translator, no Grammarly, or any other stuff.

Simply accept the possibility of making mistakes and write another sentence.

But... No, it's just a little practice with a few sentences, so stop overthinking.

Allright then, it will be wrong again and I have to fill another line in my error logger Excel sheet.

All+right=Allright, right? We drop the extra "l," for whatever reason.

It will be our fault.

If you say so my friend...

I don't even know how I've gotten past the "I have a cat."

phase...

So it starts with a sentence, ends up in an overthinking spiral, and will be buried into an Excel sheet, which is a complex analyzing tool of my progress.

It has columns for sentence count by date, errors by types, and calculated values, like CSR (Correct Sentence Rate).

There are people who only need to do something, and that's it.

But not for me.

I need plans, methods, goals, systems, feedback, progress bars, graphs, and charts for everything.

I'm the same way! Spreadsheets are so much fun!

That's me, and this over-thought self-reflective nightmare is my usual method for anything, but sometimes it works fine.

Or not...

Feedback

Honestly, you might want to reconsider your B1 (intermediate) self-evaluation. This is the third thing I've read from you and you've hardly made any mistakes. This is really impressive. I would mistake you for a native, since the tiny mistakes you have made are things that native speakers (albeit the less educated ones) make all the time. Also, please reply to this, as I'm interested in your spreadsheet method. Please describe in more detail for me how you operate this spreadsheet. I must know.

DAEMONIC01

July 7, 2025

Oh wait, is this real? I've been here for two days and... wow. :D
Okay, I'll think about it, maybe my English is good enough for a higher level. I hope you're right.

Let's talk about my... system :D
It has two separate worksheet. One for logging mistakes, and the other for some statistics about my mistakes and progress. I log my mistakes for two reason. On the one hand, to make it easier to see what should I practice more, and the other hand, to make statistics about is to track my progress. The columns are:
"Sentence",
"Wrong Part",
"Corrected Part",
"Main Error Type" (grammar, word using, etc.),
"Subtype" (like wrong article, conjugation, etc.),
"Description" (short info about why this is a mistake).

This way I can see my weakpoints that helps me improve. If I made a lot of grammar errors today, then I try to practice that area tomorrow.

The other part is the statistics for tracking progress. I'm a bit of a control freak, so I need to see where I am and where I'm going, so I have one line for each date and have columns for "Written sentences today", "Corrected sentences today", "Correction Rate" (percentage of corrected sentences), "Change" to see the change from one day to the next, separate columns for each main error type, a summary column, a NER (Normalized Error Rate) columm (How many mistakes are there in 10 sentences?), and another "change" columns to see the change of NER day by day and week by week.

It's a bit over-thought, but I like to work with data, so it's game for me.

Is this British or American spelling?