Notice Your Mistakes & Review

You have made the same article error this week that you made five years ago. Not a similar one — the same one, in the same construction, probably more than once. Nobody corrected it, because everybody understood you, and the version of French you speak has been reinforced daily by the only feedback immersion supplies: successful communication. That is fossilization, and it is not solved by learning the rule. You almost certainly know the rule. It is solved by noticing, at the moment of production, that you are about to be in the case where the rule applies.

This track is the engine for that, and its steps are deliberately small enough to run daily. You produce a short piece of French. You see the gap against the target — not a score, the actual difference. Then you name the error category, which is the step that does the work and the step everyone wants to skip: "wrong article after negation" is a thing you can watch for tomorrow, while "I made a mistake" is not. Then you re-attempt, immediately, correctly. The loop is a few minutes long, which is the only length that survives a working week.

Around it sits the machinery that keeps a correction from evaporating. Spaced reminders bring a rule back at widening intervals, and they carry the exceptions and the exceptions to the exceptions, since a half-learned rule confidently misapplied is worse than none. Checkpoints every three to five lessons test retrieval rather than recognition — producing the form, not picking it from options, because recognising a correct answer is not evidence you would have produced it. And a weekly review re-ranks your axes and re-plans the fortnight, which is where this track hands back to the diagnostic. A study campaign organises all of it into two-week blocks, so the loop has a shape you can keep rather than one you have to remember to run.