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Super challenge total info reference | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 25 of 76 24 December 2013 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree. Also, with the shorter term challenges there's a reasonable amount of time off in between the challenges... for the super challenge it's unrealistic to have a year off.
How about changing the "one language" rule, maybe? I've had yet another confirmation that I really can't focus on just one. How about just counting anything we read in our non-native languages? Basically making it more similar to the 6 week challenge than a long-term Tadoku. Of course those who are keen on reading 30+ books in one language can still do so. I however have plans for several languages in which I'm not going to read even 20 books, and I hate having to choose between what's more beneficial for my learning right now and what counts for a challenge. Edited by Serpent on 24 December 2013 at 12:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 76 24 December 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I started as a strong B1, just below the B2 cutoff. At the start of challenge, it took me several evenings of dedicated bedtime reading to finish a 48-page Tintin BD. I read extensively, because I usually didn't have ebooks (with popup dictionaries) available until my final month of reading.
By going for speed, I got speed. But I also somehow got a whole lot of vocabulary. Just before the halfway mark this past February, I somehow read all 200-plus pages of Gaiman's L'Étrange vie de Nobody Owens in one long day. And when I read Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï this fall, I was averaging an opaque word every other page or so, so my comprehension was somewhere well up above 99%. So, going just by my personal experience, it seems like reading lots of easy-to-medium books is very reasonable strategy, especially when moving between languages as closely related as English and French, provided your ultimate goal is to read fast and to understand. Sheer volume really can help, as this story about a pottery professor suggests:
Because of this, I'm actually a little uneasy about scoring books as "easy", "medium" and "difficult". It seems like such a scoring system might encourage people to wade slowly through difficult books—but they might actually make more progress with lighter works. Sure, this means people will think, "Hah! By reading easy books I can exploit the rules and go faster!" But that might actually be a good thing. And difficulty is completely subjective, so unless people completely ignore each other's difficulty scores, it would lead to ill-feeling. To give you an idea of some of the complications, let's take a look at Serpent's suggestions for scoring difficulty:
Going by the 95% comprehension suggestion for "advanced learners" would give us something like 12 incomprehensible words per page. But like I said, in many ordinary adult novels, I'm seeing an incomprehensible word every page or two. To hit 12 incomprehensible words per page, I would need to dig up some seriously hard books somewhere. So here are my thoughts: 1. 10,000 pages (give or take) is absolutely doable for an English speaker who starts at B1 in a Romance language. In fact, once I reached the the half-way point, I was pretty much phoning it in. I read something like 1,700 pages this October. EDIT: Just to be clear, I imagine the feasibility of the Super Challenge changes completely if you have more than one language, or if you're learning a language with fewer cognates. And even in an easy language, it's definitely a huge amount of work over a long period of time. 2. I like page-based scoring with no difficulty. This encourages people to read easier books with smaller pages, which is a good thing—but it also means that if they want to read a 400 page doorstop, then they can at least count all 400 pages. 3. The original rules said that 500 pages of manga equaled 100 pages of a regular book. This doesn't work very well for French BDs, which quite often run 150 words per page, compared to the 250 or 300 words per page that I find in typical French novels. I ended up counting 250 pages of BDs as 100 pages of a regular book, as I mentioned in one of the Challenge threads long ago. Not that this makes much difference in my overall numbers: BDs are too expensive to rack up large page counts. 4. I really like the idea of 1 star for every 2,500 pages. This would also allow people studying multiple languages to go for one star in each language, which seems a lot more fair. And it would encourage people to go for at least one star, which will do a world of good for a typical B1 student. It would also allow us to dump the whole messy Half/Super/Advanced distinction, which would make it a lot easier to give out pretty blue ribbons (ahem), because we could just write "SC 4☆". 5. The Challenge definitely neglected listening. It would be good to at least double the listening relative to the reading, because listening is important. 6. I could do an Advanced Super Challenge in 20 months, but I have no intention of doing so. Reading 1,000 pages per month for a few months is fine, but I'm not going to commit to 20 months of that. So that's my two cents, for whatever it might be worth: one star for every 2,500 pages and 50 hours of active listening, and keep the page-based scoring without recording difficulty (as a subtle incentive to plow through easier books quickly). But I guess Solfrid already proposed that. :-) Edited by emk on 25 December 2013 at 12:22am 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4136 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 27 of 76 24 December 2013 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm new to the Super Challenge, but I'm very interested in participating. I
I'm going to chime in wearing my elementary school teacher hat. Children best learn to read in their native language by reading "just right" books - books that aren't so easy that they barely have to read, but that are easy by all other standards. Our goal for independent reading level is 95%+ accuracy, with full comprehension. 90-95% accuracy is instructional level, which means that the child will need guidance to read, understand and enjoy the text. Anything below 90% is frustration level, which won't help a child to advance (unless they're *extremely* motivated by other factors, such as the topic in a non-fiction book). It was an ongoing argument with some overachieving parents that their child would *not* learn to read faster by reading harder books. The kids who are the best readers are the ones who devour easy book after easy book. I plan on reading a pile of children's novels this year, banking on the fact that reading lots and lots of "easy" books will help me advance much more quickly than plodding my way through difficult text using sheer brute force. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 28 of 76 24 December 2013 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
TBH, I don't think anyone will bother to read a lot of easy books in English just to have better stats. I agree that for the intermediate level/early basic fluency, medium difficulty is the way to go. Edited by Serpent on 24 December 2013 at 2:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4881 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 29 of 76 24 December 2013 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
Simple and elegant. I second this. Does that make it four cents worth? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Suzie Diglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4221 days ago 155 posts - 226 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Dutch | Message 30 of 76 24 December 2013 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Six, please. I love that idea as well. Thanks for the suggestion, emk. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 31 of 76 25 December 2013 at 1:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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50 hours or 50x90min, btw? I don't mind either way.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4680 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 32 of 76 25 December 2013 at 1:35am | IP Logged | |||||
Good advice for those who can use it. Once I got up to being able, I read in my SC languages starting with Harry Potter and then branched out to other stuff on a kid/young adult level, and those were my most useful exercises. When I started off, however, especially in French, I was WAY below the 90% comprehension level, simply because I was a beginner. The "difficult" part of the challenge wasn't to do the reading once I was already able, but getting to the point where I could read easy books at better than 90% comprehension. I actually started off with at most probably 50%-60%, as best I can remember, but I kept going and going, and, in combination with doing Assimil, I made reasonable progress after a while, and it was almost like magic. (Russian right now is even worse, yet I can tell I'm making progress based on my past experiences.) It WAS very frustrating. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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