rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5229 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 1 of 34 20 February 2015 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
Welcome to the Output Challenge Registration thread. I hereby officially open the registration for the Output Challenge 2015 !!! The Output challenge runs from 1st of March 2015 through until 31st of December 2015. Ten months.
The idea of the Output Challenge is output both writing and speech in your target language. The hope is that by increasing the amount of output you produce, you'll be able to identify gaps in your knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or other problematic areas of output.
The challenge entails:
- 100 pages, 500 words equals 1 page.
- 100 hours of recorded speech (only minutes you are speaking count)
- You can only sign-up for one language at a time.
You can post your writing for correction on sites such as lang-8, and perhaps find people willing to give corrections of your audio recordings. It would be very helpful if you can state if you're willing to provide advice or corrections in your native language.
To register, please state:
LANGUAGE:
CHALLENGE: (Audio only, Writing only, Full Challenge)
CURRENT LANGUAGE LEVEL: (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2)
WILLING TO CORRECT LANGUAGE: (Yes/No "Your native language")
COMMENTS: Any comments you feel like adding as to your reasons for choice of language, type of challenge or material you want to produce or your expectations for the outcome.
The rules are straightforward, but are open to questioning. In the normal course of the challenge if you feel that what you are doing is in the spirit of the challenge, e.g. producing copious amounts of output in your target language, and it is helping you improve, then it is probably OK. If you don't know, just ask. Generally, if you wrote it, pen, paper, keyboard, blog, poem, traffic ticket, then it counts. Audio is slightly more difficult, but if you are talking, singing, whatever and being recorded it counts. If you're not recording it, then it doesn't count. The reason is that we're only counting output that could be shared. You don't have to share, but the potential has to exist. So chatting with your neighbour over the fence doesn't count, unless you get permission from them and record it.
If you're uncomfortable with the audio then feel free to just signup for written output only.
Some other points are:
- You can be at any level when the challenge starts.
- Any work or material completed in this challenge can be used on any other challenge.
- You can join the challenge at any point while the challenge is running.
- You can only sign-up with one language, but you can do other languages after you complete the first, or change mid-challenge if you want.
- You are welcome to link to your other logs in this thread.
We don't have a cool Bot like all the other challenges, so you have to do it the hard way. Save your writing and use the word count tool in your software. Count the minutes in your audio. Save it all on a pen and paper or spreadsheet.
If anyone wants to create a mega-cool bot then please step forward!
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5229 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 34 20 February 2015 at 11:58pm | IP Logged |
LANGUAGE: Italian
CHALLENGE: Full Challenge
CURRENT LANGUAGE LEVEL: B1/B2
WILLING TO CORRECT LANGUAGE: Yes English
COMMENTS: I'm really hoping to improve my ability to produce output quickly and smoothly. I want to activate all the vocabulary I've learned in the Super Challenge and I really need to learn the more obscure aspects of written grammar.
1 person has voted this message useful
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Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4576 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian
| Message 3 of 34 21 February 2015 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
Yay, I'm definitely in :)
LANGUAGE: Croatian
CHALLENGE: Full Challenge
CURRENT LANGUAGE LEVEL: B1
WILLING TO CORRECT LANGUAGE: English, or Esperanto if anyone needs help with that
COMMENTS: No idea how I'm going to get on with the speaking, but have signed up for a
full challenge to see how it goes. Like rdearman, I feel like I've absorbed a lot of
vocabulary from the Super Challenge and my main goal for this year is to now improve
my output.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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Arthaey Groupie United States arthaey.com Joined 5039 days ago 97 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 4 of 34 22 February 2015 at 3:57pm | IP Logged |
LANGUAGE: Spanish
CHALLENGE: full challenge
CURRENT LANGUAGE LEVEL: B2? C1? Depends on which "quiz" I take and how tired/distracted I am.
COMMENTS: I haven't done explicit grammar study in years, and I suspect that I'll need to do that again
to get over my plateau. (So far for my year in Mexico, I've mostly just been doing "osmosis".) I'll be posting
my writing to Lang-8 and my recordings to
YouTube.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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milesaway Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4324 days ago 134 posts - 181 votes Speaks: French, English*, Russian Studies: Finnish, Sign Language
| Message 5 of 34 23 February 2015 at 11:50am | IP Logged |
Language: Russian
Challenge: Writing only (I am not comfortable with recording myself and posting it
online, sorry!)
Current level: I guess that depends on who you ask. I say B1/B2, some might say C1.
Let's go for the middle-ground and call it B2.
Comments: I haven't studied grammar in forever, but I live in Russia, so I'm exposed
to the language. I also read a lot, although I haven't done a whole lot of listening.
I keep telling myself to write more, so that I can eventually take the TRKI C1 exam,
but I never got enough motivation to do it.
I have a huge compilation of "journal topics", which can easily be used as writing
prompts. So I'll be going through those. I'll be posting them on lang-8, once I find
my account information.
1 person has voted this message useful
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garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 6 of 34 23 February 2015 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
Why not!
LANGUAGE: Italian
CHALLENGE: Full Challenge
CURRENT LANGUAGE LEVEL: B2
WILLING TO CORRECT LANGUAGE: English
COMMENTS: Similar to rdearman, I want to improve my production ability and activate
some more of my passive knowledge. I'm also thinking that recording my speaking could
help with pronunciation and accent.
1 person has voted this message useful
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Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5159 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian
| Message 7 of 34 23 February 2015 at 4:22pm | IP Logged |
While the discussion topic is closed, I'd like to call up the attention for something really important: 500 words would make too long a topic for posting at lang-8 and italki, and thus would reduce the chance of having it corrected. I suggest we stick to 250 words as an 'item'. We need not call it a page. That way our texts are much more likely to be corrected.
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Arthaey Groupie United States arthaey.com Joined 5039 days ago 97 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 8 of 34 23 February 2015 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
I mostly agree with Expugnator's concern about 509 words being too long to get easily corrected (for free, at
least). I have been surprised by Lang-8 members' willingness to correct long-ish texts — 2 people just
corrected my latest entry of 330 words overnight.
But it does seem like a reasonable concern.
On the other hand, one thing we could try is breaking long entries into smaller ones for correction. I've
never tried that and don't know whether or would affect Lang-8 users' willingness to correct the entries.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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