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6 Week Challenge in August! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| kagemusha Newbie United States Joined 4927 days ago 35 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* | Message 153 of 202 17 August 2011 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am in a mini lull right now with work and other commitments. Should get back on track
this weekend. I was doing at least 30 minutes a day with a few 2.5 hr days. The 2.5 hours were usually broken into 3 seasons. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Abdalan Triglot Senior Member Brazil abdalan.wordpress.co Joined 5049 days ago 120 posts - 194 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, French, English Studies: German | Message 154 of 202 17 August 2011 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I think it's not needed to inform the BOT the time of study after each short session of work throughout the day. In my experience would be impossible open the twitter page 5, 10, 15 times a day to do that. Anyway, I always keep with me a simple LOG to check where I am and where I want to get to. This LOG includes the time (in minutes) of each session I’m spending to attain my goal… before the end of the day I just inform all at once to Mr. 6wbot. I check my position in the score chart 2 or 3 times a week just to keep motivated and to be sure that you, friends, are all there (knowing I am not the only crazy lover of learning is really rewarding). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5831 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 155 of 202 17 August 2011 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sadly I think I too will be retiring from the challenge. I am having health issues, have just spent the past three days
moving into a new apartment, and am starting college classes in a week. I just can't find the energy to do anything lately. Hopefully I will be able to revisit German and work more on French later in the year, but right now it simply isn't feasible. On a side note, I too find the bot's time-tracking capacity very motivating. If you could create another bot with the same capacity and leave it running constantly for people who wish to track themselves over a longer time period, I would eagerly sign up for it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5311 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 156 of 202 17 August 2011 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you for the suggestion. I don't access the BOT after every session either. But accessing the BOT is not what's splitting my hair. It's keeping time. I find myself reaching for the stopwatch and pen and paper like 50 times a day, and that became annoying. (Often I read a few pages and then do 1 or 2 Sudoku puzzles, so my mini-sessions are numerous ^^ ) (Btw, do people stop timing when they go to the bathroom? I do. Maybe I'm too strict?) While on the other hand I guess I'm not that interested in the hours-on-task figure. I tend to use the "words learned" figure as indicator of progress, and that figure shows automatically on my flashcard file. I'm lazy :D Abdalan, you're the current winner, right? Keep it up! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 157 of 202 17 August 2011 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't use a stopwatch or paper to keep track of times. When I do Anki, Anki tells me
how long I studied (in case of multiple decks, check out the repetition time graph for the past 7 days). Same if I'm listening to Michel Thomas, I can tell from the track times. For other activities, I often refer to Twitter. I have a Twitter tab open in my web browser (yes I'm addicted) and if I do an activity and I come back to it saying that the last tweet I read was "56 minutes ago" then that means I was studying for 56 minutes. Sometimes I need to adjust if I did something else in the same time as well, but in the end it's not so important to get the time right down to the minute; adjusting for movies etc. introduces enough inaccuracy already. For reading, it's okay to measure your reading speed once every two weeks or so and do number_of_pages * minutes_per_page in order to get your times - I hate feeling pressed while reading!
I don't like this because it would suggest a permanent challenge - a sure recipe for burn-out. Having a 6 week challenge every 3 months is good to build up anticipation and motivation; several people told me that they can't wait to get started. For those with too much time on their hands, there is always the Tadoku challenge (about reading in foreign languages). Between the 6 week challenge and the Tadoku challenge, only 2 weeks are uncovered.
That's better, though I would probably get rid of the leaderboard then. I'm also planning to have the bot show more detailed statistics. There's a lot that's possible with the current system but not shown, for example tag distribution by language, average study times per tag, study time per week, study time filtered by weekday or by time of the day (that would assume people tweet somewhat close to their session), what time of day am I able to have the longest sessions (might be an indicator of concentration), things like that. The main reason I haven't implemented these is that I don't have the time, especially not the time to do them all, and I'm not sure which statistics are the most interesting.
Yes, it's the main reason I created this bot. Edited by Sprachprofi on 17 August 2011 at 9:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| oldearth Groupie United States Joined 4898 days ago 72 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 158 of 202 17 August 2011 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You've simplified things for yourself by lumping all your activities into a few big categories like "LR1" and "LR2." Maybe I should do that. Trying to keep track of things with descriptive (and now quite disorganized) tags is the reason I post bot updates in real time rather than as one big update each day, and it does complicate recordkeeping. For example, if I go on a two hour walk with my ipod and do 58 minutes of Platiquemos drills, 46 mins of Michel Thomas, and 16 mins of podcast listening I have to keep track of all those times separately to do my tagging properly. But I still agree with smallwhite about the constant stop and go of my stopwatch still being the main annoyance. Trying to time accurately, trying to fairly scale times to reflect "effort" on things like movies and interruptions, and slip ups where I forget to stop/go when I ought to ("Dang, I forgot to start it! How long have I been reading? Dunno, let's say 10 minutes.") becomes tiring after a while. Lately I find myself doing a lot more rounding because the amount of uncertainty in the adjustments means stressing so much about precise measurement is unnecessary. Edited by oldearth on 17 August 2011 at 8:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 159 of 202 18 August 2011 at 7:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I do most of my small units with my ipod anyways, so I just made a smart playlist that displays all files I played (including podcasts and audiobooks) and just check that. I only have to remember when I decide to stop listening to something before it ends; if I pause and resume it the next day I'll just tweet the next day. For reading I took the average of the time it takes me to read 10 pages in that book and multiply that by the number of pages I've read; Anki shows me my times, I remember what shows I watched (and tweet them only when I finished and episode or decided to abandon it) and when I do intensive work, it's not much of a hassle to just jot down the time as well.
That being said, I've been too lazy to update for a couple of days now. Ugh. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5212 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 160 of 202 19 August 2011 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Mixed feelings. I'm at around the 17-hour mark now, which - as I started a few days late - works out to approx. an hour a day. If I ended up at the end of the year having done an hour every day, I'd be tempted to say it was a decent, steady, commendable effort. But really, especially for the mere six weeks of the 6WC, I could easily and should really do more: it's meant to be a period of intense effort, after all. Even only watching the news every night takes 30-40 minutes. Of course, this is 30-40 minutes more than I was previously devoting to French, but still... I have to be honest and admit that I'm still plucking the low-hanging fruit as far as language study goes. And, lest you think I'm being too hard on myself: I live in (officially bilingual) Canada, have no dependants, have a job which requires no "take-home" work, and am not currently in school. As a librarian, I read a lot (both fiction and non-fiction), but there's no reason why I couldn't do some/more of that reading in French instead. But I'm enjoying myself, and the language; and we'll see how it goes by Friday 9th September (when I'll have to break off my 6WC). Sprachprofi, many thanks for your work, and please add my vote to continue the Bot till the end of the year, if possible! Edited by songlines on 19 August 2011 at 5:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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