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New Super Challenge Discussion thread2014 | ||
Tags: Super Challenge | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5020 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 241 of 766 15 May 2014 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I too would like to thank Christina for starting the super challenge! What a great idea which has really helped keep me and countless others on track. I love it! It would be nice to see the back of conversations like those above though. I find them draining enough to read, so I can only imagine how demotivating they are for those directly involved. I really think there's a real danger of these sucking the fun right out of the whole thing. For those doing a Spanish challenge, check out Esta Noche Libros, a whole web page full of people talking about books in Spanish! So you can clock up some movie hours while working out what you are going to read next! (You will need to be able to understand Argentine Spanish well though..) Incidentally, what are people reading / watching for Spanish challenges? I have recently finished Espia de Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado, and am now on Contrato con Dios by the same author. Here is an interesting talk by the author that some may like to watch: Los secretos ocultos de las historias 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 242 of 766 16 May 2014 at 12:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For me the danger is even more real because it's already happened. I'm just trying to get back the energy and motivation that have been stolen from me. For example it's extremely demotivating that I have to prepare for a German exam, but I know that there won't be any instant change in my ranking from doing anything in it. It would have to surpass my Italian, which makes no sense given that I aim to do 2x less in it.
Reminds me on how Barry Farber said: no matter how many languages you speak, you'll be judged by your French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 243 of 766 16 May 2014 at 8:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Such emotions! Clearly we are all very passionate about our language learning, if nothing else ;-) !
The way I see it, different challenges are going to "favor" different styles of learning. I'm seeing that I PREFER to focus exclusively on one language at a time, because I can get a rhythm going, and each step makes me excited about the next step, and the progress I can make is clear and leads directly to the next step. In the case of the Super Challenge, each episode in a series I watch is a stepping stone to the next episode, and each book is a foundation for the next. The Super Challenge focus on one language at a time is a philosophy which gives a nudge to those of us who might otherwise be spreading the wealth among several languages. You can agree with the philosophy or not, and the way the participants' list is calculated or not, but the focus of this SC is clear. That being said, no one is forcing anyone to do only one language at a time. But this SC clearly rewards those who follow the goals that were stated. I know I'm not stating anything new here, but just wanted to clarify why I'm finding this Super Challenge so motivating. The SC "encouraged" me to focus on one language because of the specific goals, and as it turns out, I do better working on just one language at a time. When I get (back?) to the level of French I'm striving for, or even surpass it, by reaching the 100 books/100 films goals, I'll think of going back to other languages. But I'll have a new appreciation for the progress that can be made by the one language focus. End of speech; thank you for listening... 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 244 of 766 16 May 2014 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for acknowledging that the current super challenge favours learning one language at a time. The previous one didn't, and I found it motivating to narrow it down to "just" 7 languages. But while I can neglect certain languages over the short term, I can't neglect them all my life...
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| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4519 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 245 of 766 16 May 2014 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If your sort by the rightmost column, it sorts all your languages individually. So if
you do something in one specific language, this language will climb up the ranks. Why is this demotivating? If we want to rank per person, not per language, why not just take the worst language for the ranking? This would encourage to balance your learning as much as possible. But of course, this would put persons who mix full and half challenges at a disadvantage. You can never make it right for everybody, so the random default sort is a good solution. If you need additional sorting orders to the ones provided, you could write a userscript for your browser as a last resort. There doesn't seem to be any official ranking anyway, it's just a list of participants you can sort in whatever way you want. @surrealix: One request, not very important: When sorting by language, could you sort the participants within each language group by the book/film average too? The order within one language group seems to be random right now. Would be nice to compare myself with participants who study the same language. Edited by daegga on 16 May 2014 at 1:46pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5020 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 246 of 766 16 May 2014 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I still don't get why this whole ranking thing is causing such a fuss. Who really cares who's above who?
Perhaps we should start a new discussion thread where we agree to just discuss books and movies etc, rather than let this whole thing get derailed? 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 247 of 766 16 May 2014 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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daegga, thanks for listening and being calm! I agree with your suggestion, I asked for something like that too previously.
I guess I just miss knowing who is better than me on totals... and it's ironical that the more you read, the less valuable your books become :D Um this is not the thread for discussing books and movies etc. We have two recommendation threads: 1, 2, I suppose we need to decide whether we use them for talking about the wikia category or about the books/movies, and whether we start one more thread (please not in the log subforum!), in order to actually discuss books and movies and give recs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| SofijaJoi Triglot Newbie United States Joined 3857 days ago 2 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Portuguese Studies: Turkish, Korean, Thai, Greek | Message 248 of 766 16 May 2014 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
From what I see, you didn't even finish a full challenge the first time around. You seem to have a lot of language experience, which I totally admire, but your behavior is really childish. Besides which, I'm not sure that one "star" is overly impressive (unless you are starting from a very low level in the language). That's 25 movies and 1250 pages, right? So it would average a movie a month and about two pages a day? That doesn't seem very "super" to me. I imagine it would be more useful in the long run to actually focus on a handfull of languages rather than a dozen.
Maybe you could do it simply to improve your German. Or at least to get a decent mark in your German class. =) That is really strong wording, to imply that anyone "stole" something from you, just by re-arranging the rankings. You might want to re-assess your priorities. Learning your languages "should" be more important than where you rank on a list.
But why would you need to neglect anything? Maintain what you know, and work on a few at a time. You are fooling yourself if you think you can make significant progress in 13 languages at a time. It's just not realistic. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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