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Watching Films for the 6 Week Challenge | ||
Tags: 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Film | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 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 1 of 18 26 August 2012 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to the official 6 Week Challenge rules, watching films shall not be logged as
100% of the time, because in films there can be minutes at a time that don't contain any target language. Unlike classroom time or time spent on textbooks, those minutes are also not spent teaching you ABOUT the language - they plainly have nothing to do with target-language study. By extracting only the spoken bits of a typical anime using subs2srs, I typically found an episode of 20 minutes (23 with intro & outro) to contain ca. 8 minutes of talking. Even if we say 10 minutes, taking into account that normal conversations would contain pauses that subs2srs is cutting out, it's clear that 20 minutes of anime is not giving us the chance to pick up as much language as we could from a 20 minute conversation, 20 minutes spent with Anki, 20 minutes reading Teach Yourself, 20 minutes spent reading a target-language book or 20 minutes spent listening to an audiobook. Additionally, people sometimes watch subtitled films as a way to relax, without paying so much attention to the language, while traditional language- learning materials clearly require 100% attention. That is the background for this rule. I've been watching a lot of anime for the current challenge as an experiment and I have logged the time as 50-60% on average, depending on whether I was watching the films with/without English subtitles and attentively listening for recognizable words or not. However, I noted that some others are logging their video-watching time as 100%. This skews the challenge - to keep up with them, I would have to spend twice as much time on anime as they do. So I would like to discuss this rule and make a community decision, which will be binding for the next 6 Week Challenge. In the interest of fairness, people found to be logging incorrectly will then be excluded from the highscore - I will modify the bot so that they will still be able to log their hours privately but without appearing in the big listing, so that their inflated numbers don't affect other participants. Please cast your vote above on how TV time should be counted and I will abide by the vote. Note that this is about pure watch time. If you like to pause, rewind, take notes, look up words and the like, you will be able to award yourself extra time for that. Edited by Sprachprofi on 27 August 2012 at 6:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 18 26 August 2012 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Language materials vary greatly in quality, and in what you expect to get out of them. Trying to normalize this quickly becomes an exercise in futility.
It's truly rare for me to learn more than a couple of points from a 20-minute conversation, even with a tutor and at a level where it can feasibly all be in the target language. If it's a casual conversation with a stranger, I learn even less. If I spend 20 minutes with a reference grammar, I'll be lucky to read as many phrases in the target language as I'd see in a 20-minute anime - and the ones in the anime would generally reflect actual use, which is more than I can say for coverage of aspect in any grammar I've read of Polish. It doesn't make sense to count time when you're not paying attention, of course. Perhaps classroom time should also be re-normed? I've been in precious few classrooms in my life where no time is wasted on fiddling with projectors, taking attendance, and other sundry things which are neither in nor about the target subject. Trying to take this concept much further leads to ridiculous situations. Is Assimil worth twice as much time as teach yourself, or five times as much as Rosetta Stone? How does one count using Iversen's "bloodhound" method to follow incomprehensible audio with ones' full attention? Are anki reps of wordlists actually the only thing worth counting at full percentages?
There's something to be said for keeping it simple. Personally, I find it really tedious to constantly round down, say, textbook study because the textbooks contain superfluous fluff. And, to avoid absurd inflation, it's worth not rounding anything up, despite tasks and methods varying in quality and efficiency. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 18 26 August 2012 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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To be honest, I am not that bothered by it. I am happy to accept what people log at face
value. Even if the rules are changed, people can still make things up if they care more about winning than learning. If people are logging several hours of TV a day and are still not making much progress in their target language, achieving a top score in the 6WC is something of a hollow victory for them anyway. I found the progress that the Finnish challenge participants made earlier in the year with limited hours to be far more motivational than seeing people log hundreds of hours in a 6 week period. The things I like about the set up of the 6WC at present is that the logging and scoring mechanism is just so simple. Whatever is decided, I hope it stays that way. I don't want to waste too much study time worrying about the relative worth of different activities - which is open to so much debate anyway. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4717 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 4 of 18 26 August 2012 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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That depends, if I use subtitles in other language, I only count 50% of the time (listening part). On the other hand, if I use TL subtitles, I count 100% (listening + reading).
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 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 5 of 18 26 August 2012 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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To be clear, I don't want to discuss the relative worth of Assimil over Rosetta Stone or
the like. This is not about resulting language knowledge but distilled study time and effort, with the bigger goal being to make it equally possible to hit the top 5 no matter if your chosen language-learning method is studying Teach Yourself or watching Naruto. Edited by Sprachprofi on 26 August 2012 at 9:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6905 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 6 of 18 26 August 2012 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Could you link the official 6WC rules? I've only found this: "if you're watching a
movie with subtitles or listening to podcasts in the background or the like though, please only award yourself a fraction of the minutes." and that's pretty much what I do. If I watch or listen to something in the background, I log only fraction of the minutes. However, if I watch some videos while staying focused and without subtitles or with TL subtitles I usually log the length of the video as the time spent on learning. I find it fair as I quite often pause movies, look up some vocabulary (sometimes keep looking for more and more examples on the Internet), add vocab items to Anki, from time to time pause the video to repeat aloud parts of dialogues in order to improve my pronunciation etc. Despite of all these activities "around the video" which usually make the actual watching time significantly longer, I log only the video length, usually rounded down. I just find it much simpler to log the time after the movie than to look constantly at the watch or, what's even worse, give a rough estimation. I voted for "ca. 80% of time" but I honestly think we should rely on users' own estimations, and maybe just provide some more specific examples of language activities and the percentage of the learning time that should be logged. E.g. I constantly reduce my logged reading time because I often read e.g. in the train and quite easily get distracted or read very slowly, so it wouldn't be fair to log all the time spent. The same applies to the Internet: I log less time that I actually spent browsing through and reading various websites. My video time is, on the other hand, very effective as explained above. And my TV time usually doesn't really differ much from podcasts /audio books as I watch mostly news in my target languages, which requires a lot of focus and the rate of words per minute is much higher. Well, I can only speak for myself. Movies & TV stand for about 27% of my language learning at the moment, and my 6WC target language learning does not include movies or TV. I don't know how many hours are logged by the others (I'm gonna have a look at that) but I would be very cautious with limiting any kind of language-related activities: what about music than? Radio? Browsing through the Internet? What about anything different than using traditional language-learning materials? It's a hard call. Edited by Julie on 26 August 2012 at 9:43pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 18 26 August 2012 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I started out by logging 50%, then I realized I was pausing the video frequently to look up words or write down expressions, repeating or memorizing bits of dialogue etc just as Julie does, and so I switched to logging it as 100% of the video length even though the actual time I spend working with the video is longer.
I spend more time working with the language from 30 minutes of video, than from being in a language class for 30 minutes, because I finish the assignments much faster than everyone else and then have to find something to do without being completely distracted. I do use language-related activities, but I don't fully concentrate on them, otherwise I wouldn't notice when everyone is finished and we start the next activity. But then again, that time is used for things like repetition, writing practice - automatization of skills. Do those also not count 100% because I don't focus 100%? When I was in France for a day trip, I didn't speak French myself. I only roughly logged the time I spent reading the language and listening to conversations/a tour guide. But my internal narration was in French for the entire time! My reading speed in Swedish is improving from day to day, so my former method of averaging the time I needed for 10 pages and then multiplying it for the number of pages with actual text in the book doesn't work anymore. And I don't feel like using a stopwatch, stopping it everytime somebody wants to start a conversation with me etc. And of course I don't count the time I spend talking about the language content I just worked through, even though I know mediation improves my recall of the content noticeably. ... things like that were what made me give up logging this time around. Edited by Bao on 26 August 2012 at 10:36pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 18 26 August 2012 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have differentiated according to my level and what I do with the subtitles. Russian film with Russian
subtitles = 100%. French film with English subtitles = 50%. English film with Norwegian subtitles. 0%. I have voted for 100% though, because that is simple and fair. I am more hesitant to music actually, because my brain tends to block out the words after a while, as I suspect is the case for a lot of people, particularly when they listen to it for a couple of hours straight. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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