New Super Challenge Discussion thread2014 (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

New Super Challenge Discussion thread2014
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

766 messages over 96 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 17 ... 95 96 Next >>

Tamise
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
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Speaks: English*, German, Dutch
Studies: French, Japanese, Spanish

Message 129 of 766

11 May 2014 at 12:17pm | IP Logged

I like the new ordering (and the fact it's still possible to see the old). One of things that struck me last time was that BAnna completed in German fairly early and then kept going, but was fairly far down the list because lots of us had done multiple languages - this included me last time by the way, but I've pared down to 2 for this one. Interestingly, she's now doing 3!

Daily streaks don't bother me either way - I won't be tweeting books until I finish them. I have an offline spreadsheet for all the languages I'm reading/watching in and update that daily which is enough for me.

Weekly streaks I do like though, as keeping doing something every week is great for this kind of project. Dropping a couple of days here and there is fine, but dropping out for a week isn't great. In fact dropping out for weeks at a time really hampered my French last time, so aiming for something each week sounds good.
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Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
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Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

Message 130 of 766

11 May 2014 at 12:18pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

And the current ranking system favours excessive movie sprees.

I agree fully. To complete 1 book (even of only 50 pages) takes most of us a lot longer than to watch a film of 90 minutes. So lots of watching is an easy way to get high in the rankings.

If surrealix could base the ranking on an average between books and films (as I suggest in my last post but before reading Serpent's), this will at least be reduced a bit.
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
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Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish^C1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
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Message 131 of 766

11 May 2014 at 12:21pm | IP Logged

I wouldn't mind counting by percentage, but then we have to get the half-challenges back in. And there would be a few other bugs to fix, like counting the half-challenge as 120% done if you watch 100 movies and read 20 books.
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PeterMollenburg
Senior Member
AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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Speaks: English*
Studies: French^B1

Message 132 of 766

11 May 2014 at 12:34pm | IP Logged

rdearman wrote:

@PeterMollenburg:

Hi Peter. I read the links you posted with interest and while I agreed with a lot of
what the author said I have found that watching Italian Television helped me
tremendously when I visited Rome last month. Previously it was difficult for me to
construct sentences with any speed and it was very difficult to follow a native speaker
when they were "on a roll" and talking a mile a minute.

For me watching hundreds of hours of TV taught me some things a book never could have.
The most important thing I learned was you don't need to understand every word in order
to pick out what people are saying. The next thing I learned was not to obsess about
knowing every word because there is another one being fired at you already.

Reading gives you the luxury of looking up words and checking the grammatical construct
and then getting the full intended meaning. Watching TV allows you to "get the gist" of
what someone is saying and be able to construct a reply to questions. You also get
words that don't show up in writing, things like slang and "pause" words like
in English you might shrug and say ehh. Try finding that in the Oxford English
Dictionary.

:)

Also I personally think it makes more sense to watch TV series rather than Films. Films
are one offs mostly, so you don't get used to the accents or speech patterns. But if
you watch 120+ episodes of a TV show, you'll soon learn how some characters speak and
maybe even pick out accents.

Thanks rdearman, another positive story that ensures watching is indeed useful. I guess
the article was basically saying tho, if you have 200 hours to learn as much language
as you can watching will probably get you there slower than other methods. I really
appreciate this feedback tho, and would like to point out now that it appears that
watching is indeed important, but only a part of the picture, which is basically what
you're saying anyway- that it helps with certain aspects of learning in particular.
Cheers.
PM
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Eagle32
Groupie
New Zealand
Joined 6499 days ago
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Speaks: English*
Studies: French

Message 133 of 766

11 May 2014 at 12:41pm | IP Logged

Jeffers wrote:

1. Alphabetically by user.
2. By percent of challenge completed.
3. By total completed.
4. By percent of best language completed (and when that gets to 100%, percent of 2nd language, etc).

5. Make the default list order randomised rather than sorted.

Everyone has to click to sort by the order they prefer. Then no one is happy, which is the sign of a good compromise. ;)
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
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Message 134 of 766

11 May 2014 at 12:46pm | IP Logged

That's a cool idea! That's kinda like clicking "random page" on wiki etc. This way we'll all see what others are doing, including those low in the table.
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Kerrie
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Kerrie2
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1232 posts - 1740 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

Message 135 of 766

11 May 2014 at 2:22pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

I think counting all our languages together also fits better with the marathon and not sprint idea. It keeps the challenge from turning into an elitist "make progress in a big European language you're B2 in" (or watch K-dramas :)). It feels really unfair, I'd have honestly spent those 4 months differently and set different goals if this change had been announced in advance.

Wow, somehow I feel like that was directly aimed at me. (Can someone tell me what the difference is between watching lots of Kdramas and watching lots of football games? Is it the same difference between reading real BOOKS and reading spam?)

I digress.

I'm not sure how making progress in one language - regardless of what language it is or what level you're at - is elitist. Or unfair. I actually thought that was the point of the challenge. To make progress in your target language.

As to spending those months differently, we have 19 1/2 months left of the challenge. If you want to change your goals, you still have time.

rdearman wrote:

For me watching hundreds of hours of TV taught me some things a book never could have. The most important thing I learned was you don't need to understand every word in order to pick out what people are saying. The next thing I learned was not to obsess about knowing every word because there is another one being fired at you already.

Also I personally think it makes more sense to watch TV series rather than Films. Films are one offs mostly, so you don't get used to the accents or speech patterns. But if you watch 120+ episodes of a TV show, you'll soon learn how some characters speak and maybe even pick out accents.

Yes, yes, yes! I didn't understand this until I started watching a lot of TV for the Super Challenge. Now I get it.

I just scored all seven seasons of Buffy (with Spanish and French audio tracks) for $45. I'm going to watch them with my daughters this summer in Spanish. :D

Jeffers wrote:

There's one more possibility (which will also disadvantage me) which I would love to see implemented regardless of which ranking system is used. The ranking should be based on an average of the books completed and the films completed. This will prevent people from watching for hours on end to get up the ranks, and will give us an additional incentive to get moving with our reading.

I love this idea.

Although (like Serpent said), it would need to be programmed so that it only uses the max number in the average. I don't know how complicated this would be for programming, with half, full and double challenges. 150 films and 50 books should not average out to 100% - at least not for the Super Challenge. :D

Also, would we count 100% of a Half Challenge as higher than 50% of a Full Challenge? Or would everything be ranked by the default goal of 100/100? Even though I'm doing two half challenges, I think keeping it out of 100/100 would be more in the spirit of the challenge.

Also, I would really like to see anyone who has completed a FULL challenge at the top of the list. Last time, there were quite a few people who completed full challenges, and most were nowhere near the top of the list. I think they should be recognized for their accomplishment. With the new ranking - if we keep it - they should be at the top. Maybe they could get fireworks instead of stars when they get there. :)
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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
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Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

Message 136 of 766

11 May 2014 at 2:35pm | IP Logged

a) Bilingual reading counts for each language? I found Chinese-Russian and Chinese-German
and all of these are SC languages for me.

b) In the case of a bilingual Chinese-English book where the text is interposed, how do I
count how much Chinese I'm reading? The whole book has 299 pages.

c) I still don't know how to deal with the character/page issue for Chinese. Reading
online is much more practical because I can look up a translation as well as pinyin,
instead of translating one character at once. But I need to know the appropriate
character/page ratio in order to make use of shorter excerpts such as news. I'm still a
beginner at reading in Chinese and I think going straight into novels is being
counterproductive, not helping much as a learning tool.

1 person has voted this message useful

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