Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

The Super challenge!

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post Reply
713 messages over 90 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 69 ... 89 90 Next >>
RMM
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5227 days ago

91 posts - 215 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese

 
 Message 545 of 713
05 June 2012 at 4:19am | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
kanewai wrote:
I also have a hard time considering listening to music as 'language study.' It seems like this is more a way to rack up points on twitter than a way to challenge yourself to improve in your TL.
IDK, I consider it an essential part of language study, as important as, say, grammar. I'm unlikely to reach fluency if there are no or very few songs that I like in the language.

And don't judge. :E


I think this really depends. I agree that listening to music once or twice as background noise isn't going to really do anything for you. But if you really pay attention to what you are listening to and especially if you hear it over and over until it is ingrained in your memory, then it can be a great aid to memory. Remembering the words with their melodies can really make it easier to recall them later. It works almost as a mnemonic device.

For example, I like Italian opera. There have been numerous times when I've come across a word in Italian and a line from an aria that uses that word will pop into my head.

If we do, however, add music this time or perhap next time around if there is a next time, then I think we should have clear-cut rules about not counting once-listened-to background music where you haven't really gotten familiar with the lyrics.
2 persons have voted this message useful



RMM
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5227 days ago

91 posts - 215 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese

 
 Message 546 of 713
05 June 2012 at 5:01am | IP Logged 
OK, I keep getting new ideas after I've already posted, so I hope everyone will be patient with my ramblings. Like I said, I'm just throwing ideas out there so we can all see what the options are.

If we do this again in the future I do think it would be a really great idea to have an optional "Music/Listening" category, however I've a different new idea for what to do now with this challenge. This should also take care of kanewai's fear that people won't really be doing anything when listening to music, and surrealix wouldn't be burdened further by it. Perhaps we can count listening to music *while reading song lyrics* as part of the challenge, with each song equaling one book page? Once you read the lyrics while following along with 100 songs, you can count it as one book. Or if you actually have a physical book or booklet of lyrics just count however many pages there are towards a "book." After all you would still be reading and most songs last as long or longer than it would take for someone at a A2 or B1 level to read a page in their L2. Then if you go back to just listening to the music later on, it should be a much more productive experience, since you should be able to understand the lyrics better now. Most albums come with lyrics or you can find them online easily, so this shouldn't be a problem. Libretti or so-called "books" for operas, operettas, and musicals should already be counted as books, I would think, since they are essentially plays. This would just be expanding this out a little more in the micro direction. I know not everyone wants to deal with reading lyrics, but look how much better you'll understand and remember the songs! And this would be a way of tying music in with the Super Challenge.

Now I don't know that this would actually be better than having a separate category treated like the optional categories that we now have; however, this is bound to be a lot easier to deal with (and easier to track with clear-cut rules) at this stage in the game. Just some more food for thought. Would anyone else be willing to do it like this?
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6597 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 547 of 713
05 June 2012 at 5:07am | IP Logged 
Exactly.
And I'd like to point out that by the rules of the 6WC you're required to count the time as less than 100% if you're listening in the background.



as for your other post... IDK, don't like the idea of turning this into another Tadoku. Maybe the best solution is a separate music challenge? With separate possibilities for music, lyrics, lyrics+music, lyricstraining.com and even its modes (and other music+language learning sites too if there are any).

Edited by Serpent on 05 June 2012 at 5:12am

1 person has voted this message useful



Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6620 days ago

1292 posts - 1766 votes 
Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

 
 Message 548 of 713
05 June 2012 at 7:59am | IP Logged 
surrealix wrote:


Brun Ugle wrote:
I just noticed that even though I put quotes around my titles, Twitter didn't register the titles of either my book
or my movies.


That's good spotting - it's working for nearly everybody else! I'll get that fixed for you along with the next update. It turns out
whatever you're using to write tweets is turning the plain quotation marks ( " ) into 'smart' citation marks ( “ and ” ). Notice the
subtle difference? (I didn't when writing the bot). Until the next patch comes through, you can get your titles included by copy-pasting
the plain quotation mark into your tweets instead of the smart-marks.


Ah! Now I get it. I'll just wait until the undo functions come and then I'll fix them. And I'll keep an eye on my quotation marks in the future.
1 person has voted this message useful



Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6620 days ago

1292 posts - 1766 votes 
Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

 
 Message 549 of 713
05 June 2012 at 8:21am | IP Logged 
Wow! This challenge just gets more and more complicated. Poor Surrealix trying to keep up with it all.

My own opinion is that we should probably leave it as it is this time and people who want to do music or whatever else can keep track of it on their own. Of course, they could mention it in the updates thread, but leave Twitter as it is to avoid further complications.

I assume we will have a new Super Challenge in the future, either starting next year and overlapping with this one, or starting when this one finishes. So the next time we do this, I think we should do away with all these categories of Super Challenge, Super Duper Challenge, Mega Challenge and what ever else we have, and just let people register with the categories they want. That would make less confusion I think. For example, in my case, instead of registering for the Super Duper Challenge with writing, I would just register: 100 books, 100 films and 100 essays. Then everyone could make their own challenge. At this point I counted 11 different variations on the challenge which makes it very complicated both for anyone trying to figure out what they are trying to register for and especially for Surrealix trying to write the bot.


3 persons have voted this message useful



Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4909 days ago

2151 posts - 3960 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

 
 Message 550 of 713
05 June 2012 at 11:40am | IP Logged 
Brun Ugle wrote:
Wow! This challenge just gets more and more complicated. Poor Surrealix trying to keep up with it all.

My own opinion is that we should probably leave it as it is this time and people who want to do music or whatever else can keep track of it on their own. Of course, they could mention it in the updates thread, but leave Twitter as it is to avoid further complications.

I assume we will have a new Super Challenge in the future, either starting next year and overlapping with this one, or starting when this one finishes. So the next time we do this, I think we should do away with all these categories of Super Challenge, Super Duper Challenge, Mega Challenge and what ever else we have, and just let people register with the categories they want. That would make less confusion I think. For example, in my case, instead of registering for the Super Duper Challenge with writing, I would just register: 100 books, 100 films and 100 essays. Then everyone could make their own challenge. At this point I counted 11 different variations on the challenge which makes it very complicated both for anyone trying to figure out what they are trying to register for and especially for Surrealix trying to write the bot.



I have to agree with Brun on this, although I was the one who brought up music. The original idea of the challenge was meant to be simple, and my addition of music was meant to be simple as well. For me, the cultural education is as important as the actual language education, so following with lyrics doesn't matter [EDIT: I mean following on paper doesn't matter. Hopefully after a few listens you begin to follow the lyrics more and more!] In my experience with foreigners who have learnt English, those who listen to a lot of music and watch a lot of TV/films seem to do the best with ordinary spoken English. Thinking back to the days before the internet, before DVD's and even before VHS machines, foreigners I knew picked up their pop culture pretty much through pop songs.

Anyway this is what I'm doing:
  • I will be counting albums on the update thread.
  • I am only counting each album once, regardless of how many times I listen to it.
  • The challenge comes in when you try to find 50/100 different albums in your TL(s).



EDIT: the discussion of the value of music, and methods we use, is interesting, but well off-topic here. So I've started a thread in the methods forum, here.

Edited by Jeffers on 05 June 2012 at 1:40pm

2 persons have voted this message useful



hjordis
Senior Member
United States
snapshotsoftheworld.
Joined 5186 days ago

209 posts - 264 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 551 of 713
05 June 2012 at 9:55pm | IP Logged 
Does anybody have some ideas on how to count words in Japanese? Word boundaries can get kind of fuzzy and the information density is almost certainly different and I'm pretty sure I can't just do an automatic word count in word, and I'd rather not do it by hand.

I think my English teachers used to say 1 double spaced page=about 500 words, but testing some documents I have it seems closer to 300 maybe 400. Does it seem right to say 1/2 page double spaced=1 piece of writing? I'm open to ideas!
1 person has voted this message useful



anarion21
Triglot
Newbie
France
Joined 4558 days ago

9 posts - 9 votes
Speaks: French*, Spanish, English

 
 Message 552 of 713
05 June 2012 at 10:16pm | IP Logged 


Quote:
I am afraid you are too advanced to do the Super Challenge which are for those who have a maximum B1 level, but you are most welcome at the Advanced Super Challenge :-).

You're right!! I missed that point of the rules. :)
So, I'm going to join the Advanced Super Challenge.


1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 713 messages over 90 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.6406 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.