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The Super challenge! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| 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 553 of 713 06 June 2012 at 9:24am | IP Logged | ||
If you write in Word, it gives you a character count rather than a word count. I've tried counting words manually and comparing. I haven't done it so many times yet, but so far I've always gotten a factor between 4 and 5. Another person here and I tried some other methods of counting and got the same results. So you could just try multiplying the count from Word with 4.5, but you might want to do some more experimenting yourself first since we haven't actually tested so many. Of course there is also the problem of what you consider a word as there can be some differences of opinion, but I think that won't usually give such huge differences anyway, unless you consider particles as part of the word before or something like that. I consider particles as words in themselves. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5219 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 554 of 713 06 June 2012 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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By way of an update:
Advanced Mega Challenge: Spanish 5% Super Duper Challenge: French 6% French is progressing (recovering) much more quickly than Spanish but I suspect that is because I had a decade of schooling at least a couple of hours a week and several exchange visits. I am way behind on the French conversation as I don't know any Francophones. I've found I don't really like reading fiction apart from the valuable colloquial expressions I get. Once I've finished the 3 HP novels I am reading I will use magazines and interviews for this. It's trashy but works. I like the TV/Film/Podcasts that I have been listening to though I don't understand fully all the language I hear: if I really struggle I will switch on TL subtitles or if neccessary the English ones. As work is likely to change over the next few months I am relaunching my German as a Super Challenge. I'll have to start with podcasts and online video as my German is quite weak. ~A1 and I have used it precisely once in the last 25 years on a business trip to Jena in Thuringia. Tiếng Việt nd język polski are my 'new' languages so I am aiming to get to A2 level this year. I'll be keeping 日本語 aand Italiano on the go but without the super challenge intensity unless I suddenly find I need something else .... MSA, Russian and Hindi/Urdu are calling. 1 person has 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 555 of 713 06 June 2012 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Solfrid Cristin, I see that nobody else wants to do this, but could I ask for a ruling on my previous proposal above just in case I’d like to do it sometime in the future. Do you think it would be OK to count reading the lyrics to one song (while listening to it) as one book page? It would kind of be like L-R on a small level. There are typically less words in the lyrics for a song than there are on a book page, but one would spend more time on each word and the music too should actually help one remember new words better than just reading a typical book page. So what do you think? I don’t care that much about it, but I would like to know what all my options are. The vast majority of my “books” will really be books regardless.
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 556 of 713 07 June 2012 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
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@RMM The idea of this challenge is to plough through lots of pages with text, and song lyrics do not really
give you that effect. I think I would suggest just taking the lyrics on the side :-) 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 557 of 713 07 June 2012 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
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OK. Well, it never hurts to ask.
Maybe I should also ask about the assumption I made too, just to be on the safe side. What about opera libretti? I have several of them in book form, such as the 533 page “Seven Verdi Librettos” edited and translated by the Verdi scholar and biographer William Weaver and several excellent collected libretti by language coach Nico Castel. (Naturally, for any thing that also has the English translation, I would halve the page count.) These look just like any other plays in verse to me (like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Brand, Goethe's Faust, or Shakespeare’s writings, etc.), and they are about the same length and have the same divisions (acts & scenes). Surely, these would count, just like plays in book form would, right? Or am I wrong on this? (And after all a lot of the very best literature in many languages is in play format: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Racine, Pirandello, etc., etc.) Perhaps, a little more questionably, I also have a book called “Famous Italian Opera Arias: A Dual-Language Book” edited and translated by Ellen H. Bleiler. This is set up just like any other parallel text book, but of course it only has disconnected arias in it rather than a full story. Is this OK? It is a complete book that comes it at around 100 pages. I don’t have too many parallel texts, so I was hoping to use this at some point. And just to get the rules further solidified, do poems count? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 558 of 713 07 June 2012 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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The problem with both poems, librettos, lyrics, and for that matter plays, are that the actual text is extremely
short compared to a regular page in a book. We can of course work around that, and say like with manga and children's book that every 5 pages count as one page. I would still recommend regular books, either fact or fiction, but I see no harm in a little variation as long as you divide it by 5 to make up for the shortness of the text. 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 559 of 713 07 June 2012 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, at Tadoku they count as two equalling one page (apart from lyrics, which count normally). Given that I reread each poem several times to make sense of it..that's fine with me :D
I think the real issue is that this challenge is supposed to focus on bigger chunks of text. 100-200 poems by the same author are great... 100 random poems by 20 authors not so much. I really wouldn't want this to turn into a long-term Tadoku... 1 person has 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 560 of 713 07 June 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, a page of Shakespeare equals one page of children’s books with big text and pictures or of a comic! I never, ever--and I mean ever--would have guessed that. I guess that just proves that you’ve got to check on everything.
The problem I see with it, though, is that most plays and librettos have a great deal more written material than a children’s book with pictures or comics or mangas and the material tends to be more complex, sometimes much, much more. So, it would take *much* longer to do. If it only counts as 1/5 of a book, then plays and librettos will have become by far the most time consuming and difficult thing in the entire challenge. It seems to me that getting to a full book unit with them would now take about 10-20 times what it would take to get a unit finished for writing or conversation. That’s not very practical in my opinion, and frankly I don’t at all see how it’s fair to equate something that takes a fair amount of time and attention to understand (most play/or libretto pages or a poem) with something that most people could get done in 30 seconds or less with great ease (a manga or comic page). I am happy that it’s at least an option, and if I’m going to do it anyway I guess I’ll count it for the challenge, but it does seem to be needlessly extreme in discounting a lot of the best challenging and excellent literature from most languages (I’ve actually read almost as many plays as I have fiction in my life, so it never even occurred to me not to think of them as “regular books”). I can understand about lyrics (often short, vapid, and repetitive) and I (honestly!) don’t mean to complain, but it’s just that I’m truly flabbergasted by this latest ruling. I was about to post the above, and then decided to do a little experiment. A lot of people are reading Harry Potter for the challenge, so I randomly chose a page from the first Potter book in the original English (it ended up being page 19, the second page of chapter two) and I counted the words (yes, the tedious, old fashioned way). It had 260 words on the page. I took up my Verdi arias book and opened it to a totally random page of Otello. It had 277 words in Italian on the page. More than the Potter book! I then opened my Favorite Opera Arias book and it had 170 words on the page. Less than the Potter book, but a great, great deal more than 1/5 of a HP page. You see, this is why I was so shocked by the ruling--it just doesn’t seem fair at all. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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