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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 ... 40 ... 89 90 Next >>
Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5116 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 313 of 713
29 April 2012 at 10:32pm | IP Logged 
Ok, everyone, just one more day to wait. Before we start I need to know the following:

1) Are there any more questions/doubts as to how to count things? As I said, you can always use your own judgement when in doubt, but if there is anything you would like "a ruling on" you can always ask.

2) Has everyone who wants to participate remembered to register in the other thread? Some of you declared your language and your challenge in this thread, but please remember that it is the special thread for Super challenge registration and update, under the log section which is the correct one.

REGISTRATION THREAD

3) Have you also remembered to register on the Super Challenge Twitter bot? This is not compulsary, but I recommend that you do. It is easy and fun to use. However if you know that you will not use it then please let me know now, in this thread. Then I can keep an extra eye on your updates, and include you when I make my periodical comments.

Any other comment you would like to make?

Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 29 April 2012 at 10:34pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Snowflake
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5741 days ago

1032 posts - 1233 votes 
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 314 of 713
29 April 2012 at 10:56pm | IP Logged 
I'm interested in the 1/2 challenge....50 movies and 50 books in Mandarin. The movies part should be easier whereas the books will be super hard. Also, I don't have a Tweeter account and am not planning to open one.

Edited by Snowflake on 29 April 2012 at 11:16pm

1 person has voted this message useful



habgglieb
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4380 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: Mandarin*, English
Studies: German, Korean

 
 Message 315 of 713
29 April 2012 at 11:10pm | IP Logged 
My Twitter account and my username on this forum are different. Can I use the one I've
already got, or should I create another Twitter account with the same name I'm using
here?
1 person has voted this message useful



Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4691 days ago

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

 
 Message 316 of 713
29 April 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged 
habgglieb wrote:
My Twitter account and my username on this forum are different. Can I use the one I've
already got, or should I create another Twitter account with the same name I'm using
here?


It doesn't matter. Most people's twitter names and HTLAL names seem to be different.
1 person has voted this message useful



jazzboy.bebop
Senior Member
Norway
norwegianthroughnove
Joined 5200 days ago

439 posts - 800 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Norwegian

 
 Message 317 of 713
29 April 2012 at 11:28pm | IP Logged 
For those looking for cheap novels online, the fantastic AbeBooks has sites in various countries.

US Site

UK Site

German Site

French Site

Italian Site

Spanish Site

It's mainly second hand stuff but you can get some incredible bargains where you are essentially just paying for shipping. You can also find novels in different languages on each site.
1 person has voted this message useful



Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5116 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 318 of 713
30 April 2012 at 12:09am | IP Logged 
Snowflake wrote:
I'm interested in the 1/2 challenge....50 movies and 50 books in Mandarin. The movies part should be easier whereas the books will be super hard. Also, I don't have a Tweeter account and am not planning to open one.


Ok, Snowflake. I'll keep an eye out for you - and if you decide to get a Twitter account later just let me know. It is easy, and you do not have to write a tweet every time you make a move. I use it almost exclusively to keep tabs on my languages - whether there is a challenge on or not.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6379 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 319 of 713
30 April 2012 at 12:35am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
you do not have to write a tweet every time you make a move.
Lol as the challenge involves movies, I misread this as "every time you make a movie" :DDD

Thought I'd point out that it's possible to keep a list in your log or use http://justpaste.it :) Or even keep a word document on your computer and post the full list when you finish:)
1 person has voted this message useful



surrealix
Diglot
Groupie
New Zealand
languagechallenge.su
Joined 4386 days ago

66 posts - 152 votes 
Speaks: English*, Swedish
Studies: French

 
 Message 320 of 713
30 April 2012 at 2:30am | IP Logged 
Kerrie wrote:
Can you add Croatian to the bot please?

Sure!

Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Thanks from me too for doing the bot Surrealix! I was going to invite you to stay for a week
end with my family here in Oslo, but since I see that you live in New Zeeland that may be a tad impractical:-) Let me
know if there is anything else I can do for you!

Sprachprofi wrote:
Thank you so much for programming the bot, Surrealix! Are you intending to do a challenge with
Esperanto? I'd like to buy some Esperanto books or ebooks for you. Contact me in private.

Thankyou both so much for the support and the kind offers! @Sprachprofi, I am indeed planning to do a challenge in
Esperanto, so I'll PM you. @Cristina, funny you mention that, I'm actually in Sweden at the moment ...

Jeffers wrote:
Surrealix, this might be a big ask, but I was wondering if the bot could do something with books of
less than 100 pages? I was thinking it could count them as part books, e.g. a 60 page book is 60%. This would be
convenient for those who are reading articles, short books, and so on. However, if people object to this, or if it is
just to complicated to programme, we can simply wait until we have gotten up to 100 pages with our various articles,
etc, and then submit it as one book. Thanks for all of your hard work!

Jeffers wrote:
Surrealix, I hate to bring up another problem. But I submitted a 110 page book as a test. It
registered the pages, but didn't register the book. Any book from 100-500 pages should be a book. If I read a 110
page book, do I have to submit it as a 250 page book?


It's interesting you bring these points up - we discussed something similar a little while back in the thread. Reading
your comments, I realise I forgot to stick up some sort of Q&A on the website about this. As a stop-gap measure,
here's what we talked about before:

hjordis wrote:
The bot divides total time by 90 minutes and rounds down to get film numbers. I entered one 4 hour
film and one 30 minute film, which by the rules would technically be 2.5 films, but it counts it as 3. I imagine books
work the same way. This is fine [...]
hjordis wrote:
[...] except for the people who are reading 100 page
childrens books and whatnot

Surrealix wrote:
The page/minute counting for films and books works as you said. I'll make the description a bit
clearer. The thought behind it is that people who just want to count books they've read (regardless of how long/short
they are) kan use the #book keyword, and don't have to worry about pages at all. Those who are concerned about long
books and short books can enter their pagecount each time. While the rules say that a short book is 100 page, the
twitterbot currently uses 125 - that way it's evenly scaled.

While I would have liked to count individual books (ie, according to the rules if someone read three 400 page books it
should still count as 3 books - the twitterbot will count it as 4). But this would rely on people using the title tags
every single entry so that I could differentiate books - something which obviously doesn't happen, and unfortunately I
suspect would cause more confusion than anything else.


The need for titles to do this counting is due to the ambiguity in reading tweets. It's very hard to tell the
difference between "today I read 120 pages of a #book" (ie, I read 120 pages of a longer book) and "today I read a
#book which was 120 pages" (ie, the book was 120 pages in total, and you read it all), especially if the user is
allowed to write in whatever format (and with whatever words) they want.
The easiest way around this I can think of is to make it compulsary to specify a title, and then pages can be tracked
per-book, and not per-user (therefore allowing us to count 1 book as anything over 100 pages, etc). But as mentioned,
the drawback is that people would need to spell it correctly and consistently every time. My worry is that this is
(a) frustrating to do each time, and (b) unlikely to work in practice, due to typos, misunderstanding, etc.

As things stand at the moment, the best solution for you is to simply specify "#book" each time you read a book,
without specifying the page count. This will increment your book count by 1 each time (ie, it will add 250 pages
automatically). In addition, I think I'll remove the page-counts from the rankings list (they'll still appear on each
participants' page - when I program that) because it doesn't make any sense for the subset of people who update with
the #book tag and no page-count.

I've thought about this a few times, and haven't yet come up with an elegant solution within the framework we're
currently using. If you have any other ideas, I'd love to hear them!

Snowflake wrote:
Also, I don't have a Tweeter account and am not planning to open one.

If you're worried about the privacy, I've recently tweaked the Twitter-Bot to work with private accounts too. Private
accounts mean that only people you approve can read your tweets. If you only approve the bot, nobody else will be able
to read what you post. Otherwise, good luck with the challenge!


As a final note (gosh, people actually read this far?!) I'm going to wipe the books/movies/etc back to zero sometime
early tomorrow, after which I will likely be away until early on the 2nd. It looks like everything is now working well
for the kick-off, so I'm going to hold my thumbs and hope the bugs stay away until I get back :).


1 person has voted this message useful



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