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Super Challenge Registration/ Update 2012

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4704 days ago

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

 
 Message 273 of 656
17 May 2012 at 10:45pm | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Dividing manga by 5 is fine, and I have said previously that it is ok. to count a textbook as a book, provided
you have started or redone the reading after May 1st, and there is at least 100 pages of actual text in your
target language. In a book like Assimil that can be a bit tricky to count, since there are so many notes and
parallel texts, that it can be difficult to know when you reach a 100 actual pages of text.


I counted Assimil as a book, but not while doing ordinary lessons. I read the French in it from the beginning to the end. There are 113 lessons, and I figured that they are about 1 page of French text each, when you inlclude the exercises as well. I'm also doing a lot of listening to Assimil, and working on lessons, but I won't be counting that.
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jeff_lindqvist
Diglot
Moderator
SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6704 days ago

4250 posts - 5710 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English
Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 274 of 656
18 May 2012 at 12:00am | IP Logged 
kanewai wrote:
I see a couple people listing coursebooks like Assimil. I'm torn about whether to include that on my count, since I don't 'read' it in the same way that I read a novel.
Do we have any standard protocol for that?


For whatever I'm reading, I add minutes to my spreadsheet (for me, that's more useful than a number of pages). However, in this particular case where we focus on the number of books I might estimate how much of the book is pure "content", and if it's Assimil I'd probably not use it as "reading material" in this challenge.
1 person has voted this message useful



maydayayday
Pentaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5014 days ago

564 posts - 839 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2
Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese
Studies: Urdu

 
 Message 275 of 656
18 May 2012 at 2:58pm | IP Logged 
Just a general update so no-one needs to do anything with the numbers ! - I'll tweet them to the bot for that purpose.

I am still a little unsure I could meet the 'speaking' bit of the Super Challenge as I don't really have much contact with francophones: unless I pay for and schedule in a another tutor which is a touch impractical at the moment.

I was delighted to find that the airline I flew to Vietnam with had a supply of French films: okay so not so much a supply but TWO. La Delicatesse - slightly slow for my tastes but Audrey made up for that.

The second was On Air (billed by the airline as Parlez-moi or so my rather rambling notes say.) which turned out to be similar to episodes of Frasier without the psychology. I didn't get all of the gags when I first watched it in French with subtitles nor all of the colloquial speech but these are good learning points.

I watched both of them both ways on the way out and on the way back.

In the hotel I listened to the Spanish news channel for at least 45 mins every evening (way too much sport!)

I also bumped into a bilingual Vietnamese-French lady who helped me out with toning sentences - rather than the chunks I could already manage and we talked French whcih was the first time I'd done that in xx years! Rusty but good experience!

I couldnt tweet from .VN as I didnt have the app installed and for some reason I couldnt install it while there. I need to be more prepared!

   Edit:

Turns out I wouldnt be able to install twitter anyway because of some organisational policy change.




Edited by maydayayday on 18 May 2012 at 4:24pm

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Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4704 days ago

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

 
 Message 276 of 656
18 May 2012 at 8:38pm | IP Logged 
maydayayday wrote:
I couldnt tweet from .VN as I didnt have the app installed and for some reason I couldnt install it while there. I need to be more prepared!

   Edit:

Turns out I wouldnt be able to install twitter anyway because of some organisational policy change.


I tweet from my mobile, but I don't use the app. I found the app kept trying to check for new tweets, and took a lot of my data, as well as draining the battery faster. I just use the internet on my mobile, and it works fine.
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kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4684 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 277 of 656
18 May 2012 at 10:34pm | IP Logged 
I should finish Part 1 of Madame Bovary over lunch, and I'll finally have my
first book listed! I think this section is only 75 pages (it's hard to tell on a
kindle), so I still have a long ways to go.

The reading is getting slightly easier - last night was the first time where I could
sit down and read for long stretches without a break. In English I can read all night,
but it's still tiring to do in in French.   

I also finished Episodes 3 & 4 of Game of Thrones. At first I liked the idea of
watching it in French, and was looking ahead to trying some other series as well. I've
changed my mind. The main characters are dubbed well, but a lot of the secondary
characters sound like they were recruited straight from some provincial theater. The
show is already over the top; it needs good actors (or good voice actors) to keep it
from going over the edge.

I re-listened to the last fifteen minutes in English, and that was it - I can't go back
to the French dub. I'll stick with native language films for the rest of the Challenge.

Current count:

Livres:
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers - première partie. Jules Verne, 1870. (Last 50 p)
Madame Bovary, Part 1. Gustave Flaubert, 1856. (75 p)

Flics:
1. Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008).
2. Le mystère Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956).   Guernica (Paul Éluard, 1950).
3. Le Trône de fer (Game of Thrones, HBO, 2011). Episodes 1 & 2.
4. Ma saison préférée (André Téchiné, 1993).
5. Le Trône de fer. Episodes 3 & 4.

Edited by kanewai on 18 May 2012 at 11:56pm

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prz_
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Poland
last.fm/user/prz_rul
Joined 4654 days ago

890 posts - 1190 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian
Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish

 
 Message 278 of 656
18 May 2012 at 11:46pm | IP Logged 
I've finally watched my first films in Russian!
1. Няньки (2012)
A very pleasant Russian comedy.
2. Тихая застава (2010)
To be honest, I was a little cheater, because I watched Russian film with Bulgarian subtitles... The action takes place, I guess, in 1991 in Tajikistan (then yet the Soviet Republic of Tajikistan), so I was even able to hear some words in Tajik = almost Persian ;) The film wasn't bad at all, but due to my pacifistic views I don't like war films.
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fiziwig
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4660 days ago

297 posts - 618 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 279 of 656
19 May 2012 at 5:00am | IP Logged 
With 22 films, 5 books, and 3 pieces of writing I'm beginning to realize that movies are going to be the easy part of this challenge. So I've decided to pace myself so that I can still be watching movies at the end of the 20 months. Because if I'm watching a movie 20 months from now I will (hopefully) be watching it at a higher level of competence than I have right now.

From now on I'm going to see which of the three I'm furthest behind on (in my case, 3 pieces of writing) and concentrate on that. After I write three more articles I will have 6 pieces of writing and then reading will be the lowest score, so I will concentrate on reading until I have read more books that the pieces of writing I've done.

And I'll skip watching films until my book count and my writing count catch up to my film count. That way I'll stay balanced throughout the challenge and I'll still be doing some of each 20 months from now, but doing all three at a higher level.

So my goal is to hit 25's in all three categories simultaneously in 5 months, 50's in all three categories in 10 months, 75's in 15 months, and wait to hit my first 100 until I have 99 in all three, and not before.
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Tamise
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
jllrr.wordpress.com/
Joined 5038 days ago

115 posts - 161 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Dutch
Studies: French, Japanese, Spanish

 
 Message 280 of 656
19 May 2012 at 10:51am | IP Logged 
Week 3 Update (stuff read/watched previously in italics)

FILMS:

1. Ozamu Tezuka's Metropolis
2. Babylon 5 Season 1 Episodes 1-2
3. Babylon 3 Season 1 Episodes 3-4
4. Gremlins
5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone


No new films this week owing to huge amounts of Uni work. Like fiziwig, I want to pace these anyway, and I've made the target for the month already. I have been watching lots of subbed anime, but haven't been counting this for the challenge. I'm getting better at listening and not concentrating on the English subs, but I've watched hundreds of hours of subbed anime, and it didn't improve my Japanese much, so won't count it here. I'll probably watch a few more films this month.

BOOKS:

1. 齋藤孝のイッキによめる!名作選 小学1年生
2. Grader Readers Level 1 vols 2 and 3

3. まんが日本昔ばなし 16-20
+ four volumes of One Piece manga

The book I read is a boxed set of 5 illustrated folk stories that I picked up second hand about a year ago. I thought this was going to be really difficult for some reason (actually, partly that's because the font is really thin, which I find difficult to read physically) but I was really pleased. I'll have to see if I can get more of these, and think they might have been reissued recently (my set are from the 70s). One more manga this week. I'm now onto a much more difficult reader called Breaking into Japanese Literature - I've managed a couple of pages so far, but it's tough going. Still the book is good and has lots of vocab and such.

GENERAL

The second hand book sale had no Japanese books (probably because I was there on the last day of it), but I picked up books in German, Dutch, French and a few in English - all for £0.50 each! That's fantastic for Dutch books especially as they are so expensive new and are much more difficult to get second hand in the UK.


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