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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5483 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 33 of 76 25 December 2013 at 3:07am | IP Logged |
Serpent wrote:
50 hours or 50x90min, btw? I don't mind either way. |
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Yeah, I was thinking 50 x 90 mins, but I got confused somewhere along the way. :-) If we did 2,500 pages and 75 hours, that would double the amount of listening compared to the original Super Challenge, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
A season of a television series is typically between 10 and 15 hours long, and most people seem to see big improvements within their first few seasons. So 50 hours would be about 4 seasons, and 75 hours would be about 6 seasons. What do people think?
That first SC 1☆ would still be a lot of work under a system like this. The first 2,500 pages are the hardest part of the Challenge. But the nice thing about 2,500 pages and 75 hours of watching is that (a) it's large enough to see major improvements, but (b) it's small enough that polyglots can still try to earn one star each in 6 different languages. :-)
Anyway, I'm just throwing out some half-baked ideas, in hopes that something will be useful to the Super Challenge organizers.
4 persons have voted this message useful
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6548 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 34 of 76 25 December 2013 at 3:40am | IP Logged |
And what do you think of the idea of just making all your reading count, if you prefer? As I said, I hate having to choose between what counts and what's better for my studies. I'm going to read a small amount of Spanish for example, and an even smaller amount of Romanian. I can totally make them count by signing up with them and being waaay too far from the official goal, but why not just let them count? Maybe a miscellaneous category for all languages in which you don't plan to read all that much?
I mean I don't think especially reading is such a big problem for wanderlusters? Wanderlust normally happens due to an addiction to the beginner stage where progress is so swift... and if someone is wanderlustful (?) enough to start reading in a new language, surely it's not a bad thing?
Also, what do you think about B1- vs B2+ ie regular vs advanced challenge? As I said, the difficulty thing was just an attempt to get it out of the way. Any other solutions if we even need one?
Edited by Serpent on 25 December 2013 at 3:46am
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5483 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 35 of 76 25 December 2013 at 4:29am | IP Logged |
Serpent wrote:
And what do you think of the idea of just making all your reading count, if you prefer? As I said, I hate having to choose between what counts and what's better for my studies. I'm going to read a small amount of Spanish for example, and an even smaller amount of Romanian. I can totally make them count by signing up with them and being waaay too far from the official goal, but why not just let them count? Maybe a miscellaneous category for all languages in which you don't plan to read all that much? |
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Since I'm not a polyglot, any opinions I put forth on this subject would be totally uninformed. So I'll refrain from having any. :-) What do the folks with multiple Super Challenges think? Is it better to treat each language as separate goal, especially if we're looking at 2,500 page chunks? Or should we just lump everything together?
Serpent wrote:
Also, what do you think about B1- vs B2+ ie regular vs advanced challenge? As I said, the difficulty thing was just an attempt to get it out of the way. Any other solutions if we even need one? |
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At this point, we have only three Advanced Super Challenge people who finished ahead of the regular Super Challenge people, and they read 146, 147 and 249 books, respectively. That would be 5☆, 5☆ and 9☆ respectively, which is still small enough that we could just go ahead and lump them in with everybody else if we wanted.
The 10,000-page Super Challenge is about 2.5 million words, and the Advanced Super Challenge is about 5 million words. To put this in perspective, lots of schools hold million word challenges for native students.
So if we went with one system for everybody, most things would probably work out OK. But I might be overlooking a major drawback or two. For example, students who start at A2 would probably want to compare themselves to other students who start at A2, not to advanced students starting at C1. So even if we score everybody on the same system, so to speak, we might still want to have "divisions" or something like that.
I don't know. My opinion holds no special weight here, and I reserve the right to change my mind the instant somebody suggests something better. :-)
1 person has voted this message useful
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4840 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish
| Message 36 of 76 25 December 2013 at 5:20am | IP Logged |
I really feel that each language should be a separate goal. The focus on one language,
and seeing the results you get, are a major part of what makes this challenge unique.
Otherwise it just becomes an extra-long tadoku or 6WC.
We could (well, surrealix could) add a column in the twitter bot for levels. That way,
people who wanted to sort by level could. I've noticed a pretty wide range in how people
self-assess - not just on HTLAL, but in the RL too - so it's not a factor I pay much
attention to.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5298 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French
| Message 37 of 76 25 December 2013 at 1:16pm | IP Logged |
patrickwilken wrote:
[...] I get the impression most people want to do a longer challenge. Why? [...]
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I personally prefer a longer challenge starting in May because I don’t like having too many projects that begin on January 1st. They sound too much like New Year’s resolutions, and we all know how these usually go. And as someone already mentioned, having a Challenge with a May start could be useful for the forum in general, as by late spring the level of activity is usually much lower and we may use something exciting to revive the community. Those are the reasons for my preference, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be interested in a Super Challenge running for twelve months to coincide with the calendar year.
emk wrote:
[...] Sheer volume really can help, as this story about a pottery professor suggests:
Quote:
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. |
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[...] |
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Stelle wrote:
[...] I'm going to chime in wearing my elementary school teacher hat. Children best learn to read in their native language by reading "just right" books - books that aren't so easy that they barely have to read, but that are easy by all other standards. Our goal for independent reading level is 95%+ accuracy, with full comprehension. 90-95% accuracy is instructional level, which means that the child will need guidance to read, understand and enjoy the text. Anything below 90% is frustration level [...]. The kids who are the best readers are the ones who devour easy book after easy book.
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I think that those infos make perfectly clear we should aim for quantity over quality. Moreover, I’m fairly convinced that while we may all start with binging on children’s easy novels, sooner or later most of us will want to graduate to more grown-up stuff. There’s no accounting for taste, but I can’t see myself or anyone else reading only easy books just to log higher numbers. But the fact that we are allowed to make all those books count whatever our starting point is, may be the determining factor in keeping us going until we feel ready to move on to more challenging or interesting materials.
So I second emk’s proposed 2,500 pages and 50x90min listening and doing away with the levels. After all, in a challenge which stresses extensive reading I believe the gap in reading speeds between, for instance, lower intermediate and upper intermediate learners is bound to close soon (and I think Cavesa’s reflections quoted in post nr. 23 were going in this direction). And as kanewai repeated above, self-assessment is very subjective, so I think it should be de-emphasized; anyway, a column in the twitter bot for levels could still be there for those interested in making comparison between people who started more or less on the same level.
And those were my 2 cents.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6548 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 38 of 76 25 December 2013 at 2:50pm | IP Logged |
kanewai wrote:
I really feel that each language should be a separate goal. The focus on one language,
and seeing the results you get, are a major part of what makes this challenge unique.
Otherwise it just becomes an extra-long tadoku or 6WC.
We could (well, surrealix could) add a column in the twitter bot for levels. That way,
people who wanted to sort by level could. I've noticed a pretty wide range in how people
self-assess - not just on HTLAL, but in the RL too - so it's not a factor I pay much
attention to.
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Well, but nobody is preventing you from focusing on just one language. And in the 6WC/Tadoku you also choose 1 or 3 main languages.
How about treating "misc" as a separate language, much like in the 6WC you can log your time as "multilingual"? It's up to you whether you sign up with this "language" or not.
BTW, indicating your level was originally my idea too, but I thought listing the difficulty of the material was better, mostly because beginners get to label their stuff as difficult. With the level there's the issue that eventually it will hopefully change.
kanewai, do you have books in all your languages? (as far as I remember there are some you can't even add here?) Note how pretty much all successful participants were learning a Romance language or German (or improving their English). Nobody should be forced to set themselves up for failure just because they want to log the little they do have. Reading even 100-500 pages is still an achievement.
Edited by Serpent on 25 December 2013 at 2:52pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4639 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian
| Message 39 of 76 25 December 2013 at 5:26pm | IP Logged |
emk wrote:
Serpent wrote:
And what do you think of the idea of just making all your reading count, if you
prefer? As I said, I hate having to choose between what counts and what's better for my studies. I'm going to read a
small amount of Spanish for example, and an even smaller amount of Romanian. I can totally make them count by
signing up with them and being waaay too far from the official goal, but why not just let them count? Maybe a
miscellaneous category for all languages in which you don't plan to read all that much? |
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Since I'm not a polyglot, any opinions I put forth on this subject would be totally uninformed. So I'll refrain from
having any. :-) What do the folks with multiple Super Challenges think? Is it better to treat each language as
separate goal, especially if we're looking at 2,500 page chunks? Or should we just lump everything together?
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As someone who was logging 4 languages (German was in my log only), I think I'm allowed to answer this. In my
mind the point was indeed to achieve advancement in particular languages by reaching certain reading targets in
those languages. So having a specific goal for each language was helpful. But what I did in practice was read
whatever I wanted and cycle through languages in an attempt to balance them in a way I found acceptable. I ended
up neglecting French in favor of Dutch, for example, and eventually gave up on Italian.
I don't think that changing the scoring system would affect my approach significantly. I would still want to reach
decently high numbers in as many of my languages as possible, and I still would do triage on the fly and focus
more on one or two languages that seem to need it or that I just prefer to spend my time on. But I would have
more of an incentive to not let one drop entirely just because I was too far away from my starting goal in it,
because I still could chase stars by adding a couple hundred pages of a neglected language.
So in sum, I don't have a strong opinion, and I think moving to a "log everything, sum everything, earn stars"
system would be fine if it's desired.
1 person has voted this message useful
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4484 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German
| Message 40 of 76 25 December 2013 at 6:28pm | IP Logged |
Suzie wrote:
kanewai wrote:
emk wrote:
So that's my two cents, for whatever it might be worth: one star for every
2,500 pages and 50 hours of active listening, |
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Simple and elegant. I second this. Does that make it four cents worth? |
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Six, please. I love that idea as well. Thanks for the suggestion, emk. |
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I agree that this is a good idea.
Should we then just continue the SC rather than starting a new one? So those of us who have completed the first SC would have four stars and be working towards their fifth?
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