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Total Annihilation Summer Challenge | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6444 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes  Studies: German | Message 1 of 30 11 June 2007 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome to the Great 2007 Total Annihilation Summer Challenge Extreme
Lol. Summer time, I imagine most people have some free time on their hands. How about a new, more extreme challenge where one tries to do as much as possible in a given period of time? I propose the duration for the entire summer to make it more interesting and challenging and hopefully rewarding as well. I think I'd like to see how people cope with everyday life and manage to cram as much language learning as possible. Hopefully we'll all learn a lot and change our procrastinating ways. An important reason to make it a whole summer affair is that by the time it is "over" we'll all be so much into it that we'll make it a routine and continue studying more than we used to. If you only have one hour to dedicate to "serious" study, and the rest is dead time that you can try filling in bathroom, metro or work, it's no reason not to participate. In fact, it's interesting to see how useful is this dead time. No stopping even if you can only afford bathroom learning time. If you decide to drop out, you have to write in your log, in capital letters, CAPITULATED on x x 2007 after xx measly days. For every day that you didn't study, you have to write a mea culpa. The ultimate goal is to have fun, remain motivated and learn a lot of new things every single day and in any case more that we were hoping to learn. No limits on the number of hours one can study or what is called "studying" as long as it involves the target language. All methods are allowed. If you can learn a language from the back of a cereal box, go for it! No rules regarding language families and the number of languages to be studied. You can do one or try juggling as many as possible. Both should produce interesting results. You can brush up on something you already know (or think you know lol). Ideally some participants would do only one language while others would try doing several and participants should have a general plan laid out before they start. Participation in the 6WC counts as work but you have to work on top of that to belong to this challenge, these select few language warriors... :) Basically, create long entries, and try studying as much as possible. Watch TV, movies, read comics, listen to music in the target language but do document any major effort. Please state your previous knowledge and write as much as possible in your logs regarding course materials, hours studied etc. Prior to your start, try reading a few different texts in your target languages and listen to some audio material. Try to get some kind of a feeling for how much you actually understand. Write down your thoughts. The three participants with the highest number of hours spent on one particular language and three hardest students overall would get honorary titles like "Dorkster extreme," "Ardaschir's heir" or whatever you can think of. Up to you to decide on the "prizes". Special prize for the most creative way or place of language study and for most posts per language learning log. The ultimate prize for the most effective use of time. Who decides? A committee of "elders", with more than 200 posts per head based on participants' log entries. Start date: June 15th 2007 End date: September 30th and hopefully never. Edited by reineke on 12 June 2007 at 11:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| johntothea Senior Member United States Joined 6625 days ago 193 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, Polish, French | Message 2 of 30 11 June 2007 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
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I actually like this idea.
Considering I'll have about 6 hours of free time everyday, my goal for the summer is to get to almost advanced fluency in Spanish, almost, if not complete, basic fluency in french and italian, and at least a low intermediate in all of my other languages. I'm going to try to get Polish to a solid intermediate level, just on the verge of basic fluency, just like I am right now with my Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6436 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 30 11 June 2007 at 8:27pm | IP Logged |
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I love the idea. Count me in.
I don't have the summer free (I'll be working with a research group, and will be participating in at least one conference, etc), but I was already planning to do a ton of language learning on the side. My summer starts July 10th, by my reckoning; it lasts a bit over a year, since I'm taking a year off after, but I may decide to wimp out and have the 'summer challenge' only last something closer to an actual summer. My plan is basically as outlined in the summer goals thread. In summary: massive amounts of Italian, French, and German, while trying to make progress in Dutch, Esperanto, and Persian, and for amusement, reading about various aspects of linguistics and toying with languages. I intend to try conlanging to give myself a motivation to get seriously into serious study of grammar in general, which is a subject that I'm weaker than I'd like on, deepen my knowledge of phonetics, and to get a better idea of how languages differ and are similar. The more I read, the more I realize I don't know. Juggling as many as possible would be -extremely- fun, but I'll only do that in the context of dipping toes in beyond the 6 mentioned explicitly above. One idea I've been having recently is to try to listen to at least an hour, even largely in the background, of many different languages, and decide which ones I consider most euphonious as a factor to weigh into which I put next on my list. The major problem that I can see with this is that how euphonious I consider a language varies hugely with the speaker and dialect. I'm also up to considering other wacky ideas to try out, as long as they're not mutually exclusive with any of the above, and to poaching any that I come across and like! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| gperson000 Newbie United States Joined 6447 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, French | Message 4 of 30 11 June 2007 at 10:02pm | IP Logged |
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Language learning the way it should be. I'm glad someone has finally extracted the sillyness out of the other challenges and left behind only the components that are most important and relevant.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6374 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 30 11 June 2007 at 10:45pm | IP Logged |
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This sounds really interesting and fun and I might just do it. First I'll have to gather up enough Japanese learning materials and develop a plan of attack. But if it works out I'm in!
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| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6444 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 30 11 June 2007 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you for all the encouraging comments. Here are a few hopefully helpful guidelines.
Individual time required: the most you can afford/sneak in/steal away from mundane things and everyday obligations. Try not to make excuses to yourself and others. If it's a family emergency you don't have to say a thing. If you were just plain lazy or distracted don't hide it. Make this forum procrastination anonymous. Fight it! Try changing your ways. It's one of the hardest things one can attempt to do. Calculate how much time you devote daily to your languages, how much you can realistically devote, and then try to beat that in any way you can think of. That's the single most important rule of the game. Try sneaking a lesson before breakfast. Tune your alarm clock to a foreign station. Make a word-a-day calendar. Change your home page to Yahoo France. Check your Netflix queue. Delete all English-only titles. Hit that SAP button on your TV. Check out Internet radio stations and podcasts. Do not stare each day at the back of some guy's head in the metro. Get that mp3 player! Grab a book! Try figuring out new and fun ways to study a language. Put sticky notes on furniture. Spend more time on foreign message boards (like me, lol). If you've figured a good routine to gobble down large chunks of vocabulary, share it. Like a particular comic/tv series or movie both for its content and language material? Share it with others! Whatever works or doesn't work, we'd like to hear about it. There's plenty of time to start from scratch. Check local libraries for free stuff, spend a weekend at Borders. Look for free stuff online. Before June 21, set up a language learning log with Total annihilation or similar in the subject heading, state your languages and general plans. You can change these on the fly, add new languages, explore, experiment, do whatever you please just as long as you're doing something language related. The important thing is to start and always work on something and share your thoughts with others. Have fun! That's the surest way of learning a language. Edited by reineke on 11 June 2007 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 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 7 of 30 11 June 2007 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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hehe :) I'm in!
Although today I'll have to cheat a bit and count working on my paper about the language of mass media as language learning although it's about my mother tongue (it does include information about loans from other languages though, so that sorta counts :P) you know, I don't wanna capitulate on the very first day :( ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6433 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 30 11 June 2007 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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I'm free this July, so I'll go for it. I have flash cards for German, and downloaded some MP3 sound files that I can listen to over and over again. I think I'll be one of the "jugglers", even though my MAJOR language now is German. When I get tired or bored of German, I'll retreat to Mandarin or Italian. I'm using BBC languages Italian Steps, and I have plenty of Chinese characters to work on this summer.
But I might have to stop by August, as I'll be flying to Korea and visit my relatives, buy stuff, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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