A language learners’ forum

Challenge XXV - May 2017

Starts: Monday, 1st May 2017 00h00m01s your time
Ends: Sunday, 11th Jun 2017 23h59m59s your time

The 6 Week Challenge is a challenge to upgrade your language skills in one language from beginner to something more worthwhile, and to see if you can find more time to study languages when competing with other participants in a global highscore. 6 Week Challenges start on February 1st, May 1st, August 1st and November 1st every year, so there is a rough 6 weeks on / 6 weeks off pattern. Note that you can only do the 6 Week Challenge with a language that you're a beginner at or lower-intermediate at most. This allows for a more just comparison between participants.

More about the Challenge here

The bot is already taking registrations. Join us now!

6 Week Challenge Winners (2011-2017) - List of past winners and runners-up kindly created by Teango.

Sprachprofi wrote
The bot only knows ISO-639-1 languages.

ISO 639-1 codes here

The three tags #ie #multilingual #linguistics which are all grouped together as "Multilingual" on the scoreboard can be used if you don't want to differentiate between several languages.

Also available are: Nahuatl, Ancient Greek, #ASL, #Cantonese. I don't know what the tags are for the first two.

Link to last Challenge, Feb 2017

What language are you signing up with? What materials will you be using? Share with us!

I'm signing up with Russian again. I'll try to read intensively as much as possible and aim to finish Modern Russian 1, which is the first part of Russian FSI!

I'll sign up, probably with Finnish again, or maybe I should do German again. I'm surely not above B1 yet. And it would be more useful than Finnish at the moment. Decisions, decisions.

In any case, my score will plummet like a meteor when I leave for Bratislava towards the end of May.

Still testing waters but I think I'll take up Greek. Liking it so far!

Wish I had 6 weeks to spare.

I suggest we add themes and/or sub-challenges to our 6WC. Eg.
* TV-watching / poetry / food topics / conversation island creation (and all interested participants to use a common #tag for easy comparison)
* language X / language family Y / learn new script Z (to help wanderlusters decide on a language)
* A0 complete beginners' team / Assimil team / hare team / tortoise team (for more meaningful comparisons; for moral support)
* etc

I'd really like to do this. Russian will remain my priority but I am really sad that my Spanish is now so awful, so I will be starting that back up as my challenge language (as I'm not more than an A2). I'm not sure what I will be using yet - have the next week to work it out I guess.

I've never done a 6 week challenge so if anyone has any advice, please let me know!

Hello, everybody! Long-time lurker here, first-time poster. I'm grateful to have discovered a group of neat people who have the same crazy hobby as I do.

I plan to enter the 6WC and study Norwegian, in which I am a complete beginner. I'll use Assimil's course (German base) as the backbone for my learning. I plan to supplement that by listening to NRK Alltid Nyheter and trying my hand at reading newspaper articles. I may also poke around Netflix to see what's on offer in Norwegian. I'm not the biggest fan of crime series, however, and it seems like that constitutes most of what makes it over to the English-speaking world from Scandinavia, alas....

I wish everybody luck with their challenge!

rdearman wrote:Wish I had 6 weeks to spare.

This is exactly what I'm thinking. I should rework on Swedish but I have no extra time really. We'll see what things look like once this week is finished.

MamaPata wrote:I'd really like to do this. Russian will remain my priority but I am really sad that my Spanish is now so awful, so I will be starting that back up as my challenge language (as I'm not more than an A2). I'm not sure what I will be using yet - have the next week to work it out I guess.

I've never done a 6 week challenge so if anyone has any advice, please let me know!

You might want to think a little about your tags ahead of time. There are nice graphs on the 6WC site showing the breakdown of what you've studied, but what they look like depends on your tags. Ideally, you want enough tags to see how you are using your time, but not so many that it gets messy. You could look at the old scores and click on various people's names to see how they did it.

You can choose to tweet what you've done as soon as you've done it, or wait until later. If you find you get sucked in every time you open Twitter and waste lots of time looking at cute cats or reading news stories, then you might want to just write everything down and tweet at the end of the day. But I think some people have had trouble with getting blocked for spamming when they've tweeted a lot all at once, so when I do this, I only tweet about 5-7 items and then pause for a couple of minutes to look at cats and then tweet another 5-7 items until I've registered everything for the day. You can also add the hashtag #yesterday to a tweet if you forgot to tweet something from the day before, but once I did that too early in the morning and it put it on the day before. It might have something to do with the time zone the bot is in, I guess.

If you want to make it to the top, you'll need to start looking at spare moments and how you can use them, but don't get too crazy or you'll burn yourself out. Sometimes, I just stop looking at the scoreboard to avoid getting stressed about my score. I just set the page to my own charts and leave it there.

schlaraffenland wrote:Hello, everybody! Long-time lurker here, first-time poster. I'm grateful to have discovered a group of neat people who have the same crazy hobby as I do.

I plan to enter the 6WC and study Norwegian, in which I am a complete beginner. I'll use Assimil's course (German base) as the backbone for my learning. I plan to supplement that by listening to NRK Alltid Nyheter and trying my hand at reading newspaper articles. I may also poke around Netflix to see what's on offer in Norwegian. I'm not the biggest fan of crime series, however, and it seems like that constitutes most of what makes it over to the English-speaking world from Scandinavia, alas....

I wish everybody luck with their challenge!

A lot of NRK's programs can be seen from other countries on their website and many have subs in Norwegian. As a beginner, you might not understand much even with subs, but it could be useful later. It's only the programs they make themselves that are available worldwide though.