AiyaLianxi wrote:Disclaimer: I read the first 4 pages and the last page. If things have been decided already, disregard my comments on that.
I joined in 2014 through Reddit, was involved through the end of June when life slapped me upside the head. I joined the HTLAL forums but was overwhelmed by how huge it is.
I like what's been posited so far, about having individual language logs, but a more cohesive support group. In 2014, it was me and one other person posting for most of the year for Team Korean. And again, I had to drop out due to IRL problems.
In 2015, I've been tracking my own progress the analog style, which doesn't really give me the accountability.
Another thing I didn't particularly care for (again, I was in reddit, not HTLAL) was people would make marvelous plans but not necessarily follow through. I'd rather go for a flex/stretch goal than aim for the stars and then not hitting it.
I do like the idea of monthly challenges, I think those would be a lot easier to make people feel comfortable starting. If you join halfway through the month, your "goal" is for the remainder of the days left. And with a constant brush yourself off and try again, it's less intimidating than thinking about the whole year.
And I like the idea of teams not being language specific, or maybe slightly more generic? Having a team for every language seems a bit much, and lonely. I like the idea of having teams as support groups, and then threads for specific languages you can check in on for resources. Having active, year round language learning support I think is a lot more important than having everyone isolated into teams.
Like AiyaLianxi, I also came from and participated on the reddit side. There is a subforum over there for people participating in the TAC challenge, but it's less of a community and more individual posts.
I think it would be a wonderful idea to kickstart the new forum with a successful TAC and would participate it in for sure!
Just to provide input on what I liked the most about the TAC:
I really like the accountability factor of it, and the fact that it combined groups of people all studying the same language together, so that they could ask questions and share resources together. I particularly liked the idea of the "godfather/godmother" role where there were residing members who could help guide these study groups and maybe even do activities like skype sessions together with the TL learners.
I do understand that the role of a team leader is hard, though. I remember a post Woodsei wrote before about how he/she would always default to Japanese, even though it was Mandarin/Korean/Japanese, because it was the language that (s)he was studying. I was amazed at how well Team Rare turned out though, would love to see another!
I like the idea of more "generic" teams with also "generic" monthly challenges to make it easier for team leaders to be inclusive to all their members regardless of what language everyone is learning.
I think the way tomgosse has setup a "French Study Group" thread is good. We could do individual study group threads for each language that anyone could join at any point, and have godmother/godfather figures for those threads. These would remain separate from "TAC teams." If these individual study group threads would like to supplement TAC monthly challenges with challenges targeted for their language, that would be cool and up to them (for example: Japanese Study Group has a monthly challenge for January - show your kakizome for the New Year; kanji challenges, which other languages couldn't do). Then we could just have a stickied thread linking all the study group threads.
That way TAC teams still get some fun activities like challenges without it being restricting on the language. We still get the accountability factor with our teams and a competitive spirit. The only part that is missing is that someone learning French would need to take the initiative to find other French learning logs rather than having them all compiled up in one "Team" post like how it was done before. But then again, they could all be compiled in the study group threads and imo, regardless of what language my teammates would be studying, I'd read their logs regardless so I think depends on the preference/initiative of the person as well anyway.