Which Language Challenge do you think helped you the most?

[StringerBell]

In looking over the variety of Language Challenges on this site, I started thinking about the various pros (and cons) for each one. I'm curious to hear about:

-Which challenge(s) have you done?
-Which challenge(s) do you think were responsible for leading to an improvement in your language skills?
-Are there any challenges you wished you'd signed up for in retrospect? Any challenges that backfired?
-What do you like/dislike about Language Challenges in general?

[rdearman]

For me the most useful challenge by far was the Super Challenge. Certainly for French it has helped me to the point I can read just about anything in French I want and can guess most of the words. My own output challenge would be more useful to me if I did it more!

I did the Free & Legal challenge and it introduced me to two new languages and it was very cool and interesting. I would recommend that to anyone who thinks they might be interested in doing a new language, but don't want to spend a ton of cash finding out they don't like it. Like I did with Czech. I actually discovered I didn't have enough interest in the language to continue, not that I disliked the language.

The 365 challenge is one I signed up for but bombed out of the rules were too confusing for me (Sorry Peter). But I think it would have been useful, since I've been doing a long clozemaster streak.

I did the 6WC but only twice. Both times it seemed to be just an exercise in booking lots of miscellaneous stuff you did in the language rather than studying. Only my opinion of course, other have got a lot out of it.

The thing I like about challenges is the accountability and the participation. The thing I dislike is they don't seem to get me as far as I wished. ALthough the SC seems to be the best thing for this. My own little mini-challenges seem to help, where I am challenging myself to do things like 500+ language exchanges or 500+ hours of LR.

[brilliantyears]

I'm on my second round of Super Challenge, and I just finished my second 6WC.

The Super Challenge is fun but I mostly end up using it to watch and listen to stuff, not to read stuff (which I'd benefit from a lot more). Since it's such a long challenge it also doesn't really intensify whatever I'm studying at the moment - I watch a lot of stuff anyway, so it ends up being more of a method to track what and how much I'm watching.

The 6WC however! Did it twice, benefited from it greatly. Last year I joined the challenge with Russian. My starting point was A1, and I took the challenge very seriously. All my skills really improved over the course of 6 weeks, but especially my speaking because I actually dedicated time to it. I broke through the mental barrier and got more comfortable at speaking. Listening and reading also improved, as did my vocabulary.

This year I joined with Arabic, and went from zero to a solid A1 in those 6 weeks (full disclosure: also with help of classes that happened to take place right during the challenge). Again, I dedicated a lot of time to it.

[IronMike]

Definitely the Super Challenge and the 365 Challenge for me were the ones that helped me the most. The one that has helped my Esperanto the most isn't aligned to this site: Esperanto Sumoo. My reading proficiency has remained at a high level with help from the Sumoo.

I wish I had not signed up for the Writing challenge (or did I?) as I just haven't had time.

I like the Challenges that have their own tracking or whatever it is called. Makes it easy for me to keep track of what I'm doing.

I've done a personal challenge that I've advertised on this site, my Polyglot Fitness Challenge. That one has also helped me maintain or improve my language and fitness goals. I'll probably make it an official challenge here when January comes around again.

[Radioclare]

For me it's a tie between the Super Challenge and the 365 Challenge.

The Super Challenge helped me enormously with improving my Croatian, especially the listening part of it. I like reading, so would have ultimately got around to reading in Croatian without the challenge, but I'm not normally a films/TV kind of person and so without the challenge there is no way I would have pushed myself to start watching Croatian TV. When I started I found it really, really hard. Not just trying to understand the language (although that was really hard too!) but actually just sitting in front of the screen and watching TV for 30 minutes, because I never do that in English and it just felt like a huge waste of time. But in the end I think it turned out to be the best possible thing I could have done. I got hooked on a series, listened to vast amounts of Croatian and found that I not only benefited from a significant improvement in my listening comprehension, but also in my speaking ability.

The 365 challenge has also massively helped me with Russian. Before this year, I'd spent 2 or 3 years announcing that I was learning Russian, starting, doing a bit of studying, then letting life get in the way and giving up. Signing up for the 365 challenge this year has given me the motivation to do something in Russian every single day and I made more progress in a few months than I did in the previous few years. There's no way I'd have studied Russian every day without the challenge. I think the fact that the rules are so complicated has actually been beneficial for me; I've never managed to get my head around what I need to deduct if I miss a day and I don't want to have to read the very long rules posts in order to figure it out, so that gives me an extra bit of motivation not to miss a day

[Lianne]

Challenges I've done:
- Super Challenge (a few times)
- 365 Day Challenge
- 6 Week Challenge (a few times)
- TAC/Team TAC (on the old forum; I hardly remember these)

I've gotta go with the 365 Day Challenge. I'm on day 259 of studying at least half an hour every day; there's no doubt that that's BY FAR the most consistent I have EVER been. As a result, I've made slow and steady progress in my French all year, with occasional eureka moments!

In second place would be the Super Challenge, which has kept me always making sure I fit in reading and listening practice. I have yet to actually complete a Super Challenge, though. I didn't get started on the current one until the start of 2019, so pretty far behind, but I'm hoping to at least come close to completing this one!

The 6 Week Challenge sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn't. It works when I get super into it and competitive with the leaderboard. This last one, I logged a few things and then just kinda forgot to keep logging, so it had no impact. It doesn't help that it's kind of pointless in its current incarnation, except for a bit of competition.

In general I like language challenges, because I can get a lot of motivation from a friendly competition. (See also my excessive time spent moving through the Duolingo leagues, lol.) I also like how they can help me focus on a specific aspect of language learning that I might not have focused enough on, like the Super Challenge does, and even like the 365 Day Challenge does with consistency.

[lingua]

Definitely my second go round with the SC for my reading. The improvement is noticeable and it's become a real pleasure to not have to look up very many words anymore. The 365 Challenge has been just what I needed. I have created a daily Italian habit without even thinking about it anymore.

[kanewai]

The Super Challenges, by far, have been the most effective for me. I like reading anyway, and this is a way to keep the pressure on to maintain languages, but in an enjoyable way. Watching a lot of movies was great from a cultural perspective, but I'm not sure I improved in any languages. The audio section became much more effective once I started focusing on audiobooks and podcasts.

The 365-Day Challenge would have been great if I kept it up! This, and other challenges, are becoming harder to take part in now that I'm trying to balance multiple languages.

I had mixed results with the 6-week TAC. I always start off strong, but I burn out quickly on trying to log everything. It started to feel a bit obsessive. I had better luck with TAC when I only focused on one language.

The challenges are a great way to keep motivated. It helps to feel like you're part of a group with similar goals. My main gripe: For a lot of challenges there will be dozens of pages of people signing up, or arguing about the rules - and then months of nothing during the actual challenge. I think the first Super Challenge will always remain a highlight, because a lot of people where discussing it on HTLAL for the whole 20 months. These days it just feels like it's something I do for myself; the group-aspect has mostly been lost.

*Edit: I meant the 6WC challenge. I'm mixing up my acronyms.

[coldrainwater]

tl;dr - reading Super Challenge and listening 365 Day Challenge. I would have loved to have been around back in the early days of the TAC and wish I had done it. Backfires? Too many to list and I often truncate them before they take flight. Fail early and often.

Last year, an ES reading SC progressed smoothly into a listening 365 Day Challenge. Both worked in tandem for optimal results. When I hit diminishing returns with the reading SC, I transitioned to an audiobook listening model that produced rapid results. I maxed out on audiobook value then moved to strictly ES podcasts, continuing in 365 format. The results were advanced listening and advanced reading skills. I couldn't have asked for more.

A couple of idiosyncracies worth noting: The reading SC was done more intensively and I would opt out of anything too easy or push it to audiobook territory if I really wanted to ''read'' it. That way, nothing literary was really out of bounds. With ES, it was lucky that I could pick my century and I ended up enjoying several of them (with emphasis on 16th, early 17th, and 19th century ES lit). I mention it because I simply couldn't find the right challenge level in 20th or 21st century lit (with a few notable exceptions like Delibes).

The same story held true for the 365 but I listened extensively/passively. It amounted to a long-term listening campaign that browbeat ES into my ears semi-permanently. What was coolest about the campaign is that it almost felt like cheating and was more immersive than anything else I have done to date. Consistency was there since no matter what life threw at me since all I had to do is keep my headphones with me hit play (pre-loaded material). When times get tough for me, listening drags my language progress forward, not the other way around. In times of plenty, intensive desk study rules the day.

Like kanewai, podcasts and audiobooks by far offer me the most bang for my buck in listening. Like Lianne, I am motivated by friendly competition, even if it is only with myself. It was a few memory-years back, but I recall that completing the Duolingo tree was quite helpful in my earliest Spanish study days. The bottom part of the tree was too moody for me to understand and it felt like a first-semester quantum course (not really, but you get the gist). However, the competitive drive pushed the tree to gold and it worked well as a month-long mini-challenge. I liked it enough to go at it again with German, even though it is on the back burner at the moment. Very versatile tool with the reverse tree options, good community and whatnot.

I have to give a shout out to Peter for making an awesome rulebook for the 365-day challenge. They easily absorbed/accommodated for a major language change midstream in my case and provisioned for way more than I would have thought of.

Edited: for a wide range of native language grammar errors. I need a writing challenge and something to make me do it.

[rdearman]

There is a writing challenge! The Output Challenge is both verbal and written.