What happened to the challenges

[rdearman]

Someone posted about all the interesting challenges which used to happen on HTLAL but nobody seems to do now. So I did a little digging to find out what these were.

1. Super Challenge
2. Output challenge
3. Accelerated Challenge - how awesome it would be to compare the effectiveness of passive-then-active Assimil vs. speaking from day 1 vs. Listening-reading vs. what-have-you, cramming vocabulary with an SRS or letting it accumulate naturally... and we want to give it a go! (So there you have it. 30 days, 35 hours, 0 to A2 in Finnish.)
4. My crazy 30 day challenge to learn Greek
5. Assimil Challenge
6. Reineke’s Great Summer Challenge
7. Lolcat challenge This is going to be an easy one: find and post a cat meme in, or about, one of your target languages. Bonus if you can find one for each of your languages.
8. Hard Core FSI
9. Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time
10. Reineke’s movie extravaganza
11. Spanish: A little subs2srs experiment
12. Strange experiment with French In Action
13. The Ultimate Accelerated Learning Exp. !
14. Learning exclusively with authentic video
15. The TV method
16. 61 hour Language Immersion(Learning & speaking a language in 2.5 full days through Brainwashing) This was a particularly controversial challenge I think.
17. The three dictionary technique

To be fair I had to scrounge around a lot to find these. So I'm not really sure this whole "There were loads of challenges and crazy experiments on HTLAL" has a lot of basis in reality. Still I'm sure there are a lot of them I didn't discover.

So here is a challenge for all of you. Why not pick one of these and try it yourself? Or a modified version?

[jeff_lindqvist]

I'd include these:
18. Learning a language for six weeks (The original 6WC, I assume! I participated.)
19. Assimil Hebrew in 2 weeks (Which I've more or less tried, a couple of times, but not with a totally new language.)
20. Learn 600 words a week (I haven't tried this one)
21. Learn all 24 EU languages (...nor this one.)

[Cavesa]

The Super Challenge was from May year 1 to December year 2, and from May year 3 to December year 4, unless I am mistaken. Therefore we are waiting for May year 5. But of course an earlier start is possible, perhaps it would be a nice point to discuss.

The Output Challenge is running, but I think you can follow only individual participants' reports on their log, there is no central thread, apart from the sign up one.

The other ones on the list were more individual.

But you are absolutely right they are inspirational.

[reineke]

"It is better to fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed than to succeed in a cause that will ultimately fail."

The end of TAC thread:

TAC was supposed to be a fun way of leveraging nonproductive online socializing and long-winded theorizing into something useful. Motivation boosting is only a small part of it. Motivated people will accomplish their goals but that's not a reason not to participate if the idea itself tickles your fancy in the first place. The ultimate goal is to achieve something good, productive and measurable for the participant. The process should offer the reader (Youtube follower?) insight into practical language learning techniques, methodology and resources. It's a fun anarchy of sorts where one is free to be as organized and disorganized as one likes, work alone, in pairs or groups - even serious collaborative work groups (which may prove useful for so-called minor languages). If you're "too busy" to participate, you probably should.

Early on, a few people started obsessing about start and end times, and competition format. It was originally started in the summer of 2007 I believe with a short end date that kept getting extended. Don't expect others to set things up for you, it's a drag. Slap "TAC" on your language journal blog, Youtube channel (in August, if you like) , do something worthwhile, share what you've accomplished and you're in. Turn it into an open invitation if you like. Inspire others.

The competition part is both real and contrived. We all like to feel accomplished, brag a little (or a lot), help, and share our experience. TAC may offer a way of channeling this into something productive or simply offer a venue to blow off one's language learning frustrations which in turn may cause someone to offer encouragement etc. You can discuss your favorite method more constructively when it's practically applied and practiced rather than preached.

TAC will live and die on its own. Feel free to create other challenges, as people have occasionally done, and incorporate them into your personal TAC. With regards to the name of this wacky learn-a-long, it has been adopted here, over at HTLAL and I have seen it on a couple of other sites. It is not a serious name, it is somewhat puerile and I can see some dignified people not participating solely on this account. To an extent, I sympathize. If I could go back in time ...I would probably not change it as I'd be too busy winning the lottery. There is some history to it, and some good memories. What is being annihilated? Laziness. The target language (Kato Lomb's fortified "castle"). Your sorry participation. A couple of times I went through the list of participants, digging deep into forum history. Most were MIA, which was expected. Learning a language, establishing a new habit or breaking a bad one - that's very hard.

If you're feeling constructive, work together on consolidating this forum or rehabilitating the old one. I don't see people sitting in two chairs for too long.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =13&t=1527

[Ani]

Can I advance the hypothesis that fewer challenges are posted because the challenge subforum is cluttered with many nearly dead or just ancient threads pinned to the top? Like why is "experiences with Tadoku" pinned? It sort of makes the subforum feel like a place to put durable, historically relevant threads instead of a place to post your wacky idea challenge..

If we need something pinned maybe it can be one concise post with historical rules and dates for reference and *maybe* links to past threads, and then close it to commentary.

What if we unpinned everything, challenged everyone to make and participate in more challenges, and just see what rises to the top?

[rdearman]

I removed all the Challenges which weren't posted into since mid-2017 and anything which isn't active right now. I'll pin the next super challenge. However, long running challenges have a tendency to sort to the bottom, which is why we pin them. In fact most of them when unpinned only dropped down a couple of slots. So this would seem to indicate not a lot of challenges being challenged.

I was thinking of a couple of new ones:

• Read a book backwards challenge - I was always told to read my work backwards because you'd catch more errors. It forces you to look at the words and phrases more intensively. Anyone fancy the "Read a book backwards challenge"?
• Pass the Chicken Challenge - Start a thread in a TL with one paragraph of a story, next poster must continue story. Any mistakes and the person who made the mistake must start a new story using the corrected mistake.
• Idiom Challenge - A single thread where we look for the most obscure idiom in a language, one with the most likes wins. Any language, weekly winner, no repeats.
• Librivox challenge - Record an entire audio book in your TL and submit it for approval.
• Post-it-note challenge - Put one word vocabulary on a deck of post-it-notes (e.g. paper flashcards) After you review in the corner of the card mark X (didn't know) or O (knew) when you get 3 O's the card can be destroyed. See how fast you can destroy a post-it-note deck.
• Haiku Poem Challenge - Write one Haiku Poem every day in TL with STRICT Haiku Poem rules
• Ted Talk Challenge - Watch X Ted Talks in 30 days in your TL (Easier if you're doing a FIGS)
• 101 Essays - Write 101 essays in your TL which are all at least 500 words
• Joke month challenge - find 10 jokes per day in TL.
• Language Exchange Challenge - 1-2 language exchanges every day for X days.
• Rap-per-day Challenge - Write a rap song in TL every day, bonus if you record it!
• 1001 Books to Read Before You Die challenge - Read all these books.

Right, that should be enough for you to get on with, so stop moaning we don't have challenges here!

[Cavesa]

I was thinking of a couple of new ones:

• Read a book backwards challenge - I was always told to read my work backwards because you'd catch more errors. It forces you to look at the words and phrases more intensively. Anyone fancy the "Read a book backwards challenge"?
• Pass the Chicken Challenge - Start a thread in a TL with one paragraph of a story, next poster must continue story. Any mistakes and the person who made the mistake must start a new story using the corrected mistake.
• Idiom Challenge - A single thread where we look for the most obscure idiom in a language, one with the most likes wins. Any language, weekly winner, no repeats.
• Librivox challenge - Record an entire audio book in your TL and submit it for approval.
• Post-it-note challenge - Put one word vocabulary on a deck of post-it-notes (e.g. paper flashcards) After you review in the corner of the card mark X (didn't know) or O (knew) when you get 3 O's the card can be destroyed. See how fast you can destroy a post-it-note deck.
• Haiku Poem Challenge - Write one Haiku Poem every day in TL with STRICT Haiku Poem rules
• Ted Talk Challenge - Watch X Ted Talks in 30 days in your TL (Easier if you're doing a FIGS)
• 101 Essays - Write 101 essays in your TL which are all at least 500 words
• Joke month challenge - find 10 jokes per day in TL.
• Language Exchange Challenge - 1-2 language exchanges every day for X days.
• Rap-per-day Challenge - Write a rap song in TL every day, bonus if you record it!
• 1001 Books to Read Before You Die challenge - Read all these books.

Right, that should be enough for you to get on with, so stop moaning we don't have challenges here!

-I am not reading a book backwords. Right now, I am studying surgery and it feels exactly like that. As if I was reading the book backwords. And the pages were ordered wrong. And it was completely in Coptic.

-Pass the Chicken sounds awesome! I'd love that!

-Librivox: this sounds great but I would be worried about teaching other people mistakes. Using Librivox both as a source of listening practice AND as an outlet of our speaking practice might create a not that awesome circle.

-The Post-it-note challenge sounds great! But I'll buy tiny post-its, to not feel like wasting too much paper. I'm in!

-101 essays sound good. I would like that as a group challenge, with everyone publicly making a fool of ourselves together and on the same subjects.

-I'e never really liked vast majority of the "to read" lists. But I liked those by prof.Arguelles. There were at least three that I know of. The western canon, the western canon long version, and the 20th century. Perhaps a challenge of reading a certain number of those in a certain number of languages could be great. But I don't think many of us would be able to read the whole long list even in translation Or even one half of it.

[iguanamon]

Towards the end, TAC wasn't a challenge. It was all about who would join the team, choosing a cool team name and talking about how it was going to go. TAC took over the forum in December and January and was pretty much over by mid-February with nothing much ever happening language-learning-wise. What it did do was create a buzz and excitement for a little while to be followed by its inevitable (unofficial) premature end, and ultimately by "Is anyone still around?" type questions. Very few teams ever made it to the end of the year and there was very little to show for the time invested, except camaraderie (valuable in itself), of course... at least from my observation. The study groups have also followed a similar pattern since their creation, but at least they get revived from time to time.

Since we are primarily about self-learning languages, which is a very individual process, these types of challenges tend not to mesh so well with group activities. Getting "rugged individuals" to cooperate, across multiple time zones, multiple language levels and abilities, multiple learning styles, multiple language-learning experience levels and multiple desired outcomes is especially difficult.

Some of the challenges rdearman linked to were also highly individual. I liked sarahgirl23's Crazy 30 day challenge to learn Greek at the time which showed that an experienced learner could learn a lot by really concentrating on learning a language in a short amount of time. s_allard is doing something somewhat similar with his own German B2 Challenge right now after years of people criticizing his core language-learning method. I'm looking forward to seeing the result.

I had thought of a group challenge that might be interesting- The Free and Legal Challenge: Learn a language to at least A2 or B1 (self-evaluated or online test) using only "free and legal" materials available online. So, no downloaded Assimil/TY/Hugo in 3 Months/Colloquial (unless just the audio portion of Colloquial- free and legal), etc. I believe it is indeed doable for big and small languages. There are enough legally downloadable non-copyright courses available, audio with transcripts/subtitles (an exception is made for downloaded srt files- they're in a gray area). The majority of my Haitian Creole learning was free and legal, for example. It is possible to learn the FIGS languages, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Esperanto, Interlingua, Catalan and Japanese, plus some languages that might not be so obvious with free and legal materials- and not just with an English base.

I've thought about how the challenge would go, with a time limit and specific rules, even a section for monolinguals who have yet to learn any second language. It could be interesting to see whether limiting one's self only to what's free and legally available online would spur participants to seek non-typical resources- think outside the box, hinder learners or simply show no difference in learning as opposed to buying a course and/or paying a tutor/buying books/dvd's/dictionaries/grammars. If anyone is interested I'd be happy to set it up.

Edit: So, given the nature of self-learning and differences in learners, I think challenges that focus on learners being able to do their own thing as much as possible work best.

[smallwhite]

I expect challenges to be productive (known to be beneficial eg. 6WC makes you find time) and only experiments to be limiting (TV-only, XXX-only, must YYY). I don't think we should challenge people to do things that are not necessarily beneficial or that are known to be second best.

[Ani]

I'm game for the haiku challenge! I'm going to go start writing mine