Super Challenge: questions and discussion

[Serpent]

Register here
Super Challenge Bot

This thread is for discussing the rules, recommending materials, asking questions (including those about the bot) and basically everything that doesn't fit the registration thread. If we decide to do optional short-term subchallenges, they should also be posted here.

Tags:
#read #reading #watched #watching #listened #listening #film #audio
The tags #movie and #book no longer work after #Moldovan and Tibetan were added.

A quick recap of the rules:
- The default goal is to read 100 "books" and watch 100 "films" in 20 months. A "book" is 50 pages and a "film" is 90 minutes. You can also do a half or double challenge.
- If you just have 5 books and 5 films, then you read/watch them 20 times. Though my guess is that by the time you have read/seen them 5 times, you WILL get other films or books.
- A film counts even if you see it with subtitles in your native language or vice versa (in your own language but with TL subtitles). If both subtitles and audio is in a non-native language you have to choose which language you want to count. The same goes for the LR method (Listening-Reading).
- If it lasts approximately 45 minutes (a show/series) it counts as half a film. If it lasts more than three hours it counts as two films. The bot counts 90 minutes for a film.
- You can do fiction or any other material – a documentary on whales, or a book about gardening works just as well as a novel.
- With parallel texts, remember not to count your native language. Usually this means counting 50% of the total text, or a bit less if there are explanations in your L1. If the text is in two non-native languages, you can count it as a half for each.
- A manga counts as 5 manga pages = 1 book page.
- Poetry/librettos count as 1/3 of a page
- For a children's book with large letters, pictures and few words on every page you count 5 pages as one page. When in doubt, use your best judgement.
- You can be at any level when the challenge starts.
- The material covered for this challenge can be counted and done in parallel with any other challenge.
- Podcasts and YouTube videos must have a minimum length of 10 minutes to count.

[Serpent]

Graphic by jeffers. Green represents the original idea, yellow and orange are also allowed (but some participants choose not to count these), red doesn't count.

Infographic- Films for Super Challenge(v0.5) (1).png

[Mista]

For those who would like a little push to get started, you are welcome to join the forum book club, where the books for May have now been selected (which can be read in any language). They are:

- The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup
- The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren
- The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- Southern Mail by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

the book club can be found here:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 17#p165617

Join us there to talk about the book(s), or to suggest books you want to read in June (or later, if you are reading this at a later date).

[Bex]

OK I'm gonna ask because this bugged me last time and I didn't ask then.

Why is TV news OK and audio news not allowed?

The rest I can understand. But what's the difference... they both seem like perfectly good native audio resources to me?

[rdearman]

Why is TV news OK and audio news not allowed?

Quoting Serpent from 2016:

Video news count but the length requirement still applies.

So everything needs to be at least 10 minutes long, and video news counts, but not audio. I can't remember the reason audio only didn't count. But really the spirit of the challenge is Films and Books. All the other stuff was allowed by exception. Too many exceptions in my humble opinion and Christine should have been more strict, but she is very very nice. Sort of like the good-fairy, while I'm more wicked-witch.

[Bex]

I understand that a line needs to be drawn somewhere but surely it should be drawn at Native materials and minimum duration.

I don't understand how 'learner's audio' is allowed but not 'radio'. Surely radio is more in the spirit of the original SC than learners audio?

If the answer to my question is "that's just how it is and the spirit of the challenge is Films and Books. All the other stuff was allowed by exception" then my next question is: Are we stuck with the original SC rules or can these be discussed and updated?

[rdearman]

I'm not the keeper of the rules. That is Christine & Serpent. You'll have to direct questions about the rules to them. They have been updates just about every year we've done it.

[rpg]

Thought I'd share-- since I've been using LingQ recently, which makes tracking page counts pretty annoying, I calculated the average word and page counts of 9 Spanish and French ebooks I've got in Calibre, and came up with an average of 275 words per page, so that's the figure I plan on using for the challenge.

[jeffers]

OK I'm gonna ask because this bugged me last time and I didn't ask then.

Why is TV news OK and audio news not allowed?

The rest I can understand. But what's the difference... they both seem like perfectly good native audio resources to me?

As rdearman said, Cristina's original concept was 100 books and 100 films, but then immediately loads of people began to ask "can x count as y"? So she made some exceptions and not others. Some exceptions were "too far off" the original concept. As the same questions kept being asked, I made the infographic, and sent it to Cristina who said it matched her concept.

Here's the way to read it: the left side is the original concept. Yellow are the things closest to the concept, with the upper branch beginning with other versions of video stories, the lower branch beginning with stories, but no videos.

Podcasts are a further step away because they have no video component and are much less like a story. The other orange ones are all visual but either live (e.g. plays) or non-story (e.g. news).

The problem with exceptions to the "Film" challenge is that it began to get broader and broader, e.g. "I was on a guided tour of a museum for 2 hours" (which some agreed with but Cristina said was a step too far) to what I think was ridiculous: "I was in Paris for 10 hours listening in on conversations around me" (I don't think anyone actually took that one seriously).

The book half is a lot simpler of course: you can read any text, and generally speaking a page is a page. Exceptions are made for comics, poetry, etc, which have fewer words per page, and books with tons of words per page. For those, an average word count is a good guide.

[Bex]

Ok I understand the 'why' of it all and thanks for the explanations but does it have to be like that?

Would it not be easier if it was just left to peoples discretion or are people really that competitive?

I would prefer a really simple rule such as: Any native content with a minimum duration of 10 minutes.

The reason I'm asking is I actually avoided listening to native audio, like the radio, during the last SC because it didn't count. And I think that is not in the spirit of the SC.

Surely it's spirit should be....listen & read to as much native content as possible? I would be pleased if the Super Challenge encouraged anyone (in anyway) to do more with the language that they are learning, I wouldn't care if it bent the rules.

Anyway... I've asked, I understand why and I've laid out my views on it. I'm sure it doesn't bother anyone else as much as it does me and I feel better for asking