Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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rdearman
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby rdearman » Sun May 03, 2020 9:20 pm

Does that also include language families? Many of the issues were related to having not just language but language families.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby Cenwalh » Sun May 03, 2020 9:47 pm

rdearman wrote:Does that also include language families? Many of the issues were related to having not just language but language families.


Turns out I had a slight misunderstanding. 3 contains all the languages (and more) that 2 does, but the families are kept in 5 (which also has more than 2). So you could just shove all of 3 and 5 in the same table, tell people to use those codes, and basically never worry about it again. The codes are pretty easy to find because they're listed on the Wikipedia page for pretty much every language or family.

ISO 639-5 can be downloaded here http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-5.tsv
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby jeffers » Sun May 03, 2020 10:54 pm

Cavesa wrote:Btw, are we interested in extending the SC beyond our forum or not? Might be a nice opportunity to get some new blood that might fit into the community :-) Just to know whether I should talk about this to outsiders, perhaps post on reddit, or not


I think it's a great idea. I've mentioned it to a few people in the past, one or two of whom expressed some interest, but none of which ended up joining.


CarlyD wrote:I've read all the posts about what is allowed for listening, and what isn't. And I've decided--I will listen to anything I can find, no matter the form.

If it fits the rules for this challenge, I'll add it here. If it doesn't, then I can add it to my 6 Week Challenge count, and the 366-Day Challenge count. But I don't want to see something in German and say--I won't bother, because it won't count.


Absolutely the right attitude, imo. The challenge is a big thing, but if it becomes the only language study you do it could be a bit unbalanced.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby IronMike » Sun May 03, 2020 11:22 pm

Cenwalh wrote:
rdearman wrote:Does that also include language families? Many of the issues were related to having not just language but language families.


Turns out I had a slight misunderstanding. 3 contains all the languages (and more) that 2 does, but the families are kept in 5 (which also has more than 2). So you could just shove all of 3 and 5 in the same table, tell people to use those codes, and basically never worry about it again. The codes are pretty easy to find because they're listed on the Wikipedia page for pretty much every language or family.

ISO 639-5 can be downloaded here http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-5.tsv

This would be great, especially if it would apply to all challenges, not just SC (e.g. 6WC too!).
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby jonm » Mon May 04, 2020 7:39 am

jeffers wrote:Looking at the raw numbers, it looks like a daunting challenge: 100 books = 5000 pages. 100 Films = 150 hours or 4500 minutes. But if you break it down into daily tasks it's not quite so bad as that:
A full challenge consists of reading 8.2 pages per day and watching 7.3 minutes per day.

Should this be 9000 minutes for the film half of a full challenge? So watching 14.75 minutes per day?

jeffers wrote:The film half has always been the easy half, basically watch a decent length film every week and you have it. Or an episode of a series every 2nd day. Or listen to an audiobook/podcast on a daily walk. No problem. Lockdown will make this portion more difficult because I used to listen to audiobooks on my commute, which isn't happening right now, and everyone is trapped in the house together, so various family members are fighting over the TV with the DVD. I think I'm going to have to get more used to watching on my laptop.

The hard half is the book half. This is where acting like I was in the 366-day challenge will be useful: try to read something every day and try to hit those minimum reading targets every day. Undoubtedly this means I will exceed the daily targets, at least by a little bit, which will create some flexibility for later on. The flexibility allows mini-breaks, but I know from past experience that a mini-break can be a risky thing, and often turns into longer than I planned.

I found this helpful, as it matches my impression based on the first few days (of my first challenge). I feel like I could tear through the films right away if I wanted to, or wait and tear through them close to the end. Whereas I don't think I could possibly "cram" the reading, so I'm gonna try to make a habit of doing a little reading every day.

And thanks for the caution about the mini-breaks. :) I was thinking I'd get a bit ahead and bank some pages and minutes for whenever I can't attend to the challenge. Good to keep in mind that it might be hard to get back into the swing of it.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby Lianne » Mon May 04, 2020 9:08 pm

jonm wrote:I found this helpful, as it matches my impression based on the first few days (of my first challenge). I feel like I could tear through the films right away if I wanted to, or wait and tear through them close to the end. Whereas I don't think I could possibly "cram" the reading, so I'm gonna try to make a habit of doing a little reading every day.

And thanks for the caution about the mini-breaks. :) I was thinking I'd get a bit ahead and bank some pages and minutes for whenever I can't attend to the challenge. Good to keep in mind that it might be hard to get back into the swing of it.


Speaking from experience, my advice is do not leave the films to cram near the end. You might not be able to cram as much as you think you can. :lol: It is the easier half for sure, but it still takes a fair bit of time.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby jeffers » Mon May 04, 2020 9:13 pm

jonm wrote:
jeffers wrote:Looking at the raw numbers, it looks like a daunting challenge: 100 books = 5000 pages. 100 Films = 150 hours or 4500 minutes. But if you break it down into daily tasks it's not quite so bad as that:
A full challenge consists of reading 8.2 pages per day and watching 7.3 minutes per day.

Should this be 9000 minutes for the film half of a full challenge? So watching 14.75 minutes per day?


Whoops! You are correct. I put the wrong multiplier on my spreadsheet! I'll edit my original post.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby rdearman » Tue May 05, 2020 8:56 am

rdearman wrote:
davidchoward wrote:
rdearman wrote:There is a list of issues on the github site, so feel free to knock yourself out. :) Probably the most pressing is the bug which doesn't allow 2 & 3 character ISO codes at the same time. For example, you couldn't use AA & AAX. It isn't parsing the 3rd character before it jumps off to the next function.


Hi, thanks! Yes, I think I would like to try on the ISO code issue now.

When I try to access the site at https://super-challenge.language-learners.org/ it looks like there is some database connection error. Is there something in the code that needs to be changed for this years site, or is there just some migration that needs to take place?

Just creation of this years db. Hopefully it will be done soon. For testing purposes you will needvyour own bot account and a MySQL db. Unless you convert it to used other dbs as well.


We're almost ready to get the bot back up and running. After the issues with the DB (the forum & the SC use the same DB server) I have managed to get the db ready for this year. Just need to get the connectino strings fixed. So this should be working soon. I am still using the old ISO codes at the moment, but this could be changed later.

@davidchoward - If you're really interested in fixing something, issue #4 on the issues list is the biggest headache for me. Basically, the bot searches for new tweets every 5 minutes, using a background daemon for the checks. Everything is fine unless this daemon fails! Then if it isn't fixed within 5 minutes there is no way to gather the tweets between the time the daemon died and 5 minutes before you restart it. It would be nice to have a separate program which could be run manually to vacuum up all the tweets that have happened since the last update. Or modify the existing daemon to check on startup if there have been new tweets.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby davidchoward » Tue May 05, 2020 1:54 pm

rdearman wrote:@davidchoward - If you're really interested in fixing something, issue #4 on the issues list is the biggest headache for me. Basically, the bot searches for new tweets every 5 minutes, using a background daemon for the checks. Everything is fine unless this daemon fails! Then if it isn't fixed within 5 minutes there is no way to gather the tweets between the time the daemon died and 5 minutes before you restart it. It would be nice to have a separate program which could be run manually to vacuum up all the tweets that have happened since the last update. Or modify the existing daemon to check on startup if there have been new tweets.


Thanks, I will take a look.
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Re: Super Challenge: questions and discussion

Postby Serpent » Tue May 05, 2020 9:46 pm

Wouldn't it be easier to make sure the bot actually responds to tweets, and then to resend the tweet if there's no response in 5 minutes?

Also there's a separate thread in the technical subforum :)
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