Monthly News Challenge

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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aokoye
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:07 am

Ogrim wrote:Written news articles can vary greatly in length, from short notices to a several (A4) pages. How do we calculate the number of news items on this basis?

If the goal is 60 news items in a month, can that be 60 in different languages? Can I add articles I read in Russian, podcasts in Catalan and TV news in Romansh or German to get to 60 items or must I stick to just one language at the time? How do I count watching an evening news programme (like the "journal 20 heures" on French TV) which lasts 45 minutes or an hour?


This issue is why I was waffling between whether or not to have the goal be 60 or 90 news stories. Some stories are very long (articles in newspapers primarily) and some can be very very short, like news segments. I think I'm tentatively going to say that any thing between 2 and 3 (A4) pages can be broken up into multiple "stories" for the purpose of this challenge and that 15 minutes of news equals 1 story (round up when it doubt).

That said I am really of the mind that we should all use our best judgment and that it's going to be very individual. If something feels like it should be two stories instead of just one go with your gut - I'm not here to police you. If something feels really easy despite it being really long then perhaps you might want to think about calling it 1 story instead of two or more.

Oh also the question of 60 news items and if those can be in 60 different languages. Yes they can. The sixty stories can come from any language that isn't your first language(s).
Last edited by aokoye on Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:12 am

emk wrote:
Ogrim wrote:Written news articles can vary greatly in length, from short notices to a several (A4) pages. How do we calculate the number of news items on this basis?

For the original Super Challenge, we had the same issue with "pages", which which are much longer in adult books than children's books. But this mostly worked out OK, because the people around A2 tended to read books with really short pages, and the people closer to C1 mostly read adult books with much longer pages. I don't know whether that would help here, but at least personally, I intended to read shorter articles in Spanish and longer articles in French.

I just decided to invest US$13.90 to get the full transcripts for News in Slow Spanish, Latino version. It looks like I get four articles a week. So here's what I've read / listened to over the last two days, just to see if I've got the general idea:

  1. ES: Cuatro países latinoamericanos van a las urnas. A nice overview of recent elections, and I'm surprised that I can already enjoy this news at my current level. Apparently I get four new articles each week? Seems reasonable, given my level.
  2. FR: A 13-minute segment of the Les Années lumière podcast about the recently-awarded Nobel prize for DNA repair. The Quebec accents weren't too challenging for this segment, but the one right before was pretty rough.
  3. FR: Suivre une classe prépa, c’est comme « rattraper un TGV » (one of my 15 free Le Monde articles this month). This is about the French preparatory schools which students attend to get ready for the grandes écoles, the most prestigious universities in France. I re-learned the word bachotage "cramming", and I remembered how annoying I find the flowery sentence fragments in Le Monde. But the article itself offered a great glimpse into how the "elite" part of the French system works:
    C’est d’une métaphore ferroviaire que Thomas B, 21 ans, use pour décrire les rails que doivent emprunter les étudiants qui s’engagent en classe prépa : « En début de première année, nous courrons après un train à vapeur, en fin de sup, il faut suivre un TER et pour les concours, nous devons rattraper un TGV. »
    I also learned that a TER is a train express régional. Lots of great little cultural details here.
  4. FR: Predicsis, la startup bretonne qui a séduit Amazon Web Services lors du salon ReInvent. Maddyness is specialist news site that reports on French technology startups. This was a short interview with the founder of Predicsis, which is trying to use modern AI technologies to analyze customer behavior (retention, upsell, fraud). France actually has a ridiculous number of seed-stage software startups, but there's historically been trouble getting Series A funding. And Predicsis, like most French tech startups, is obsessed with entering the US market as soon as possible. I really need to keep track of which of these companies get funded, and see if anybody needs an occasional US software consultant who speaks French. :-)
aokoye, are these the sorts of articles and news sources you were thinking about?


Those all look great and are the type of thing I was thinking of when I was thinking about news sources (including the startup magazine). Great start! I also like how you summarized the articles. That isn't a requirement (I know I won't be doing that with all of the news I consume for this challenge) but I do think it's a good idea in terms of growing one's own proficiency.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Tue Nov 03, 2015 7:38 am

This evening I watched today's Tagesschau which was 15 minutes. They talked about various topics including asylum, Lufthansa, and the plane crash in Egypt.

After that I read a story in Die Welt about the fact that on a 3rd grade math test somewhere in the US the answer to "what is 5 x 3" the correct answer isn't 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3, but rather 5 + 5 + 5 (according to the test you had to use the "repeated addition strategy"). The author spoke to a member of Deutsche Mathematikervereinigung (German Mathematics society) about what would happen had this been asked on a test in Germany and then about about Common Core. I kept thinking to myself, "wow...talk about Common Core has reached Germany..."

After that I kicked myself again for getting almost none of my news from domestic (let alone local) sources because I read a story, also from Die Welt, about a five year old in Oregon who has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and how she has decided that she, essentially wants to go on hospice care at home as opposed to go back to the hospital - her parents support her in this. The question of course is whether or not a five year old can even come close to grasp what that means (the story didn't use the word "hospice" but that's essentially what they meant). It was very sad but also interesting. At the moment (well as of the writing of the article) the girl is doing as well as can be expected and hasn't been admitted to the hospital for some time.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby Ogrim » Tue Nov 03, 2015 7:58 am

Thanks for the clarifications. I'll join the challenge and will post my summary of news I've read hopefully later today.

I have decided not to count news in my stronger languages, so I exclude English, French and Spanish - if I counted those it would not be much of a challenge for me as I consume a lot of news in all three languages every day. So mostly news in Russian, but I may add one or two news items in other languages if I think they are worth sharing.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby gsbod » Tue Nov 03, 2015 9:33 am

Two questions:

Has the challenge started?

How do you count news segments when it comes to watching something like Tagesschau? Would you count one per topic, or one for the whole show?
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aokoye
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Tue Nov 03, 2015 3:32 pm

gsbod wrote:Two questions:

Has the challenge started?

How do you count news segments when it comes to watching something like Tagesschau? Would you count one per topic, or one for the whole show?


The challenge has started and for something like Tagesschau you'll want to count every 15 minutes. I'll try put an FAQ in the first post later today.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby tomgosse » Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:54 pm

I listened to a ten minute broadcast on RFI's Journal en français facile. The main story was about the Russian airline crash in Egypt and its effect on tourism.
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aokoye
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Sat Nov 07, 2015 3:21 am

Just an FYI, I finally added an FAQ to the bottom first post. I think I covered most of the questions that were posed but if I didn't feel free to let me know :)
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