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Challenge XXXVIII - August 2020

Starts: Saturday, 1st August 2020 00h00m01s your time
Ends: Fruday, 11th September 2020 23h59m59s your time

The bot is currently accepting registrations and you can register at any time before the final day of the challenge.

Since I don't usually start these threads, I have no idea what else needs to said here. For people needing basic info on the challenge, please see the thread for the May 6WC and earlier 6WC threads in this forum.

The 6 Week Challenge scores are posted here.

For info on how to register with the Twitter bot, go here.

If smallwhite or anyone else with more experience with the challenge wishes to add more info or simply hijack this thread, feel free to do so. I won't mind.

I originally registered for Tagalog, but due to an unfortunate development with one of the main resources I was planning to use (Clozemaster), I will be changing it to Russian. I'm currently A2-ish in Russian.

I'll mainly be using Colloquial Russian 1 and 2 as well as TY Russian Grammar, various You Tube channels and podcasts and some native media. I also need to spend some time improving my typing and cursive because I haven't really practiced either since the last 6WC.

You’d want to write everything I wrote in my last 6WC OP, ‘cos if you don’t, someone will surely post and ask. Especially the ending time which is the #1 FAQ. And if you don’t carry forward (and add to) the non-typical language codes, that information would be lost. My OPs were basically a FAQ, added to each time new useful information came up. And a link to the previous 6WC lets you read backwards in time every single 6WC in history, for fun or for information.

PS for those who are interested, I cured my linguaholic symptoms by acquiring workaholic symptoms at my new (temp) piece rate job. I can’t decide which set of symptoms are better.

I'm in again for German. I'm currently high A1, mostly due to lack of motivation. Hopefully I'll speed up a bit for this challenge.

Yes please!!!! German. Finally, I have no exams to prepare for, I even have some free time, and I really need to improve my German. 6WC is just what I need!

smallwhite wrote:You’d want to write everything I wrote in my last 6WC OP, ‘cos if you don’t, someone will surely post and ask. Especially the ending time which is the #1 FAQ. And if you don’t carry forward (and add to) the non-typical language codes, that information would be lost. My OPs were basically a FAQ, added to each time new useful information came up. And a link to the previous 6WC lets you read backwards in time every single 6WC in history, for fun or for information.

I only started this thread as a courtesy to other people interested in doing the challenge since the bot was taking registrations. I have zero interest or willingness in taking over any responsibility for maintaining this challenge. Someone else needs to deal with all of that. If an admin wishes to delete this thread and start another one, fine, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm just a participant and none of this minutia is my concern.

For once I have a beginner language (Spanish) and some time off work coming up where I've got barely anything interesting to do. Perfect time for a 6WC then.

My lofty goal is to try and "finish" A1. I'm about half way there at the moment.

I'm doing Russian, with full focus on reading and vocabulary

I live in Japan right now. For this 6WC I started to count my social life in Japanese. For Japanese, I studied a lot - but my social life died during Corona, so I'm trying to revive it and talk Japanese wherever I can, the data would also be interesting compared to my normal learning.

Japanese is not my target language for the 6WC (Korean is), but it still ticks up the total hours by a large margin - I have not counted my Japanese social life in previous 6WCs.
Will this ruin the competition? I noticed that other more experienced learners also put in like stuff they do on the side in other languages, like TV or Internet reading. But I'm not sure of how I should handle this, don't want to take the fun out of the competition.

I can only comment as a fellow participant, but I'd suggest you need to make your own judgement, taking account of the rules, especially the following:

You can do any activity - studying textbooks, doing Anki, Listening-Reading, even watching movies in your target language. However, please consider whether you are focussing on the language. If you're doing something where the language is not your one and only focus (e. g. ironing while playing a podcast in the background, or watching a TV show where you mostly focus on the native-language subtitles and don't intently listen to the target-language audio), please only award yourself a fraction of the minutes, corresponding to the percentage of your attention that you gave to the target language. For 60 minutes of studying to count as 60 minutes in this scoring, you have to be 100% focussed on learning your target language.

I know myself, when I'm in a social environment using my target language, I have varying levels of engagement depending on the situation and my mood. My gut feeling is that if you are fully engaged and developing your language skills throughout, it counts. If you're not that engaged and/or overly relying on familiar patterns of usage and therefore not developing your skills, maybe it doesn't count.

As for me, I'm not counting any time spent on languages apart from my target 6WC language. I simply don't want the trouble of having to time myself every time I open a German book. Not to mention the moral quandary of how much of a podcast "counts" if I've fallen asleep in the middle of it...