Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

[CarlyD]

A couple of questions:

For movies, I intend to record off of tv. If I record a 30-minute show, I'm assuming it would count for 1/3 of a film. But if I replay and replay parts for comprehension, and end up spending 90 minutes watching and rewatching a 30 minute show--is it still 30 minutes or is it 90 minutes?

I ask because of the initial comment that "you can read the same book 20 times"--so rewatching, assuming that you're gaining more from each viewing, seems like it would count.

On the same note, if I read 10 pages of a book today, and reread those same 10 pages next week, I count them again, right? I'm thinking that books I can understand right now will be once-and-done, but if I'm struggling with a higher level and just barely/maybe/kinda understand it, there's gain in rereading it more than once. So each time counts?

[rdearman]

A couple of questions:

For movies, I intend to record off of tv. If I record a 30-minute show, I'm assuming it would count for 1/3 of a film. But if I replay and replay parts for comprehension, and end up spending 90 minutes watching and rewatching a 30 minute show--is it still 30 minutes or is it 90 minutes?

I ask because of the initial comment that "you can read the same book 20 times"--so rewatching, assuming that you're gaining more from each viewing, seems like it would count.

On the same note, if I read 10 pages of a book today, and reread those same 10 pages next week, I count them again, right? I'm thinking that books I can understand right now will be once-and-done, but if I'm struggling with a higher level and just barely/maybe/kinda understand it, there's gain in rereading it more than once. So each time counts?

Yes, repeating counts.

[Serpent]

It definitely does, but I'm not sure everyone is comfortable with counting repeated rewinding like that. (I'm fine with it but I'd count the rewinding as half the length at most, e.g. 45 min here) By this logic you could read each sentence in a book 10 times and then count reading the whole book 10 times
I hope we can get an answer from Cristina

[sfuqua]

I hope we can repeat a lot, if people who are new to their language need to, but I don't think I'll go through with my plan to do a Mandarin challenge the next super challenge by learning one character and reading it 1250000 times and listening to it 2500000.
I'm not going to do an output challenge with my one character either.

[CarlyD]

I hope we can repeat a lot, if people who are new to their language need to, but I don't think I'll go through with my plan to do a Mandarin challenge the next super challenge by learning one character and reading it 1250000 times and listening to it 2500000.
I'm not going to do an output challenge with my one character either.

Hey, if your goal in life is to only learn one character, you'll be good.

My goal is to understand all of the words, not just some of them. So if I need to repeat something to meet that goal, so be it.

[Arnaud]

deleted

[sfuqua]

I continue to be pleasantly surprised at how fast my Tagalog is tuning up. I know I have used some of the vocabulary that I learned from reading. Since I'm grinding the rust out of a language that had fossilized into domestic talk and TV, I'm getting the illusion of very rapid language learning.
My Spanish hasn't done anything that interesting, which is not surprising since I spent the last 10 months doing extensive reading and listening. I listened to RNE last night while falling asleep. It was the best comprehension I've ever had with Spanish. I could understand every word. It was as easy as Tagalog or Samoan.

I know it's very early, but my Tagalog results are encouraging.

[NoManches]

Question:

Is anybody else logging in minutes rather than number of movies watched?

I don't want to deviate too far away from what the Super Challenge is (movies and books in your TL), but at the same time I don't like the idea of checking off numbers of movies after I've watched them. I've been watching a lot of TV shows lately and to be conservative and to keep myself honest, I have been rounding the tv show minutes down and have been keeping a running tally of the minutes watched.

So for example, if I watch a 45 minute show I only count it as 40 minutes (because of commercials and whatnot). Since the Super Challenge comes down to 9,000 minutes of TV/Movies, can't I just log in the minutes as I go?? I ask because I could seriously use the input from youtube videos where people use colloquial language and speak very fast. Why couldn't I log in minutes from videos and count it towards the Super Challenge? Anybody else doing this?

If I intensively watch a 10 minute youtube video, can't that count towards my 9,000 minutes?

[lingua]

I count only the minutes of movies/shows I watch. I do not count podcasts or videos. For reading I only count book pages. To me the rest of it is just study.

[Brun Ugle]

I always count by minutes and pages. You can look at Cristina's post to see what counts, but most videos would count if they aren't too short and are in the target language. I watch mostly TV shows on dvd or YouTube, so I just look at how long the video is and use that number as there aren't any commercials to worry about. For books, I basically look at the page it ended on and the page it started on and subtract to find the number of pages. If the writing seems a little thin because of lots of dialogue or something, I would count the words on a few pages to find an average and then use that to calculate the number of pages. I've also used that method to count the number of pages for an e-book.