Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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Solfrid Cristin
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby Solfrid Cristin » Sun May 01, 2016 10:33 am

One page down, means only 4999 to go :-)

I spent all morning reading the same five pages in Russian four times, to get to 20 pages. It will get better over time. :D
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geoffw
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby geoffw » Sun May 01, 2016 3:01 pm

For anyone who is new to this or hasn't truly experienced the length and breadth of a Super Challenge, a personal reflection from the first one, which started in May 2012, IIRC:

I had been obsessed with language learning for decades, but still, amazingly, never managed to teach myself a language to a useable level where I could converse, nor read books, nor watch tv. I wanted to learn French. I was curious about Dutch at the moment, too, for no obvious reason. I signed up to do a half challenge in French (which meant 5000 pages, back then), and declared that I would "unofficially" do a half of Dutch, too. The "unofficial" label was soon forgotten, and I completed my half challenge in Dutch. I got through maybe 3k-some pages of French. I did some studying with Assimil for French (and years later, Duolingo), but reading, watching, and listening were always my primary methods.

Within the past week I have, inter alia, gone to a French conversation group and participated with little difficulty, and watched a Dutch tv show without really needing to think about the fact that it was in a foreign language. In all this time I have never traveled to either a French- nor a Dutch-speaking area (sadly). It works. Certainly for closely-related languages--but I suspect that others out there may have success stories from more distant language pairs? Anyone?
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zhuzilu
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby zhuzilu » Sun May 01, 2016 4:36 pm

geoffw wrote:It works. Certainly for closely-related languages--but I suspect that others out there may have success stories from more distant language pairs? Anyone?


I really enjoyed reading about your experience! It does work definitely! In my case at the moment, only in English (and French to some extent), except with engrenages the TV series I struggled a little bit with it. I also signed up with Chinese last year, but failed miserably (although I was living in Taiwan for 6 months, just recently came back to Spain) which high up my level indeed. So I hope at the end of this challenge I can experience as well the same improvement in my Chinese skills.

Good luck to anyone on your challenges!! :D :D :D
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Lorren
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby Lorren » Sun May 01, 2016 8:52 pm

Solfrid Cristin wrote:One page down, means only 4999 to go :-)

I spent all morning reading the same five pages in Russian four times, to get to 20 pages. It will get better over time. :D


I started reading a book in German about a month and a half ago. When I started reading this book, I was reading a paragraph a day. Now I'm up to reading a Kindle page a day (a page a day is what I am planning for both Russian and German for the first two months of the Super Challenge).

Today I went back to the very beginning of the book and read all 10 pages that I've finished so far. Since I've been practicing the vocabulary with Anki, I was able to understand it pretty well.

Your idea is pretty good though. If I get behind schedule then I can just read pages that I've already read.
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Serpent
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby Serpent » Mon May 02, 2016 7:30 am

I couldn't resist counting a 6 min video of how to use a dental irrigator :lol: It won't make a difference in the long run.
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Allison
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby Allison » Mon May 02, 2016 2:20 pm

What time zone is the bot in?
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby rdearman » Mon May 02, 2016 3:07 pm

Allison wrote:What time zone is the bot in?

Tells you the local time of the server at the bottom of the main page. East Coast time (same as my hosting provider)
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BAnna
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby BAnna » Wed May 04, 2016 2:38 am

I confess to being a rather ignorant user of Twitter. In this SC, upon tweeting I'm getting up to 15 "likes" by various odd entities such as a soccer school, clothing companies, etc. That did not happen the last time and I would like to turn it off if I can. Perhaps someone can point me to the settings on Twitter to block these? Many thanks in advance.
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zhuzilu
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2618
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby zhuzilu » Wed May 04, 2016 11:08 am

BAnna wrote:I confess to being a rather ignorant user of Twitter. In this SC, upon tweeting I'm getting up to 15 "likes" by various odd entities such as a soccer school, clothing companies, etc. That did not happen the last time and I would like to turn it off if I can. Perhaps someone can point me to the settings on Twitter to block these? Many thanks in advance.


It may happen because of the content that you post about. For example, last challenge I was doing some Harry Potter on French and I have got a lot of pottermore/harry potter/hogwarts and various account liking my tweet. I think they just like all tweets that include some keywords to win more followers/visibility.

If you go to https://twitter.com/settings/security you can protect your tweets, so that only the people that follow you (or that you allow to follow) could see your tweets.

Hope it works!
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Aozora
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Re: Super Challenge 2016-17 DISCUSSION THREAD

Postby Aozora » Wed May 04, 2016 2:38 pm

I'm getting this weird thing where when I tweet my book pages, the bot just tells me I'm not registered for Tibetan :/ I can't find anything wrong with the tweets ("I read 25 pages of "miyama" #book" and "read 25 pages #book") but only barebones tweets like "#read 25 pages" work. Is there something about the hashtag #book?
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