A language learners’ forum

Luso wrote:To be honest, I've been tracking this subject since it started, and I don't remember this second period of bot failure. In the beginning of May, we were made aware of a certain number of tweets that were missed by the bot (late April, mainly). I carefully listed mine and retweeted them on May 7th. As far as I can remember, they were acknowleged by the bot back then. Apparently, those and the following ones (until May 27th) weren't. Was this evident to everyone concerned but me?

It wasn't evident to me either unfortunately so now I'm feeling a bit confused I had also resubmitted the tweets which were missed when the bot was down, received replies from the bot, and then carried on sending tweets which continued to get replies and which I therefore assumed were being recorded.

So if I know understand it correctly, we need to resend any tweets which are not showing as recorded on the temporary page rdearman set up, regardless of whether the bot has already replied to acknowledge them once.

Assuming I've got that right, should we resend them straightaway? And should we continue sending current tweets as and when we watch/read things? I'm just wondering whether the more times we tweet things, the more potential layers of confusion we're adding for those trying to repair the bot

Radioclare wrote:

Luso wrote:To be honest, I've been tracking this subject since it started, and I don't remember this second period of bot failure. In the beginning of May, we were made aware of a certain number of tweets that were missed by the bot (late April, mainly). I carefully listed mine and retweeted them on May 7th. As far as I can remember, they were acknowleged by the bot back then. Apparently, those and the following ones (until May 27th) weren't. Was this evident to everyone concerned but me?

It wasn't evident to me either unfortunately so now I'm feeling a bit confused I had also resubmitted the tweets which were missed when the bot was down, received replies from the bot, and then carried on sending tweets which continued to get replies and which I therefore assumed were being recorded.

So if I know understand it correctly, we need to resend any tweets which are not showing as recorded on the temporary page rdearman set up, regardless of whether the bot has already replied to acknowledge them once.

Assuming I've got that right, should we resend them straightaway? And should we continue sending current tweets as and when we watch/read things? I'm just wondering whether the more times we tweet things, the more potential layers of confusion we're adding for those trying to repair the bot

If the bot acknowledged it, then don't resend. If you didn't get an acknowledgement then resend. I put the dates in this thread awhile back. Ignore my reply to Serpent, I misremembered the dates. So there isn't any "second period" when the bot wasn't functioning. BTW there is no way to get the bot to look at tweets older than a few hours, so there isn't any "fixing" of the bot happening.

The only thing which has been done to the bot is to change the database tables to make them compatible with the way the newer version of MySQL stores UTF characters. This doesn't seem to be backwards comparable, so if you're records from before the hacking have funny characters in there, you'll have to live with it.

When I get some more time, I'm planning to make a list of known problems with the bot as it stands at the moment and repair them. I'll probably just start logging all of them in the github area for the bot. Feature requests and bugs. Feel free to add to the list.

https://github.com/language-learners/superchallengebot

I really don't want to mess around with it too much since it is working it just has issues.

This is my first superchallenge and I didn't realise it ended on 31st Dec 2017. I've left myself 193 days to do it!

I started SC Spanish on Weds 21st June 2017 at A1/A2 level and I'm using readlang as it's convenient and counts the words.

I've found lots of A1/A2 videos (which I count as reading as that's what I'm doing with them), and I've also read quite a lot of harder material even up to C1/C2 with some comprehension.

I also currently use Duolingo (110 day streak) but don't count that as part of the SC.

I've previously used Wlingua, memrise and others. I've done some prosody training.

So, I'm going from a low level of Spanish knowledge (max 8 months half-hearted Spanish) with little experience in language learning generally.

Anyway - so far my progress bar on reading is better than the time progress bar - so that's good.

Videos can wait until my skills are better and they ARE improving.

Someone asked earlier about usefulness for people below B1.

I think A1/A2 videos on readlang are a good start.

I've come to the conclusion that workrate is key for me, if it's too hard, I'll skip it (this happened with an Esperanto course which I found hard but memrise / duolingo were easy, mildly addictive and time-consuming in a good way).

Readlang short music videos are good for me having a high workrate, around 300 words (over a page) every 5 minutes, say 3000 words an hour allowing for breaks. Extr@ was also great.

I'm keen now, so these numbers are high, but I've read 12,000 words (48 pages) in an evening and 16,000 (64 pages) on a Saturday. Some of those were from higher level texts. A1/A2 are more comfortable.

So any idea what happened to the tweets that were acknowledged but don't show up on the list?

As for the characters, well we should be able to fix them by editing the items... the problem is that i don't know what they were in the first place (look at my slavic challenge, those in cyrillics are completely unreadable )
is it really a change that cannot be postponed until the next challenge?

Bit late in the day for this question, sorry. But if I read a book for my Super Challenge in French, can I also read it for Russian? So for example, if I read a Harry Potter translation in one language, can I read it for the other? I know you can't count listening to an audiobook if you also read it, so I wondered if this might be the same.

(Sorry if this has already been answered ad infinitum!)

MamaPata wrote:Bit late in the day for this question, sorry. But if I read a book for my Super Challenge in French, can I also read it for Russian? So for example, if I read a Harry Potter translation in one language, can I read it for the other? I know you can't count listening to an audiobook if you also read it, so I wondered if this might be the same.

(Sorry if this has already been answered ad infinitum!)

Yes, you can count it. You can even count it more than once in the same language as long as you read it more than once. You can also count both the audiobook and the regular book if you do them both separately. It's only when you listen and read at the same time that you can't count both.

Brun Ugle wrote:Yes, you can count it. You can even count it more than once in the same language as long as you read it more than once. You can also count both the audiobook and the regular book if you do them both separately. It's only when you listen and read at the same time that you can't count both.

Brilliant, thank you!

You can also count parallel texts

(if you do the Tadoku challenge, you can count repeats but you have to list them accordingly, and the first repeat counts as 50%, the second as 25% etc. But this only applies if you've read this very text before, so you can reread in another language without penalty)

I found myself having a mock conversation (in my mind) with myself in Spanish today.

Forming questions / answers and self correcting endings etc. This is progress!

I didn't have this before I started a SuperChallenge (writing it as one word so easier to find in searches!).

I'm still a beginner, but understand more.

According to readlang "You've completed 160 texts containing a total of 79361 words".

I'm now 10 days in to the SuperChallenge and haven't looked at any films/videos yet.

I just tried tweeting a book I read in German to the bot, but it just answers "You don't seem to be studying Tibetan. Register first using the #register tag!" :/ I tried the tags #German and #de but neither worked... And just like others, I also have a post missing from the list which I sent on May 11th, although the bot confirmed the tweet. Are we really not supposed to retweet them (once the current problem has been fixed)?