April Vocabulary Challenge

[reineke]

The challenge cannot be completely fair however I was going to post that the test setup is especially unfair towards the students of non-inflected remote languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.). It's not even fair if you look at languages like Russian and Hungarian vs Spanish etc.

I'd simply count single dictionary word forms. If you're studying conjugation or declension you could look into a conjugation or grammar challenge.

[tomgosse]

Okay,

Here are my starting numbers from Memrise:

2017-03-31_17-54-33.jpg

[Cavesa]

The challenge cannot be completely fair however I was going to post that the test setup is especially unfair towards the students of non-inflected remote languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.). It's not even fair if you look at languages like Russian and Hungarian vs Spanish etc.

I'd simply count single dictionary word forms. If you're studying conjugation or declension you could look into a conjugation or grammar challenge.

You are right. But I don't think a change is needed, since we all compare numbers just with comparable participants during the challenge (I suppose we all do, please correct me, if it's not the case), and the "prize" is impressing each other with other diligence. I'll be no less impressed by a Mandarin learner fulfilling their goal of learning 50 or 1000 words than by Russian or French learner learning 1000 words including conjugations and declinations.

[luke]

Isn't anyone going to claim this?

20,000 Words in Spanish, in 20 Minutes!

Similar material.

[MamaPata]

This sounds great - I could really do with something like this!

Language: Russian
Current Vocab: I have no idea. I have been learning Russian for several years now, and I use a lot of resources. I have gone through the memrise courses I am currently using to find my starting count, and that adds up to 699. But that doesn't include finished courses, etc.
Goal: Also no idea. I will see how many I get through in the first week and then set myself a goal working from that.

Good luck everyone!

[WalkingAlone13]

I am also down. I have neglected Memrise for far too long already due to exams and such, but this looks to be a great excuse to get get back to my usual memrising. I will use this course for German https://www.memrise.com/course/198332/4 ... ith-audio/

My level of German seems to vary drastically depending on whom you ask, so no idea. High A2/low B1 seems like a safe estimate for what it's worth.

Goal: I am only going to aim for 1200 - 1500 words unfortunately, as I have a lot of coursework during this month still.

[aokoye]

I'm in!
German: I'm around a B2 and I have no idea how many words I know. Vocab is my weak spot. I'm currently working through the grund under aufbauworkschatz book by cornelsen. Given that it covers vocab from A1-B2 there's going to be a ton of stuff I know but it should be fairly easy to keep track of the newish words/words I have trouble.

Japanese: I think I know around 50 words give or take. My goal is 10 words a day which will put me at learning 300 words for the month April.

I'm only counting lemmas as otherwise it just gets too complicated for me to keep track of.

[CurlySue]

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your interest in this

I've added everyone as a competitor. I've also double-checked the OP for accuracy, but I tend to be absent-minded, so if you find a mistake in your entry, let me know and I will fix it.

Just an FYI, because this forum is only moderately active and some people don't log in often (and I posted this challenge very close to the end of March), I think we should let people enter until April 5.

Also, I'm going to post at the end of each week in April asking people how they're doing and what their count is. You don't have to respond to this, but it would be good for people to get an idea of how the competition is doing. I'm also going to ask that you don't post updates more often than this; the thread is just going to get really cluttered if people are posting their vocabulary count every day or even several times a week.

The challenge cannot be completely fair however I was going to post that the test setup is especially unfair towards the students of non-inflected remote languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.). It's not even fair if you look at languages like Russian and Hungarian vs Spanish etc.

I'd simply count single dictionary word forms. If you're studying conjugation or declension you could look into a conjugation or grammar challenge.

I had the same thought about Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Thai/etc, but as you yourself said, there's no way to make this competition 100% fair.

To be honest, I think the distinction between "grammar" and "vocabulary" is somewhat artificial. You could say that grammar simply refers to how we conceptually join different words to try to make sense of language ("go" and "went" are spelled differently, pronounced differently, and mean different things - they are distinct words - but we join them conceptually because we think it will help us understand something about language).

Since learners of highly inflectional languages have the advantage of being allowed to count each inflected form as a separate word, I may consider counting (phonemically) different pronunciations of the "same word" as separate ^^ (e.g., 阮 (first person exclusive plural) can be pronounced both as "guán" and “gún”)

In the interest of making this competition as fair as possible, I'll allow this.

For Japanese, all kun-yomi (native Japanese readings) of a kanji will count as a separate word; on-yomi (Chinese readings) will only count as a separate word if they mean something on their own; otherwise, on-yomi will have to be combined with others (e.g. 画面　が・めん) to count as a word.

[reineke]

I did say that it's impossibile to make the challenge fair but there's no reason to make it extra unfair. Conjugations have built-in mnemonics so I would count parlare as one word and ignore different conjugations. Even if you're only counting individual dictionary headwords, most English-speaking students of Romance languages will have an advantage. Anyway, it's your challenge. Have fun.

[Aozora]

I can't help myself, I'm joining too. I'm joining for Japanese only and I'll be counting dictionary headwords. My personal goal is to read a lot and collect words to study from that.

Languages: Japanese
Estimate of pre-April vocabulary: unknown, I'm around B2 level
Goal: 1000


How will we be updating our progress? Part of a contest is seeing where others are at.