A language learners’ forum

I think it's time to unpin the discussion thread, so I'm linking to it here. The rules thread remains pinned.

I probably should have asked my question on rules for the super challenge here.

I know you can reread a book or rewatch a movie over and over and count it toward the challenge, but can you count it if you reread or rewatch a chapter or scene several times several times?

I remember in the first challenge you could re-read books and chapters. I never did - I had to re-read a lot of the hard stuff, but I figured it was balanced out by the easy stuff.

Hello there,
since the next SC is approaching I want to make some points clear that I didn't understand completely. I read somewhere in the discussion that live lectures were not allowed. How about recorded ones/ MOOCs/ educational videos etc.
Also how about scientific papers instead of books.

The reason I ask is because apart from French and Spanish, I also like to take part in English where I am fairly advanced in 'everyday' english, but scientific articles/ papers or scientific/educational videos include a lot of technical terms which I am not that very familiar with, so I'd like to train that particular part. Of course there are also documentaries or just normal non-fiction, but it's still a bit different.
If that's not possible then I'd just do it for myself, but not in the context of the SC

Last time the distinction was made specifically between recorded and live lectures. I watched MOOC's and everyone was fine with that

Christina wrote over on HTLAL that language families would be OK. Are we going to have them? How would that work? I'm not sure whether to do it or not, because I'd still like to see my books/movies divided up by language, not just family.

Brun Ugle wrote:Christina wrote over on HTLAL that language families would be OK. Are we going to have them? How would that work? I'm not sure whether to do it or not, because I'd still like to see my books/movies divided up by language, not just family.

I didn't see that. I am a little busy reading all the stuff here and i rarely if ever get over there anymore. After a discussion with Serpent we have a way to record that on the bot, so what language families do i need? Romance .....

The easiest way to do that would be just to add them as new "languages". But as long as you don't count anything twice imo it should be fine to sign up for example with Spanish and with Romance, which would just mean Romance langs other than Spanish.
During the previous challenge I wrote for example "it-ch: " or "pt-br: " in the beginning of some items to show the variant in question. I didn't always do that, only with the audio that's different from my "main" standard. This time I'll do that with all languages I guess (assuming we get this family thing to work )

What languages are you planning to do, Brun Ugle? I think it could be useful to add "Scandinavian" as a language, along with Germanic. I personally don't need to keep Germanic and Scandinavian separate though.

Would it be too funny if the Finno-Ugric tag was #fu?

Oh and Slavic please... Since all of them have c somewhere at the end, maybe the tags could be #rc, #gc and #sc for Romance/Germanic/Slavic? if these aren't already taken...

For Romance languages, I would most likely do only Spanish. But in the Germanic family, I kind of want to work on all the Scandinavian languages and also German. I plan to try reading some books in English too, classics and other important works mostly, but I don't know that English really fits well in the Germanic family even if it is technically a member.

The thing is, I'd kind of like to see everything divided up by language anyway, so I don't know if I'd want to do it as families. I assume that if I'd did Germanic, than everything I tagged as Germanic would get lumped together as one group. It could be cool if you could tweet your progress by language, but it was also collected by family. I mean so that your score would say, for example, that you'd read 20 books in the Germanic family and then if you clicked on that it would show that you'd read 7 books in Norwegian, 5 in Swedish, 5 in Danish and 3 in German. But I think that would be a lot more work to set up than Serpant's idea of setting up families as separate languages.

Anyway, I still haven't decided for myself. In any case, I'm not really trying to win anything, I just like the idea of registering what I read and watch and motivating myself to read and watch more in languages I wouldn't normally do much in.

Bit of technical clarification. If you want the bot to track this, then it has to have digits. e.g. Therefore I was going to go with "Romance = 01", etc. Annoying but I don't want to have to re-write the bot one week before the start of the challenge, and it means that families sort to the bottom.

Brun Ugle wrote:It could be cool if you could tweet your progress by language, but it was also collected by family. I mean so that your score would say, for example, that you'd read 20 books in the Germanic family and then if you clicked on that it would show that you'd read 7 books in Norwegian, 5 in Swedish, 5 in Danish and 3 in German. But I think that would be a lot more work to set up than Serpant's idea of setting up families as separate languages.

Cool, but ain't going to happen this year!

Unless of course you know a programmer type who'd like to extend the source code. (Actually that probably isn't that difficult even for a hacker like me, but I don't have the time. I'm sort of busy, SC, OC, 10kSRS, admin forum, and working for a living seem to take up a lot of my time)