iguanamon wrote:To everyone participating. I would like to ask you, when you feel you are ready, to discuss- what has surprised you after having undertaken this challenge?; what has been of benefit to you in your learning from doing the challenge that you can apply outside the challenge to other languages?; do you feel that it forces you to make your own connections in a way that's different from having ideal resources available?; what does being restricted to a few less than ideal resources change for you in your learning, in other words, what are you doing differently in the FLC vs your non-restricted learning?
Well, I guess I can start the ball rolling. We aren't much time into the FLC but some things I noticed straight-away was posting a log and asking for help was a great method for getting more resources. Also there are actually a lot of resources available on the forum itself. One observation I made earlier is forum members have an easier time getting resources than others might, simply because we have a strong network of language learners to rely on.
I am doing 2 FLC's one straight and one with the library exception. Czech (library exception) and Setswana (straight FLC). Czech is more closely related to the language learning which I've done before. There are courses available, you can find them at the library, the library also has a lot of free materials and even an Internet course which I can have for free. Books and audio is easier to find for Czech than Setswana. This is obviously because of the relative size of the speaker base for each language. Czech has around 10 million speakers, while Setswana has less than half of that with only 4 million speakers. There is more literature available for Czech since it is a European language with a long written history. The earliest literary works written in Czech date to the 14th century. Setswana didn't acquire a written format until the 1880's and had a mostly oral history. Setswana authors are still few in number. All the information I could find shows ~19,000 books published in Czech each year, while Setswana is less than 200 per annum.
A scarcity of resource really isn't a problem for Czech. I have Clozemaster, Free online course from the library, I have course books I can check out of the library. In addition there are books you can get as well as audio resources. Even a FSI Course. You can look at the resources I found in my FLC Log. There are also Czech speakers here on the forum. So a FLC with a base of 10+ million speakers will probably be fairly easy to do.
Setswana resources are a whole other ballgame. Because of a relatively recent period of literature there isn't a lot of old books to read. Because of the small speaker base it is much harder to get materials. I have found it almost impossible to find a native speaker without paying somewhere like iTalki, and even then there was only one person who listed it as a language. The thing which surprised me is actually the amount of resources which I did actually find! I went in assuming it was going to be difficult to find resources, but I found a lot of resources relatively quickly. Radio stations to listen to, grammar books, online dictionary, courses from the Peace Corps. Even YouTube videos showing pronunciation and some TV series in Setswana which are on YouTube. While there is actually more content than I expected, there isn't as much as I want.
One of the fun things I've discovered is Twitter. You might have not have heard of this website before, and other than the SC Bot I never really used it. But I have found it useful to get some read (if short) text exchanges between native speakers. I've copied these into a file and worked my way through a lot of literal translation where I couldn't find the word in the online dictionary (the only dictionary I can get) I ask the original poster what the words mean. My success rate is about 70% of the posters respond with the answer.
I think twitter might be useful for other languages where you're spoiled for choice like Mandarin, French, etc. but I haven't really searched for anyone to follow yet. The FLC shows there are resources out there for just about every language. Languages with a long tradition of written literature makes it even easier for people who want to learn. I couldn't do a super challenge in Setswana simply because there isn't enough books available to me. But there probably is enough videos and things on YouTube to get me 1/2 way through a film portion. Unless I wanted to read the Bible 10 times.
Because there aren't a lot of resources, repetition is required. You keep reading the same thing over and over, so having people posting exchanges on twitter is a god send since it is new, different and modern.