A language learners’ forum

I realize 50 pages as a book is quite short but only 15 people met or exceeded the 100 book threshold on a per language basis. If the goal is to balance amount of time spent on film and books (so they're more or less equal depending on the speed of the reader) they feel balanced now.

I’m not counting words and seconds. That would drive me nuts. Minutes and pages are fine. I never found that a problem and I don’t really care if a “book” is 50 pages or 100 or something else, or if you prefer to call them “reading units”, but please let’s stick to counting in pages.

Brun Ugle wrote:I’m not counting words and seconds. That would drive me nuts. Minutes and pages are fine. I never found that a problem and I don’t really care if a “book” is 50 pages or 100 or something else, or if you prefer to call them “reading units”, but please let’s stick to counting in pages.

I don't think anyone would count words, just let software do it or count the words on one page (of a class of book) and multiply. So maybe 250 words per page for a novel, but a bit different for a children's book or a pocket bible.

Some of the software I use like readlang does words not pages, I just multiply / divide as needed.

OK, well the consensus of opinion seems to be leave it alone. No problem for me, I don't have to change anything.

We'll leave it as it.

Whodathunkitz wrote:I don't think anyone would count words, just let software do it or count the words on one page (of a class of book) and multiply. So maybe 250 words per page for a novel, but a bit different for a children's book or a pocket bible.

I just multiply / divide as needed.

I thought that went without saying, but apparently not.

1.yes, many people signed up for more than one challenge. So the analysis of failures and successes might look a bit different actually. I don't think the reality is as bleak as the graph shows (but thanks for the graphs, tiia, I found them very interesting)

2.I am all for considering more options. However, 5000 pages are ridiculously little for my goals and I must say I am a bit of tired o trying to define double challenges and such stuff.

Perhaps it is time to define SC beginner-intermediate and SC intermediate-advanced as two variants? The same date, time limit, two versions? It might be a nice compromise between one size that doesn't fit most of us, and the highly divided "everyone designs their own challenge" attitude?

3.I am against makin this a non terminating challenge, as it would completely lose the purpose and not be motivating anymore. Whole life and language learning and everything I do is a non terminating challenge. I can just read for fun a bit, I am already doing that, no challenge at all. So do many others SC is adding value to my learning and life exactly because it has an end. I cannot handle any more non terminating challenges, I am already hating my life enough due to endless pursuits of goals that are never gonna be completed. SC is not a goal in the sense of "I am gonna stop reading after it" or "I am gonna be perfect at the language after it". It is a goal that CAN be achieved and moves me in the right direction, and all within an imaginable survivable time limit. And it is a group activity, a rare occassion, where I have similar goals and means as other people, which is also a welcome change to my normal life, it is a welcome relief from my studying loneliness.

4.No, not everybody wins in the non terminating "let's jut measure it" challenge. Noone wins, because you never know whether the others were really trying at the given moment. And why should everyone win anyways? We are not three year olds. I am completely ok with a friendly challenge, where I lose. It motivates me to do much more than in my normal lonely ways, and I am genuinely happy for the people with better results than mine in this community.

5.I'd like to stick to pages and minutes, or books and hours, etc. Not words and seconds. Too much measuring, too much counting, too much focus on management instead of doing the challenge.

Cavesa wrote:Perhaps it is time to define SC beginner-intermediate and SC intermediate-advanced as two variants? The same date, time limit, two versions? It might be a nice compromise between one size that doesn't fit most of us, and the highly divided "everyone designs their own challenge" attitude?

Actually it could be setup as two challenges, however you'd have to log your results with a different bot. So if you were doing beginner and advanced you'd tweet to two different bots and it would show on two different websites.

I actually like that it's one table for all, but would it be possible to indicate somehow, for what the person signed up for? Maybe just as simple as adding another column for the type of challenge (half, normal, double, triple..) to the list of participants without changing anything else? (Because that would be much more complicated as I understand it.)

SC is adding value to my learning and life exactly because it has an end.

True. Having things in life that end at a certain point is great.
I would add, that starting a new every two years also makes it easier for new users to participate, because everyone starts at the same time with the zero minutes and zero pages. (Except those starting later during the challenge.)

5.I'd like to stick to pages and minutes, or books and hours, etc. Not words and seconds. Too much measuring, too much counting, too much focus on management instead of doing the challenge.

Absolutely!
I have a certain idea how much a page is, and how many pages make a typical book, but words? That would be just a ridiculous high number for me. Plus, it's usually not that hard to find out how many pages a printed version of a book has. (For children's books with a large font and illustrations etc. there was the rule to count five pages as one btw. Or to use any other number that seems appropriate.)

(And then there would be differences, because some languages have more compound words and some are agglutinative while others aren't. So even a word count is not really comparable.)

tiia wrote:I have a certain idea how much a page is, and how many pages make a typical book, but words? That would be just a ridiculous high number for me. Plus, it's usually not that hard to find out how many pages a printed version of a book has. (For children's books with a large font and illustrations etc. there was the rule to count five pages as one btw. Or to use any other number that seems appropriate.)

(And then there would be differences, because some languages have more compound words and some are agglutinative while others aren't. So even a word count is not really comparable.)

Books don't even have identical layout, gutter, type face, size etc. This can vary a lot even between two editions of the same book. Let's just assume that things will even out. People will still use different kinds of material, e.g. magazines, books with relatively little text on the page, books in large print (and more pages), sitcoms with a lot of dialogue content per minute, films with not so much dialogue. Maybe the bot can calculate the number of words (or pages) from the ISBN? Who knows, perhaps you're zoning out while reading (or watching the movie) - do you still count the same pages/minutes?

(I know, this is starting to look like the spreadsheet discussion last summer...)

Yes, you are right it would split the table and bot, I didn't think of the technical aspects. Thanks!

I agree with Tiia that being all together is better. But see what people signed up would help.

We could stick to number of pages, agree on what is book unit this time, and use that for measurement again. About the real books: I am not for counting real books, as I read mostly long ones (fantasy) But it would be great to have this information somewhere too.

So, each line would now include not only the name and language and the stars (which are awesome and I hope we keep them!) and counts, but as well the type of challenge? Or perhaps the type of challenge could be signaled by colour of the line or name! (the colours are just examples of course)
green- SC as it is defined for the current round
red- double SC
blue-reading only
violet-listening only

It might be cool to have the actual number of books there. For example in the profile, you could see that ExampleParticipant has read 1230 pages so far, that is the counted part compared to others, and finished four real books (that would be just for information, not the ladder).

Would any of this be possible without too much work from the bot makers? And would anyone else even like it?