A language learners’ forum

luke wrote:
1,000,000 mark is nice, round, challenging, achievable, and extensible.

Using "words" and "seconds" would eliminate some of the confusion of calling a number of pages a book when it's not, or saying something is not a book when it is. (The "reading unit" helps, but that still invites questions like, "what is a reading unit")?

Reading a million words, is a recognizable achievement. Listening to 1,000,000 seconds is also a feat.

The word/second approach would leave room for people doing double, triple, and greater challenges.

Forum members would have to decide if the competitive angle helps them. Personally, the achievement in and of itself is enough for me. Competition doesn't add anything to my motivation, but I do recall posts in which someone was inspired to push harder to keep their rank.

A non-terminating challenge would also be interesting. Just like posts accumulate over time, words or seconds could continue to accumulate. Language learning is often a non-terminating activity.

rdearman wrote:

NoManches wrote:So I think the idea of allowing people to read the EQUIVALENT of 100 books and allowing people to watch the EQUIVALENT of 100 movies is a good idea.

Yes, but my point is. What is the definition of a book?

If the lower range is 75k, then with 250 words per page then a "book" is 300 pages. We currently use 50 pages for a book.

"According to Amazon’s great Text Stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. The figure was found through looking at a number of books’ text stats, until “Brave New World”‘s 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books–50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words."

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/ ... 34636.html

Audiobooks/movies can also be counted/estimated in terms of words as well and I think this is more meaningful than "seconds". If you're using a time measure minutes make more sense. Reading can also be measured in minutes and that would take care of cases where someone's working intensively on difficult texts, putting in a lot of work but churning out few "pages".

Audiovisual material should not be called "films".

Hopefully you can make something of this:

"In order to encounter all the 3000 most frequent words in English 1, 5, 10 and 20 times, you’d need to read or otherwise meet 47,300, 236,700, 473,000, and 947,000 words, respectively;

- to encounter all the 5000 most frequent words in English 1, 5, 10 and 20 times, you’d need to read or listen to 132,100, 661,000, 1,321,000, and 2,642,000 running words;"

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... ute#p85227

How much material is needed for minimal, normal, or optimal documentation of a language?

"...one needs close to 100,000 words per individual to have any chance of capturing that individual's entire active lexical range. That would be about 17 real-time hours."

"...I calculate that an hour of transcribed recorded speech contains about 6000 words."

"a desideratum for corpora to be used for close syntactic work would be at least a million words, preferably at least ten million.

Good documentation: A million-word corpus. 150-200 hours of good-quality recorded text, up to about 20 hours per speaker, from a variety of speakers on a variety of topics in a variety of genres."

"The sobering examples of the research experiences ...show that even 100,000,000 words is at least an order of magnitude too small to capture phenomena that, though of low frequency, are in the competence of ordinary native speakers. That would represent at least 20,000 recorded hours."

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... our#p83292

"At a normal speech rate, speakers produce about 10–15 phonemes per second, corresponding to roughly 5–6 syllables every second or 150 words per minute."
The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... ute#p42413

Average speech rates

Presentations: between 100 - 150 wpm for a comfortable pace
Conversational: between 120 - 150 wpm
Audiobooks: between 150 - 160 wpm, which is the upper range that people comfortably hear and vocalise words
https://virtualspeech.com/blog/average- ... per-minute

This starts on Tuesday. Shouldn’t we have a registration thread by now? And is the page and bot ready to take registrations? The webpage is still showing the results from last time.

jeffers wrote:I've updated the infographic about what does and doesn't count for the film part of the challenge, because the minimum time for video/audio was allowed to be 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes.



EDIT: can't share from Google drive?
EDIT2: fixed with some help from Jeff Lindqvist.

I don't see the image?

@Brun Ugle unfortunately the bot is not ready yet.

Can't we at least start the sign-up process and track everything on paper until the bot is ready for updates? I track everything in my notebook anyway and then post to the bot.

I'm not in charge of the SC thread but I know it is being prepared.

Brun Ugle wrote:Shouldn’t we have a registration thread by now?

CarlyD wrote:Can't we at least start the sign-up process

Done, sorry for the delay. Please PM me if there are any typos/errors or just some weird wording somewhere. Or if you have any suggestions for the main post