The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jun 08, 2019 11:20 pm

coldrainwater wrote:Retrospectively, I had been on what amounted to an all out assault on Spanish listening, which was successful and for the record, I likely listened a few months more than needed, dipping mildly into a bucket of diminishing returns. I didn't think of it that way in the moment, but looking back and looking at the hours....
I write this question in case I forget it after catching up on your log, where you probably mention your Spanish "assault"? How many hours did your assault last? I ask because I'm doing an assault on French right now, and plan in a few months to begin an assault on Spanish. Anyways, good luck to you and all the others attempting this 365 challenge. And now on to your log.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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coldrainwater
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby coldrainwater » Tue Jun 11, 2019 7:33 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:
coldrainwater wrote:Retrospectively, I had been on what amounted to an all out assault on Spanish listening, which was successful and for the record, I likely listened a few months more than needed, dipping mildly into a bucket of diminishing returns. I didn't think of it that way in the moment, but looking back and looking at the hours....
I write this question in case I forget it after catching up on your log, where you probably mention your Spanish "assault"? How many hours did your assault last? I ask because I'm doing an assault on French right now, and plan in a few months to begin an assault on Spanish. Anyways, good luck to you and all the others attempting this 365 challenge. And now on to your log.
Good question. Looking back at my log and some prior forum posts, the assault period had a pretty clear start month of June 2018. End date when I realized I had overshot the mark a bit was March 2019. In that ten month timeframe, I estimate about 130 hours of listening per month, so 1300 hours in total. Much of that listening time was passive listening and extensive by nature.

I saw a couple of sub-patterns that might be worth the mention while I am thinking about them. They might give you or others ideas. The transition I made in June 2018 went from a mix of mostly literature reading (advanced), some audiobook hours (listen only or read/listen, also advanced content), and 1-2 hours of podcasts per day to dropping the literature reading and replacing it with almost all audiobook hours, plus a continued 1-2 hours per day of podcasts. At that point, going through audiobooks was quick, one every few days perhaps. Once that became pretty easy, I dropped the audiobooks and sought more challenge from podcasts, seeking some of the toughest I could find with varied content (some of my favorites are described in the Spanish podcast thread). At the time I am not sure I knew what you would call it, but since very early on in my Spanish listening, I liked to listen to 50 or so hour chunks of a given audio resource (podcast). That seemed to be the right amount of time for me to get used to the idolects of the few people that happened to be presenting. In addition to podcasts involving humor and podcasts from different countries, I listened to quite a bit of peninsular Spanish. I really liked the subject matter and it was easier for me to find challenging audio content via Peninsular dialects (I pretty much went on weekly raids of iVoox). It is a moot point now since I am not currently a big TV watcher, but I did take the time to compare TV dialogue to my podcasts, and the podcasts were almost always more challenging, so I stayed with them. In November of 2018, I was able to field test the results with monolingual travel to Mexico City and again with a trip to Cataluña (Barcelona) in December 2018. Several groups of natives independently evaluated my listening as advanced in Mexico. I saw and still see plenty of weakness to improve upon should I want to push listening further, but I would have to have put it at C1 or thereabout in the moment.

For completeness and as an addendum, I have kept it in my mind that I started a longer-term listening habit in March 2017, a few months after joining this forum and realizing the mistake I had made in neglecting listening for the first nine months or so of my journey. It is hard for me to give accurate data, but I suspect I listened to an average of maybe 2 hours per day from March 2017 to the end of February 2019, maybe 1450 hours in total (with the potential for a lot of variance and even more nuance in that figure). Incidentally, I believe that explains why I persisted into 2019 with such heavy listening hours even though I recognized that the skill was already sufficient for my language needs. Completing that two year stetch was motivating for me. Part of it was momentum and force of habit as well.

All in all, I wish you the best of luck in your assault on French as well. I don't look so far into the future, but French could be my next language after German. I will be following your progress. The listening aspect of French is one of the most intriguing aspects of the language in my limited experience/opinion. As post-data, I also have a few ideas on how I can make my log and other posts a bit more useful (to myself and hopefully others too). Rather long-winded answers like this one are fun and good offer a good reflection, but they do take a long time to read and would be fairly skipped by many.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue Jun 11, 2019 11:10 pm

Thank you for your detailed and informative post. Your goals were far more ambitious than mine. I'm shooting for three hours of listening per day and for a goal of 150 hours total. More time can be added to that, because recently I finished 150 hours of listening to episodes of TV serials dubbed into French. I judged that successful because by the end I was understanding practically everything of the series That 70s Show.
For this challenge, everything is fair game: audiobooks (listening or reading/listening), blogs, movies (with or without subtitles, and, occasionally, dubbed), native language TV shows (with or without subtitles), and documentaries. When I began, I stumbled out of the gate. A couple of the movies that I watched were IMO awful: Indochine and La vie en rose. It took a couple of weeks to find TV shows I could watch. Normally, I don't watch TV shows, and I don't even have a TV anymore. Nor have I found a show I really like, but a few are bearable. Documentaries for the most part are mostly comprehensible, and the blogs by Dany Caligula, Nota Bene and Axolotl are comprehensible, and I am relieved to say entertaining as well.
Now I can see a sequence I should follow, but I don't know whether I will, now that I am started. I think it would have helped, once I finished a long run of one dubbed TV show, to sample 4 or 5 others, just to get used to different voices.
Then to move on to movies and TV shows with good French subtitles, like Kaamalott, first using the subs, then not. I am counting on Netflix to provide these. Finally moving on to films without subtitles. But all the while watching blogs and documentaries and listening to audiobooks.
My blog just gives a bare list of what I have listened to, but I should go back and give at least a minimum comment about what I liked and did not like. The first entry of this challenge is https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10087&start=40.
When I finish this French challenge, I intend to start another in Spanish, more or less on the same lines as this.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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coldrainwater
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby coldrainwater » Wed Jun 12, 2019 5:51 am

Thanks Mork for sharing details about your plan. They are very insightful and I like seeing how others go about similar challenges. I have had the exact same experiencce with TV as you have and actually let go of my last TV (a cathode ray tube behemoth) back in 1999 (the year I graduated high school and had no more room for it in the new college dorm). I struggled as well and the only TV that I managed to watch a respectable number of hours in was Aquí no hay quien viva (summer 2017 iirc). Thankfully, we now have a full thread on official Spanish TV with great reviews by people who love to watch them. I will take a look at your challenge starting post now. Thanks again for sharing.
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Fenderman
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby Fenderman » Mon Jul 01, 2019 1:29 am

We're halfway through the year and challenge...good work everyone!
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Neurotip
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby Neurotip » Sun Sep 08, 2019 9:13 am

Hi all,
I'm still hanging in there and I'm really finding it helpful to have the Challenge to keep me motivated. However I can't help noticing I'm trailing the pack by some distance (179 points, next lowest 203). Can I just check that I'm still formally speaking 'in' the challenge?
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PeterMollenburg
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Sep 09, 2019 5:42 am

Neurotip wrote:Hi all,
I'm still hanging in there and I'm really finding it helpful to have the Challenge to keep me motivated. However I can't help noticing I'm trailing the pack by some distance (179 points, next lowest 203). Can I just check that I'm still formally speaking 'in' the challenge?


Hi Neurotip,

Unless you quit, or alternatively you never provided scores (the most important one being the final score at the end of the challenge), then you’re still ‘in’ the challenge.

Well done to yourself, Neurotip, as well as everyone else still participating. There aren’t that many of us left, which to me speaks of the challenge to study consistently over long periods of time - an essential ingredient with successful language learners.

Of course, I understand there are loads of successful language learners outside of this challenge. It’s challenging to say the least, attempting to learn a language consistently while pulled in many other directions throughout one’s daily existence, and for some such a challenge is just not practical. For such individuals, and others who just can’t apply themselves daily, it is indeed possible to learn a language without studying it every day - the journey might just be a bit longer.

Still, I hope this challenge has brought and continues to bring consistent application of language study to at least some language learners that weren’t so diligent or focused prior to the challenge, since although success is attainable with less than perfect consistent application, it’s more efficient to avoid missing study sessions in the quest for one’s language-learning goal(s). Forming the habit is half the battle! Keep up the consistent learning!
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PeterMollenburg
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Sep 23, 2019 1:57 am

Godryka wrote:I apologize for late update of my August score. It was a bad month for me in terms of days missed in the challenge. I was on vacation for three and a half weeks in August/September, and this turned out to be a killer for my routine. I considered withdrawing from the challenge completely, but then again this experience has been beneficial overall, so I decided to withdraw completely only if my scores become negative at some point. Which could eventually happen, since in September I already missed 8 days of French.


Well it’s certainly not all about being perfect, nor winning. It’s about learning to apply yourself consistently, which you’ve most certainly achieved. Still, you could draw on your holiday experience (and not finding/puttingbaside time for language study) to develop strategies how you could possibly in future minimise the likelihood of missed days.

Some people might miss weeks in such a situation, so don’t beat yourself up over it, use it as sth to reflect on and to improve if a similar situation arises again... and don’t forget all the days you did study and all the fun you may of had while on a break away!
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Arizakai
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby Arizakai » Wed Oct 30, 2019 7:59 pm

May I join this challenge for the last two months of the year? I would sign up with Swedish.
1 x
Super Challenge 2022/2023:
English books: 48 / 5000 films: 372 / 9000
French books: 26 / 5000 films: 133 / 9000
Italian books: 0 / 5000 films: 0 / 9000

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PeterMollenburg
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Re: The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge - Sign Up and Discussion

Postby PeterMollenburg » Wed Oct 30, 2019 11:56 pm

Arizakai wrote:May I join this challenge for the last two months of the year? I would sign up with Swedish.


Of course! Good luck! Start date 1st of November?
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