it occurred to me I could signal-boost this here

[syntheid]

Not sure if anyone else is on the HTLAL (How To Learn Any Language) forums, but the 2014-2015 Super Challenge is starting on May 1st 2014, if anyone is interested.

Short summary: It's a 20 month challenge to do a lot of input: reading and listening, 100 'books' and 100 films in that time. Based on the idea of extensive reading boosting your target language skills. There's also a twitter bot associated for easy logging/visual graphs of progress/light competition as you can see how other people are doing as well which can keep you on track.

Comments

[littlebutfierce]

Whaaaaat OMG how terrifying/intriguing. ^^;;; Are you doing it?

I am sure it would be really useful if I were able to do this but I'm not sure if trying to & maybe failing would still be useful for me (b/c obviously I'd've read some books/watched some films that I hadn't before!) or if it would just prove too demoralizing. Hmmmmmm!!

[syntheid]

Oh definitely! I did the first one for 2012-2013 and it was really fun and helped out my Japanese a ton. Last time I basically attempted a quarter-challenge unofficially, to read 25 books and watch 100 movies, and I didn't make it. I was worried about it being demoralizing also, but the progress ended up being really motivating, even if I wasn't able to complete it.

The way the rules work this time, I think they're doing 'stars' for each 25 books/movies you read/watch, so you can sort of do a quarter challenge more officially? Plus the books are shorter; the first round we were counting 100 pages per 'book' and now it's only 50 pages. :) So I signed up for a full challenge, but even if I only get to half, I'll be pretty happy with myself.

[littlebutfierce]

Ugggggh so tempting. Although part of me is hesitant to dive in just b/c I don't really know that forum/am not familiar w/its culture, etc. I poked at some of the language log threads last night & wowwwww people seem hardcore. ^^;;;

If I did it, I'd aim for a half challenge each in French & German. Well, I suppose I still have a few days to think about it before the 1st of May!

ETA: Possibly stupid question -- the rules say that a TV series episode of 45 minutes counts as half a film. Can I then assume that an episode of approximately 22-ish minutes (saaaaay episodes of A:TLA) counts as a quarter film? Or are they really that strict (idk, maybe they might argue that anything shorter than 45 minutes isn't letting you get enough immersion at once or something)? For some reason I find that forum quite intimidating -- I'm not usually the newbie afraid to ask questions but I thought I'd ask here instead first, ha. If you don't know or whatever, that's totally fine, of course!! I see the discussion thread but it's so long -_- (Also the forum is REALLY slow for me for some reason...)

[syntheid]

Oh sorry, I didn't see your edit, so I dunno if you already got it answered, but yes. The twitter bot will actually take an argument for logging exact minutes, so you can tell it you watched 22 minutes (or even just 5 minutes if you're watching things on youtube or something) and if you watch three or four it'll add up to a 'film' for you automatically. I logged my books that way, too, and just registered whenever I read 5 pages or whatever. The challenge is pretty lenient, especially since it's all self-reported. I think as long as you're getting it all done it doesn't matter how you do it, barring obvious things like watching something dubbed in your native language even if it's a foreign film wouldn't count. But some people have done things like count playing video games as reading for challenges, they just count how many words were in dialogue and how much approximates a page, so if you watch a film in your native language with L2 subtitles it could count as reading also potentially. Personally, I think that sounds like too much work for me.

(The forum is awful tech, sadly, it's pretty slow and fucks up formatting sometimes, especially if you don't use Firefox.)

[littlebutfierce]

A belated thank you for this! Yeah, I decided to go ahead & watch bits & pieces &/or shorter things, after... spending too much time reading that long-ass old discussion thread for the challenge. ^^;; Wow, I agree, estimating pages based on a video game is waaay too much work for me.

& ugh yes, the forum is slow & I... keep running into threads where people say really actually kind of offensive things, UGH. I think I'll just uh do the Super Challenge & minimize my time actually on the board. ^^;;

[thirdblindmouse]

Innnteresting. Thanks for linking it!

[syntheid]

You're welcome. :)