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

[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. ^^;;