UniLang

It doesn't matter if you already know some, the idea is to work towards a goal.

はしさん wrote:Does it count if we're already learning the language? I might like to give it a try with the following:

- German
- Estonian
- Finnish

But I guess I have a month to decide?

Or maybe Māori as theres no shortage of supplies here..

Do it for Māori! Go non-Indo-European languages!

はしさん wrote:Does it count if we're already learning the language? I might like to give it a try with the following:

- German
- Estonian
- Finnish

But I guess I have a month to decide?

Renaçido wrote:Do it for Māori! Go non-Indo-European languages!

Exactly.

Renaçido wrote:Exactly.

Hehe. Maybe I will then

I have a few concerns.

With Ulalemo, we picked one language to be studied by all participants, we could simply go to the corresponding forum, but for this purpose I doubt it would make much sense to separate ourselves since it's unlikely that we would get feedbacks from each other. But still, spamming the general language forum doesn't sound like a good idea either. ''' , since you began this, could you contact the administrators and discuss the space? A forum would be desirable, something like "Events."

Another thing, the naming. Sure, it's not a copyrighted idea but using the same name as they do in HTLAL may not exactly be pleasing to either side. Although it certainly is a spinoff of what they already have in HTLAL, I think a different name might be desirable.

はしさん wrote:Does it count if we're already learning the language?

Renaçido wrote: It doesn't matter if you already know some, the idea is to work towards a goal.

Exactly. As long as you improve, it's in with the spirit of the competition.

ILuvEire wrote:EDIT: Okay, I've made my decision, but as I understand it, we've got until January 1st to give our final choices, right?

Yeah, it's not too strict but try to keep up with your choices from the 1st onwards, since language hopping is fun but you won't pregress anywhere. That being said, if you find that early on in the contest you want to add another lang, or at any point discontinue a lang, that's fine and any work you do and the time you did it in will be counted, since even 2 months of study can be valuable.

Karavinka wrote:I have a few concerns.

With Ulalemo, we picked one language to be studied by all participants, we could simply go to the corresponding forum, but for this purpose I doubt it would make much sense to separate ourselves since it's unlikely that we would get feedbacks from each other.

A lot of us are on the 24/7 skype chat (contact hashi) and we will be getting together to chat about our progress as we inevitably do. Although most of us are doing different langs there is some overlap so if you join the chat you may be able to chat to someone doing the same lang as you.

Karavinka wrote: But still, spamming the general language forum doesn't sound like a good idea either. ''' , since you began this, could you contact the administrators and discuss the space? A forum would be desirable, something like "Events."

I'm on it

Karavinka wrote: Another thing, the naming. Sure, it's not a copyrighted idea but using the same name as they do in HTLAL may not exactly be pleasing to either side. Although it certainly is a spinoff of what they already have in HTLAL, I think a different name might be desirable.

well I figured if we stole the idea we may as well steal the name and admit where it came from since it's a pretty blatant theft, but I'm not too fussed about the name since it's the competition that I'm into so if anyone's got any ideas, I'm happy to rename it.

so the new tally is:
myself, Caius, linguaholic, Kenny, Karavinka, csjc, veqq, 邪悪歌, Fiona V., Stawrberry, ILuvEire, Mikael, Renaçido, はしさん, (and maybe Jaybee) that's 14 definites which is better than I expected so yay us.

There is one thing I had not yet really thought about, which would be announcing the winner. Although it's a formality (cuz we're all winners ^^) there should be an official pannel and some criteria by which to judge. I'm gonna send the mods a letter, asking them to make a forum, and also to judge. I know there are many criteria we could judge by but unless anyone has any objections I propose the criterion "the contestant who has acheived the most, wins".

count me in
for
Hebrew
Armenian
Yiddish
Persian
Irish

While working on my kanji list ( ) I realized just how much Japanese I don't know yet so I think I'd definitely be in for Japanese
Also, I'm really fascinated in Hebrew as well as Arabic, so for right now I think I want to add that on my list of languages, though I may drop one or the other later if it gets to be too much
Anyway, so here's my list at this point
Japanese
Swedish
Arabic
Hebrew

''' wrote:There is one thing I had not yet really thought about, which would be announcing the winner. Although it's a formality (cuz we're all winners ^^) there should be an official pannel and some criteria by which to judge. I'm gonna send the mods a letter, asking them to make a forum, and also to judge. I know there are many criteria we could judge by but unless anyone has any objections I propose the criterion "the contestant who has acheived the most, wins".

What do you think about having different awards instead? So there's not any "winner" but a series of crazy endowments.

any ideas in particular?

I have a few ideas:
most nouns learned
most verbs learned
most adjectives learned
best speaking ability
best writing ability
best reading ability
best listening ability
most morphemes learned
most equal progress (for those studying more than one language simultaneously)
most 漢字 learned (for those studying Japanese or Chinese)
most expressions/phrases learned
greatest variation in politeness (for languages like Japanese and Korean that have varying degrees of politeness in their verb forms and whatnot)
best translation ability between languages (for those studying more than one)

I don't really keep track of how many verbs, words and expressions I know in a certain language.

Plus how exactly are you planning to measure something like that? I mean there's no reliable way to gauge things like "number of nouns learned".

when I do language, I mostly focus on passive vocab anyway because I'm usually reading from the language, and I never EVER actively learn vocab because I hate it. If I use words enough, they will stick. So I have no idea how many words I know in each language, since I have no lists to go off.

Yeah Jaakuuta, all of those are pretty hard to measure, except for speaking ability maybe. We could get organized to make some recordings in said languages at specific times of the year (every 3-4 months?) to see any improvements in pronunciation. (It doesn't work very well for Classical Maya though.)

''' wrote:any ideas in particular?

Yeah... When I was writing that I was mainly inspired by how annual awards work at the ZBB forum... Though I'm not sure how it could applied to language learning itself, seeing Jaakuuta's ideas.

Hmm... What about if we make some contests? That seems to be a good idea...

Something like writing a poem, a short story, a paragraph, some piece of art written/drawn in the language (could be best drawing by hand (combining image and alphabets, or making with the language's alphabet like in those Arabic calligraphy designs)). It could also be editing real world images and translating them, or maybe creating ad-like images about certain events (next year there's a soccer world cup coming!). It could be some kind of video (that would require a lot of effort though, and it would be impressive if somebody did it).

Things easier to appreciate and judge.

For those with a bit of a conlanging interest we could also hold "best rescripting". (With the categories "best 1:1 phoneme adaptation", "most complex creative adaptation", "best historically built adaptation" (the one with the best explanation of why those letters were chosen, based or historical/phonological facts or something).)

Anyway, how do people determine "the winner" at HTLAL?

Sean of the Dead and I want to sign up together for Scottish Gaelic and American Sign Language.

Put me down for Portuguese, Hindi and Persian.

Renaçido wrote:
Something like writing a poem, a short story, a paragraph, some piece of art written/drawn in the language (could be best drawing by hand (combining image and alphabets, or making with the language's alphabet like in those Arabic calligraphy designs)). It could also be editing real world images and translating them, or maybe creating ad-like images about certain events (next year there's a soccer world cup coming!). It could be some kind of video (that would require a lot of effort though, and it would be impressive if somebody did it).

Things easier to appreciate and judge.

Many of those depend on the person's artistic or creative ability which is irrelevant, besides, assessment always gets in the way of study. Be wary of any course heavy on assessment

Renaçido wrote:For those with a bit of a conlanging interest we could also hold "best rescripting". (With the categories "best 1:1 phoneme adaptation", "most complex creative adaptation", "best historically built adaptation" (the one with the best explanation of why those letters were chosen, based or historical/phonological facts or something).)

I can do that, I make arabic even better

Renaçido wrote:Anyway, how do people determine "the winner" at HTLAL?

No idea, that'd mean spending time there.