6 Week Challenge

Make more time for studying. See how much progress you can make in a language in 6 weeks. Compare yourself with others.
Details at the HTLAL forum.
Read about using the bot here.

 

How to...

Back to highscore

Anyone is welcome to participate in the 6 Week Challenge, independent of whether they use Twitter or not. However, this awesome stats page relies on people posting updates in tweets. In other words, if you want to be part of the highscore, you have to have a Twitter user name. (You do not need to install any software and you do not have to spend your life reading Twitter.)

Register

If you want to participate without being tracked on this website, you may register by posting in the August 6 Week Challenge thread at HTLAL.

If you want to participate and track your progress here, you have to (additionally or only) message your registration to the tracking bot. For this, go to Twitter.com, log in and tweet something along the lines of
@6WCBot I want to #register to study #German intensively in August. #HTLAL user; working #part-time.
The exact wording and the order doesn't matter at all, just the tags.

  1. #register or #reg to declare that you're participating (required)
  2. #German (or another language) to indicate your target language for the month (required). Only one language can be your target, because the idea of the 6 Week Challenge is to make giant progress in one language. However, the bot can register the maintenance work you do on other languages as well.
  3. You may optionally use one of the following tags: #HTLAL, #Unilang, #AJATT or #Tadoku to become part of a team. This is for group comparisons - are #HTLAL users the best language students?
  4. You may also optionally indicate your work status outside of language study - are you employed #full-time, #part-time or are you #free at the moment? Someone who works #full-time will obviously have few hours for language study. This is indication is also for statistics purposes, so that you can compare yourself to others with a similar workload as yourself.

The bot will reply to confirm your registration or to confirm your score. However, due to the nature of Twitter, you will only see the bot's replies if you look at your "Mentions" or if you're following @6WCBot.

Get Good Scores

When you have studied something, or at the end of the day, you should post an update to the bot, so that it can update your score and your rank. Additionally, this will keep other 6 Week Challenge participants informed. Maybe you even want to post something that you just read in/about your target language.

For example, an update might look like
@6WCBot I studied 1 hour and 45 minutes of #Deutsch using #Anki today. Ich spreche noch kein Deutsch.
Of this, only the time and the language tag are required. Instead of #Deutsch you could also use #German, #de or #deu. The #Anki tag is just for your own statistics - you could make a #tyger tag if that makes sense to you, name them whatever you like. During and after the challenge, this website will be able to tell you how much time you spent on each activity this way.
For the time, the bot can understand "2 hours", "120 minutes" or "120min" as well as any combination of these. However, you need to write a separate update for each language if you did work on more than one language. You can do any activity - studying textbooks, doing Anki, Listening-Reading... if you're watching a movie with subtitles or listening to podcasts in the background or the like though, please only award yourself a fraction of the minutes. For 60 minutes of studying to count as 60 minutes in this scoring, you have to be 100% focussed on learning your target language.

Work done on your target language contributes to BOTH the target language score and the overall score. Work done on other languages only contributes to your overall score, so you will be tempted to do more for your target language. Think carefully about which language you really want to push ahead this time. You must at most be lower-intermediate in it though, better to be a complete beginner. We want to see progress.

To undo your last update (if you mistyped), type
@6wcbot #undo
To undo an earlier update, identify it by the language and amount of time, e. g.
@6wcbot #undo 20 minutes #Esperanto
Note that this only works if you had an update where you studied exactly 20 minutes of Esperanto. If you logged 25 minutes but intended to write 5, you cannot use this, you first have to undo the 25 minutes and then re-add 5 minutes.

One last tip: normally, only those who follow both you and the bot will see what you write to it. To make your tweet visible to everyone, start it with a dot (.@6WCBot) or include @6WCBot somewhere other than the beginning.

Contact @Junesun or e-mail yutian DOT mei AT gmail DOT com if you have any questions or encounter any issues.

Have fun! Good luck with your language studies!