Let’s Talk Language Challenges

No, I don't mean what's hard about learning languages.

We've all seen them. The "30 Days to a Beach Body," or "25 Days of Thankfulness Challenge," or probably "100 Days of Drinking More Water." They abound on social media for seemingly every goal. But there aren't a ton of language challenges, which I think is a real shame.

Sure there's the Fluent in 3 Months Challenge, but it costs a pretty penny and has a fairly vague goal of having a 15 minute conversation at the end of 90 days. I'm sure there are a few other established challenges, but by and large, they are either quite short, cost money, or require you to post videos of yourself speaking Um, no thank you. I'll keep my incoherent mumblings to myself, or at least to real life where they can't be resurrected later (although my husband does have a pretty embarrassing story about my Spanish pronunciation when we were first dating that comes up every so often).

Anyway, as a HUGE fan of New Year's Resolutions and goals (more on that later I'm sure), I have been craving something long-term, guided, and specific. Never one to not jump in over my head, I've been thinking of putting together one of my own.

This is where you come in, dear reader.

This is a new blog and has almost no viewership, but what the heck, let's poll whoever is out there and see if this idea has any traction. It's like that saying that I can't remember the beginning of: if you want to go far, go together. Which of these would you be interested in joining in 2023?

52 Weeks of Spanish - a low-intensity challenge. One grammar point per week and maybe some vocab lists.

52 Weeks of Russian - same as above, but with cases! And Cyrillic!

Intensive Comparative Languages - let's try something a little (a lot) more challenging. I've been thinking about this for a while and it breaks a lot of rules. I propose we try to learn 3 related languages at once, side by side. Pretty much every lanaguage learning article warns against this very thing, but I can't find any quantitative evidence on it. I have, however, found a few equally vague articles saying it's fine and one book that I impulse bought on Amazon but can't figure out how to link to on my phone. This would involve specific book references (like a traditional class syllabus but without the classes) and probably some pleas to log your time to see if we can come up with some quantitative conclusions.

A Year-Long Plan that can be tweaked to fit whatever language you happen to be studying. I haven't figured out the specifics, but I think it can be done.

Which 2023 Language Challenge would you be most interested in?

0%52 Weeks of Spanish
0%52 Weeks of Russian
0%Intensive Comparative Languages
0%A Non-Specific 52 Week Plan to Fit Any (okay, most) Language

I know it's only November, but the thing about plans like these is they require, well, planning. This poll will likely close in early-to-mid December 2022 to give me a few weeks to get everything together.

This post brought to you by insomnia. Please excuse any typos or delirium.

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