Now on the heels of the Read more or die challenge, some language enthusiasts are looking for a new challenge. But wait, what was the read more or die challenge? The basic idea came from a problem that many language learners face… there’s never enough motivation to read in languages that you haven’t learned that well yet. It’s hard to read when you’re not that familiar with the language, interrupting the reading to look up a word in a dictionary occasionally. Also, when you’re reading slower, a text tends to need to be even more interesting to hold your attention, since it can often feel more like work than pleasure.

To solve this issue, Lan’dorien came up with the idea to have a contest where anyone can sign up and everyone tweets when they’ve read pages in a foreign language and then you can see how many pages your friends are reading compared to you. I even know some people who created a Twitter account for the sole purpose of this contest! This brings in the competitive spirit and also motivates you to keep up, so you don’t fall too far behind your friends. Participants I’ve talked to have all seemed to have quite a lot of fun and have made significant progress in their foreign language reading when they normally wouldn’t have found time to do it.

Photo by Erling A (License: CC BY 2.0)

As I mentioned earlier, this challenge is now coming to an end and those participants are foaming at the mouth for another challenge. Well, now you can study any language you want and indicate the number of minutes you’ve spent studying! Feel free to use audio and video materials (yes, watching a movie in your target language counts!), books or software. The only pre-requisite is that you need to be a beginner in the language (at most lower intermediate B1 level) in your target language. I obviously can’t participate with Esperanto, so I’ll be working on my Polish!

To sign up, just send the following tweet:

@6WCBot I want to #register to study #Esperanto intensively in May. #Transparent blog reader; working #full-time.

This will automatically add you to the Transparent Language learning team, so you can compare yourself with other people who read this blog! Of course, if you want to focus on another language, change #Esperanto to the language of your choice. It’s recommended to add whether you’re currently employed #full-time, #part-time or #free, so you can compare your results with people who have a similar amount of free time. Sign up today and represent yourself in our community!

• More information about the Twitter bot
• Contest high scores list