New Year Challenges – January 2016 (5 Challenges + 1 Printable!)

Hi there guys, gals, and non-binary pals! So we’re not quite on the final day of 2015 (unlike when I posted something similar last year…) but it’s time again to start thinking about gearing up for our new year.

As I’m sure you’ve all realised, I’m a big fan of language challenges, and as we go into a new year, other people really seem to get into them too. So here’s my collection of language challenges that I’ve seen (and will probably take part in) during at least January 2016. If you know of any more, please let me know! I’ve done some googling, but I’m probably missing one or two.

Read More or Die (Tadoku) Challenge.

You can register for this challenge already by heading over to this link, or by messaging the twitter bot. The premise is simple: choose up to three target languages and read as many pages as possible for the month of January. Now I find the only problem is that I don’t always have internet access (and therefore can’t update straight away) – so I solved that by making a printable (my first one ever, yay)! It’s on Dropbox, in three different colours, so if you want it, decide if you want it in purple, in green, or in grey. I’m going to be using it just because it saves me drawing out another table in my notebook. 😉

EuroTalk’s uTalk Challenge 2016.

Much like last year, the EuroTalk team are offering some free downloads – just head over to this link and sign up (name, email, and which of their 120+ offered languages you’d like to learn). Then you download the app and they’ll send you a code to unlock the ‘Essentials’ upgrade – and that’s it! The challenge is to learn all the words within the month – and the cool thing this year is that if you manage that, they’ll send you a code for another language for February; and then if you do it in February you’ll get a code for March and so on. I’m really hoping I can get the basics down in a few languages this way this year. Unfortunately, the app is currently only available for iOS, but if you’re using a different phone/tablet, they have said that if you send an email they’ll see what they can work out. They also have a hashtag: #uTalkChallenge, so if you’re a Twitter user, maybe get on that.

Tumblr Challenges

I’ve already spotted three different language challenges on tumblr so far for 2016 (so not counting the ones that run every week):

Speutschlish’s A Polyglot New Year 2016. This is a month-long challenge, with daily prompts. You can take part either by creating your own tumblr and using the tags, or by joining the Facebook group and taking part over there. A good thing about this challenge too is that people are encouraged to search for the tags plus their native language, so that they can correct and help with tasks too.

Lalalinguistic’s Language Study Challenge. This is a little simpler; it’s a challenge to study for a certain amount of time every day. I think this is a great challenge, though the minimum study time of one hour might be difficult, because I know I will definitely start slacking off by week two of January. Again, you take part through your tumblr blog and using the tags provided.

Af-hverju’s New Years Challenge. This is a little similar to Speutschlish’s in that there are daily prompts; but the prompts are already on the original post for you to have a look over right now! They’re mostly question prompts, but there are some more unusual ones on there (Jan 15: Write a poem.), and it looks like it’ll be fun. Again, use your tumblr and the tags to take part.

That’s all I could find for challenges this January – so again, if you know of any more, let me know! I’m surprised iTalki don’t seem to have a challenge listed (but then I delete a lot of their emails, so…) but we’ll see if lots of them pop up on the first.

I also found this article when searching for challenges, which might be useful if you’ve never done a challenge before or if you’ve found them difficult: How NOT to suck at language challenges.

Good luck everyone and I guess I’ll be back tomorrow with some goal setting and hints about my 2016 plans! 🙂