New Year Challenges – January 2015

Alrighty, so we’re here on the last day of 2014 and I’ve got a blog post for you! I’m going to do some goal-setting tomorrow but for today, I thought I’d compile a list of all the language challenges I’ve found that are taking place or starting in January 2015. Just a little something for you all to consider! 😉

The folks over at Memrise are running a challenge where whoever learns the most new words of any language in January will win $1,000! There’s also some prizes for the runners-up, including t-shirts for the top 50 people. Make sure to get planting and watering! You can read more about this contest here.

There might be no prizes for this one, but the Tadoku challenge, which runs several times throughout the year, begins tomorrow and ends 31st January. There’s a twitterbot; you just let it know which languages you’re going to read in and then use it to keep track of the number of pages you’ve read. There’s also another method of keeping track on the website. How many books do you think you’ll get through? You can read more about Tadoku here.

iTalki have also set up a January challenge: this one does cost you 100ITC to sign up to, but all you have to do is take 20 hours worth of lessons during January and then you get 400ITC left. If you’re using iTalki a lot, this definitely seems like a worthwhile investment to get you some more money for lessons! You can read more about the iTalki language challenge here.

Lindsay over at Lindsay Does Languages has set up her own challenge that I think will run all year – it’s an Instagram challenge too, which looks fun! She gives a list of prompts and each day, you find a way to interpret the prompt in the language you’re learning. (Use the hashtag #IGLC if you’re taking part.) You can read more about this challenge and get the prompts over at her blog.

On tumblr, a post by user speutschlish (also on wordpress, I found) has been making the rounds called ‘A polyglot New Year’. Every day for the month of January, speutschlish is going to post ‘a language-related prompt to get you listening, reading, writing or speaking in your target language(s).’ This sounds like a lot of fun and you don’t even need to have a tumblr account to take part – you can use the hashtag #APNY2015 on tumblr, wordpress or facebook. You can read the post about the challenge here in English or here in Spanish.

And finally, the challenge I’ve been talking about a lot: the uTalk challenge begins tomorrow! You can see my previous posts on the subject, but the aim is to use the uTalk app in a new language as much as possible during January. If you sign up and email the EuroTalk team, they’ll send you a code for a free premium package of whichever language you want to learn and you can get started tomorrow with the rest of us. You can read more about the challenge on the EuroTalk blog here.

Phew, that’s a lot. Let me know if you’re thinking of doing any of these challenges – it might be ill advised, but I’m taking on a handful myself! Aaaaaaand of course, Happy New Year to everyone!

Guten Rutsch! / 新年快乐！/ Feliz Año Nuevo! 😀