Do the Challenges motivate you?

I join every German challenge that comes around, and over the last several months end up near the top. That said, I really don’t get much motivation from the challenges. My motivation usually comes from a compelling ebook or ebook/audiobook pair. (The book I’m currently reading on Lingq hasn’t been a favorite, and it shows.)
But I’m curious if others get meaningful motivation from challenges.

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I occasionally look at you ahead of me on the “Hard Core” German challenges and think “If he can do it then I probably need to keep plodding along - and every day”!
The way the statistical analysis is set up, you earn a pile of “coins” at the start of your language journey, and then it gets increasingly difficult to find Linqs or indeed to learn Linqs, so I do not take where I am in any league table very seriously.
Additionally, as you switch from “input” by reading and listening to more “output” activities by writing and speaking you seem to earn very little “credit” in “coinage” or otherwise. I write essays in German most weeks, and necessarily battle for hours to do my best on formulating them correctly. But it is of little consequence in any Linq challenge league table, although it is supremely important in my current language journey in German.
However, I console myself that you can look at your own personal tabulation each Saturday and see roughly whether you are “level pegging” with your previous week, and also whether you are “firing on all four cylinders” in terms of reading, listening, writing and speaking.
Remember that “upturned hockey stick”? Inching up an interminable slight incline, also known as the “intermediate plateau”, it probably does assist to know you are, just about, making progress on what cyclists call a “false flat”, even if it seems occasionally of the “one step forward, two steps back” variety.
Even with the Linq challenges trying to spark some motivational “competitiveness” I think we all need to remind ourselves occasionally that we are actually only in competition with ourselves, and certainly not with any other Linqers, who are also struggling ever so slowly up that incline.

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Maybe a small bump when it first starts, but when I quickly realize there’s no way I’ll even be in the top 10, I slow back down to normal =D.

I might try to leapfrog some folks in the vicinity of me, but most of the time, I end up with “real life” distractions getting in the way from being able to consistently push harder than my usual plodding.

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I did the one 90 day challenge in Russian. I was motivated at the beginning with the rankings then my motivation from the competitive aspect waned as I got slaughtered by the heavyweights. I had to satisfy myself with doing just enough to stay top of the slackers.

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I did participate and even won a few of them. Actually I still participate but I have to say that I’ve lost interest and in these days I can’t even push like I was in the previous weeks.

As @bembe said, the way these Challenges are made are not really balanced and the way words are counted right now is not really motivating (with all those fluctuations).

I’ve suggested to put a daily cap so to have a limit that people can reach and avoid those spikes from some users. After all is a 90 Day Challenge and not a 1 day 1 million coins!

But as already noticed, some actions get more coins than others and in the hard-core Challenges it doesn’t matter if a user doesn’t do all requirements, they still go up in the chart even if they do only one thing and get lots of coins from it.

As soon as you progress you have less known words to make (or less LingQs) and focus on other activities.

For all these reasons I don’t find them very motivating anymore and I’m not even sure if they help me progress or if they even are counterproductive. In fact, I was even thinking to not participate anymore.

I wish they could be more balanced and engaging though.

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“real life” distractions are very addictive. :smiley:

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As Steve Kaufmann has mentioned before (How to Learn a Language the LAZY Way - YouTube), don’t compare yourself with other people :slight_smile:

I always enroll in them but done really care where I finish. I use them as a way to gauge my progress by the number of challenges I’ve completed.

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I really liked the individual goals of the hardcore challenges, but after a time it required an odd behavior of making LingQs that I did not need.

In the beginning I felt they were very helpful, because despite being labelled “hardcore”, they correlated to reasonable daily goals that resulted in meaningful progress.

At that time I had no idea how much time to even try to invest, the only idea I had was “read”. Seeing that I “should” be listening a half hour a day was a nudge in the right direction.

The non-hardcore challenges are “fine”. I would not describe them as important to me, but I will keep entering them because I like seeing others that are actively engaged in the same L2s as I am.

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Motivation, it seems to me, is in the eye of the beholder. My spouse has a very competitive spirt and loves to be at the top of leader-boards and challenges. Me, I don’t care to compete with others and get no joy from being at the top. I am motivated based on my own standards and challenges. My spouse loves to “game-ify” learning whereas I hate it. I like the raw, brutal, nitty-gritty, deep learning and consider games a waste of time.

My suggestion is to try lots of different strategies, find what motivates you and chase that ‘rabbit’ as fast as you can while dismissing all the other strategies.

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Pleaaase let me know where can I find the challenges? I just signed up

@kalliatrian You can find them under the Community > Challenges.

I get some motivation from the challenges, but I often find that the targets are fairly arbitrary and do not match my priorities in the languages I study.

For example, in the hardcore challenge I have to listen ~30minutes a day on LingQ on average to finish it. As my priority in Greek is mostly the ancient form, listening is generally prioritized less and I have a hard time reaching the 45 hours. On the other hand, the other targets are way too easy for me and are often reached within 1-2 weeks (rather than the 90 days) if I study moderate amounts (maybe 4-5hrs a week) on LingQ.

Competing with others on the coin amounts is usually more motivating, but there’s often very little competition over 90 days, especially on smaller languages.

I personally would love to see different challenge forms such as “90 day reading challenge”, “90 day listening challenge” etc etc so that it is possible to compete not just on coins, but also on words read, lingqs learned, listening hours etc. I also wouldnt mind seeing challenges be non-language-specific so that I am competing against more than 2-3 people (at most)

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Yes, it would be nice to have an overall Challenge with everybody. But only if they fix a daily cap so to avoid any kind of abuse or glitch.
The problem with a listening challenge is that you don’t get coins for things that you do outside the app which at some point is where the listening is really happening.

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You could fix that by having the challenge be specific to ‘hours listened’ rather than coins. Then we can just add in the hours listened outside the app manually to our profiles. Ofcourse its not always reasonable to directly compare hours, but I think it would be a lot more meaningful than points

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With regard to listening hours: It might seem reasonable to enter listening (or even reading/writing/speaking) hours from outside the app, but if external activities were credited toward challenges there would undoubtably be rampant cheating.

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Definitely! I always love a challenge. Motivates me sometimes. Keeps you going and adds just enough pressure to want to do well

Challenges always motivate me - but it’s more about my actual interest in the topic. For example, if I’m reading a book in a different language, I want it to be a genre that interests me. Motivation comes from many different aspects for sure.

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Yeah, I agree. The challenges can be motivating, but at the current way they are set up they are not ‘fair’. Like listening is undervalued, while high frequency vocabulary LingQing when someone first joins LingQ is overvalued. I think this needs to be looked into. The person who can win these challenges can be someone who joins LingQ, already knowing the language, and just mark thousands upon thousands of new words as known. This ‘unfairness’ really reduces the willingness and desire to even try in the challenges.

The challenges need to depend on effort. For instance, just as there’s a Monthly LingQing Challenge for all languages, maybe there should be a Monthly Listening Challenge for all languages and a Monthly Reading Challenge for all languages. This should only include listening and reading done on LingQ, not incuding activity added from outside LingQ.

What do others think?

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Yes, to a degree, generally just at the beginning. But that motivation would fade in a week or so. Be it that the challenge is not as " challenging" as I expected. So you need more than motivation to complete a challenge. That’s why I changed tactics. For example, I set my own goals before joining a challenge, then I consider a challenge as going to the library, where I would be surrounded by people reading, doing their homework or whatever they are doing, which can get me a little more motivated.

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