5 Thoughts On My 1st Attempt at the 30-Day Speaking Challenge
You may have noticed that I spent the month of December participating in Huggins International’s 30-Day Speaking Challenge for Indonesian (my first post/video in the series is here, and the full archive is here). Basically, I recorded myself speaking Indonesian for 5–10 minutes a day for thirty days (on average… there were a few gaps I had to make up for), based on daily prompts sent to us by the organizer. It was a very helpful exercise and I learned a lot from it.
Here are a few thoughts I have on how the challenge went.
1. My Indonesian was at just the right level for this challenge
When I first heard of the “30-day Speaking Challenge” in mid-November, I had planned to do it in Hokkien, a.k.a. Taiwanese or Southern Min. At the time, I’d been working on the language for about a month using recordings from Glossika, similar to the ones I had previously used for Wenzhounese. The fact that it was a Chinese dialect probably made me over-estimate my ability to speak the language early on, but after some consideration I quickly realized I didn’t have enough active vocabulary in Hokkien to talk about interesting topics every day for a whole month. (I’ll have more to say about Hokkien in a later post.)
Fortunately, I had a readily available Plan B which turned out to be perfect for this situation — Indonesian.
I’ve been interested in Indonesian (and Malay) for a couple of years now — after all, I even gave my blog a pseudo-Indonesian(/Sanskrit) name. The mix of Sanskritic and Islamic influences in Indonesian reminds me a bit of Hindi-Urdu (another fave of mine) while also being totally different; the fact that the entire country is a whole bunch of islands appeals to the cartography nerd in me; and I find the sociolinguistic situation of Indonesian to be very intriguing —it’s the lingua franca of a large multi-ethnic country, but it’s also developed a highly distinct colloquial variant, and has a complicated relationship with other regional languages like Javanese… not to mention that the same language is also basically spoken next door in Malaysia.
In fact, I had been learning Hokkien at the same time as Indonesian because of its Southeast Asian connection — Hokkien is one of the main Chinese dialects of Indonesia and Malaysia (along with Hakka and Cantonese) and has even left a noticeable mark on colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (e.g. in pronouns and money terms, etc.).
At the same time, I really hadn’t had many opportunities to practice Indonesian in real life, so my progress had started to plateau a bit. I only run into Indonesian/Malay speakers at language events (or elsewhere) a few times a year on average, so most of my non-textbook exposure so far had just been from reading/listening to material online.
I had a decent grasp of the grammar of Indonesian and knew a good amount of vocabulary, enough that I’d say I was somewhere between A2 and B1 before I started the challenge. All I needed was a reason to use that knowledge to actively produce interesting sentences on a regular basis… and the 30-Day Speaking Challenge was exactly that.
2. The challenge reversed my usual language-study priorities, with interesting results
For the most part, I’d say I’m very much a “reading-first” language learner. I’m a big fan of language in its written form (or forms, I guess), and my primary goal when I first start learning a language is usually to be able to read stuff written in that language, whether it’s news articles, literature, social media shit-posting, or street signs. Once I’m able to read at around an intermediate level, I start listening to more stuff in the language as well. Speaking generally comes naturally as a result of exposure over time (there’s the comprehensible input hypothesis again…), and isn’t something that I really prioritize unless I need to travel somewhere soon.
On the other hand, the 30-Day Speaking Challenge was obviously all about speaking. And considering how rarely I actually get to speak Indonesian in real life, this practice was absolutely necessary.
The goal of becoming better at speaking Indonesian shaped my language studies for the entire month. I made sure to pay extra attention to various useful phrases and sentence constructions as I encountered them (e.g. “not only… but also”, “not… but rather”, “actually”, “especially” etc. etc.) and to keep more frequently-used terms in my active, productive memory instead of just being able to passively understand them.
Making daily videos also forced me to diversify my Indonesian media consumption to include more examples of natural speech for me to imitate. Before, I had mostly relied on two sources for Indonesian listening practice: 1) music and 2) VOA Indonesia’s daily news broadcasts. Neither of these were particularly good examples of day-to-day conversation, so I had to start scouring YouTube for more conversational content.
Indonesia is a huge country with a decent level of internet connectivity, so online Indonesian content wasn’t hard to find at all. There are lots of Indonesian-language YouTubers: comedians, gamers, makeup artists, travel vloggers, expats who speak Indonesian, and so on, so there was plenty to choose from. I tried to copy how they introduced and ended their videos, and how they spoke to the audience, but at the same time I avoided using super-colloquial speech like many of them did. Colloquial Indonesian often feels like a separate language of its own (a lot of its basic vocabulary, and even some grammar, is entirely different), and I decided to focus more on the standard language for this month.
The one channel that was most useful for me didn’t belong to a YouTuber, though — it was the video archives of CNN Indonesia, especially the longer feature segments. (What can I say? I like the news, it’s why I got a degree in journalism….) Compared to VOA Indonesia’s news broadcasts, these videos tended to have much more of a natural, conversational feel to them (especially with interviews, panels, and morning programs), while also sticking to the standard language with minimal colloquial influence — basically the exact register I was aiming for in my daily videos. (I also ended up learning lots of random stuff about Indonesian politics because of this.)
Two times in December, I also got to speak a bit Indonesian in real life — once with a Indonesian learner at a language exchange event, and once with a native speaker at a tech networking thing. I don’t think these encounters would have gone quite as well if I hadn’t been practicing on a daily basis beforehand.
3. Even without much feedback, the opportunity for self-evaluation was very helpful
The first time I submitted my recording to the Huggins International tracking system, I actually had to ask the organizer to add Indonesian to the language list on the submission form. I guess that means I was the first person to ever do the Huggins International 30-Day Challenge in Indonesian! (December was the 9th edition of the challenge, which started in March 2017.)
That was kind of cool, but also meant that there wasn’t really anyone around to give me feedback for my videos. A few people offered help, and I got some general feedback on the lines of “you’re doing well!” which was encouraging if not particularly informative.
And I was fine with that. I’m honestly kind of glad no one bothered to watch me butcher their language in the first handful of videos I did, before I started to really get the hang of things.
For the first six days (the last one is here, for example), I made an effort to review each recording and then transcribe and annotate it, making note of mistakes and vocabulary issues as I went. This was helpful early on, but also turned out to be way too time-consuming, so I stopped doing it after the first week. (I think the in-depth annotations also became a bit less necessary as I got more accustomed to speaking the language every day.)
Although I stopped doing the transcriptions and annotations, I did make sure to continue keeping notes during the recordings themselves, and then reviewing those notes later. (You can see me taking these notes in each of the videos, which have simultaneous recordings from my screen and my webcam.) This was a lot more efficient and probably the type of review that I needed the most.
4. Obviously, I did lots of additional studying as well
I definitely think the Speaking Challenge helped me improve my Indonesian a lot. But if I was a scientist trying to quantify the net benefit I got from participating in the Speaking Challenge, I’d have to account for a huge confounding factor: I was also serving on a grand jury in Queens for the entire month of December!
The law says I can’t disclose much about what went down in the grand jury itself (especially not online!) but here are a few ways it impacted my language-study routine:
- My commute (from home to court instead of from home to work) was longer than usual, giving me an extra thirty minutes of reading-my-iPad-on-the-subway time per day
- There was a lot of down time during the day between cases, which meant even more time for language study — at least a whole hour per day
This extra time allowed me to get through a lot of Indonesian study material in December, including a Russian Malaysian textbook I was halfway through when the month began, two second-year Indonesian textbooks published in Australia, plus the first several chapters of an advanced reader that I’m still working on. I also mixed in a bit of reading from other books on Indonesian idioms, colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (almost a different language), Javanese (actually a different language), and a history book too.
So it’s pretty likely that my Indonesian would’ve taken a big step forward in December just because of the extra time jury duty gave me — but the added focus that the Speaking Challenge gave me helped me make better use of that time as well.
5. I’ll definitely try this again in 2018
I’ll be traveling at the end of January and early February, which doesn’t work well with the schedule of the 30-Day Challenge, so I won’t be trying this again until March at the earliest. But based on my experience this past month, I’d definitely be interested in doing it again — maybe in Indonesian again (another Indonesian-learner signed up for January so there might be more of a learning community next time), or maybe Slovak or Hungarian for the Polyglot Gathering in June, or maybe Hindi-Urdu just because I think it would be fun to do… or maybe I’ll finally get good enough to do it in Hokkien like I wanted to all along.
There are also a few other websites that organize “30-Day Language Challenges” besides Huggins International— the Eurolinguiste blog has one, and so does Mango Languages. These seem to be a bit more elaborate, with day-by-day schedules requiring you do a bit more than just “record a video” — the tasks include things like “make a social media post” or “have a Skype call” which sound like they might be more fun, but also more work. I might consider doing one of these as well, and in any case I’ve got at least a month before I have to decide!
