After receiving so much positive feedback from people saying they’d love to join me in my latest quest to improve my speaking, I’ve decided to create an official langblr challenge: #SpeakingIn20
Background: I’ve always neglected my speaking skills in Norwegian, and I decided that for the remainder of the year I want to try to do 10 minutes dedicated speaking practice 6 days a week, clocking a total of an hour a week, and thus have 20 hours under my belt by the end of the year. I recorded an intro with the intention of rerecording a similar intro at the end of the year and seeing how much I’ve improved in that time.
Because this was born from the goal of using the last 20 weeks of 2019 to do 20 hours of dedicated speaking practice, so that in 2020 I’ll actually feel like I can speak Norwegian to some (small) degree, I felt like #SpeakingIn20 worked!
The goal of this challenge is to get in a set amount of speaking practice every week, and see how much you’ve improved by the end of the year.
The Rules Guidelines Of This Challenge Are:
Start by picking a challenge level:
Chill - do the challenge 1-2 days a week
Medium - do the challenge 3-4 days a week
Hardcore - do the challenge 5-7 days a week
Pick a time goal for each day. (Eg 2 mins, 5 mins, 10 mins etc - this is totally up to you!)). You’re going to try to speak for that amount of time every day you do the challenge! Note: you don’t have to do it all in one go - if you can’t talk for 5 minutes straight, it’s okay to break it down into 5x1 minute sessions.
Record a little introduction. You don’t have to share it with tumblr if you’re too self-conscious; you just want to have a record of your starting point, so you have something to compare to at the end of the year. It can be as long or as short as you like!
You can talk about whatever you want, however I will be posting prompts at the start of every week and will keep a masterpost with all the previous prompts, so if you get stuck you can look to that for inspiration. [Update: I only ended up posting up to week 12, but feel free to go back and reuse prompts you previously skipped over or found difficult!]
You can use notes if you want (eg vocab lists, things you want to mention, other visual prompts), but try to avoid just reading out something you’ve pre-written if possible. (It’s totally okay to write something out to start with so you can get an idea of holes in your vocab, just condense it down to notes before you try speaking!) Do what you want! If you want to read aloud or have a script, then do that! Just make a note so that you know for future reference and can make a fair comparison of your skills now vs in a few weeks/months.
You can also do pronunciation drills such as repeating words you find difficult, practising tongue twisters, reciting the alphabet etc.
Record yourself speaking if possible. Again, you don’t have to upload anything if you don’t want to - you can just post about how you’re getting on - but you can if that helps to keep you accountable! Once you’re done, make sure you listen back to your recording and make a note of what you did well and what you need to work on still.
Use the hashtag #SpeakingIn20 so we can find each other. You can also hashtag with the level you’re doing and the language you’re learning like so: eg #SpeakingIn20Chill #SpeakingIn20German etc
If you want to do multiple languages, go for it! Just try to be consistent with what you do (ie don’t start skipping out on one language)
Anyone can join at any time! So if you miss the start now, or if you fall off the wagon, you can still (re)join later
Please reblog and spread the word! Speaking’s so difficult, it’d be awesome to have as many of us as possible cheering each other on!
