Student's plot

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Pull up a new tab, crack open your dictionaries and hold on to your glossaries, kids. ‘Cause it’s time for an August Polyglot Challenge!

If there’s one bane at the core of many a language learner’s existence, it’s vocabulary and how to learn it. Which is why this month we’re going to not just learn a manageable amount of new words, but become mini-experts on them.

Your Challenge: 

To choose 25 words at random from the dictionary in your target language to learn each week. Well, not entirely at random. Do some perusing. These words should stand out to you in some way, whether they be related to your interests, have a wickedly sweet pronunciation or cool letter combination, character or sign, or simply not be directly translateable into your native language. By the end of the month, you will have extensively learned 100 new vocabulary words that appeal to you in your target language.

How It Works:

Choose one language for the challenge to focus on throughout the entire month. If you want to choose your native language, go ahead. If you’re learning more than one language, consider doing the challenge for a different language next month. 

At the start of each week, use a dictionary to make your list of 25 words. Include part of speech, meaning, pronunciation notes or even IPA if you’d like. More information will be added to the list throughout the week.

Listen to the pronunciation of your words on an online dictionary or ask a native/proficient speaker to say them if possible. Discover the etymology of the words. Break the words down. Do they contain affixes? Are they obsolete, irregular, a staple of every speaker of that language’s basic vocabulary? Do they have multiple definitions? Find quotes or example sentences using the words. Expand your initial vocab list with the tidbits you learn throughout the week.

Write your own sentences using the vocabulary. If you’re a beginner in that language, you can write a description of the word in your native/proficient languages or write a bilingual sentence where you insert the word where it’s appropriate. Write at least one sentence for each vocabulary word. The more, the better.

At the end of each week, check to see how well you recall the words you’ve learned. You might consider writing out the words with their meanings by memory, playing a matching game with your words and their definitions, blurring out the word in your example sentences and filling in the blanks, quizzing yourself with flashcards or whatever you would usually do to make sure you know all the words you learned that week. Then choose your 25 words for the next week, take a deep breath, and repeat.

Langblrs are encouraged to:

Share the words you’ve learned with the langblr community so everyone can increase their vocabularies together. Share the resources you used, pictures of your notes, your struggles, frustrations and triumphant moments of learning your vocabulary, whatever you’d like. (:

Additional Rules:

This is an opportunity to learn neat, phenomenally beautiful words in your target language. Don’t settle for memorizing a list of basic vocabulary provided to you by your learning textbooks - YOU NEED TO MAKE UP YOUR OWN VOCABULARY LIST FROM SCRATCH. If you don’t have a print dictionary, use an online dictionary or Wikipedia to start. Cognates are considered cheating for obvious reasons (they’re hardly a challenge to learn) and are forbidden. 

Let the August Polyglot Challenge begin!

The Classics

Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here.

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

Textbooks

If you don’t absolutely need to pay for your textbooks, save yourself a few hundred dollars by reviewing these sites.

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

今日（2月22日）はねこの日！The reason is that the date is 22.2 →ににに, which is like a cat’s cry of にゃんにゃんにゃん. To celebrate this day, here is some cat vocabulary.

about knowledge :

au coeur de l’histoire (history)

les chasseurs de nazis (nazi hunters)

france musique 

on ne parle pas la bouche pleine (food + literature)

les chemins de la philosophie

le collège de france (advanced)

il était une fois (fairy tales)

la main verte (gardening)

la méthode scientifique

regardez voir (photography)

sur les épaules de darwin

very good trip (rock n roll)

chroniques du ciel (aviation)

la tête au carré (popularization)

les p’tits bateaux (pros answering children’s qs)

les grands musiciens (interview with a pro musician)

littérature moderne et contemporaine

about society :

arte radio (politics, health, history, tech…)

slate (similarish to ted talks)

hashtag (debating very current problems)

quoi de meuf (women talking about pop culture)

affaires sensibles (trials)

les gentilshommes (relationships men/women)

bouddhisme et méditation

kiffe ta race (about racial problematics)

le flow (well being)

sois gentille dis merci fais un bisou (portraits of women)

les couilles sur la table (men talking to women)

miroir miroir (destroy social norms)

du grain à moudre (debating sensible questions)

coucou le q (casual sex ed)

change ma vie (about personal growth)

la poudre (powerful women’s interviews)

nice to hear you (talks with creators, ceos, artists and nice humans)

mortel (to reconcile you with death and mortality)

la menstruelle (periods)

about movies and tech :

la cartouche (gaming)

la chronique ciné

studio 404 (tech)

geek inc (nerd chatter)

nouveau monde (innovations)

2h de perdues (shitty movies)

silence on joue (gaming)

radio rôliste (role playing, mmorpg)

nociné (pop culture/movies)

season one (to discover new shows)

12.01.18 🍓 revising some kanji in the lead up to the end of year jlpt n3, the book i’m using is from the 日本語チャレンジ series

it’s 23:59 as I’m writing this but anyway…

pieuvre - octopus

baleine - whale

méduse - jellyfish

poisson - fish

narwal - narwhal

dauphin - dolphin

seiche - cuttlefish

épaulard - orca

raie - stingray