2015 New Years Language Challenge Wrap-Up!

2015 New Year’s Language Challenge Wrap-Up! What a great way to welcome the New Year with the completion of the italki 2015 New Year’s Language Challenge! The Challenge was to complete 20 hours of language lessons on italki in 6 weeks (from January 15th to February 28th) to win a reward of 400ITC! (Click here for the Official rules) Challenge Recap! We did an analysis of this Challenge and it was similar to our previous Challenges (2014 October Challenge, 2014 World Cup Challenge, 2014 New Year’s Challenge). For this year: 48% of Challengers completed the Challenge! We had Challengers came from all over the world (representing 66 countries). These were the top 5 countries participating: 1. United States 2. United Kingdom 3. Russian Federation 4. Spain 5. Canada Wow! We had over 49 languages that were learned in the Language Challenge. The 5 most popular languages that our Challengers were learning were: 1. English 2. Spanish 3. French 4. Chinese 5. Italian We also had a lot of much greater representation from our less popular languages like: ? Armenian ? Bengali ? Esperanto ? Galician ? Icelandic ? Lao ? Mongolian ? Punjabi ? Tamil ? Telugu ? Urdu ? Zhuang Other interesting tidbits: ? 71% of Challengers who submitted a Public Video Pledge completed the Challenge. Compared to the 48% that finished from all the Challengers, this really helps! ? One hardcore challenge winner completed over 100+ hours (and you know who you are). This is doing more than 2 hours of language lessons a day! Wow! ? 11.5% of our challengers were also Community Tutors or Professional Teachers on italki so many of them were not only learning but teaching during the challenge! ? 3.9% of the challengers just missed winning by 1 hour or less. Ouch. ? Planning ahead pays off! In one of our surveys, 82% of successful Challengers had already chosen a teacher (or teachers) before getting started.   They were also twice as likely to have considered their Challenge goal and mini-goals. ? Confidence is not enough. Of Challengers who told us their confidence levels, those who did not finish the language challenge were just as confident as those who did!   Plan ahead to create a structure and study habits to help you commit. ? Josie, Karthik and Aime our italki staff completed the Challenge and really improved their Chinese. They all won the reward but their bigger prize was that was they got to keep their jobs (just kidding)! Again, while it’s great that 48% of you that finished the New Year’s Challenge! We wanted congratulate all the challengers who participated. Even if you didn’t finish, we hope that this was a positive experience and it helped you kickstart your language learning for 2015! Give yourselves a big pat on the back! If you missed this Challenge, don’t worry as we’ll have future Language Challenges. See you at the next Challenge! 2015 New Year’s Language Challenge Wrap-Up! What a great way to welcome the New Year with the completion of the italki 2015 New Year’s Language Challenge! The Challenge was to complete 20 hours of language lessons on italki in 6 weeks (from January 15th to February 28th) to win a reward of 400ITC! (Click here for the Official rules) Challenge Recap! We did an analysis of this Challenge and it was similar to our previous Challenges (2014 October Challenge, 2014 World Cup Challenge, 2014 New Year’s Challenge). For this year: 48% of Challengers completed the Challenge! We had Challengers came from all over the world (representing 66 countries). These were the top 5 countries participating: 1. United States 2. United Kingdom 3. Russian Federation 4. Spain 5. Canada Wow! We had over 49 languages that were learned in the Language Challenge. The 5 most popular languages that our Challengers were learning were: 1. English 2. Spanish 3. French 4. Chinese 5. Italian We also had a lot of much greater representation from our less popular languages like: ? Armenian ? Bengali ? Esperanto ? Galician ? Icelandic ? Lao ? Mongolian ? Punjabi ? Tamil ? Telugu ? Urdu ? Zhuang Other interesting tidbits: ? 71% of Challengers who submitted a Public Video Pledge completed the Challenge. Compared to the 48% that finished from all the Challengers, this really helps! ? One hardcore challenge winner completed over 100+ hours (and you know who you are). This is doing more than 2 hours of language lessons a day! Wow! ? 11.5% of our challengers were also Community Tutors or Professional Teachers on italki so many of them were not only learning but teaching during the challenge! ? 3.9% of the challengers just missed winning by 1 hour or less. Ouch. ? Planning ahead pays off! In one of our surveys, 82% of successful Challengers had already chosen a teacher (or teachers) before getting started.   They were also twice as likely to have considered their Challenge goal and mini-goals. ? Confidence is not enough. Of Challengers who told us their confidence levels, those who did not finish the language challenge were just as confident as those who did!   Plan ahead to create a structure and study habits to help you commit. ? Josie, Karthik and Aime our italki staff completed the Challenge and really improved their Chinese. They all won the reward but their bigger prize was that was they got to keep their jobs (just kidding)! Again, while it’s great that 48% of you that finished the New Year’s Challenge! We wanted congratulate all the challengers who participated. Even if you didn’t finish, we hope that this was a positive experience and it helped you kickstart your language learning for 2015! Give yourselves a big pat on the back! If you missed this Challenge, don’t worry as we’ll have future Language Challenges. See you at the next Challenge! 2015 New Year’s Language Challenge Wrap-Up! What a great way to welcome the New Year with the completion of the italki 2015 New Year’s Language Challenge! The Challenge was to complete 20 hours of language lessons on italki in 6 weeks (from January 15th to February 28th) to win a reward of 400ITC! (Click here for the Official rules) Challenge Recap! We did an analysis of this Challenge and it was similar to our previous Challenges (2014 October Challenge, 2014 World Cup Challenge, 2014 New Year’s Challenge). For this year: 48% of Challengers completed the Challenge! We had Challengers came from all over the world (representing 66 countries). These were the top 5 countries participating: 1. United States 2. United Kingdom 3. Russian Federation 4. Spain 5. Canada Wow! We had over 49 languages that were learned in the Language Challenge. The 5 most popular languages that our Challengers were learning were: 1. English 2. Spanish 3. French 4. Chinese 5. Italian We also had a lot of much greater representation from our less popular languages like: ? Armenian ? Bengali ? Esperanto ? Galician ? Icelandic ? Lao ? Mongolian ? Punjabi ? Tamil ? Telugu ? Urdu ? Zhuang Other interesting tidbits: ? 71% of Challengers who submitted a Public Video Pledge completed the Challenge. Compared to the 48% that finished from all the Challengers, this really helps! ? One hardcore challenge winner completed over 100+ hours (and you know who you are). This is doing more than 2 hours of language lessons a day! Wow! ? 11.5% of our challengers were also Community Tutors or Professional Teachers on italki so many of them were not only learning but teaching during the challenge! ? 3.9% of the challengers just missed winning by 1 hour or less. Ouch. ? Planning ahead pays off! In one of our surveys, 82% of successful Challengers had already chosen a teacher (or teachers) before getting started.   They were also twice as likely to have considered their Challenge goal and mini-goals. ? Confidence is not enough. Of Challengers who told us their confidence levels, those who did not finish the language challenge were just as confident as those who did!   Plan ahead to create a structure and study habits to help you commit. ? Josie, Karthik and Aime our italki staff completed the Challenge and really improved their Chinese. They all won the reward but their bigger prize was that was they got to keep their jobs (just kidding)! Again, while it’s great that 48% of you that finished the New Year’s Challenge! We wanted congratulate all the challengers who participated. Even if you didn’t finish, we hope that this was a positive experience and it helped you kickstart your language learning for 2015! Give yourselves a big pat on the back! If you missed this Challenge, don’t worry as we’ll have future Language Challenges. See you at the next Challenge!