Gamification of your Chinese learning

[OneEye]

Not sure how to reward myself for 20 mins vocab work. Hearty self-pat on the back?

 

I've been using HabitRPG lately, and it's proven pretty effective. I have all kinds of tasks in there, from stuff that I have to do on a daily basis to stay on track at school, to exercise, to Anki decks. You can add in your own rewards that you can "buy" with the gold points you earn, but I haven't found it necessary so far. Just building up my character's stats has been enough for me. Then again, I grew up playing RPGs, so I already knew it would probably be fairly addicting, and it hasn't disappointed so far.

This topic and the next few posts were split off from here.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I'm totally new to this but this looks fun!

Do you find privacy an issue? I guess sometimes you need to insert quite personal information. Logging in via Facebook would be stupid, right? (I have no idea - honest question)

[OneEye]

It is fun. It seems ridiculous to care about a little pixelated dude on a screen, especially when there's no story or actual gameplay involved. But It's fun upgrading him with new weapons and armor, and when his health gets low I really do work hard to get as many things done as possible so that he levels up and has his health restored. I haven't died yet, and I've gotten a lot more done in the past few weeks than I probably would have without the game, because I'm faced every morning with what I didn't get done the day before.

 

Anyway, I never log into anything via Facebook. I don't trust it.

 

I guess HabitRPG has some social media aspects, but I don't use them. Everything on my list is harmless, anyway, so I'm not really worried about privacy issues.

[realmayo]

Wow that's very cool! 

[roddy]

Topic split.

Similar things I can think of are, on perhaps the simplest level possible, Don't break the chain, which is entirely unsocial. Imron I think has used this a lot. I've tried to, but tend to forget to update the site.

Bloom is a similar idea - tell it what things you should be doing regularly, and it'll remind you to do them and reward you with...er... pretty pictures.

It's quite easy to pour scorn on these things - "if you want to do it, why not just do it?". These people have obviously never had to hide an alarm clock from themselves to make sure they get up in the morning. Or promised themselves a slice of cake if they eat healthy all week.

[realmayo]

I've been tempted to buy clocky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clocky for years. I'm clearly a candidate for HabitRPG. Will report back on how I get on.

[roddy]

This might also qualify - commit yourself to doing something for 100 days, and update on your progress with very short videos. 

 

Isn't there also some website where you make a public commitment to, eg, donate $500 to charity if you don't study Chinese every day for three months?

[Lu]

 

Isn't there also some website where you make a public commitment to, eg, donate $500 to charity if you don't study Chinese every day for three months?

I heard about a website like that, with the charity being something you would really, really, really prefer not to give money to, so that it really is a punishment. But I don't know the name of the site.

 

And how pointless to pour scorn on such things. Pats on the back are free and very motivating, and if you don't have someone on hand to give them out to you, why not get a website to do it? The website I use (getyedone.com, similar to the ones mentioned above but more basic) comes with bugles and flags when I accomplish something, what's not to like.

[tysond]

www.beeminder.com is quite good for these kind of things.