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Language competitions


Jellyfish

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Those American spelling competitions always seemed weird to me :P

In Poland we have something called "dyktando": somebody reads a text aloud and people (children, most of the time, it can also be a test) are supposed to write it down correctly. It checks people's knowledge of ortography and interpunction.

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We have that in the Netherlands as well, we call it 'dictee'. Most often used in schools, but once a year, around Christmas time, some of the biggest newspapers together with a Dutch and a Belgian tv network organise one. It's written by a celebrity Dutch writer, usually with a very high difficulty. Half of the contestants are celebrities, the other half are 'normal people', who scored the highest in an initial test.

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We don't have spell competitions here in my country. There is no interest from the goverment to foment  any of the humanist subjects, in fact they are reducing the pedagogical hours little by little. So schools tend to aproach the scientific side more because math olympics and scientific fairs improve the subsidy the school gets.

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I won the grade 8 spelling bee. I even got to compete further in the provincials competition but bowed out on the word "battalion". Even in this thread people say it's a useless skill, but my proficiency garnered me a 25 dollar gift card for Chapters.

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When I was a child, we had  听写 or ting xie (dictation) during our Chinese language classes. The teacher would dictate a list of words (the characters would have been taught to pupils the week before, so everyone was expected to memorize them) to the pupils and we would have to write them down correctly. Any mistake would be a punishable offense!

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I actually wish that Sweden had that competitive spirit in school. Here 'everyone is a winner', and 'children should not compete against each other'. I would have loved to have competitions such as spelling bee's, etc.

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I actually wish that Sweden had that competitive spirit in school. Here 'everyone is a winner', and 'children should not compete against each other'. I would have loved to have competitions such as spelling bee's, etc.

Lol, that sounds exactly like the prejudices we all have from that country. Still one of my favourite places to live.

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  • 2 months later...

I don't believe we have nothing of the sort in Portugal, at least to my knowledge. Closest thing we have to a language competition would be some translation context, but those are mostly held at academia and college-level (though some may exist at high-school level).

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