itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

i am learning welsh obviously (plus brushing up french)

the welsh is going badly -- french is telling me i am 24% fluent, which is a fib imo

should I install this and see how bad my German has become, y/n

(I'm already downloading it)

Duolingo is a great way to absorb language basics and grammar rules, but once you have that stuff down and are in the mode of adding vocabulary I found it kind of inefficient.

xp You will learn many duck-related German sentences ime

i have been surprised how much french i still know in terms of vocab: my grammar was and is terrible

polyphonic otm, I finished the French tree and have never gone back, currently use Memrise (and used Lingvist until I ran out of words) to build vocab

in welsh i have discovered nothing about ducks but i have encountered a DRAGON (draig)

I completed the Japanese Duolingo and it is good for absorbing things by wrote but I grew frustrated with never having any of the grammar explained to me. It’s provided a good base.

There’s some more discussion of Duolingo

Do You Speak A Second Language?
日本語は話せます 🇯🇵

pimsleur >> duolingo

well but Duolingo is free

honestly DL is more like a fun app that helps you read stuff in a foreign language

huh 46% fluent

not bad I guess

Was going to say, however tell me more about why pimsleur is good? Everything else I have been trying has been lower cost but really falls down on getting me to speak. I’d pay for some live interaction.

I used to be fluent in Portuguese but haven't used in 20 years - wonder if this could get me back on my bullshit.

Duolingo fluency shield suffers from grade inflation especially when you are progressing through, say, the first third of the course or have just taken the placement test. At some points if starts to drop off and decay and you may regret giving into your ex-clever schoolboy’s craving for this particular form of external gratification.

Think last word should have been "validation."

whenever i type "nos lau" (thursday night) it tells me i have a typo and that the correct spelling is "nos lau"

Did you type a lower case “el” (wrong) or a capital “eye” (correct)?

oh right that makes sense yes

That was really it?

Some of the answers in some of the courses are messed up so that it will tell you about an alternate answer or typo which seems to be dependent on some punctuation, or even some other “invisible punctuation.” There seem to even be cases where it is supposed to accept some letters from say, a standard English alphabet, without certain diacritical and just tell you to “mind the accents” but it gets into some looking glass world where it doesn’t accept the correct foreign alphabet letter. Feel like I️ saw this happen in Turkish, with the non-dotted i, the ı.

i haven't gone back in and checked but yes, it's quite likely tha:, since i realised when i read yr post that i was listening to DL's pronunciation of Iau and thinking "wow the initial i sound in front of those vowels is really like an L isn't it?" -- based on assuming my grasp of welsh pronunciation is actually worse than it is

(the pronunciation i learnt as a kid IS different to the version they're using: spoken welsh has surprisingly strong regional variation: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/13474058/Dialects-much-more-than-a-simple-north-south-divide)

(but it's not really the consonants that vary)

Ah, some weird keyboard autocorrect is now putting something strange when I type the letter capital “eye” I.

Speaking of which, at some point iOS seems to have added a Welsh keyboard, which may um, assist you in your answers.

"wow the initial i sound in front of those vowels is really like an L isn't it?"

or maybe the other way round, anyway i was struck by how different their pronunciation was than mine would be -- which is because i was misreading the letter

Sometimes wonder if the Welsh as taught is just some sort of approximation standard that is in fact spoken by no one at all, like Bokmål/Nynorsk, I️ think.

How is your pronunciation of the letter double el?

Ach, still the weird “ego problem” or “ego trip” with the capital eye. Think I️ need to delete my autocorrect dictionary.

Tom, delete ILX all my bookmarks my autocorrect dictionary now!

Ah, that didn’t seem to work. I’m stymied.

my double ll pronunciation is p good i think! the nearest large town to where we went on family holidays when i was a kid is machynlleth and i know how ppl who live in it say it

this was before welsh was actually taught in schools -- indeed, it was actively discouraged in schools back then, and i know someone who was made to leave school at 16 because he preferred to speak welsh (as did his entire family, of hill farmers)

(he became a mechanic and a builder, and is now very comfortably off and owns half the town)

Ah. I have never been in the presence of a Welsh speaker as far as I know, apart from John Cale at an instore.

I against I against I

(Had to chose the *RONG* spelling for each of those eyes to get the correct one)

Seems to me the pronunciation of Welsh, especially the “ll,” involves a lot more spittle than, say, English.

At one point I was having some problems with the days of the week with when to put the word for day in there, such as “dydd Iau.” Seem to have sorted it, can’t remember what the problem really was.

The other thing to remember of course about the “i” is that the word for Thursday starts with j for Jupiter-or Jove! do u see?! in most Romance languages.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/14295031/Dydd-Mercher-a-Dydd-Iau

yes i haven't worked out when not to use Dydd yet!

(tho i also haven't yet been marked wrong on either, and have been assuming -- perhaps wrongly -- that they are effectively interchangeable, at least in this limited context)

ooh handy steer on the root of the day names, i'd spotted they were "a bit like French" but hadn't taken it any further

To throw a spanner in your welsh works - Memrise has a course in Belter Cant.

Sut mae, Marc? Sut dych chi?

Dych chi eisiau coffi?

Learning Dutch thru this atm and I like it.

Hartelijk gefeliciteerd!

Both the Dutch and Welsh courses have been spruced up in the past few months, so you guys are on the cutting edge.

/too much time on Duolingo

"The grapheme k was also used more commonly than in the modern alphabet, particularly before front vowels.[3] The disuse of this letter is at least partly due to the publication of William Morgan's Welsh Bible, whose English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough k letters in their type cases to spell every /k/ sound as k, so the order went "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth";[5] this was not liked at the time, but has become standard usage."

"why doesn't welsh have the letter k?"
"we ran out that one time and never restocked"

grrrr i am just as bad now at grammatical gender in french as i was aged 13: le cheval but la souris whyyyyyyyyyyyy pourquooooooiii

some rules and patterns here (but of course no clue why le cheval but la souris):
http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/grammar/le_or_la_in_french.shtml

my devoted year+ on duolingo french got me enough of the basics that I was able to get a civil servant job in France where I speak French full time. it helped that I was living in France most of that time and that I'd already spent a lot of time reading french (or trying to, with much dictionary use) and that I already spoke Spanish pretty well (son of a native speaker but didn't grow up speaking it, only learned it in school). so I am yay duolingo!

I spent some time on the japanese tree earlier this year as I learn that language next but I'm going to need more than just duolingo to do it because I don't have a great sense of the grammar whereas learning a second romance language, I already grokked the main structures, what I really needed was enough confidence in applying those structures to go ahead and speak it irl.

although I think the japanese accent is easier than the french accent, so duolingo may be ok in that regard (japanese mostly sounds like it looks, unlike french)

I'm doing German which I'm already sorta conversational in as my Dad is from there. I wasn't raised speaking it though and what I do know is only what I've picked up listening to him speak with friends and relatives and the times that I've spent there. I'm really enjoying it so far though and am excited to improve :).

i just discovered the chats-with-bots feature (after several days of just ignoring the you-have-mail signal): i like that it goes "excellent response!" after what is (in another, more accurate sense) a pretty basic not-actually-rude response

I spent some time on the japanese tree earlier this year as I learn that language next but I'm going to need more than just duolingo to do it because I don't have a great sense of the grammar whereas learning a second romance language, I already grokked the main structures, what I really needed was enough confidence in applying those structures to go ahead and speak it irl.

I can recommend the ‘Human Japanese’ App for this.

currently working on:

FRENCH
WELSH (beginners' stage): the language of the holidays of my youth
NORWEGIAN (beginners' stage): many of the student helps in the school i grew up in were norwegian
VIETNAMESE (barely even beginners' stage)*: significant enclave of vietnamese live in my part of hackney

*I am finding Vietnamese very hard to be honest, I am not sure I have securely remembered a single word yet. I mostly do it last thing at night, when I would otherwise be playing some stupid free game on my phone, so I am often quite sleepy.

mark, here is an entertaining article about Lydia Davies' endeavour to teach herself Norwegian using one long "boring" novel and no translation dictionary (caveat: Davis is a translator who already speaks three languages and knows her limited way around a couple of others)

http://lithub.com/lydia-davis-at-the-end-of-the-world/

Davis, rather

i tried to take welsh my first year of college. I got a big F in that.

i should use duolingo to brush up on German though which i took for years and years. but my issue is mainly vocabulary at this point.

About a week in. Enjoying!

Currently:
Welsh, because we've got some Welsh translators coming in at work, and I think it would be polite and politic to make the effort - wish them good morning, ask them how they are, tell them that I am a dragon and I like to iron school clothes.
French to clean some of the rust off - I can read it okay, but I can't produce and my grammar is sloppy.

Ambitions:
Irish. I'll drop Welsh for this at some point - it's my cultural background and I dimly feel that if I'm going to learn a Celtic language, it really should be this one.
Russian - I'd like this back to a basic level, but it'll wait (feel like I need some focus to jump the hurdle of dicking about with international keyboards on my phone)

Dunno how much this could help me learn a new language, but it was PERFECT for gradually brushing up my high-school Spanish to where I could pass an open-dictionary translation exam for school. So... that was cool! Struggling to keep up with it afterwards though. Agreed that the continual review of old vocab items, while helping me remember them, makes it less fun and game-like to open the thing up for a few minutes on the train. The fun of unlocking new "levels" is gone. Wish there was a second, upside-down skill tree that gets revealed at the end :-/ LOL at the idea that I'm 55 percent fluent, also.

I've been idly contemplating learning a language for, well, years really. Thought I'd finally attempt something and didn't want to do a language I'd already studied (French, German) although I've forgotten a lot of what I had learnt (especially German). I've gone for Spanish, started up a Duolingo account, seems fine although I know my pronunciation is going to be terrible (e.g. I am completely unable to roll Rs, which is probably quite an impediment and maybe I should just pick another language). Dunno if I'll keep this up, I do have a vague interest in languages and linguistics, I'm also a terrible procrastinator and have a habit of starting things then forgetting about them and starting something else, so...

Doctor Casino... a common tactic once you complete a tree is to do the so-called Reverse Tree, which means switching Duo to the language you were originally learning and then learning English from there. I'm doing that for Spanish now and it is actually useful, at least once you get past the basics.

wooooahhhhh

Not sure what I think of Davis' way of learning Norwegian.
She did choose a stunningly boring book, but at least it's one that has a minuscule vocabulary. You just need to learn some Norwegian words for "married", "born", "daughter", "son", "inheritance", "dowry", farm" etc and you've got most of it covered.

It's like learning English by reading the Domesday Book.

Duolingo was pretty enjoyable for the little while I managed to keep with it, but I only used it to try to improve my skills on a language I'm moderately familiar with. I stopped, figuring I'd be better off fighting with some "real" texts. I think I'd feel like I got more out of it by picking a language I know virtually nothing about. (I.e. a non-Germanic one)

Must..resist...properly posting to thread again...until the weekend

New Mandarin course looks pretty good
/proud alpha tester

I learned or tried to learn Norwegian fifteen years ago using Teach Yourself, Routledge Colloquial, and a Yahoo group called norskklassen (said group’s existence was terminated and archives deleted in a rush one day, presumably due to some impropriety I can only speculate on). There was also an email thing related to norskklassen where there would send you a lesson every day and you could send in your version to the group for corrections. Sometimes we would record ourselves reading “Three Billy Goats Gruff” to check our pronunciation. I’d like to think I got pretty far- one time I sent in an errata list to TY Norwegian and the actual proofreader of the book paid me a compliment, but I ultimately ran into a few problems, and felt it was easy come, easy go.

One problem had to do with the dynamic of such a group. There was sort of a no-man’s land between the beginners or eternal beginners (eternaj komancantoj) and the native speakers where, once you started to go longer form and begin make a bunch of inevitable mistakes you might get hypercorrected. There was an incredible old fool of an English radiologist living in Norway who would type rubbish into the stream and be tolerated but an aspie Welsh systems guy who was in the running to be the world’s best self-taught language student, the Sanpaku of language learning, would end up pissing people off when he sent in his always near-perfect self assignments.

Nutshell: I believe that Duolingo is more efficient than the yahoo group/listserver approach, at least for getting to the high beginner level. Some of it’s deficiencies can be addressed by doing Pimsleur as well. The problem remains of how to progress through intermediate levels to the Mastery of the thread title (just reminded me of another famous and now famously broken-linked thread of Mark’s with Master in the title) by self-study alone.

May have a little more color on the Norwegian learning or Yahoo Groups language learning in general

either my french pronunciation totally collapsed in the last two days or er something else has gone wrong: it won't accept any of my vocal input as recognisably accurate

That aspect is notoriously buggy. Both from the point of rejecting correct answers and accepting wrong ones, think it really only checks the first few seconds. Sometimes something throws off even that, maybe some lag in the system.

Doctor Casino... a common tactic once you complete a tree is to do the so-called Reverse Tree, which means switching Duo to the language you were originally learning and then learning English from there. I'm doing that for Spanish now and it is actually useful, at least once you get past the basics.

― brain (krakow), Friday, November 17, 2017 11:43 AM (two days ago)

Oh no, laddering is learning a third language through a second one. I've tried that and it seems to be helpful.

https://en.duolingo.com/comment/4870355/Reverse-Trees-Laddering

my understanding is that duolinguo extracts labor from you by feeding you snippets of text that other customers have paid to translate -- have any of you seen odd phrases to translate yet?

"i am a dragon"

Swedish course has some great ones. Can’t remember any right now though

https://78.media.tumblr.com/942c11ca244667d918feb4895165105f/tumblr_o5ovkcZhS91uyebceo1_1280.jpg

learning portuguese

Wazzavout those Bonus Flirting Idioms?

Re Norsk: There was a great Norwegian-English dictionary we used that was compiled in the early sixties using cutting edge computer technology of the day. There was also a grammar book reissue some used that was by Siri Hustvedt’s dad. I asked her about it once at a reading by Peter Robb of his Brazil book at Paula Cooper’s bookstore 192 Books on Tenth Avenue. She told me her dad had a very strong Norwegian accent that he never lost, and spoke with until the day he died. Paul A. seemed to be slightly jealous when I was taking to her.

There was a nice English-Norwegian dictionary that my aspie Welsh online friend was using that has since been turned into an iPhone app I can recommend.

Sorry, suzy actually logged onto my account and posted
/xpost

I should have taken a screenshot at the time but I swear that duolingo asked me to translate "diese Nüsse"

Two from German:
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/11022972/Hilfe-das-Pferd-frisst-die-heilige-Kartoffel
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/14581013

One from Swedish: https://en.duolingo.com/comment/11674924

Just discovered the Health Shield in the store of the iPhone app which I think is pretty useful, don’t know when it first appeared

"I want 91 lemons"

Do you? Do you really?

Psst! It’s a U2 reference.

Also, should we post here when we get Duolingo feedback

Anyway the Health Shield is a much better deal and as well as being more useful than just buying a refill

Dragons appear in the Korean course as well.

except for french (35% fluent!) i am basically spinning my wheels on practice sets to keep my health ok

If you use web/desktop or Android you don’t have to deal with that.

Or on iOS you could also buy a Health Shield and forge ahead for half an hour without worrying about that

wtf are you guys talking about

i think practice is a good thing!

also i just got through my first tranche of vietnamese -- blimey what a lot of hard-to-distinguish diacritical marks

Practice is a good thing, except on those days when you want to learn some new stuff - so you can practice it later!- and keep running out of health and having to go back to the well and repractice earlier stuff.

wtf are you guys talking about
Have you used this app? On an iPhone? In that case it assigned you a circle of five arcs of health which you lose when you submit a wrong answer on a new lesson, one of which will be automatically restored every four hours or so, otherwise you can regenerate by practicing old lessons or purchasing in store with lingots. No health means no new lessons can be studied.

hmm i haven't used it in a couple of years, i don't remember that system. i finished my "tree" and then did a couple of bonuses lessons and that seemed to be all the content that was on offer.

Do people itt generally type the answers in or speak into the mic?

I have been typing only, but it does feel like I am neglecting a crucial language skill. Don't want to disturb the bf with repetitive badly pronounced foreign sentences. Maybe I should creep into the bathroom to hiss them into my phone for 20 minutes every day

(also just a lot more comfortable with typing and with the accuracy of rating typing vs speech in general, tho it's hard to type diacritics and it's frustrating to be slowed down by them on the timed quizzes)

do the speaking

i turned that part off on public transportation but otherwise your instincts are pretty right on imo

speaking around your bf might be good practice too, for getting over jitters of embarrassment! which is often a stumbling block when actually using a language in practice

hmm i just used the word "practice" to mean two entirely opposite things

Probably would be good practice for getting over the embarrassment, but maybe not for not being really annoying to be around!

I know the embarrassment is v real tho, I had a German neighbour for a year or two while I was learning German and did not dare to wish him so much as a Guten Tag

where I am at: I did a bit of German on this thing a while ago to supplement in-person lessons, though I am a completist and started at the beginning and never got near my actual level before getting bored. Since then I have dabbled with Irish and Czech but not got past the first few lessons of either. Never tried a Slavic language before and found even basic Czech greetings dishearteningly hard to get straight in my head.

Lesson 1 Czech has (or had, a month ago) an audio phrase which is just blank audio and the comments suggest it'd been like that for some time, which is a bit off-putting. iirc if your Czech L1 audio quiz is silent the answer is something like "thank you, good evening". Should get back into it but I hope there isn't more duff audio later.

also i just got through my first tranche of vietnamese -- blimey what a lot of hard-to-distinguish diacritical marks

It took me like three months of living in Vietnam before I realized ư and ủ were not the same sound

just read this Wired article about Duolingo (which was interesting, but stopped just as I thought it was warming up):
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/duolingo-unique-view-on-learning-language

where I read that

It knows which users are least likely to progress (English speakers learning Turkish and Irish, it turns out)

so I may not be the only person to bail out of Irish after two evenings...

One problem with Turkish course is fuzzy logic is sometimes broken with respect to what it will accept as a correct answer:
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/25182151/Lesson-ki-shows-as-not-correct

I actually had that exact problem. I was doing that lesson on the iPhone and it wouldn’t take any answer I would give. I tried without punctuation, with all the punctuation as giving in the furnishes correct answer and a few other combinations in between. I finally switched to the laptop to finish the lesson or maybe switched to another lesson or even language for the duration of my Health Shield. Also had the lesser problem today where it wouldn’t match the capital dotted i from the Turkish keyboard with the same letter in the answer and I had to switch to lower case i.

Houston, bir sorunumuz var.

Also seems to sometimes require the word “bir” for “a” when one might not think it is needed

PRATİK YAP

Btw, already knew fluency percentage is pretty bogus and just received some kind of definitive gaze proof of this

in the real world i have a bizarre German language level that is full of fancy vocab with persistent entry level grammar failures.
duo says i'm 65% fluent which is so bogus it's laughable.
it's free! what do we expect?
at level 23 the questions are the same as when i began.
earlier, duo responded to feedback about androgogically useless or unnatural questions, now they've removed the option to do so.
so much practical language that is simply missing.

A sentence that persistently shows up in the entry-level Korean, for both myself and others: 'yes, men are people.'

#notallmen

Oes draig gyda ti?

Nac oes

HELLO DERE

I did the french and spanish twice all the way through all powered up and I really had to use italki to progress further.

i am currently endlessly cycling in practice mode to keep up my streak but always too tired and/or busy to feel ready to progress at all

I'm approaching 500 days and might finally give up at that point as I feel it stopped teaching me much quite some time ago. My only motivation now is maintaining my streak.

It definitely gave me a great base for learning a bit more deeply elsewhere though and I would always recommend it. Might try a new language instead to try and bring back the fun of it.

anybody try Rosetta Stone? it was the gold standard for awhile. also cost its weight in gold iirc

https://sites.google.com/site/englishatthetab/_/rsrc/1432922076196/home/esl-resources/duolingo/ESL_Duolingo%20owl.png

Rosetta Stone for Vietnamese was ok, used it for a while. They didn't provide any explanation of concepts, in order to make it totally immersive, which was super frustrating for stuff that wasn't intuitive

I cannot recommend italki enough if you actually want to be forced to speak aloud and figure out what you would likely talk about in another language. When I lived in Lyon, so many French people were like, "why do you know this word?" I kept saying L'INTERNET!

HI DERE

This cross-training/laddering definitely challenging and useful, not just a novelty stunt.

How's yr soft mutation, mark?

lol i "took a break" before xmas and have not yet got back on con ngựa as they say in vietnam

Just made up a bad bilingual joke and am feeling compelled to post it here.

Doesn’t quite work though, so never mind, I guess

Okay, it was something to do with someone offering Steve Martin chocolate covered ants in Paris and Steve raising his hands and saying “Fourmis”?

« Fourmis? »

Almanca dilinde artık %35 oranında akacılığa ulaştın!

I am augmenting my Duolingo practice of Swedish in two ways in 2018:

- signing up for MHz Choice, an Amazon Prime channel that offers tons of international TV shows with English subtitles for $7.99/month; they have tons of Swedish crime shows
- reading Swedish crime novels with a dictionary close at hand; I've been able to find cheap paperbacks on eBay

Cool. Maybe you should start standalone thread for that. But maybe not

Anyone else still doing this? Also, what’s with the crowns?

I'm not doing it at present. My wife's been doing German though. I'll ask her about the crowns.

Oh I see

Yep, still using it. Currently on a 590 day streak and have finished both English to Spanish and Spanish to English courses. It bores me, but I can't stop now!

Sí, todavía lo estoy usando. Actualmente tengo una racha de 590 días y he terminado el curso de inglés a español y tambien el curso de español a inglés. ¡Me aburre pero no puedo parar ahora!

so close!

"también"

Okay, I see the purpose of the crowns is to add more material, but with its implementation two useful features seem to go missing from the iPhone app:
1) when simply reviewing, it doesn’t tell you anymore what skills you have improved
2) When clicking on a skill it no longer gives you the list of weak words

Wow, randomly checking in German I see that one of these Crown levels has 30 lessons.

Abs. Obs. 4, Level 3

Are these actually new questions or is this just a different way of counting the same old questions, I wonder

Perhaps this new format will inspire me to finish the last ten leaves of my Turkish tree

¡Gracias ∞! Normalmente no recuerdo los acentos perfectamente, necesito practicarlos más.

I got the Crowns feature a couple of days ago and it looks like it could be just what I was needing to keep going on Duolingo after finishing both forward and reverse trees. Will see how it goes as I switch to revisiting the Spanish tree for the first time since starting and finishing the reverse.

Was wondering about that myself for trees I had long ago completed and left, asking myself whether the crowns just a way of putting a positive spin on the similar old process of keeping the tree gold. Perhaps that little semantic shift is enough to motivate. Seems like at least they finally got rid of the funny Fluency percentage.

Three leaves to go in Turkish

Slowing down, perhaps due to some Zeno’s paradox effect.

Wonder if I will be able to say Zeno’s Paradox in Turkish when I reach the end.

I will be able to say “owl” though, if not “golden owl.”

Oh good. This might be what I need to go back and redo all of French and Spanish again. The big crown on the right is how many lessons you have done in total?

Something like that. Each leaf goes up to five crowns, afaict

I went into one leaf of German and pushed onto level 5. Didn’t really see much new material, I have to admit.

Still wondering how it will let you know when you need to review

Unless you have five crowns, that is

Got up to level five in the first 5 categories on the Spanish tree. It seems like there are a couple new words but not really much added content, especially considering how many exercises you have to complete to get to level 5. So far the best part is that as you level up the voices speak faster.

Ah, haven’t noticed that.

Or did I?

Two Turkish leaves left

Altın baykuş var

Now to forge ahead on the Turkish to EnglishGerman tree

I'm at no more than level 3 anywhere on my Swedish tree, even for levels where I'm shown as having passed milestones. So I'm starting over at the beginning, basically.

Three seems to be a default inherited high level, wouldn’t necessarily call it “(just like) starting over.”

This release seems to have fix some annoying problems with offline progress being lost. *Fingers crossed* that this is indeed the case.

Also what do you mean by “levels where I'm shown as having passed milestones”?

Peeked at my French tree, which I haven’t looked at in ages. Seems like there was recently a lot of modification, for some leaves I don’t even have level 0 completed now. Sill have La chouette d’or at the bottom though

Oh but I completed two lessons and it sent me right to Level 2

Seems to be a new leaf called Gallicism

Okay, one more thing. On most trees, for those lessons I had placed out of I was assigned three crowns, whereas for other lessons I had to work at one by one I got one or two crowns.

Some explanation of these kind of things here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/26739837 in particular....

"We went one step further and actually used how many times you’ve seen the words in a skill and how many times you got those words right to determine whether to place you at Level 1, 2, or 3. Since levels get harder as you go up, we didn’t feel comfortable placing anyone at Level 4 or 5, since the old system didn’t give hard enough exercises to place into these levels. Of course, if you already know the language very well, this may not be the right level. But, it is still more challenging than what was offered before."

Thanks. Had seen that but needed go reread more carefully. Interesting that that spaced repetition, which seemed to be the shibboleth, or perhaps the backbone of this and other systems, has now been pushed way into the background. In my experience, it works great until it doesn’t, so that’s okay I guess.

the french tree got completely made over about a week before the crown system took effect

Thanks, maura.

This Dutch continuous tense is interesting .

moved to Portugal in late September and have been doing my best to learn Portuguese:

- Completed all the Duolingo courses (didn't reach 100%, but it seemed to me I finished the game)
- Had private classes, 10 lessons, 60 minutes each
- Read all the Harry Potter books in Portuguese (as ebooks on my phone, easy to look up words using Linguee)
- Spoke a lot of Portuguese with new friends

Where am I now? I am able to read a novel, currently reading "My Brilliant Friend" in Portuguese and I can follow the plot, although there are of course many words I am unfamiliar with.

There's a big difference between reading and verbal communication though. Yesterday went to a restaurant to celebrate a friend's birthday, conversation was all in (Brazilian) Portuguese and if I was to put a number on how much I was able to follow, I dunno, I'd probably say somewhere around 75%. I understand what they're talking about, most of the time also what they're saying, but the details often escape me - especially if I don't pay close attention (and I find it surprisingly easy to zone out when listening to a foreign language). And I still feel quite limited in my powers of expression, telling stories is a big challenge.

All in all, ~6 months in I feel I'm doing pretty well. I did not know any Portuguese going in, but I've always been good at learning languages and I had a good grasp of Spanish and French before attempting Portuguese (similar grammar, lots of similar words). I hope to reach fluency within a year, but let's see how it goes. Learning a new language is truly difficult and any ad/book/course that promises to teach you a foreign language in a month is an obvious scam.

Yup

Yeah it’s a journey

I’ve been working up a Japanese branch up to level 5 to see what would happen. There’s no new content to speak of and I was about to give up when, half way, through level 4, it added typing in kana as a test type.

Good in theory but frustrating as Duolingo inconsistently understands kanji, so it fails you if you use them. Not knowing that いえ is 家 so that いえの掃除をしてください is corect, while 家の掃除をしてください is incorrect, is pretty poor.

Have you found a Japanese course yet that you really like yet, Ed? I tried busuu for a bit but then soured on if.

Also came to say that I have been doing that thing of going from the target language back to English which has ended up being more useful than expected.

For one thing, Duo’s encouraging words in a foreign language sound so sweet:

5 op een rij!
Goed gedaan!

Dat is juist

Perhaps a topic for another thread, but there is some kind of amusing ( and not “bemusing”, also a topic for another thread the one about frequently misused words and the language mavens they hurt) feeling of discovery when one finds that a word from an alien or invented language in sf is actually just a repurposed foreign language borrowing, such as the vodsels of Under the Skin or the baans of Viriconium.

Goed gedaan James, ga zo door!

Dank je wel, LBI!

Les afgerond!
161 dagreeks
Je hebt je dagelijkse doel bereikt!
Verder

Note that the “dagreeks” includes any language, doesn’t mean I have continuously studied Dutch all that time

Kies een kist als een beloning voor het behalen van je doel.

Prachtig!

Je bent een kei!

Dutch is kicking my ass atm. Serious uphill struggle after I was doing so well : /

What lesson are you on now?

I wanted to try out the reverse-learning method discussed here, but there's no "English for Swedish speakers" option, which is disappointing.

xpost I'm currently on "Sep.Verbs". It's more that Dutch sentence structure twists my brain in knots. I'm a native English speaker.

Don't most Swedes speak some English already? Maybe there's just not much need for basic instruction at the Duolingo level.

Have you found a Japanese course yet that you really like yet, Ed? I tried busuu for a bit but then soured on if.

Also came to say that I have been doing that thing of going from the target language back to English which has ended up being more useful than expected.

― We’ll Take Chanhassen (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 April 2018 11:50 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Working through Genki and using Memrise and the genki apps for Flashcards.

I see.

My understanding of the speakers of the three closely related Scandinavian languages is that they all mostly speak two languages, their own language and English, while they look askance at their immediate neighbors and their strange pronunciation,and they don’t really quite get why anyone wants to learn a foreign language especially their own, so extrapolating only a little it’s not surprising they wouldn’t bother to make an English language course, anybody who is anybody already speaks English.

Best encouragement is in Hungarian, where for every correct answer it says “Helyes.”

My understanding of the speakers of the three closely related Scandinavian languages is that they all mostly speak two languages, their own language and English
so far so good

while they look askance at their immediate neighbors and their strange pronunciation
languages are mutually intelligible (some linguists consider them to be only dialects), Danish pronunciation being the "weirdest" and hardest to understand across languages (there have been quite a few famous tv sketches picking fun at Danish)

they don’t really quite get why anyone wants to learn a foreign language especially their own
it's certainly a... surprise that anyone without a strong connection to Denmark would like to learn such a relatively useless and (because of the pronunciation) extremely complicated language, I mean if you really want to learn a Scandinavian language why not go with Swedish which at least has regular pronunciation, but anyway learning a foreign language besides English (usually German) is mandatory in primary school and in addition most high school students will study Spanish or French, these days languages like Japanese, Chinese and Arabic are also taught at many high schools

Okay, actually went there and started doing reverse Japanese to English. Very challenging but instructive.

And now that I have told you guys this I have broken the spell and don’t have to do this anymore

Danish pronunciation being the "weirdest" and hardest to understand across languages

My wife, who speaks German, tells me she has an easier time understanding spoken Danish than spoken Swedish.

that's interesting! working in an office with Norwegians and Swedes I'm used to being told how weird Danish sounds - and from studying many different languages myself (German, French, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Hindi, Arabic) I can confirm that the distance between written and spoken Danish is quite impressive and not wholly unlike that of Arabic :P - but would be nice to throw a few Germans into the mix and hear their thoughts

cultural ties between Denmark and Germany are probably stronger (German was the royal language for centuries iirc) than those between Sweden and Germany, and I believe a lot of people in Schleswig are bilingual

I do believe this passage from wiki to be rather otm:

Danish has a very large vowel inventory comprising 27 phonemically distinctive vowels,[4] and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon stød, a kind of laryngeal phonation type. Due to the many pronunciation differences that set apart Danish from its neighboring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and "weakly" pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be a difficult language to learn and understand,[5] and some evidence shows that small children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish.[6]

Een taal is nooit genoeg.

Ik zal dit jaar tweetalig zijn

Je hebt goed je best gedaan en hebt er 10 op en rij goed.

Na und?

So I read about some other product called LingQ today.

LingQ no doubt allows you to go a lot further, but the interface seems kind of noisy and distracting, to me at least.

But really came to post: when willl Duo add Icelandic?

In any case, now speaking random phrases out loud in Danish

Hello, thread that I killed. Came to see that the Linguee dictionary seems to have a login feature, wonder what that actually does for you

Hungarian course for English speakers kind of a joyless slog. Reverse direction much more manageable.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/19937675/Has-anyone-finished-the-Hungarian-course-and-reached-level-25

It’s like they took that Monty Python sketch to heart

Brand new Hindi course looks really good though. So far web-only, not on apps yet.

(thread is dead)

(Oder besser gesagt: kaputt)

(must get back on this, maybe when the heat is less and the book is out)

(The book? Do tell. Oh wait, don’t want to jinx)

(due out september: and mentioned elsewhere on ilx but i am wary of spamming too aggressively)

(Cool)

Nice! Good luck with it.

I'm still persevering with Spanish on Duolingo, but it's so rote nowadays that I've little to say on the experience.

I'm very keen to start learning some Basque, but that will be a whole other (non-Duo) kettle of fish!

look forward to trying the Hindi one!

Think it may turn out to be one of the more useful courses.

I'm very keen to start learning some Basque, but that will be a whole other (non-Duo) kettle of fish!

I did a few lessons in the Catalan course, but the audio was quite poor, some first generation speech generator.

There are certainly some internet resources and even a few apps (I think, I've not tried them yet), but, unsurprisingly, resources do seem a bit thin on the ground, especially if you want to learn from English. This discussion has some pointers: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/13783730 I've found a few additional things (potential online courses, apps), but haven't had a chance to collate them into a list yet.

I'm doing a wine course this month, but hopefully before the end of the year I'll be able to start a little Basque on top of my Spanish. Ideally I'm hoping I can find someone in Glasgow who can give me some basic lessons because I know it'll be a very tough language.

As an aside, I took the Duolingo English Test again last week and my level has dropped 17 points - from 97 to 80 :(

It remains a pretty interesting model for how they could monetise the company going forward, and potentially for how learners of languages other than English could get some ‘currency’ for all their hard work should they extend it in the future, but it’s still the most fundamentally flawed test I think I’ve ever seen.

They’ve professionalised elements of it - there is a browser lockdown for security and the passages of text are no longer copy-pasted from Wikipedia, as far as I can tell - but the most repeated item type remains telling ‘real’ words from ‘fake’ ones, which is a ridiculous way to check language proficiency. Other parts of the test (describe image, gap-fill of text) are so obscure or badly done as to make it extremely difficult for even native speakers to respond properly.

I’d like to believe that the team writing that test has little or nothing to do with the teams writing the courses.
‘Real’ vs. ‘fake’ sounds more like a test for dyslexia than a proficiency test.

Mijn naam is haas, ik weet van niets

Oder
Mein Name ist Hase, ich weiß von nichts.

https://youtu.be/kbgWk5Nl4hw

Hartelijk dank!

Dank yo!

Niks te danken!

Graag gedaan!

En: graag de tekst uit je hoofd leren voor maandag ;-)

Hindi (grammar) notes and tips start one lesson before the first checkpoint and end with the second checkpoint.

So they finally added Tips (&Notes) to the app, although I can only see for Spanish and Chinese. Although App Store says that they also added Tips for French but I can’t find those.

Indonesian seems to have shown up recently

Jaké jsou tvoje cíle?

Finally finished Hungarian.

Waarom zijn de bananen krom?

Dutch Duolingo appears to radiate a definite 70s vibe for some reason:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RyRRjl39rI

Ha! They also had
Heb jij ooit een rechte banaan gezien?

i have been so bad at this for so long

the owl sometimes waves sadly at me from my phone but i ignore

We miss you, Mark S. Do you still want to learn Welsh?

i still want to learn everything! maybe when my book is out in the world and out of my head (just a few more weeks i hope) (i also haven't played the piano all year!)

We haven’t seen you in a while. Take a 5 minute lesson now!

Rome is niet op één dag gebouwd.

Hm, stopped working this afternoon

The iPhone app, that is. Desktop is fine.

Just reinstalled, seems to work again

Snězte tu žábu!

Sorry, what I really saw was just
Snězte jablko!

Ik zag de astronaut in een zwart gat vallen.

For once, I can’t tie a 70s song to that one, but I’m eagerly awaiting Duolingo serving you “Als het gras twee kontjes hoog is”!

arabic launching next year, which I've been waiting for

Nå må dere hoppe i loppekassa!

Smi mens jernet er varmt!

Er du tospråklig?

haha, very good James

Har vi mødtes før?

nej, det tror jeg ikke...

Falsk alarm

Some of the tones are wrong in the Mandarin course which can be slightly annoying. For the most part course seems pretty nice though in its current form.

Started French on dis ting. Never learned another language before (apart from a D at GCSE). About a quarter of the way through - I presume the easy bit. I'm gonna be an expert in talking about dresses and ducks. I'm supplementing my Duolingo by watching Star Wars in French, listeing to l'equipe's football podcast when I go to bed, and I've ordered a dozen Asterix books.

I am still confused about the crowns and new levels but at least I restarted the spanish and french and trying to power completely up again.

In the end think crowns are an improvement on the prior system.

Took a couple of months off but have restarted Swedish. My reading and writing is pretty good, but I would never dare speak the language out loud to anyone.

I prolly wrote about this above, but I studied french for 6 months on duolingo and then did some skype sessions on italki to practice my conversation. By the end of the first 30 minutes I was soaked in sweat.

I want to get back to my Italian tree. It's in bad shape. I've mostly been wanting to work on French, where Duolingo isn't so useful for me anymore - what I really need are more opportunities for conversational practice.

Yeah, for French I really do think you need native French speakers to speak with. Italian and Spanish seem more phonetically intuitive for americans.

I live in a highly bilingual Canadian city, so I'm not exactly lacking native speakers. It's really just shyness/laziness/fear.

When I speak spanish in spanish speaking countries everyone switches to english or wants to practice their english with me. In France, no one switches to english and everyone corrects me. I kind of love it.

I had 4 years of HS Spanish and did all of Duolingo and live in a Spanish speaking country for the last 2 years. Did all of duolingo for French, had no previous French language background, lived for 4 months in France and go back for a month once a year. My French is probably 3xs better than my Spanish because I was forced more to speak it.

I'm curious what order people do the tree in - do you work through several levels of each new skill or move to the next one ASAP? Do you mainly click manually on individual skills or mainly do timed practice sets? When do you go back to old skills, if you do? and so on

not sure why I ask except I feel I may be doing it ~wrong~, but I guess there is no wrong as long as you're not bored, forgetting a lot of things or out of your depth

for me, the pre-crowns system made it clearer what Duolingo's magic algorithms thought you should be doing next, with the health of old skills fading, and the timed practice seemed to revisit old topics more whereas now it seems to be giving me questions from topics I haven't got to yet instead

I took French in grade school, but didn't use it at all for about a decade. Duolingo was very useful for brushing off the cobwebs. In some ways, though, Italian is psychologically easier since I'm learning it from scratch. I don't go into it with the shameful feeling like I should already know such-and-such.

I keep thinking that a year in France would be ideal but I'm not sure yet how to swing it.

Re crowns: a friend suggested getting two crowns per topic, which is what he does. I have been trying this recently and finding it helpful. More crowns seems to be diminishing returns. In the old system I could get burned out keeping a tree gold or feel bad when it started to decay

Do they still decay? I restarted spanish and am doing it from scratch by just testing out until I can no longer test out. I have the same ocd about keeping everything gold.

I hardly have any gold lessons anymore, I think I did it once or twice in some trees I barely look at, so not sure if and when decay happens

Mine haven’t decayed. Maybe the don’t do that until your entire tree is gold. Please let us know when that happens:)

https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002253131-Crown-level-decay-and-spaced-repetition
No more decay. Also, I agree 100% with the last sentence

oh good. That was kind of the worst. Especially if you did a bunch of modules all in one day so they all lost their gold all together.

Oh yeah, forgot about that.

Thanks, that article is helpful! I like the "two crowns" rule too. I've racked up a lot of crowns on the very early stuff and it definitely feels like diminishing returns.

btw it turned out that "Practice" was giving me questions from skills I hadn't seen yet because I'd tested out of some skills ages ago and forgotten about it - I didn't look at Duolingo for months and then resumed going through them one by one. So I guess it probably doesn't do that normally.

Acabo de llegar a la racha de 800 días hoy.

¡Enhorabuena!

¡Gracias!

I'm working through getting the full Spanish tree to gold again by testing out each subject to jump levels, but it is still taking forever. With five levels per subject the course seems huge compared to when I originally finished the tree, though I'm not convinced on how much actual new content there is in there as there seems a lot of repetition. Duolingo has me at 3170 words learned at the moment, but unfortunately can't remember what that was in previous times.

Sloppy typing...

*there seems to be a lot of repetition
*unfortunately I can't remember

Do you think it’s worth it to do all that? Maybe you should try the Reverse Tree instead.

Or, if you are up to up it, you could try to “ladder,” and learn another language through Spanish.

I guess I still feel like it's useful for me as well as simply being a force of habit at this point. I don't think I'm learning much new material from it, but it gives me 5-10 minutes of Spanish practice every day, which is definitely a good thing and in practical terms it certainly helps to cement vocabulary. For a long time it was really quite boring, but as I progress further down the tree again I enjoy it more as the more complex sentences and different tenses starting to come in. I still have a 2 hour Spanish class once a week which is my real focus (currently finishing up A2 level and hoping to start B1 in the spring) and Duo is just a quick daily practice, especially when life is too busy or too stressful to have the motivation to study more independently outside of class.

Yeah, I've done a fair bit of the reverse tree as well, but switched back when they revamped the Spanish course and haven't looked at it since. I should go back to it, for sure. I haven't tried learning another language from Spanish via Duo, but that's a nice idea, I hadn't thought of that. I've found some Basque courses elsewhere that will need to be done from Spanish when I have a little more time, which I'm really looking forward to!

Wow, where are those Basque courses you speak of?

There's one here, but the website navigation isn't great and I've only managed to get on to a Basque for Spanish speakers course despite them saying it should be for English users: https://www.hiru.eus/es/e-ikasi/idiomas/ikasten/ikasten-for-english-users

There should also be resources here and perhaps a full course, but I haven't investigated this one so much and again I struggle with navigating the website and keep getting lost in its subsites: http://www.ikasbil.eus/web/ikasbil/home

Het is over tussen ons!

I really, really need to become very fluent in Spanish but seeing Japanese and Hawaiian! now on duolingo... arg. It's that stupid boyfriend meme.

Hm i like japanese more than spanish i have to admit

Hawaiian course is super short and you can finish and make your tree gold in a matter of days if you want.

Doubt that Duolingo will make you fluent in Spanish.

Also, found the Japanese course a little disappointing.

Chinese course is nice though, especially having the notes available through the app.

I know a ton of spanish vocabulary just from hs and life but I just got super lazy about grammar, so duolingo is helps there. Chileans have a lot of weird slang here, so getting drunk and interrogating people is the only thing for that. And they call avocados "palta"! Maybe i will do the hawaiian one next week.

It’s the quechuan influence

South american spanish has that so it is slightly different from central american spanish, and both of these different from mexican spanish

Then you have all the dialects/slang/regionalisms across all spain and latin america

If you have any questions i can explain what i know

First Duolingo question of the day and it's one to really set me up for a day of fun and adventure. pic.twitter.com/U3jSGHTVUm

— Charlotte Gore 🏳️‍🌈 (@CharlotteGore) October 21, 2018

(thread of Swedish duolingo)

xpost are you chilean (I forget)? I've been here for almost two years total now and I only want to learn the slang that no one uses anywhere else.

Not chilean but i studied Spanish for a long time (10 years?) and visited a few countries, plus just general knowledge from being friends with/having girlfriends from south america

I don’t know much chile specific slang but i know some south american slang and it’s more or less similar

Has anyone used the language app Lingodeer?

xpost The slang I hear the most (I've been coming here for the last ten years are):

"Flaite
means “trashy” or “chavvy.”

Cuico/Cuica
“Upper-class” or “snobby.”

Wéon (spelt huevón)
...commonly used word in the Chilean language. It can be intended as a rude term, especially if used with strangers, but it can be used among mates and be a term of endearment. Wena on its own can mean “ok,” “good,” or “hi.”"

apart from huevon as mentioned above

i like

bacan: cool

cachar: to understand

wea: thing, generally when you can't find the correct word for something it becomes "esta wea"

huevear: to annoy

carrete: a party/a night out

pololo/a: boy/girlfriend

pega: job

yerac, you might already be familiar with this site, but this is good for etymologies and chilean slang: http://etimologias.dechile.net/

but yeah, huevon/weon/wea/huevada/huevear, and bacan, are all used in other parts of south america, especially peru

cachar means to fuck in peru

one thing i always found funny is carajo means shit, right? well in venezuela and other parts of latin america they call small children carajito

there's all sorts of things like that in latin america though

yeah like guagua means baby in chile but bus in cuba

ha that's true

Xpost

LingoDeer is better for Japanese, at least, as it explains the grammar points where Duolingo doesn’t. Can’t comment on other languages.

안녕하세요

iPhone app looks quite different now

All the drawings are now more jolly for one thing. As is Golden Duo, who no longer has a flag draped over his shoulders

MENOS DE 10
2 SLICES
MASAJE GRATIS
RINGS CHEESE FRIES

Ha, wrong thread

or IS it?

Ha, exactly.

But came back to post: Hawaiian now has sound

Looks the same again. Must have been a temporary switcheroo

Jij hebt mijn stijl gestolen.

Jouw woorden zijn net poëzie.

Think there must be some sort of server shortage and when I see the older style icons, which just happened again, it is throwing me on some dev server.

is there an astroturfing push on at the moment? - i keep getting alerts about old complaints i lodged in the forum where some doofus comes out with a reply something like " y'know what's really clever about duolingo? - that they do this that or the other"( which is actually garbage and helps nobody learn anything practical...) always ascribing some kinda overarching plan to the random slew of shit nobody says which is the same at level 1 as it is at level 30

Don’t know anything about that.

Just reinstalled and it looks the way it has been looking as of late but performs much better.

En we zingen en we springen en we zijn zo blij.

The Duolingo forum has a few threads with people complaining about the new look and some changes to scoring on the android app.

Almost done with Danish. Some crazy sentences now, such as:
Det er ikke min skyld, at rumvæsnet stjæler mine lektier hver dag.

Or
Er du virkelig bang for et lille spøgelse?

Finished. The last lesson was on HC Anderson. Feels like something is missing now that Duo no longer has the flag around his shoulders.

stærkt arbejde, james! how many courses have you done by now? and how do you feel abt the sound of spoken danish?

More courses than I’d care to admit to right now, sorry. I know that some people think Danish pronunciation is weird, but I like it, having watched many Dreyer films and The Kingdom and The Kingdom II many times.

that's pretty cool james!

In fact years ago I worked through the Teach Yourself and Routledge Colloquial courses in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. I already knew German so this wasn’t too hard. *coughs* Reading is not that hard but listening comprehension is still quite difficult as is proper production of grammatically correct sentences. You have just inspired me to think of getting the Pimsleur Danish course.

( Attempting to proactively embarrass myself out of my language learning jones)

(My name is James Redd and I am a compulsive language learner)

(Not sure if it’s working)

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!

Godt Nytår!

¡Feliz año nuevo!

Not to be pedantic, heh, but I feel like more often than not I just hear ¡Feliz año! without the nuevo.

Yeah? I don't think I've ever heard it that way amongst Spanish friends and family.

I'll listen out for it though and will probably notice it now. Whereabouts are you JR&tBs?

In New York, in Queens. I am thinking of Argentines I know, as well as Colombians and Mexicans. And Dominicans!

I just got looked at like I am crazy for asking about the feliz año vs feliz año nuevo (in Chile).

I heard it several times yesterday and have a text and an email in that form.

I found a couple of sites that say some people shorten this to feliz año when speaking.

I feel like it is probably considered a little more informal hence friendlier. I am sending out RFIs to native speakers.

My partner (Cuban-Spanish) agrees that saying just 'feliz año' is fine in speech and pretty common, though she personally favours the full phrase. Good to learn. Gracias JR.

¡Feliz año a todos los estudiantes de lenguas de ILX!

No hay de que.

I got veto'd from putting "espero que no te hayas portado mal este año" in the holiday cards to the building doormen this year (not a fancy building, most buildings have doormen here). I went with the simple "felices fiestas".

So Teach Yourself has made the audio for many of their courses freely available- although the relevant app is super buggy- and a lot of the ebooks are available at $3.99 on US Amazon, for now at least

you can just download audio if you want. Best practice to avoid buggy behavior seems to be to download all at once and not track by tracks

But I really came to post that somebody just told me “¡Feliz Año, mi estimado!”

Convenience link to current site for old school public domain courses from the US FSI etc.: https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/index.html

And to U of C Bengali course: http://home.uchicago.edu/cbs2/banglainstruction.html
along with related audio: http://www.iu.edu/~celtie/bengali_archive.html

Hij denkt dat hij iemand is, maar hij is niemand.

Je huiswerk voor deze week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiTvbWMHbn4

Dank u wel!

Je mag “je” zeggen, hoor!

Oké, dank je wel!

Hold on, didn't realise you can study Dutch. Fantastisch. Moi, j'ai commencé à étudier la langue francaise. I can understand a lot but I'm uncomfortable with speaking.

One weird thing about the Dutch course, is that they seem to have recently introduced a female voice which clearly has more computer-generated artifact noise than the male one.

Please ignore first comma

Waarom weigert je om me te helpen?

The worst computer voice I’ve come across on there is the one for Catalan.

I can send you dutch sound files. However, my accent is rub: I'm from the West Flanders. Considered to be the worst sounding. Lol

Also "waarom weiger je mij te helpen". If you put verb first, it is w/o the t. For example: je drinkt but drink je

Thanks. Thought I got that sentence verbatim from Duo.

“thought” or “though”? Again, it’s all about that extra t...

Lolt

:-)

Okay I found the original sentence- without the "t," thanks. Had to search within the Duo Discussion, Google search has deindexed almost everything but the Duo Dictionary. This one uses the listless vox generator I mentioned
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/28947790

"Waarom weiger je om me te helpen?"

She sounds like a scary bot.

Waarom weiger je om me te helpen James?

Ha, thanks!

Here is two year old discussion on Dutch voices: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/14870029/Is-it-possible-to-change-the-new-Dutch-voice-back-to-the-lady

(mine wasn't recorded w/a line-in mic btw, but in a noisy office space fyi)

A good voice makes all the difference in the world though. Why did they ditch the previous lady voice?

I'm not sure but I think maybe the lady voice on that sample is the previous one back in rotation.

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/20701365
https://www.textaloud.com/

The male Dutch voice I have been used to is clearly Ivona Ruben, as stated in the forum, not sure if this female voice is Lotte or not.

Yes, just cut and pasted the new favorite example sentence and it is clearly her.

Here are some comments upon Ruben's arrival:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/15611328
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/14870215
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/15388323

Eeek sometimes the french pronounciation seems muffled. I couldn't understand what she said. I got it wrong.

The worst computer voice I’ve come across on there is the one for Catalan.

― Spirit of the Voice of the Beehive (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, January 20, 2019 10:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i was doing the català for speakers of castellano a couple years ago and gave up because the voice clips were so bad

Haven’t figured out where that voice comes from yet but I see that sometimes they use a TTS (Text To Speech), such as IVONA for Dutch and Welsh, sometimes HTS (Hidden-Markov-Model? To Speech), such as for Irish, and sometimes just a human voice: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/8859682/Uncover-the-secret-of-the-Esperanto-voice

Okay, Ruben is back on my Dutch course. Wat ruikt er zo lekker?

Wie wil er een potlood?

My kid is now doing duolingo too. Il y aura compétition entre nous deux. Elle gagnera, j'en suis sûr.

Probeerde je mij iets met jouw dans te vertellen?

I think it accepted that, although it’s preferred answer seems to be:

Probeerde je mij iets te vertellen met jouw dans?

The first sentence is in the “correct” hierarchical word order, and sounds slightly stilted, the second one is more conversational.

tbh, that stiltedness also stems from the needlessly emphatic “jouw” where “je” would have been preferable (in both sentences).

Urgh I even have a problem with word order in dutch and it's my first language! And I really need to say gewoonte (habit) instead of gewente which is RONG (and dialect).

Wonder if they use dutch pronounciation in duolingo (as opposed to flemish, which sounds much softer).

I'm at ten days now. Getting progressively harder. But j'aime apprendre le francais. C'est pour utiliser dans ma profession.

Thanks. Yeah, seems like the first word order is more, um, Germanic.

Actually just found this in German grammar book

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES sometimes follow the verbal bracket, especially in colloquial speech.

So same thing, I guess

I’m learning Japanese, which is unsurprisingly hard though I’m making progress! I’m actually grateful for the repetition so I can get the sounds and characters down.

I also have Irish, but more to improve on what I already have? The Irish woman on there is from Donegal though and her spoken Irish throws me :(

Does it have kana and kanji??? Jealous. Nihongo wa muzukashii deshoo neeee

Not sure yet but assume so. Think they start you with hiragana so you can understand the importance of syllables.

Can you switch between languages? Want to brush up my japanese too.

You definitely can - have three I switch between.

Hurrah. Nihongo benkyo shimasu!

Ganbatte kudasai! (That's 50% of my Japanese knowledge right there, so any excuse to post it)

Is the Irish course Donegal dialect content-wise or is it just the audio accent? Someone complained in the comments that it sounded like an English person speaking Irish and I wasn't sure if that should bother me, as an English person hoping to... well, not speak Irish so much as look at Irish words and make a decent guess at pronunciation. I wish there were audio clips for more of the words.

(I also wish Duolingo had more guidance about accents and regional variations in general. If I learn Portuguese via the Duolingo course with a Brazilian flag on, would I then sound weird in Portugal? And so on.)

I don't seem to get on very well with learning whole new languages on DL, though. I've abandoned about 5 of them. Still plodding away at German, and I think it's good-ish practice for genders and word order and maybe vocab too, but not sure how much I'm actually learning.

Other people have complained about the Irish content previously not accepting other ways of writing things, so I’m unsure. I’m not sure about how they teach it because sometimes they ask you to write something and I know that writing this word will now have a h as opposed to the standard spelling, but then you’ll get it wrong if you’re a beginner because you don’t know that.

Arigato!

De hoeveelste is het vandaag?

De vijfentwintigste. Waarom vraag je?

Because I just learned the word “hoeveelste.”

I love that word! Wonder how you pronounce it.

I lost my ten day streak due to being sick. J'avais mal à la tête. Atama itai da yoooo

Dommage!

Some Dutch things I recently came across that I found interesting or amusing, not through Duolingo:
The words
paalwoning and
maggiblokje®

The word order in the sentence
Ik ben de stad in gefietst.

Interesting French locution I just came across in Le Petit Robert:
Inconnu au bataillon

Another fun Dutch word:
Pinksteren

I’m learning Japanese, which is unsurprisingly hard though I’m making progress! I’m actually grateful for the repetition so I can get the sounds and characters down.

Duolingo is a bad place to start learning Japanese and I don’t think the course is very much cop. LingoDeer isn’t a bad place to start though. You need more explanation of the mechanics of the language and LingoDeer has that. There are however a bunch of tools that are way worse than Duolingo; tools that try to shoehorn Japanese into a European language template - so bad.

I agree with Ed.

Started doing Japanese w memrise (while continuing w duolingo). It's meh but better than nothing.

Het is zo helder als koffiedik.

Het is zo helder als koffiedik.

No, dict.cc

More useful coffee-related turn of phrase:

http://www.projects.science.uu.nl/ubv/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/koffie.jpg

https://static.mijnwebwinkel.nl/winkel/hello-bird/image/cache/full/789e31ffe6d4af0459320960ee774375f9192875.jpg

that one is advanced level lol

voor gevorderden

I don’t even know how to interpret the first word.

it’s supposed to be “plat Amsterdams”. The first word is actually three words: “waar is m’n...”

Heel erg gedankt!

Aargh, heel erg bedankt

niks te danken!

Bakkie! Haha. We'd never use that word in the Flanders.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSuxJBbswMfWqKE0Tm7RLdkUWsuWvkihVd26k9XSoaFIc8UqlQ

Duolingo is a bad place to start learning Japanese and I don’t think the course is very much cop. LingoDeer isn’t a bad place to start though. You need more explanation of the mechanics of the language and LingoDeer has that. There are however a bunch of tools that are way worse than Duolingo; tools that try to shoehorn Japanese into a European language template - so bad.

Thanks for the tip - I’ll check it out. I’m a bit eh over it atm - not sure of the usefulness of repeating the same eight or nine words over and over for AN ENTIRE MODULE.

Russian is killing me, but that’s really my fault for not revising the alphabet before I started.

The fact I'm studying french from english is weird. Like I need to first translate to dutch. But I'm loving it.

Just found another meaning for “bakkie” - “radiozendapparatuur”

translated as “rig” in English.

Also a third meaning, “aanhangwagentje” or “trailer” in English.

Oh, it seems the second meaning is a CB radio.

Bakkie doesn't feel like it's Algemeen Nederlands (official dutch). Certainly not in Belgium. We would say "bakje" (-je means small). Don't take my word for it though. Lol

“Bakje” is the diminuitive for the word “bak” in Standard Dutch, “bakkie” originates from the (influential) West Netherlands dialect. In the South of the Netherlands and in Flanders the most common dialect equivalent would be “bakske”.

“Bak” is used in many different (idiomatic) ways, most of them related to the core meaning of “(usually rectangular) container”.

This is a fun (and I’m sure not nearly exhaustive) map about the local variants of “kopje/bakje koffie”:

https://www.mijnwoordenboek.nl/dialect-vertaler.php?woord=kopje%20koffie

(an *interactive* map, no less)

Well, there's even a difference between East-, West-Flanders and Antwerp. Bakske is sth we'd rarely if ever use here (in the West-Flanders).

No doubt! That’s why I left it at “most common”. So what would the West-Flanders version of “bakje” be?

We'd pronounce it baksje. I think. Lol. (Sorry massive migraine)

I can’t quite parse this sentence:
kleine panda roofdier dat bij de wasberen hoort

Small panda predator that hears by the raccoon? Is known as the raccoon?

“horen (bij)” (originally it’s “behoren”) means “belong (to)”

it’s not really a sentence though, more a definition:

“kleine panda: roofdier dat bij de wasberen hoort”

“small panda (actual English: lesser>red panda): predator belonging to the raccoons (i.e. raccoon family)”

Ah, thanks. Oh I see. There is no colon but the first part is in blue and the definition is not. This is from Prisma, not Duo btw.

Roofdieren = verscheurende dieren or is there a subtle difference?

Or does it mean carnivores?

Predators, carnivores, carnivorans... These are all different things in English, but who knows when to use which word? (I certainly don’t).

Same in Dutch, where there’s 4 or 5 of these: roofdieren, Carnivora, carnivoren (=vleeseters), predatoren. (“verscheurende dieren” is some kind of archaic term afaict). The first two are apparently synonyms, so that would make “roofdieren” “carnivorans” in English. However, in daily speech “roofdieren” is used as a catch-all term standing in for all of these categories.

(Now I’m starting to get a headache too!)

Thanks! Sorry to drag you down into my Dutch dictionary dilemma.

would you call it een waarachtige woordenboekworsteling?

Ik weet het waarachtig niet!

Chinese anyone?

Wil je nog koffie?

Mandarin course is pretty good but after battling through the third checkpoint I took a long break and haven’t really been back.

would you call it een waarachtige woordenboekworsteling?

Wil je nog koffie?

_would you call it een waarachtige woordenboekworsteling?_


Never heard of that. Sounds "stiff"

‘twas

Some discussion here of why Japanese is the hardest of the hard and more difficult to learn than Mandarin. https://www.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/7eqk7t/language_difficulty_ratings_according_to_fsi/#thing_t1_dq6u69a

Actual FSI site has only four categories and no asterisks. There German is not in its own category but lumped in with the slightly harder languages. Not sure who modified the categories and added asterisks but I agree with them.

Just learned about the so-called circumpositions in Dutch.

Een voorbeeld: ik loop langzaam naar hem toe.

So I usually watch netflix with the english subtitles on because we get a lot of street noise when the windows are open. Sometimes the shows or movies only have spanish subtitles. Last night I started watching a french movie with the spanish subtitles on and my brain couldn't deal. It was really bad.

I haven’t tried this yet but it seems like it could be useful.

https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com

Xpost this is what it feels like learning w duolingo. I mean, shit, my English is pretty good (eyeroll) but in my head I'm thinking about how sth gets lost when I have to translate to dutch. And I'm "content" is happy but in dutch we use the same word anyway. Gah

There can be something very confusing about hearing and reading subtitles in two closely related languages.

That extension does indeed look useful, Ed, thanks.

Ed, thanks! Yeah, I basically tuned out the french and was just reading the spanish and then getting confused about what language I was hearing. It also probably didn't help that I was drinking wine.

I used the non-extension search for Dutch and when I restricted availability to the US it gave me too small of a set, leaving out films that indeed I can see.

Thanks to subtitles I learned English as a kid. Here in Belgium we never dub films.

Been on duolingo for ab 40 days. Hurrah

Gefeliciteerd!

Maybe the point of that site is to only tell you videos with both audio and subtitles available in the target language.

I can't stress enough the importance of watching movies w subtitles. It really is a good way to learn a language. A dialogue goes much quicker and you have diff ways of speech/pronounciation.

Just remembered that when I was nipper I would read from a Dutch book in translation, Paulus and the Acornmen.

Oh man, Paulus de Boskabouter, that takes me waaaaay back in time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNaJ19bTqoE

We had this flexi disc at home when I was a kid (apparently it was a freebie that came with washing powder or something in... 1964) I must have listened to this a thousand times back then. All the characters were voiced by writer Jean Dulieu himself. “Even? Even? Dacht je dan dat dat zo gemakkelijk ging?”

And these were on TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9eTyUKDcPA

Wow, thanks!

Thank you for reminding me!

Tu n’as validé aucune unité
lors de ce test
Ne t’inquiète pas ! C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron.

Haha I can sort of understand this.

Have to say I'm less hesitant to address french customers. Yay

Surely a Flemish speaker the correct way to address French customers is with disdain.

I've got to the stage where my French vocab is pretty good but my grammar is sorely lacking. I'm working my way through this textbook although I wish it would stick in my head better.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51PYHL3xDbL._SX376_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Has anyone made any grammar breakthroughs recently?

A grammar breakthrough would be great - in my Spanish evening class we've learned three past tenses now (he hablado, hablé, hablaba) and have been collectively struggling for weeks to get to grips with the nuances of when each is to be used. Plenty of times it is obvious, but there are so many subtleties and I can't quite get the hang of it yet.

Surely a Flemish speaker the correct way to address French customers is with disdain.

Ah yeah breakthrough. I'm just studying what I learned in (and subsequently forgot after) high school. So no breakthrough.

I wonder if I finish duolingo, what I should do? Read Rimbaud? Or start memrise? Are there any apps that go further than duolingo? Je veux etre capable de seduire un Parisien. 😂

N’oublie pas Johnny Hallyday!

But I really came to post interesting expression I just came across that I don’t quite get:
een boterham met tevredenheid - du pain sec

Maybe something easier than Rimbaud, but I’m finding reading native material is really helping the Japanese. I joined a couple of reading groups on a Japanese learning forum. Find something that interests you and start to read. There are a bunch of browser extensions that allow you to look up words in browser which makes things faster although the built in Japanese-English dictionary on the kindle is terrible.

If I were doing French I’d be reading Asterix in French.

Oh good idea! Maybe they have Asterix on kindle

Et il y a aussi VanDamme.

Wat is een boterham met tevredenheid?!? Ik ga nu opzoeken.

Oh wow! Een boterham met tevredenheid is just a slice of bread. Nothing on it. So dry bread. Pain sec.

It seems to have a figurative meaning too, which I can’t quite parse:
Schaars inkomen, schaarse middelen waar men het maar mee moet doen

Oh I think I see

Daar gaan we weer!

Weer of geen weer.

Neem me niet kwalijk.

Oefening baart kunst.

I love the last saying. It's not used enough imo (in mijn opinie lol)

It's raining cats dogs: het regent pijpestelen.

Een bord pasta of een bord met pasta?

Wat is het addertje onder het gras?

Okay this is just weird:
Wil je dat Duo je stiefvader wordt?

Woehaha. Je mama dumpte je vader?

Sorry, ik liet me meeslepen.

Dat zal ik je niet aanrekenen, hoor.

Dat staat je fraai.

Jij mag er ook zijn, James.

Sorry, I thought that phrase was going to mean one thing, then I saw it meant another and used it anyway.

I mean it seems like it might saying something nice and complimentary but it’s actually used sarcastically, isn’t it? Foreign languages are so hard!

It could most definitely be used sarcastically, in an old-fashioned, slightly stilted way (although that’s not how I understood it here - knowing/assuming you’re a nice person and such lol)

Same as breastcrawl! I wouldn't use that phrase sarcastically, personally. But basically every compliment could be made to sound sarcastic.

Hoi JamesRedd,

Je stelde "Tomorrow we go to the restaurant to eat lamb" voor als een vertaling van "明天我们去饭馆吃羊肉。". We accepteren deze vertaling nu. :)

Bedankt voor de bijdrage, ga alsjeblieft zo door!

- Duolingo

^een noodkreet

We zullen het er maar bij laten.

Fraai is not a word used here (Flanders). Feels more Dutch.