Do You Speak A Second Language?

You actually took French from Pierre Capretz? I just watched one after posting and the format of the videos is really pretty great even outside a classroom.

I tried doing a Memrise course that consisted of the Duolingo vocab, but perhaps predictably the redundancy made it feel a bit pointless.

It's not wildly helpful since it's just the infinitive forms, but working my way through the "450 Most Common Verbs" felt good. I just started a conjugation one too and have been slowly working on "Intermediate French," which is a random hodgepodge of vocabulary that starts out with a bunch of religious terms for no apparent reason but was kind of refreshing compared to the usual subjects. Reminded me of how Lingvist seemed to draw its core vocabulary from crime novels resulting in my memorizing multiple synonyms for gun, money, and the police, probably none of which are used in Quebec.

He didn't teach the sections every day, but he did teach the big once-a-week class sometimes, yeah.

Yes, those videos are really good. There was a similar German one I used to see on television sometimes called Focus or Fokus or something like that. There was some other German language learning video that people had some kind of ironic appreciation of around here.

Kind of always find the midlevel vocabulary learning tedious and the related precanned lists unsatisfactory. Perhaps should learn memory palace techniques but have resisted thus far.

"I do think the web version of DL is basically essential."

agreed, the interface mobile app just feels so slow in comparison, which can make it boring to use

Yes, you can fast on the web page and it usually forces you to type and spell everything instead of just shuffling tiles.

I like both. I mostly use the phone app, but occasionally visit the site. What I really need is a vocabulary booster (other than, say, cracking open a Swedish dictionary) - I can form simple sentences now, and need to stock up a bigger supply of words to insert into them.

Also like the way on the web you can mouse over the foreign word and hear it pronounced, perhaps on your way to mouse somewhere else, without clicking on it. This may seem trivial but it still seems to add a little speed somehow.

One more thing: iPhone gamificaton is perhaps too punitive. One too many mistakes, fat fingered or otherwise, and you are forced to keep reviewing to Gain Health to go forward. It's good to review but sometimes it nice to go through a few new lessons to get them into your head first.

Just signed up for a 12-week Spanish course at a local private language school starting next week. I'm sure 6 months on Duolingo have done me a world of good, but I need to move beyond it and need some outside structure and motivation to manage that.

Interested to say how that works for you. I can tell you about my experiences with such courses but perhaps it is best to wait and see how it goes and you report back first.

Phil, there is some kind of Cambridge University Press Swedish Grammar reader that seems useful, but dang if it isn't expensive.

A lot of the universities in Glasgow offer evening language courses as well, but my partner went to this particular private school to study English when she first arrived here and had a good experience, so I'm giving it a go first. Whatever it's like, I'm sure I'll learn something if I put the effort in and if it's not up to scratch then I'll try elsewhere for the next level after three months.

Sounds like a good plan.

I get the distinct impression my English is going downhill. :-(

With the app you can study that too!

Question: what do you do when you get to the end of the tree? Just stop? Keep the tree gold for a while? Delete and start again?

I'm trying to do two lessons from the tree and two practice sessions, where it throws random stuff at you, daily. It seems to be working well enough. I can make up sentences in my head and check them with Google Translate, and they come out right more often than not.

I never finished my tree, but in the forums some people recommend starting the English course but with your own language preferences set to French

You signed up for Swedish, Phil?

Yeah.

The reverse tree, as people call it, seems to be a popular advanced option, as rob describes.

Ah thanks. I see that people also do something known as laddering.

This might be handy for Phil and others: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/19825381

That being a list of the Swedish lessons along with their word lists. Did you come across this sentence yet, Phil?

Island är en ö.

Huh. Island is a country.

No, I haven't seen that yet, but it says "Iceland is a country."

It's an island as well

I just remember this whole thing from school whether you're 'in' or 'on' somewhere, whether it's an island or a country or something. On and on and on it went, and I can't remember whether you're on or in Iceland...

Gotta say the Tips and Notes are useful if sometimes spotty. The ones for French are particularly well done.

I finished my Spanish tree on Duolingo last week. The golden owl is pretty impressive. I still have to strengthen a lot of the skills and there are a number that I don't actually have a real handle on at all, despite being able to complete them on the app (in particular the subjunctive, the multitude of past tenses, imperative, conditional), so a lot of work to keep me going on Duolingo yet.

I'm 4 weeks into my Spanish class too and it's going well - I'm way ahead of it grammar-wise, but the speaking and listening experience is useful and it's a fun couple of hours each week.

Still not made any concrete plans for a Spain visit this year yet unfortunately and our calendar is filling up. Really hoping we can get over, even if it's just for a week to visit family.

Good for you. In fact your post inspired me to finish my French tree, which I had been lingering over the tail end of, just to see the elephant owl.

Also, I read the various pages about the Fluency Shield and ultimately agree that it is mostly an annoyance.

Being doing this app for about two months now. Will try to come up with a concise post about my results.

Offline feature is buggy.

Have gotten to the point where I can piece together articles on sydsvenskan.se. Apparently an old man was found dead in the customer bathroom of a food store in Malmö this morning.

paul joseph watson was right

B-b-but Phil, what about the story about the crocodile and his gang of reptiles?

sonned in a Balto-Slavic linguistics beef
http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art264e.pdf

http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-make-gold-duolingo-tree.html?m=1

English isn't my native language, but I learned (learnt? feeling slightly self-conscious here tbh) early in life. Funnily I don't really remember it being much of an effort, beyond feeling really pleased with myself whenever I yelled out bon mots like NO IT IS A CAT which I still use in regular conversation today.

I actually feel self-conscious using my native language now, because the only person I ever really conversed with with my father. I don't speak it very often now and on the rare occasions I do, I really beat myself up if I make a mistake.

wait are you a new poster or an old poster with a new name? or other?

Me? I'm a new poster, I only found this place a few days ago

Oh ok that's unusual
How did you find us?

I read Freaky Trigger and I ended up on its wiki page. I went down a rabbit-hole of links and here I am!

Also I'm here to astroturf for 4 Non Blondes

wait are you a new poster or an old poster with a new name? or other?

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, March 13, 2017 12:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago)

So now you have to pony up lingots if you want to test out (now relabeled "Skip") of an individual leaf of the tree.

....and now Japanese is available.

This is fun: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScNGbQseoYKGciA2JcPZgwFmQ7K6Ide2CM2DkZB-5Chxbk5ag/viewform

ha that is neat

favourite blend: questicize

That was awesome. I should have kept a copy of my answers