Do You Speak A Second Language?

Japanese is app only so far, no desktop- it is still hatching- and therefore no grammar yet.

How far along are you in Irish, jim?

― Barkis Garvey (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, August 4, 2017 5:36 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not very, 1899 xp. I'm enjoying it because it's legitimately extremely challenging to me. i am thinking of going to scots gaelic classes in the autumn and thought as they are fairly closely related it might help me a little to have some vocabulary and pronounciation

I stopped just past the second checkpoint. I'll pick it up once my next Japan trip is booked (hopefully this fall)

About to hit the second checkpoint. Wish me luck.

not very, 1899 xp. I'm enjoying it because it's legitimately extremely challenging to me. i am thinking of going to scots gaelic classes in the autumn and thought as they are fairly closely related it might help me a little to have some vocabulary and pronounciation

I guess the term is "verbnoun."

Or "verbal noun."

About to hit the second checkpoint. Wish me luck.

About to hit the second checkpoint in Duolingo. Planning to be in Japan at New year and don't want to be wholly reliant on E again.

I like busuu because they get real live users to check your speaking and writing as well as doing voice recognition. I've been correcting a lot of russian's English to earn brownie points with the system - not free, though.

Hm, seems like busuu has a free aspect as well, is that part too easy?

DL just gave me
あさごはんはいつもパンを一まい食べます。

In Hobby 1, which is where my brane finally brakes.

Because the sentence structure starts getting mildly complicated.

Turned on the Japanese keyboard last night. Not going to tell you how long it took me to type that one sentence.

Too bad Momus isn't around anymore to help us improve our Japanese. Oh wait.

You know, there are some apps specifically to learn Kanji, used to use one called imiwa? years ago, hasn't been updated in a few years though, don't know which apps that are still being maintained are good.

I passed the year mark on Duolingo just the other day. I'm just about keeping up my streak, but am mainly concentrating on a weekly class and, having found an excellent teacher, I hope to add a bit of one-to-one tuition later this year to accelerate things before we head to Spain for a couple of weeks in January.

RIP 中島春雄

Wondering if we should start a thread for Japanese Learners, or find out if one already exists, although I didn't find after a quick search. Am somewhat reluctant to do so, since this language has defeated me before and am afraid to jinx the rest of you.

日本語は話せます 🇯🇵

Still curious what else Euler did to improve his French a part from DL, I mean aside from living and working in France.

a part
You see what I did there?

Nothing else!

As a linguistics person I constantly click on this thread hoping for a discussion of linguistics topics, but it's just about people learning languages, which is a different thing. Can we have an actual linguistics thread? Are there any people interested in discussing linguistics?

Think we should ask mod to edit the word out of the title. There is at least one other thread that is more about linguistics, but maybe you are already familiar with it: A Foreign Language Vocabulary Thread: In Which We Look For Things That Have A Different, Non-Cognate Name in English/French/Spanish/German.

Just talk.about linguistics itt then ffs

There is another linguist, f. hazel, who posts on the other thread a lot, so it seems like that is a better place for it.

Years ago this thread was in fact a rolling linguistics thread, these days it has shifted focus to learning second languages... perhaps we should ask mods to reassign the [rolling linguistics thread] subtitle to the foreign language vocabulary thread that James Redd linked? Linguistic discussion on ILX seems to usually arise as a secondary exchange about some linguistic-y topic that has sparked more general interest, centering the linguistics aspect usually leads to silence.

I just started reading a book called Thinking with Demons by Stuart Clark which is about witchcraft in the middle ages, but the entire introduction so far has been about framing the topic correctly in terms of philosophy of language. Which surprised and delighted me, since I mainly bought it as an excellent book about witches, not linguistics!

The other thread title is so long, and it is not quite a [Rolling Linguistics Thread]. Maybe we should just append [+Linguistics] or something like that.

I'd like top complain that the linguistics language learning thread has got bogged down in semantics.

heh, just change one of them's title to [+linguistics +continuant -tense]

wow, xpost of a semantics AND phonetics joke

Hey, take it over to the [Trilling Linguistics ThRead]

I just started reading a book called Thinking with Demons by Stuart Clark which is about witchcraft in the middle ages, but the entire introduction so far has been about framing the topic correctly in terms of philosophy of language. Which surprised and delighted me, since I mainly bought it as an excellent book about witches, not linguistics!

further evidence that we are twins

*huggles*

How about just calling it The Standby Hermeneutics Thread?

Game of Phones?

A+

further evidence that we are twins

yes and we need to start developing our psychic powers thereby!

Has anyone taken, or worked with, the more formal, certificated Duolingo language tests?

Wazzat?

It's basically their play to generate direct revenue from learners - providing a quasi-formal certificate to you if you pay $49 and pass a test. It has started to take off in the US with universities, apparently.

They do it with English, definitely, and possibly other languages but i'm not entirely sure how extensive it is yet. It seems to be the direction they're going in, though.

Ugh

In theory, it might not be so bad. There would be a value in having something you can put on a CV if you are learning a language that is hard to formally certify in other ways. If they introduced one for Japanese, for example, it would be much more convenient than the JLPT.

The risk with English is that it's already a market that is well catered-to and a cheap-and-cheerful cash-grab has the potential to drive down standards in the wider industry, but that is probably a niche concern.

The English one is apparently not very good psychometrically. I am going to try it out next week if i get the time.

They are going to have to monetise learners somehow if they're going to grow but it sounds like they have been trying / failing with a few different ideas over the last couple of years.

Right. Japanese would be interesting. This guy doesn't like the English test: https://eltjam.com/deconstructing-the-duolingo-english-test-det/

Yep, the critical paper cited in that review trashes the test.

And yet - if you want to go to Yale, it's accepted as an alternative to one of the big three so they must be persuasive!

Yes, saw my alma mater was right up there. What are the big three?

IELTS / TOEFL / PTE Academic.

All three or four hours long vs Duolingo's 30 minutes.

Seems like the academic equivalent of the much-maligned Fluency Shield.

From a purely linguistic perspective, the idea of aptitude testing a language (any language) induces a kind of philosophical vertigo. I mean obviously you need something to place students on a track that helps them the most, but thinking about it induces a nice kind of ASMR tingly feeling.

Tbh, if you can broadly come up with a framework for what it means to teach and learn English you can test against that framework fairly easily until you get to discussion of what is meant by 'fluency' and the wheels fall off.

The fuzziness / appropriacy / biases of the underlying framework is the dizzying bit imo but that extends a lot further than assessment.

Yeah, it's more about what gradations of fluency might be that's dizzying... like some kind of lenticular map that is legible at some angles and impenetrable from others.

Yep, and I think the wild proliferation of scales (CES, GSE, IELTS bands, different TOEFL scales, etc), each with their own contradictory claims of alignment to the Common European Framework of Reference, points to that.

It is interesting that one of the fashionable topics at a lot of recent applied linguistics conferences has been assessment literacy, though - lifting the hood on a lot of these issues and going in to the limitations of testing as well as the mechanics.