itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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

For me at least

Yeah, the new energy system can get to fuck. Can't even do 3 lessons before it runs out, even if you get all answers correct

Spite-paid for lifetime of Babbel. I like it so far. It's not infantilising.

I just got a sentence in a Norwegian lesson that was a quote from The Go-Between.

Found out this week I’d accidentally been paying for Babbel for three years. Annoying that you can’t switch languages with a paid license.

Haven’t really been following the DL share price slump as closely as I should but it sounds like they’re doing ok on revenue but spending a lot on AI, as well as investing for ‘long-term’ gain, which has upset investors.

Annoying that you can’t switch languages with a paid license.

Oh.... that sucks. I was hoping lifetime meant all languages they have?

One might expect that, yeah

I've managed to not hate Duolingo by only doing it on my laptop (e.g., I don't know what the energy system is; I get 5 hearts every 24 hrs) with an ad-blocker. But lately it feels like I'm running into the AI: there's a higher frequency of unnatural sentences that "work" but are off. One today: "I downloaded a very nice application" (where "nice" = "sympa") and "This is a special TV show today."

It's entirely possible there's no AI involved at all and these are just bad legacy sentences or even things a French speaker might say but the Eng translation seems odd, but that's why using this tech is so insidious from the user perspective. Anyway maybe this is the year I finally pay for something more useful. I'd kill for something actually tailored for le français québécois

use one of the online services that pairs you up with a native speaker to practice (particularly useful in your scenario where you're looking to learn a specific dialect), Duolingo is a fun game but will never get you beyond the beginner stages of language learning

oh yeah I'm under no illusions about its overall efficacy, but I do like having something I can do on a daily basis that at the very least reinforces learning I've picked up in more formal educational settings. And yes I slot it alongside my daily wordall.xyz or spellbee play -- it just feels like the game is being degraded

I still use it, but mostly for underserved languages that still have good Incubator courses. I also am on certain Discord servers where I can ask questions and, in particular, some of the creators and/or ex-Duolingo forum managers of those courses are available to help.

my favorite Duolingo sentence was from a couple years ago in the German course: it translated to “I am
lying on the ground eating bread and crying”

see now that has the distinct stamp of a human writer

The whole official Duo line of "nutty sentences are more memorable and the research proves it" is very problematic.