itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

Yeah I have a harder time speaking Spanish now. I end up slipping French words into my speech automatically. I should probably do a Spanish course in French again to jar it back. It's not lost---I picked up Spanish from hearing it spoken by my family when I was a kid (it's my father's native language), and only took courses in it to mine it out.

Basically my experience is that I can sort of keep Spanish and French straight now, although I am pretty sure I don't speak either as well as you, maybe can fake Italian a little, but otherwise pretty much every Romance language gets mushed together and every Germanic language gets confused with, well, German. There is a reason people end up speaking Portuñol/Portunhol. Also, think the English to Italian course is not so great anyway and hasn't been updated in ages so you are not missing much.

I started doing the English to Italian and then realized I shouldn't, but the little I did was basically the same.

Normally when I'm in Italy I just speak Spanish with a Chef Boyardee accent and everything goes well enough. I don't give talks that way though, just like, shopping.

It would be good for me to be able to read Italian and I really just want to get the very basics because I bet I can mostly figure out it after that (the technical words will be basically the same as in French, but e.g. pronouns, articles, conjugations, are all enough different to confuse me).

Will be interested how that works. I usually *think* that will be the case but then there always ends up being some linguistic narcissism of small differences that throws me off. But I have confidence that your more systematic academic approach will help you prevail.

i don't think the languages even have to be close. i never studied german for speaking properly so i've always had trouble getting numbers to stick—what comes to my tongue when i'm trying to read (where the numbers are very unhelpfully not spelled out) will often be a russian word instead.

Yeah, that kind of thing happens too

yeah I learned French from this software + years of poring over French texts with dictionaries/translation software + spending extended time here. probably won't ever spend a ton of time in Italy (not against it, I just have other countries where I'd rather spend 6 months+ (for which I also should learn their languages!)) but with texts I can make quick enough progress. maybe it's wrong but I feel like between two other romance languages there ought to be enough of those small differences already baked in that Italian won't offer *too* many others.

I just found that which each new language it became harder and harder to immerse myself, physically or virtually or otherwise, in a way that it really soaked in.

yeah we'll see. my ambitions are quite modest for any further language acquisition. If I get further than basic fumbling that'll be great. They're fun games with a bit of practical upshot. That's the privilege of being a (native) English speaker at the time of Globlish.

Sometimes, like just now, I click on Words and look at number of words I have supposedly learned or at least studied or touched somehow and I internally sigh or some equivalent.

In other news Clozemaster did a big update yesterday. Shifted a bunch of stuff around, especially on the app which seems to have been completely redone. In some ways there is more TTS and in some ways less TTS, not sure how I feel about it.

So I am a half dozen lessons away from the end of the Gaelic course. Trying to slow walk it, but maybe will end up rushing it like the center of a Tootsie Pop as is my wont. Always that emotional see-saw between “this is starting to make sense, starting to converge, I got this, smooth sailing from now on” and then “this is impossible, nobody can learn a foreign language properly without living in the place where it is spoken and being immersed.”

Cf. DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the "Spock's Brain" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Oops. Apparently that usage of cf. is problematic.

Tha e cho crosta ri cat-fiadhaich.

No to both of your questions from a few days back, James Redd

Thanks for responding!

that league table purple lightning bolt XP Ramp Up Challenge
This went missing for me after this week's reset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct#Catalan

E•MO•CIÓ

Ah, that explains the name of the Cava grape variety Xarel·lo. Interesting.

Think I need one of those Elvis Costello Spinning Wheels to decide what language to study at any given moment.

HI DERE

https://status.duolingo.com/

All Systems Operational

So I have some kind of advanced/super-geeky/OCD approach to this app I have been using recently if you want to hear about it.

i want to hear about it

Okay, so if I want to go fast, I go over to the League Table and hit the Purple Lightning Bolt for the XP Ramp Up Challenge. More often than not I can tell what section it has me working on so then I can go back to the tree and do lessons- more slowly, since no time bonus, but yes accuracy bonus- from the corresponding leaf in the tree.

i didn't even know there was a purple lightning bolt

I don't get one on the web or android app.

i don't seem to have one either. there's a barbell that seems to generate practice questions in a similar way on the main page, not tied explicitly to any lesson, but it's not timed.

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/37695355/XP-Ramp-Up-Challenge

I used to get a double-XP bonus that I could activate for free in the store every Thursday and would last for thirty minutes, doubling the XP for whatever lessons I did in that time, but it was a similar kind of test feature and only around for a few months for me.

Oh yeah, I would get that too

I used the purple lightning bolt twice today (ON IPAD) to get a bit higher in my tier. I gather these tiers are specific to language1->language2 ? ie if you're doing English->Portuguese the rankings are different than those for French->German ?

I can buy double XP bonuses with gems, which I have a lot of, because of all my progress from five years ago that got converted to gems in the meantime.

Tiers have nothing to do with which language(s) you are studying. You can click on any other individual of the fifty in your cohort, or yourself for that matter, and see what they are studying to confirm this.

ah ok thanks! which tier are you in? I am in the ruby tier, looking at a promotion to the next tier in a couple of days if I keep up the good work.

I am in Diamond League, in which the only Achievement left is to finish first, which is highly likely for reasons I can explain if needed.

Note that within each League I believe it is random which fifty people you will compete with each week.

huh ok. nice! I've only been doing this again for a month now.

Liking this new thing when you level up and it gives you extra points and tells you which ones you missed and are reviewing.

Can’t remember which language you are studying now, Euler.

I am doing Italian, from French.

Studio italiano.

And are you finding it easy or challenging?

Easy. Between French and Spanish, both the nouns & the verbs are pretty familiar already. The grammar is also pretty similar. I haven't gotten into any tenses but the present yet, though. Conjugations in the present are mostly regular so far too (except for être and avoir, ha I don't know the infinitives of those verbs in Italian, though I know the conjugations). As usual with Duolingo, you get a pretty fractured understanding of things, but that's even easier when I already know other very similar languages.

i was racking up XP like crazy for like 2 months and then suddenly got super bored with trying to max out my lesson-levels at 5/5 for the checkpoint i've gotten to (which is the method i'd settled on, rather than always going ahead—i tested into the next checkpoint a while back, but haven't been opening up its new level-1 lessons), so now i'm at risk of being demoted from wherever i'm at, pearl league iirc, unless i do a bunch this weekend just to stay in the running : /

it would be a real boon if the subsequent lesson-levels weren't such a repetition of the earlier ones.

Yup

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind.

For me racking up lots of XP usual comes from useful review which eventually turns into not-so-useful review and then just gamification whirlpool spin.
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