itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

I sprung for Max last week and it’s not a major upgrade on Super but the AI chat bot is quite fun and the ‘explain my answer’ feature intermittently useful. The latter seems like something that should be baked into any course as standard, tbh.

I’ve recently completed a year-long experiment to see how far I could get in Spanish only using DL and no other study tools, with progress tracked against a third-party spoken Spanish assessment and it has been effective to a point. I’ve gone from CEFR A1 to a solid B1, which is, more or less, what DL claims it will do.

Yes, I can believe it. Don’t want to play for Max though.

Today I have reached a 2001 day streak. More and more I rely more heavily on other apps. I will continue to use this one as well, despite various misgivings I have accumulated over the years.

This is kind of interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnPBoh0W0M0

Somewhere along the line male and female tts voices were added to the Irish course which makes it that much more appealing.

FInally hitting the Duolingo wall in every language and may heed the siren song of Steve Kaufmann and try LingQ.

Went back to Duolingo after a gap of months and found to my horror that you can no longer use the keyboard to type in the web version, you're stuck with the word bank.

O RLY?

Sorry. Are you sure that’s true, sometimes there’s a magic button somewhere hard to notice.

I hate the web interface with the heat of a thousand suns though so very rarely use it.

It's really completely gone. There used to be a "use keyboard" option, but they took it away except on maybe one question per set. It's awful.

Terrible. Maybe it’s time to try Clozemaster or Glossika.

Please remind me again which language(s) you are learning?

German mainly, though I teach French and I like to assign Duolingo to my students as homework. I don't require them to spend much time on it, and they can go at their own pace, but it's been a good way to give them some general practice time and the chance to see more vocab than we can get through in class.

Kind of wish someone would learn Catalan with me, but I know that's not often how it works. Believe there was someone upthread maybe who mentioned it. There are some good YouTube channels and podcasts these days like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYA7LheeFcE

It's on my (long) list, but sadly I wouldn't have the time at the moment.

I'd love to try and learn at least a little of several of the Iberian languages.

I just don’t know why people continue to use Duolingo when we live in an era with LingQ, Drops, Memrise, and iTalki

I've tried most of the alternatives people are suggesting and don't like them nearly as well, and many of them you have to pay for. Duolingo at its best was a genuinely effective, well-organized, free app that made you use the language in sentences rather than just memorizing vocab. It's been getting steadily easier, which is frustrating, but until they took out the keyboard I still liked it a lot.

Duolingo is very addictive in many ways, but after all these years, I am finally at the point where pretty much all my languages are maxed out to where I can’t really advance much and they are either too easy or too hard or both at the same time. Those other alternatives are all configurable in way that makes it more possible to find the sweet spot of real progress.

Steve Kaufmann indulges in some annoying stuff at times but the things he says about language learning usually seem to ring true and LingQ seems to be a useful app so far.

I tried LingQ but it seemed to just be one-word-at-a-time translations like you'd get from reading an ebook. And it didn't seem to know how to handle German compound verbs - it would only let me click on one half of the verb at a time, and of course that would result in a totally off-base translation. So I gave up on it pretty much instantly. Is there more to it?

They have these mini-stories as a way to build up vocabulary and experience the grammar live. They don’t actually teach grammar, he recommends you buy the smallest grammar book you can find.

Then you can make your own lessons or find some uploaded lessons you like. I found some Catalan videos and podcasts I like which is why I wanted to try it. The main thing is that the vocabulary is color-coded so you can easily see which words are new to you and which words are difficult, versus words you know and easier words.

You can also search and list your vocabulary based on the difficulty level.

So it first glance it looks pretty kinky but maybe there is something to it

Ha, hinky not kinky

My anecdotal experience is that when I do it and then go back and use some other software I seem to feel more confident, the other software seems easier and I retain more.

The intention is supposedly to have more material, more repetition and variation.

I like this YouTube channel called CouchPolyglot. I see her, Laura, talking about something called Comprehensible Input with some other language YouTubers and it makes sense to me. Think Steve Kaufmann of LingQ seems to be on board. She speaks German and has lived in German-speaking countries for several years, maybe she has some German instructional videoa.

Well she does but they are in Spanish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqSBh6kVn0g

Here's SK talking about CI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au4CoCLi1Is

Looking at the German in LingQ right now. Seems to understand the compound verbs.

There’s a ton of stuff available for German in there.

This seems relevant somehow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/sports/baseball/friends-tv-show-baseball-spanish.html

“The basics you can learn in a classroom,” said Flores, who was interviewed in Spanish, along with most of the players, for ease. “But to speak the language, that comes from here in the clubhouse, on the street or from television.”

Just started using the add your own dictionary search feature to Clozemaster and it is truly awesome.

I may yet wake up tomorrow with an enthusiasm hangover but right now this trick is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67197462

In addition to all the other apps I may use, I just started messing with something called uTalk.

Still on this jag

I'm back at DuoLingo again after taking enough time off to forget the previous interface. Still working on Spanish and right now "ir" is giving me pain.

Well this is shit

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/duolingo-cuts-10-of-contractors-in-move-to-greater-use-of-ai

Yeah, I hate this. I used the paid version, which obviously I don't want to continue to support if they're going to lay people off and, presumably, end up with a worse product. But I also don't want to give it up. Its whole shtick works well for me. Fifteen minutes a day, structured lessons, nagging notifications, etc etc.

Wonder what this will be like.

https://lingonaut.app/

Also wondering if anyone else is following the recent memrise snafu.

I'm trying out Lingopie https://lingopie.com/ which seems like it would suit me. Lots of tv shows in French where you can add/remove the subtitles in english and your target language. Any words/phrases that you don't know you can save and you get a quiz at the end of the episode.

I haven’t found Duolingo to be much help. For one thing, it tests the words that I never ever miss way too much, words I’ve known for years and would never forget. Another problem for me is that after a while the disjointed sentences and vocabulary feel like they don’t add up to anything. Ok, now I know how to say I’m taking the dog to the airport or give me back my peanut or whatever, then I’ll move on to some totally unrelated lesson, and it never seems to build to real conversational skills even in languages where I already have some conversational ability.

It’s utility depends on the language but yeah, overall agree with you

Kinda resent they only have Brazilian Portuguese. Totally understand way more ppl speak it, certainly they should have it as an option, but give ppl a choice ffs.

Do they have British/Australian/New Zealand English as a choice? What about all the Spanishs?

Some other apps, Glossika and Drops have the choice of European Portuguese