itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

i am learning welsh obviously (plus brushing up french)

the welsh is going badly -- french is telling me i am 24% fluent, which is a fib imo

should I install this and see how bad my German has become, y/n

(I'm already downloading it)

Duolingo is a great way to absorb language basics and grammar rules, but once you have that stuff down and are in the mode of adding vocabulary I found it kind of inefficient.

xp You will learn many duck-related German sentences ime

i have been surprised how much french i still know in terms of vocab: my grammar was and is terrible

polyphonic otm, I finished the French tree and have never gone back, currently use Memrise (and used Lingvist until I ran out of words) to build vocab

in welsh i have discovered nothing about ducks but i have encountered a DRAGON (draig)

I completed the Japanese Duolingo and it is good for absorbing things by wrote but I grew frustrated with never having any of the grammar explained to me. It’s provided a good base.

There’s some more discussion of Duolingo

Do You Speak A Second Language?
日本語は話せます 🇯🇵

pimsleur >> duolingo

well but Duolingo is free

honestly DL is more like a fun app that helps you read stuff in a foreign language

huh 46% fluent

not bad I guess

Was going to say, however tell me more about why pimsleur is good? Everything else I have been trying has been lower cost but really falls down on getting me to speak. I’d pay for some live interaction.

I used to be fluent in Portuguese but haven't used in 20 years - wonder if this could get me back on my bullshit.

Duolingo fluency shield suffers from grade inflation especially when you are progressing through, say, the first third of the course or have just taken the placement test. At some points if starts to drop off and decay and you may regret giving into your ex-clever schoolboy’s craving for this particular form of external gratification.

Think last word should have been "validation."

whenever i type "nos lau" (thursday night) it tells me i have a typo and that the correct spelling is "nos lau"

Did you type a lower case “el” (wrong) or a capital “eye” (correct)?

oh right that makes sense yes

That was really it?

Some of the answers in some of the courses are messed up so that it will tell you about an alternate answer or typo which seems to be dependent on some punctuation, or even some other “invisible punctuation.” There seem to even be cases where it is supposed to accept some letters from say, a standard English alphabet, without certain diacritical and just tell you to “mind the accents” but it gets into some looking glass world where it doesn’t accept the correct foreign alphabet letter. Feel like I️ saw this happen in Turkish, with the non-dotted i, the ı.

i haven't gone back in and checked but yes, it's quite likely tha:, since i realised when i read yr post that i was listening to DL's pronunciation of Iau and thinking "wow the initial i sound in front of those vowels is really like an L isn't it?" -- based on assuming my grasp of welsh pronunciation is actually worse than it is

(the pronunciation i learnt as a kid IS different to the version they're using: spoken welsh has surprisingly strong regional variation: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/13474058/Dialects-much-more-than-a-simple-north-south-divide)

(but it's not really the consonants that vary)

Ah, some weird keyboard autocorrect is now putting something strange when I type the letter capital “eye” I.

Speaking of which, at some point iOS seems to have added a Welsh keyboard, which may um, assist you in your answers.

"wow the initial i sound in front of those vowels is really like an L isn't it?"

or maybe the other way round, anyway i was struck by how different their pronunciation was than mine would be -- which is because i was misreading the letter

Sometimes wonder if the Welsh as taught is just some sort of approximation standard that is in fact spoken by no one at all, like Bokmål/Nynorsk, I️ think.

How is your pronunciation of the letter double el?

Ach, still the weird “ego problem” or “ego trip” with the capital eye. Think I️ need to delete my autocorrect dictionary.

Tom, delete ILX all my bookmarks my autocorrect dictionary now!

Ah, that didn’t seem to work. I’m stymied.

my double ll pronunciation is p good i think! the nearest large town to where we went on family holidays when i was a kid is machynlleth and i know how ppl who live in it say it

this was before welsh was actually taught in schools -- indeed, it was actively discouraged in schools back then, and i know someone who was made to leave school at 16 because he preferred to speak welsh (as did his entire family, of hill farmers)

(he became a mechanic and a builder, and is now very comfortably off and owns half the town)

Ah. I have never been in the presence of a Welsh speaker as far as I know, apart from John Cale at an instore.

I against I against I

(Had to chose the *RONG* spelling for each of those eyes to get the correct one)

Seems to me the pronunciation of Welsh, especially the “ll,” involves a lot more spittle than, say, English.

At one point I was having some problems with the days of the week with when to put the word for day in there, such as “dydd Iau.” Seem to have sorted it, can’t remember what the problem really was.

The other thing to remember of course about the “i” is that the word for Thursday starts with j for Jupiter-or Jove! do u see?! in most Romance languages.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/14295031/Dydd-Mercher-a-Dydd-Iau

yes i haven't worked out when not to use Dydd yet!

(tho i also haven't yet been marked wrong on either, and have been assuming -- perhaps wrongly -- that they are effectively interchangeable, at least in this limited context)

ooh handy steer on the root of the day names, i'd spotted they were "a bit like French" but hadn't taken it any further

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.

I pay no mind to Duolingo tables and such.

I'm back on Scottish Gaelic and started Latin. Both I'm sure not among the better courses on there but relevant to my interests. I want to start arabic up again but it defeated me quite thoroughly my first swing at it

Duolingo Arabic course is mostly about learning the alphabet. Drops has Arabic, been fooling with it but haven't really put the pedal to the metal. I actually learned a bit of it from a book, DK 15-minute Arabic, which also has an accompanying app to help a little with the self-study.

Just got to the sun and moon letters, in the Hobbies unit right before the third checkpoint.

The (Scottish) Gaelic course on Glossika looks pretty good. And is free.

And now I went back to the (Scottish) Gaelic on Duolingo and am enjoying it. Found some pretty good tied in resources as well.

https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_Skill:Body_2
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/35392478/A-list-the-Scottish-Gaelic-words-taught-up-to-the-first-checkpoint-and-their-translations
https://duome.eu/tips/en/gd

Still finding the Gaelic fun.

Arabic gets pretty hard around the Picture 2 lesson, fifth from last.

The IRN BRU glè bhlasta.

The leagues suckered me into going a little too fast for a couple of weeks

this seems right but if you don't then it can be SOOOOO SLOOWWWWWW

I find that if it really feels too slow it is because the language it is already too easy for me in some sense and Duolingo isn't really going to help that much by itself anyway.

i'm only doing french, have studied russian (in school) and german (for grad student reading) but it does give the impression of being pretty breezy. i think they contribute to that by structuring so much of the content in terms of very friendly true-friends (~false friends) that help you think you already know all the vocabulary? which is maybe just natural anyway given the relationships between the languages.

Yeah, despite all the well-known difficulties of getting French exactly right, because of the close relationship it is one of the easier languages for English speakers to learn, especially if they already have experience with or are just not afraid of foreign languages. And the Duolingo course is fine but probably not particularly hard.

yeah it seems kind of cosmically inappropriate that words like 'go' AND 'have' do the same kinds of functionally-overloaded work in both languages! it's like have some self-respect, france

Lol

Wondering when this honeymoon is going to come to an end but for now: Tha Gàidhlig spòrsail!

Also, finally, finally forcing myself to slow down, by almost always pressing on the speech bubble to see the comments and (re)listen if possible and now by looking at those offsite Vocab and Tips and Notes.

Don’t know if we have ever commented on the fact that when Duolingo gives you three choices that more often then not you can apply logic, some sort of um, syllogism, to figure out the correct answer, because the other two are variants of it and it is in the center.

Going further down the (Scottish) Gaelic rabbit hole. Found a blog with a few interesting things on it, including this post about dictionaries:
https://gaelic.co/gaelic-dictionary/

as well as this useful site with lots of learning material, including audio and video:
https://learngaelic.scot/index.jsp

Tha sglèat a dhìth air Calum.

Report from the far corners of Duolingo. Found a few new courses in there, these being
Swedish from Spanish
German from Dutch
Esperanto from French (not released yet)

Also noticed that the TTS for the Catalan from Spanish course seems to be the same voice but cleaned up a little.

Interesting that “glas” means both green and gray in some Celtic languages.

"gorm" means both blue and, when referring to people, black

in Irish Gaelic anyway

Oh yeah. Think I saw that as well

This is interesting, regarding one of my favorite topics: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/4134876/Duolingo-experimented-with-the-use-of-real-human-voices-and-concluded-that-people-liked-TTS-more

Do you already speak Irish, jim?

Also have you gotten to the Body 2 lesson of (Scottish) Gaelic?

I've started doing Italian, but in order to avoid the damage that my learning French did to my Spanish, I'm doing the French course for Italian. I don't really have any reason to do Italian aside from being impressed at how many non-Italians I know who speak it (and wanting to join their ranks), and, of course, the loveliness of the language itself.

Did the French mess up your Spanish? I used to mock college kids coming back from Europe saying things like that but then ultimately I ended up experiencing something similar. Also I resisted that kind of cross-training for a few years but in the end I found it useful, not just a stunt.

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.