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.

It’s kind of interesting that 10-15 years into the online, direct-learning model, only Babbel and Rise have ever turned a profit. I wonder if DL will go after the corporate market more aggressively.

Good point

god morgen! snakker du norsk? jeg liker norsk. it's like the same as english with different words.

jeg snakker litt norsk.

not to be confused with

jeg snakker lite norsk

Heh

Some recent improvements I noticed:

New sections on the alphabet for Russian, Korean, Greek, Arabic and Ukrainian, the last course which I’ve never looked at.

Scottish Gaelic course is pretty huge now.

This looks useful: https://www.clozemaster.com/forum/t/new-feature-cloze-listening/12633

Been making some significant improvement by supplementing "book learnin" with watching YouTubes of native speakers. Mostly food/travel vlogs. Playback speed .75x for now.
2 advantages over book learnin: 1) subject matter is much more interesting and 2) get to hear native speakers speaking to a native audience, so get more exposure to idioms, slang, vernacular etc.

Seems like the dictionary feature has been deprecated and the related wordlist is now much less useful.

i know i am asking too much of this stupid app but i'm on a 21 day streak of norwegian and doing pretty well but cannot understand in possessive words when to say like "my book" vs "book my." both are used but in different situations and there is nowhere you can click to have it explain why. i wish there were like little instruction cards for these things. i could just look it up on my own i know!

This wiki page has some useful info though:
https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Japanese

Guess the dictionary is still here, even if not on language menu and not linked to word list:
https://www.duolingo.com/dictionary/ja

Have you tried the "discussion" link, harbl? There's usually ppl asking the same thing I'm wondering in there

Yes! I try to always look at the discussion link.

The one thing that was good about the way the dictionary used to work was that it gave lots of sentences with the corresponding audio.

Guess it still sort of works, although I have a feeling that that will be a temporary link.

Hmm. Works now.

i do use the discussion link but it's always after the question and i can never remember it later. i know where the difference is, it's definite vs. indefinite, but i still can't keep straight which way it goes.

Yeah, I find it useful sometimes for certain things like word order or pronunciation, but other times it goes in one ear and out the other.

I feel like I used to know that distinction in Norwegian but long ago forgot. I can look up in books I still have and post here if you like.

sure, go for it!

the discussion did help me learn to distinguish the spoken "barna" vs "barnet" which i kept getting wrong

Oh yeah.

Okay, book says noun first, broren min is "more oral, concrete and earthly,", whereas the noun last min bror is "more formal, textual and abstract." This is from Louis Janus's grammar book, which I recommend, it's pretty clearly written, although LJ the person was kind of difficult, at least in my online interacts with him.

ok so i'm right in feeling like it's not that easy to to understand. maybe beyond the abilities of duolingo to teach, too!

I tried to see how many google hits I got for each of those two but that didn't help me get a feel for it.

I got 4 million hits for "min bror" but only 260 thousand for "broren min." On the other hand "lots of broren min" in tatoeba but no "min bror" as far as I could tell.

Ah, there is more detail, as expected, in the book by the Strandskogens, also recommended.

I really enjoyed learning Norwegian but then I had some difficulties and it didn’t quite stick. I can elaborate if you like.

^ yes

i think i've figured out the possessive thing, it's just definite noun goes first, indefinite noun goes second. i can't get over the number of words for grandparents. bestparents, fathermother, mothermother, oldmother, something else. then grandchildren is childrenchildren?

Main difficulty was: it was easy enough, what with being closely related to German and English. But I couldn't find a context to use it and practice it. I used to be on a Yahoo Group, two of them actually, but it was usually more for absolute beginners. And then once I tried to write more complicated things and made a few mistakes it would freak out the some of the gatekeeper native speakers and such. Not a guy way to learn or speak a language. Now we have italki I guess.

Best thing to do if possible is to start speaking sooner rather than later but then you need an appropriate person to do that with.

Or course I should practice what I preach but...

yeah i would like to do italki. maybe another month or so.

the lack of speaking is why i can't speak spanish anymore even though i used to be quite good at it when i did talk to people. even though there are TONS of opportunities i could find easily, but i like new shiny things and i want to do a new language. also hate hot weather and want to visit a cold place.

It's complicated.

Certain languages call, and there is very little use in trying to ignore them for an "easier" language.

On the other hand Norwegian is just not a big enough language to concoct some kind of long distance immersion.

On another note: how’d you do on Oscar’s Duocon Keynote?

Got my Oscar's Duocon Keynote August badge successfully. Assume you did too JR?

i didn't see that, what is it?

Monthly challenge

oh, yes, i unknowingly completed the challenge

Just finished the October challenge over the weekend but my heart wasn’t in it.

Almost wish it would randomly choose a language for me to work on.

How’s the Norwegian going, harbl?

p good. 76 day streak. i was in diamond league then i got demoted. i don't do quite enough to get back there but it's ok.

I still have a soft spot for Norwegian for some reason.

Have you tried to read any of these yet?
http://runeberg.org/folkeven/

no, but looks useful, thanks!