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.

Let me share my iTalki link

https://www.italki.com/i/DG6EeD

Ah, thanks, but I forgot about that and already signed up earlier.

I am assuming you are using it for Japanese. Do you have a teacher you like? Don’t feel like pursuing Japanese right now, but might change my mind. Can’t figure out how to follow you either, assuming you don’t mind me following you.

Hm, looks like I can follow someone through the posts on the community wall, but not otherwise.

I have a woman called aikiko based in Melbourne, she’s one of many young Japanese in Australia trying her best to dodge going home for ever. We mainly do conversation practice and read magazine articles, it works pretty well.

I’ve never posted anything on the community wall.

Also trying to see the different ways to search for teachers, tried to find your teacher for example but couldn't.

Anyway, tried a lesson yesterday which was kind of interesting, tried to schedule another one for today, but that teacher didn't respond but yet another one did so we will see.

Okay I tried some more lessons. Think I found a really good guy for Hungarian who lives in South America thereby also teaching Spanish and is low-cost that I think I would recommend if someone is interested.

A bunch of these people speak or teach multiple languages, so it is possible to do something like learn a new language and reinforce one you already know with the same person.

I've never tried this. Only japanese.

All I can say though is everyone is crazy undercharging for the effort they put in.

Yeah.

Just compare it to what you would pay for, say, music lessons.

Ed, do you use the italki classroom? Or Skype? Or Zoom perhaps?

Zoom typically, no teacher has ever been able to get the italki classroom to work.

Ha, I think it worked for me once or twice but yeah.

How long of a lesson do you typically do?

Normally an hour, sometimes I regret that as it’s scheduled after work and it can make for a long day.

I’m really using it for general conversation, and my fallback is to have some stuff to read together. Which can still be taxing, still not perfect with kanji.

https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-grammar/grammatical-cases/the-partitive-case-partitiivi

Hey, so I just finished the Finnish tree.

cool! one run through? how many nodes are there?

I'm in the latter part of my third run through the French->Italian tree. still having more fun with French->German, but I have a lot more context for German in my work, so a lot of words & even grammar are like, oh yeah, people argue about how to translate that word into English from Kant.

34 nodes maybe. Think I will spend some time on this with Clozemaster next.

I hear you about German.

Wirklich!

Just looked at Scottish Gaelic and there was a huge update which seems to have started rolling out in December.

There are a lot more languages with English than with French!

I'm on my fourth round through the French->Italian tree. It's getting routine. This is good, but not always much fun. But I am a devoted student.

I'm probably 1/3 through my first run through the French->German tree. It's very much not routine. But it's more enjoyable now than Italian, because every lesson is an a-ha! moment. It will become routine too I imagine.

Do you guys have any Instagram pages you like to follow for languages?

My friend likes dw_deutschlernen for German.

I don't use instagram. I've ordered a German children's book, having asked a German friend for something her child enjoys, because right now that's a level of German I'm striving for. I read cooking sites in German (chefkoch.de) and Italian (lacucinaitaliana.it) because I like to cook.

Greek just got a major update.

I like Deutsche Welle too. Not instagram, just their website. They've got a little educational telenovela where every episode is just a few minutes long, and the News in Slow German is good as well. I should get back on learning German; I've really been letting it slide during the pandemic.

Recent courses I just discovered:
Esperanto from French
French from Dutch

Greek course seems to be an improvement

thanks for the Deutsche Welle reference !

I follow a bunch of Japanese stuff on Instagram but it’s not language learning, it’s just content in Japanese that I’m interested in, it make me read.

So the word “Mezzogiorno” came up on another thread. Do you know how to pronounce the “zz” in that word, Euler?

zz like in pizza no, with a bit of t ?

btw I finished #1 in my Diamond division this week! first time I've finished #1 in any division, let alone the top division. I ended with just under 4500 points. Usually Diamond takes 6-8k points to win. I got a good draw this week. But I also had a more active week than usual for reasons independent of my ranking (had to stay up late with other people & grinding through this was a way to stay happy). Now I don't have to think about that again.

no, common mistake

more like a dz in this case

https://forvo.com/word/mezzogiorno/

ha, oh well. my Italian friends will correct me. already, one told me that I have to stop using a castellano accent for Italian.

heh

Think I finished #1 in Diamond League twice so far but of course the only time that really mattered was the first. Believe I got relegated once but then it was impossible to stay relegated so I try to wait a little bit after the reset before hitting Duolingo directly- I do some other review instead- to avoid at least some of the crazies.

I really wish the Words feature was better, have probably complained about it before.

Like I wish it didn't list the super basic words I just practiced, only the harder ones, many of which seem to go missing. At this point I don't really need to know I just practiced the word for "a" or "the" or "no" or "and."

What is the words feature?

The ones that the lesson is actually about.

Click on the three dots in the middle of the menu at the top of the webpage, to the left of the flag.

Should say
Events
Dictionary
Words

Think it’s more useful in the beginning, when you haven’t done too many lessons.

Probably better to just use the dictionary feature.