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.

Duolingo Japanese improved since you last looked, more lessons, tips in app, much more kanji but yeah, LingoDeer probably still better. For Korean but of them seem kind of too hard to get started with seems like Drops might be a way to ease in.

I recommended it to my daughter.

Also weird how I perform well in some sections but am horrible in others. Do love doing french. I missed it so much.

Gaelic is out. Folks in Scotland are amused and happy that Irn Bru makes an appearance in the first lessons... "Tha IRN BRU math"

Ha, that’s probably the only word of it I know

But I don’t think it will help me place out of any lessons.

Seems an ex-ILX0r makes an appearance in the first lessons as well.

yay. glad that gàidhlig is up, even though it's still in beta.

Tha IRN BRU math

Does the Gaelic have an notes or tips? Don’t see any

Although sometimes they show up later on.

Cha toil leam Callum idir.

Er is geen kip te zien.

trying out Clozemaster now

Dit heeft met jou niets te maken.

Ik geef nooit op.

Tegen wie denk je dat je het hebt?

anyway, back to Duolingo. Seems that once one gets to Set 6 of the Stories, the questions are in the foreign language and the stories themselves are significantly more intricate.

Drops is my new jam.

Dit heeft met jou niets te maken.

Dit heeft niets met jou te maken sounds more natural btw.

Also wtf is the difference betw tous les jours and chaque jour? Just seems weird we can’t use the latter.

in what context? they seem pretty similar

□ chaque jour. La tâche de chaque jour. ➙ journalier, quotidien. Périodique paraissant chaque jour. ➙ journal. PROV. À chaque jour suffit sa peine. □ tous les jours : chaque jour, quotidiennement. Ce sont des choses qui arrivent tous les jours, couramment. (1579) De tous les jours : courant, habituel, ordinaire. La vie de tous les jours, quotidienne. PROV. On n’a pas tous les jours vingt ans
© Le Petit Robert 2016

because of the league tables decide to do a longish lay-off of Duo between Sunday and Monday night.

Thanks!

Weet ik veel!

I’m still in section one. :-( This is taking 4evah

Kijk voor je, alsjeblieft.

Geen huisdieren!

Drop 90 Days Challenge starts tomorrow. Who’s with me?

Hold on, what’s this?

https://languagedrops.com/90dayswithdrops

Kijk uit voor de hond!

i’m gonna learn finnish

Yes, it’s on there.

along with Icelandic.

counter for Drops 90 Day Challenge is currently not working

Kijk goed. Ik zal je laten zien hoe je dit doet.

Doe het rustig!

Getting Drops and Clozemaster into the mix really seems to help.

I'm sticking with this Gàidhlig course longer than i have with other languages i've tried on here.

I've started german (primarily using pimsleur but supplemented with youtube and duolingo). live with a fluent german speaker so trying to blitz a base in 6 months and then maybe try to switch to speaking german at home... see how we go

really found 'le journal en français facile' podcast useful for french listening practice - anyone know of a good equivalent in german? think you have to pay for 'news in slow german'

Deutsche Welle has slowly spoken news podcast every day

it used to be free but maybe not anymore if that’s what you are saying

still seems free, just downloaded today’s episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-nachrichten-deutsch-lernen-deutsche/id282930329

I'm sticking with this Gàidhlig course longer than i have with other languages i've tried on here.

perfect - thanks !
xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxih6CN62V0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SqEmkwADmY

just finally learned what the combo bonus is