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.

Unfortunately they do not :(

A thing that made me go "wow I'm living in the future" is Google Translate's feature where you point your phone's camera at something and it quickly superimposes a translation, in the same font as the original text and everything. Vietnamese is an available language with that. I've been watching Italian cooking youtubes which have English subtitles, trying to follow along whole checking the subtitles as infrequently as possible. Then use that Google translate feature to check my translations of some comments. Obv you'd need to use a laptop or tablet in addition to a phone.

memrise sort of has vietnamese! it's not one of the officially supported ones, though.

i'll have to check out that google translate thing. i had no idea, and yes that does sound futuristic.

Another neat thing in Buusu is native speakers will grade your little exercises at the end of some lessons and give feedback. Such as "describe what you're doing today", either in writing or speaking. You can return the favor and grade people learning English. The inner English teacher in me enjoys it. Cool to help random people on the other side of the planet learn your language.

Euler, are you still doing the Italian/French Connection? I just went back to that to finish off the week and learned a common locution between the two languages for an April Fool.

I am! I have been in diamond league for two weeks now. I'm never going to be near the top, because my 700-1000xp doesn't hack it, but I should avoid relegation; thus, the league aspect is practically over for me.

I'm in the final set of lessons now, past the last tower or whatever; it's the biggest sections and I'm doing the imparfait & it's gotten much harder for me.

May I ask what if anything in particular makes it so difficult?

Actually I am at the exact same point in that tree, although I already finished that particular lesson and am onto the next two.

I guess any kind of past tense is always where it gets interesting.

It's not really the imparfait that's difficult, it's that the sentence structures have gotten harder, and I keep messing things up with word orders that I'm not sure are even wrong. Like I can write "nouveau" before or after a word as a modifier. It can change the meaning a little but c'mon, duolingo shouldn't be *that* sensitive. Basically I just keep messing up little things but ON IPAD it's annoying because I have limited stars & I end up "playing" less than I want to, because I don't (yet) want to pay.

Ah yes, sentence structure and word order issues, know exactly what you are talking about. You can always complain and maybe they will (eventually) accept your answer, but doesn't really help in the short run.

Yes, though sometimes I'm in the wrong. But I found it annoying yesterday when I had to translate "bambina" and I just gave "enfant" and it wanted "petite fille" and that's not a good translation, since "petite fille" generally means "granddaughter" and not just "little girl". Bleh.

I’ve gotten tripped up by something similar- can’t remember in which language though;) What about the de=di/da confusion, how is that treating you?

Hm, just looked at that node. I was unfamiliar with this usage of stare (stava) to mean to go out, or leave (with).

Also this is tricky: “da bambino” without a verb, translating to “quand j’étais petit. »

“Stare” one of those all-purpose verbs that does a lot of work

BTW, today will be my 1000th day of my current Duolingo streak. Although I did have to use a streak freeze every once in a while along the way, such as last week.

Yeah, that lesson is a drag, at least for getting things right without having to learn special expressions.

I'm not having too much trouble yet with da/di, but that may be luck.

I should have posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMlpqOsc2BU
yesterday

Hm, no obvious crazies in my cohort this week.

Here’s another another expression from the lesson that will mess you up: non vedere l’ora.

Not sure if it's overkill but maybe we could start a separate thread for that project.

for which project? just learning italian? this thread isn't particularly active, I think it can stay here, but I dunno

Yeah, learning or improving Italian. Probably best to keep it here as you say.

Just noticed that the reverve tree, from Italian to French, recently got an upgrade.

Some new lessons maybe but hardly any tips or notes it seems.

I don't ever read the tips or notes, if I don't just absorb the grammar from playing then I'd rather work through a more structured text. I choose duolingo for the former.

I used to do the same, but at some point started forcing myself to read them more often. I also almost always click through the speech bubble to read any discussion or get any extra audio.

So what does don't green the time mean? Don't waste it?

Duolingo left me pretty bewildered by prepositions but then I got to them in buusu and they make total sense

I feel like I'm mocking an Italian accent by bouncing on the double vowels, but that's just how you gotta do them huh

It's "vedere" not "verdere."

This is kind of hard and not a lot of fun. Going back to my other languages.

Started the Spanish a little over a week ago and loving it. Like others have said, I'm a little surprised that the gamification aspect apparently works so well on me.

It's stupid, but in the set 6 story "Need Help?", the way the narrator says "Nnnnecesita...ayuda!?" cracks me up every time.

I only just started German a few weeks ago, but I feel like I'm taking to it faster than any other language I've ever tried. It's really fun.

wow, they just updated the french->italian course, and most of my "progress" is erased? I don't care, it's not like "finishing" the older course would have signified anything in particular re. competence in the language, but it's still striking. at least the undone levels are easy again!

Oh, yeah, it's all gone purple

But on the other hand I am much further along in the tree.

same here. & I don't mind doing easy things, to boost my basics. & the lessons are different now, for instance I don't remember "pronto" being introduced in the old lessons but now it's in like basics 1.

Had that a few times in my Spanish tree and I'm always glad now, as it means more content, so I can keep going ad infinitum!

I only just started German a few weeks ago, but I feel like I'm taking to it faster than any other language I've ever tried. It's really fun.
― jmm, Tuesday, August 4, 2020 4:20 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

come to the german thread !

The German language

I'm going to reset my german this week/next - might lace in some duolingo work as a novelty

I was going to reset my Italian through French tree and then try to place out of all the purple but then I just went to the last castle instead.

I'm back grinding the French tree after my lessons finished for the summer. Allez!

a Beatles fan at the Duolingo office must have snuck this one through

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDes5A_g1ap/

Heh

Today I discovered a person who does Duolingo at least twice as much as I do that I know in real life.

That’s...probably too much?

Ha, he admitted as much himself. But he has been quite helpful in assisting me in learning his language, so it has worked out okay for me so far.