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.

Is it waar naartoe or waarnaartoe? I'd say the former.

DUO said the latter. Was interested in that long word, which is why I posted that.

Discussion here: https://taaladvies.net/taal/advies/vraag/566/waar_naar_toe_waar_naartoe/

Also this seems like it may be useful to me https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/3733010/Grammar-Dutch-Word-Order

Took a break from Dutch and am working on Greek a little bit, which is fun and interesting for various reasons I can elaborate on if you like.

Omg isn't it hella hard? My kid is still undecided to continue Old Greek

Doesn’t seem so to me, but I am learning at my own pace

I can dance a tango, I can read Greek — easy.

Modern Greek is easier than (the) Ancient Greek(s)... but it's still quite hard for English speakers to learn! On par with Russian, definitely harder than Dutch. But easier than Arabic or Mandarin.

Ah, you are right, f. hazel, it is in the second hardest category. Very hard to shake that feeling of “In just a short period of time I have learned a few simple greetings, phrases and grammar points — it’s all downhill from here!”

But easier than Arabic or Mandarin.

Japanese is pretty easy. Apparently Korean is easier?

Ancient Greek is still taught in schools here but less and less kids want to study it. I would love if Ophelia continues but it's up to her.

How do you all do it: do you randomly pick a theme or finish one before heading to the next one?

Japanese is not easy

I studied Japanese for three years, it feels easy at the very beginning (no subject/verb agreement, no plurals, very few sounds not already present in English) and then rapidly destroys your self-confidence (honorifics, counters, ten-year investment in memorizing Kanji if you ever want to read a newspaper headline)

^otm

Well, true, the honorifics are quite hard. But compared to dutch (and other languages) it felt easier. Much less exceptions. It feels more structured compared to my language. Granted, languages come easily to me.

Also I read a book on how the Japanese think. (Sociology, psychology,... and how that relates to the language.) It was eye opening and hence made studying the language easier for me.

Did you visit Japan or take any sort of certification test?

I remember my Japanese-as-in-from-Japan professor being asked if she was going to move back to Japan and her momentary abandonment of her usual formal-Japanese-professor aspect to exclaim "absolutely not, I hate living there!" and then she spent the rest of the class saying how great Japan was to make up for it. Not mentioned in textbooks: it really sucks to be a woman there.

Also I read a book on how the Japanese think. (Sociology, psychology,... and how that relates to the language.) It was eye opening and hence made studying the language easier for me.

― nathom, Tuesday, 14 May 2019 5:07 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would like to read this book.

As for kanji, I find that relatively easy. I’m thirty weeks into a kanji learning programme and I can read most of what a 6th grader can a lot of what a high schooler can. Actually I’m slowing down that to bring my grammar and comprehension up to a similar level. It’s been a real boon to be able to read so much more, though.

Position of women in japan is pretty shocking, if slowly getting better.

Yeah, but aren’t you actually in Japan now? Don’t you think that makes it a wee bit easier as well?

I’m only occasionally in japan. In Australia till August. I’ve just started using an iTalki tutor which is helping.

日本語の文法を覚えるくらい難しいことはない。

I'll look in the attic, Ed. It's been two decades since I read it. Lol

Wat voor noten hebben jullie?

Meneer beer eet een peer.

I'm doing the Irish course and it's bizarrely obsessed with menus and apples.

Yeah. I looked at that one for a bit and it seemed to be missing something, not a lot of audio for one thing, and also the kind of stuff you are describing.

1000 day streak today!

¡Hoy he logrado una racha de mil días!

Waaaaht. Omg. I'm on day 120. Slipped off the top 20. Thanks to returning to FB. LOL

I'm a creature of habit and many days just do a quick couple of lessons, but more when I have time (I'm at 55000XP over those 1000+ days). I've always maintained my streak freeze, which has saved me a few times along the way when life got particularly busy.

I'm at the stage I want to purchase a grammah book bec it feels duolingo is fun but not informative enough (in that regard).

Sounds like a good idea.

This page might be useful for those willing to follow into the Modern Greek rabbit hole: https://www.foundalis.com/lan/greek.htm

Ophelia started Japanese! So proud of her.

Still waiting for https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/32196326/Improved-Norwegian-Course-Overview-and-F-A-Q

In the meantime just noticed Arabic on the app.

Only the app barely works anymore. Overtaxed servers, I assume.

Okay, it’s a go.

It’s a super tiny course :(

Tap the pairs

Hardly any discussions either. I saw a few but they were only a day or two old.

Seems like at least a good way to work the writing system.

Only the app barely works anymore. Overtaxed servers, I assume.

Doubt if it will enable me to catch up to Ed, but the Japanese course is much improved with the recent update. Although I think it may still be in A/B testing so not all will see.

The French course got a nice refresh. Having a lot of fun with the "Bad Day" and "Junk" modules.

What about “Bistro”?

Can I just say, I hate the Leagues? I mean, it was cute when there were a limited amount of them, and it was a race you could win. But it got old really fast - and now the leagues are just never-ending, like every time you complete one, another one appears?

Also, the "scoring" for the leagues is really unfair. I'm on Level 5 (the top level) for over half the available courses. The ones that are left are actually really difficult, because German grammar is complex.

Stupidly, because I was trying to "win" a league, I raced really fast through levels 3 and 4, so I did not absorb the actual grammar. Now I'm down to no lessons left, but I still need to review them, so I do a lot of reviewing.

It used to be that reviews and new lessons counted for the same amount of points - 10. Then you got up to 5 "bonus" points for new lessons. Then the "new" lessons got bumped up to 18 points, with "bonus" points on top of them. And now reviewing older lessons had been demoted to only 5 points. Like, it's actively penalising you if you are reviewing grammar rather than trying to absorb new lessons at an unfeasible speed.

At first the Leagues were useful, because doing 20 or 30 reviews a day was really GOOD for my German. But now it's really stopped being fun, and I wish I could opt out of them without feeling like I'm "losing".

yeah i try to not pay attention to them and just go at my own pace. too much gamification!

Same here, mostly

I complained, and discovered that it is possible to disable the Leagues:

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/33039989

Though they made another new change today - vastly decreasing the number of "lessons" in the levels, especially the upper levels, and wow, has that been unpopular.