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.

Just thought of the most obvious dumb and bare minimum way to preserve streak everyday

Also somebody told me the other day about preply, which seems to be very similar to italki.

Major revamp rollout

How do I shot 2X boosts?

some new minigames (see how many you can match) and "daily quests" and animations and stuff...and now I am not merely Duo Plus. I am Super Duo

they added a "perfect lesson boost" for 100 gems, which gives you +10xp for perfect lesson for the next 15 minutes.

honestly, sounds like the kind of thing i would only use if i was falling off of diamond league on sunday night and i was feeling desperate

in other words - hell yeah! when you're feeling the heat in duolingo, you will take any advantage available

But have you seen the Nu-Nu Duo yet? I kind of hate the Match Mini-Game. It goes too fast for my brane.

yeah, i was kind of stressed out by the end of it! but if this is how i can finally tell people that i would like another orange juice please and that the green dresses are very pretty, this is what i have to do.

Think maybe I am kind of liking this new upgrade. We will see.

Some courses got longer, some way longer.

Some voices got treble, some voices got bass.

https://blog.duolingo.com/new-duolingo-home-screen-design/

https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/6448984613773-Guide-to-understanding-Duolingo-s-new-learning-path

Guidebook

At the start of each unit is a guidebook packed with grammar tips and useful phrases. The guidebook can be accessed any time, even when you complete the unit. NOTE: Guidebooks are not available for all languages.

Basically think I may prefer this new path version. Not really missing the tips and notes that much since I found them hard to use and ulitimately gave up on them. Wonder if anyone is going to go ahead a write the guidebook for any of the smaller languages, that would be really nice, but I am doubtful.

What we have here is failure to communicate BILINGUALLY!

(Strother Martin, I know, I know)

The new pathfinder version, which only I seem to have in my circle of friends, basically flattens out the tree which is why any uncompleted tree gets much longer. Still mostly enjoying it, eliminates some of the illusion of choice.

Really enjoying the Finnish course right now

Currently have 7777 XP for the week- four sevens clash!

I addition to the new single path layout, there is also a feature for some languages to be able to save words and study them through Word Play, although the app sometimes gets confused about which language it is looking at

Seems to be on for Italian, Portuguese and Turkish, although this last one gets mixed up and will take words from other languages.

Don’t know if I should tell you how many XPs I have this week.

It was north of 16K but I can’t sustain that.

In other news, now the single path version allows an easier, low-scoring practice on the individual stepping stones which I find useful, although I usually only do it right behind wherever I am in the path.

top guy in my league right now has 15K points this week, with another day to go. El hombre se encanta estudiar espańol mucho.

i'm still a little confused by the "single path layout" you're talking about james! i did update my app (to super duper lingo) a few weeks ago and some things changed, but for Spanish the overall layout looks the same. Here's a screenshot of where I am now. It's probably what everyone does but I like to build up my skills to _LEGENDARY_ before going on. my usual practice is to level up 3-4 different skills in waves, like this:

https://i.imgur.com/GrSEG4T.jpg

When I level one up to 4, I'll bring the next one to 3, the next to 2, and then a new one up to 1, then back to the 4 to bring it to 5/legendary, etc. it's slow but I find that it helps me to retain what I'm learning when I do a few different skills at once rather than focusing in on one.

i can't believe i'm only just now nearing Checkpoint 2 after months of daily usage, but i'm pysched as hell to see what's beyond the the checkpoint. i'm assuming there will be peggle and free prizes, things of that nature

if anyone wants to be my duolingo pal, i'm @weinventyou

Yay Karl, added you. I'm jaq.m there. I've been working on Spanish forever pero muy despacio and with a very big gap, still a long way from checkpoint 2.

it takes forever! plus i've barely even listened to any of the "Stories". those are actually pretty fun, I just always forget they're there!

Looks like you still have the old layout.

To get all teh XPs I kind of had to use a lot of 2X multipliers and build up (in the new format) things to Legendary from the lower levels in multiple languages. I really don't know how people do it week after week in a single language or what the point is.

I'm tempted to use this to start learning Finnish. My hesitation is that such a different language probably requires an actual native (or native fluent) speaker to teach it properly.

I think the Finnish course is pretty good. Much better than the Hungarian course, to name one.

Duking it out for third place in the Diamond League *Finals*

Okay, think I burned through almost all of my easy Xpoints.

Really came to say that Finnish seems like one of those languages like Norwegian where the offiicial language one is taught differs a lot from the main spoken variants.

Still liking this Finnish course though

https://blog.duolingo.com/funny-duolingo-streak-stories/

French has started kicking my ass on complicated reflexives. I’ve mi ex in to German for now.

*moved on to* German

I like "mi ex in." Maybe you should do your own conlang.

I’ve gone back to Norwegian for a bit

Or should I say: Mi in ex to Norwegian?

I assume you will all get the new home screen soon. I like it for some languages. For others I rebooted them to reset to a lower level, although in one case it came out again to the same level.

Looking at some of the Duolingo FB groups as well as discord servers. Not sure how I feel about either.

Haven't seen the new home screen yet. It seems like with every change to the UI they change the owl too, and it annoys me. Muscle owl in the ads for Duolingo Xtreme (or whatever it's called now) is very disturbing.

You mean Super Duolingo?

First blush it seems that the FB groups are more useful than the Discord servers. Who knew?

Yeah, Super Duolingo