itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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.

currently working on:

FRENCH
WELSH (beginners' stage): the language of the holidays of my youth
NORWEGIAN (beginners' stage): many of the student helps in the school i grew up in were norwegian
VIETNAMESE (barely even beginners' stage)*: significant enclave of vietnamese live in my part of hackney

*I am finding Vietnamese very hard to be honest, I am not sure I have securely remembered a single word yet. I mostly do it last thing at night, when I would otherwise be playing some stupid free game on my phone, so I am often quite sleepy.

mark, here is an entertaining article about Lydia Davies' endeavour to teach herself Norwegian using one long "boring" novel and no translation dictionary (caveat: Davis is a translator who already speaks three languages and knows her limited way around a couple of others)

http://lithub.com/lydia-davis-at-the-end-of-the-world/

Davis, rather

i tried to take welsh my first year of college. I got a big F in that.

i should use duolingo to brush up on German though which i took for years and years. but my issue is mainly vocabulary at this point.

About a week in. Enjoying!

Currently:
Welsh, because we've got some Welsh translators coming in at work, and I think it would be polite and politic to make the effort - wish them good morning, ask them how they are, tell them that I am a dragon and I like to iron school clothes.
French to clean some of the rust off - I can read it okay, but I can't produce and my grammar is sloppy.

Ambitions:
Irish. I'll drop Welsh for this at some point - it's my cultural background and I dimly feel that if I'm going to learn a Celtic language, it really should be this one.
Russian - I'd like this back to a basic level, but it'll wait (feel like I need some focus to jump the hurdle of dicking about with international keyboards on my phone)

Dunno how much this could help me learn a new language, but it was PERFECT for gradually brushing up my high-school Spanish to where I could pass an open-dictionary translation exam for school. So... that was cool! Struggling to keep up with it afterwards though. Agreed that the continual review of old vocab items, while helping me remember them, makes it less fun and game-like to open the thing up for a few minutes on the train. The fun of unlocking new "levels" is gone. Wish there was a second, upside-down skill tree that gets revealed at the end :-/ LOL at the idea that I'm 55 percent fluent, also.

I've been idly contemplating learning a language for, well, years really. Thought I'd finally attempt something and didn't want to do a language I'd already studied (French, German) although I've forgotten a lot of what I had learnt (especially German). I've gone for Spanish, started up a Duolingo account, seems fine although I know my pronunciation is going to be terrible (e.g. I am completely unable to roll Rs, which is probably quite an impediment and maybe I should just pick another language). Dunno if I'll keep this up, I do have a vague interest in languages and linguistics, I'm also a terrible procrastinator and have a habit of starting things then forgetting about them and starting something else, so...

Doctor Casino... a common tactic once you complete a tree is to do the so-called Reverse Tree, which means switching Duo to the language you were originally learning and then learning English from there. I'm doing that for Spanish now and it is actually useful, at least once you get past the basics.

wooooahhhhh

Not sure what I think of Davis' way of learning Norwegian.
She did choose a stunningly boring book, but at least it's one that has a minuscule vocabulary. You just need to learn some Norwegian words for "married", "born", "daughter", "son", "inheritance", "dowry", farm" etc and you've got most of it covered.

It's like learning English by reading the Domesday Book.

Duolingo was pretty enjoyable for the little while I managed to keep with it, but I only used it to try to improve my skills on a language I'm moderately familiar with. I stopped, figuring I'd be better off fighting with some "real" texts. I think I'd feel like I got more out of it by picking a language I know virtually nothing about. (I.e. a non-Germanic one)

Must..resist...properly posting to thread again...until the weekend

O RLY?

Sorry. Are you sure that’s true, sometimes there’s a magic button somewhere hard to notice.

I hate the web interface with the heat of a thousand suns though so very rarely use it.

It's really completely gone. There used to be a "use keyboard" option, but they took it away except on maybe one question per set. It's awful.

Terrible. Maybe it’s time to try Clozemaster or Glossika.

Please remind me again which language(s) you are learning?

German mainly, though I teach French and I like to assign Duolingo to my students as homework. I don't require them to spend much time on it, and they can go at their own pace, but it's been a good way to give them some general practice time and the chance to see more vocab than we can get through in class.

Kind of wish someone would learn Catalan with me, but I know that's not often how it works. Believe there was someone upthread maybe who mentioned it. There are some good YouTube channels and podcasts these days like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYA7LheeFcE

It's on my (long) list, but sadly I wouldn't have the time at the moment.

I'd love to try and learn at least a little of several of the Iberian languages.

I just don’t know why people continue to use Duolingo when we live in an era with LingQ, Drops, Memrise, and iTalki

I've tried most of the alternatives people are suggesting and don't like them nearly as well, and many of them you have to pay for. Duolingo at its best was a genuinely effective, well-organized, free app that made you use the language in sentences rather than just memorizing vocab. It's been getting steadily easier, which is frustrating, but until they took out the keyboard I still liked it a lot.

Duolingo is very addictive in many ways, but after all these years, I am finally at the point where pretty much all my languages are maxed out to where I can’t really advance much and they are either too easy or too hard or both at the same time. Those other alternatives are all configurable in way that makes it more possible to find the sweet spot of real progress.

Steve Kaufmann indulges in some annoying stuff at times but the things he says about language learning usually seem to ring true and LingQ seems to be a useful app so far.

I tried LingQ but it seemed to just be one-word-at-a-time translations like you'd get from reading an ebook. And it didn't seem to know how to handle German compound verbs - it would only let me click on one half of the verb at a time, and of course that would result in a totally off-base translation. So I gave up on it pretty much instantly. Is there more to it?

They have these mini-stories as a way to build up vocabulary and experience the grammar live. They don’t actually teach grammar, he recommends you buy the smallest grammar book you can find.

Then you can make your own lessons or find some uploaded lessons you like. I found some Catalan videos and podcasts I like which is why I wanted to try it. The main thing is that the vocabulary is color-coded so you can easily see which words are new to you and which words are difficult, versus words you know and easier words.

You can also search and list your vocabulary based on the difficulty level.

So it first glance it looks pretty kinky but maybe there is something to it

Ha, hinky not kinky

My anecdotal experience is that when I do it and then go back and use some other software I seem to feel more confident, the other software seems easier and I retain more.

The intention is supposedly to have more material, more repetition and variation.

I like this YouTube channel called CouchPolyglot. I see her, Laura, talking about something called Comprehensible Input with some other language YouTubers and it makes sense to me. Think Steve Kaufmann of LingQ seems to be on board. She speaks German and has lived in German-speaking countries for several years, maybe she has some German instructional videoa.

Well she does but they are in Spanish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqSBh6kVn0g

Here's SK talking about CI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au4CoCLi1Is

Looking at the German in LingQ right now. Seems to understand the compound verbs.

There’s a ton of stuff available for German in there.

This seems relevant somehow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/sports/baseball/friends-tv-show-baseball-spanish.html

“The basics you can learn in a classroom,” said Flores, who was interviewed in Spanish, along with most of the players, for ease. “But to speak the language, that comes from here in the clubhouse, on the street or from television.”

Just started using the add your own dictionary search feature to Clozemaster and it is truly awesome.

I may yet wake up tomorrow with an enthusiasm hangover but right now this trick is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67197462

In addition to all the other apps I may use, I just started messing with something called uTalk.

Still on this jag

I'm back at DuoLingo again after taking enough time off to forget the previous interface. Still working on Spanish and right now "ir" is giving me pain.

Well this is shit

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/duolingo-cuts-10-of-contractors-in-move-to-greater-use-of-ai

Yeah, I hate this. I used the paid version, which obviously I don't want to continue to support if they're going to lay people off and, presumably, end up with a worse product. But I also don't want to give it up. Its whole shtick works well for me. Fifteen minutes a day, structured lessons, nagging notifications, etc etc.

Wonder what this will be like.

https://lingonaut.app/

Also wondering if anyone else is following the recent memrise snafu.