itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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

New Mandarin course looks pretty good
/proud alpha tester

I learned or tried to learn Norwegian fifteen years ago using Teach Yourself, Routledge Colloquial, and a Yahoo group called norskklassen (said group’s existence was terminated and archives deleted in a rush one day, presumably due to some impropriety I can only speculate on). There was also an email thing related to norskklassen where there would send you a lesson every day and you could send in your version to the group for corrections. Sometimes we would record ourselves reading “Three Billy Goats Gruff” to check our pronunciation. I’d like to think I got pretty far- one time I sent in an errata list to TY Norwegian and the actual proofreader of the book paid me a compliment, but I ultimately ran into a few problems, and felt it was easy come, easy go.

One problem had to do with the dynamic of such a group. There was sort of a no-man’s land between the beginners or eternal beginners (eternaj komancantoj) and the native speakers where, once you started to go longer form and begin make a bunch of inevitable mistakes you might get hypercorrected. There was an incredible old fool of an English radiologist living in Norway who would type rubbish into the stream and be tolerated but an aspie Welsh systems guy who was in the running to be the world’s best self-taught language student, the Sanpaku of language learning, would end up pissing people off when he sent in his always near-perfect self assignments.

Nutshell: I believe that Duolingo is more efficient than the yahoo group/listserver approach, at least for getting to the high beginner level. Some of it’s deficiencies can be addressed by doing Pimsleur as well. The problem remains of how to progress through intermediate levels to the Mastery of the thread title (just reminded me of another famous and now famously broken-linked thread of Mark’s with Master in the title) by self-study alone.

May have a little more color on the Norwegian learning or Yahoo Groups language learning in general

either my french pronunciation totally collapsed in the last two days or er something else has gone wrong: it won't accept any of my vocal input as recognisably accurate

That aspect is notoriously buggy. Both from the point of rejecting correct answers and accepting wrong ones, think it really only checks the first few seconds. Sometimes something throws off even that, maybe some lag in the system.

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.

― brain (krakow), Friday, November 17, 2017 11:43 AM (two days ago)

Oh no, laddering is learning a third language through a second one. I've tried that and it seems to be helpful.

https://en.duolingo.com/comment/4870355/Reverse-Trees-Laddering

my understanding is that duolinguo extracts labor from you by feeding you snippets of text that other customers have paid to translate -- have any of you seen odd phrases to translate yet?

"i am a dragon"

Swedish course has some great ones. Can’t remember any right now though

https://78.media.tumblr.com/942c11ca244667d918feb4895165105f/tumblr_o5ovkcZhS91uyebceo1_1280.jpg

learning portuguese

Wazzavout those Bonus Flirting Idioms?

Re Norsk: There was a great Norwegian-English dictionary we used that was compiled in the early sixties using cutting edge computer technology of the day. There was also a grammar book reissue some used that was by Siri Hustvedt’s dad. I asked her about it once at a reading by Peter Robb of his Brazil book at Paula Cooper’s bookstore 192 Books on Tenth Avenue. She told me her dad had a very strong Norwegian accent that he never lost, and spoke with until the day he died. Paul A. seemed to be slightly jealous when I was taking to her.

There was a nice English-Norwegian dictionary that my aspie Welsh online friend was using that has since been turned into an iPhone app I can recommend.

Sorry, suzy actually logged onto my account and posted
/xpost

I should have taken a screenshot at the time but I swear that duolingo asked me to translate "diese Nüsse"

Two from German:
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/11022972/Hilfe-das-Pferd-frisst-die-heilige-Kartoffel
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/14581013

One from Swedish: https://en.duolingo.com/comment/11674924

Just discovered the Health Shield in the store of the iPhone app which I think is pretty useful, don’t know when it first appeared

"I want 91 lemons"

Do you? Do you really?

Psst! It’s a U2 reference.

Also, should we post here when we get Duolingo feedback

Anyway the Health Shield is a much better deal and as well as being more useful than just buying a refill

Dragons appear in the Korean course as well.

except for french (35% fluent!) i am basically spinning my wheels on practice sets to keep my health ok

If you use web/desktop or Android you don’t have to deal with that.

Or on iOS you could also buy a Health Shield and forge ahead for half an hour without worrying about that

wtf are you guys talking about

i think practice is a good thing!

also i just got through my first tranche of vietnamese -- blimey what a lot of hard-to-distinguish diacritical marks

Practice is a good thing, except on those days when you want to learn some new stuff - so you can practice it later!- and keep running out of health and having to go back to the well and repractice earlier stuff.

wtf are you guys talking about
Have you used this app? On an iPhone? In that case it assigned you a circle of five arcs of health which you lose when you submit a wrong answer on a new lesson, one of which will be automatically restored every four hours or so, otherwise you can regenerate by practicing old lessons or purchasing in store with lingots. No health means no new lessons can be studied.

hmm i haven't used it in a couple of years, i don't remember that system. i finished my "tree" and then did a couple of bonuses lessons and that seemed to be all the content that was on offer.

Do people itt generally type the answers in or speak into the mic?

I have been typing only, but it does feel like I am neglecting a crucial language skill. Don't want to disturb the bf with repetitive badly pronounced foreign sentences. Maybe I should creep into the bathroom to hiss them into my phone for 20 minutes every day

(also just a lot more comfortable with typing and with the accuracy of rating typing vs speech in general, tho it's hard to type diacritics and it's frustrating to be slowed down by them on the timed quizzes)

do the speaking

i turned that part off on public transportation but otherwise your instincts are pretty right on imo

speaking around your bf might be good practice too, for getting over jitters of embarrassment! which is often a stumbling block when actually using a language in practice

hmm i just used the word "practice" to mean two entirely opposite things

Probably would be good practice for getting over the embarrassment, but maybe not for not being really annoying to be around!

I know the embarrassment is v real tho, I had a German neighbour for a year or two while I was learning German and did not dare to wish him so much as a Guten Tag

where I am at: I did a bit of German on this thing a while ago to supplement in-person lessons, though I am a completist and started at the beginning and never got near my actual level before getting bored. Since then I have dabbled with Irish and Czech but not got past the first few lessons of either. Never tried a Slavic language before and found even basic Czech greetings dishearteningly hard to get straight in my head.

Lesson 1 Czech has (or had, a month ago) an audio phrase which is just blank audio and the comments suggest it'd been like that for some time, which is a bit off-putting. iirc if your Czech L1 audio quiz is silent the answer is something like "thank you, good evening". Should get back into it but I hope there isn't more duff audio later.

also i just got through my first tranche of vietnamese -- blimey what a lot of hard-to-distinguish diacritical marks

It took me like three months of living in Vietnam before I realized ư and ủ were not the same sound

just read this Wired article about Duolingo (which was interesting, but stopped just as I thought it was warming up):
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/duolingo-unique-view-on-learning-language

where I read that

It knows which users are least likely to progress (English speakers learning Turkish and Irish, it turns out)

so I may not be the only person to bail out of Irish after two evenings...

One problem with Turkish course is fuzzy logic is sometimes broken with respect to what it will accept as a correct answer:
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/25182151/Lesson-ki-shows-as-not-correct

I actually had that exact problem. I was doing that lesson on the iPhone and it wouldn’t take any answer I would give. I tried without punctuation, with all the punctuation as giving in the furnishes correct answer and a few other combinations in between. I finally switched to the laptop to finish the lesson or maybe switched to another lesson or even language for the duration of my Health Shield. Also had the lesser problem today where it wouldn’t match the capital dotted i from the Turkish keyboard with the same letter in the answer and I had to switch to lower case i.

Houston, bir sorunumuz var.

Also seems to sometimes require the word “bir” for “a” when one might not think it is needed

PRATİK YAP

Btw, already knew fluency percentage is pretty bogus and just received some kind of definitive gaze proof of this

in the real world i have a bizarre German language level that is full of fancy vocab with persistent entry level grammar failures.
duo says i'm 65% fluent which is so bogus it's laughable.
it's free! what do we expect?
at level 23 the questions are the same as when i began.
earlier, duo responded to feedback about androgogically useless or unnatural questions, now they've removed the option to do so.
so much practical language that is simply missing.

A sentence that persistently shows up in the entry-level Korean, for both myself and others: 'yes, men are people.'

#notallmen