itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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

Oes draig gyda ti?

Nac oes

HELLO DERE

I did the french and spanish twice all the way through all powered up and I really had to use italki to progress further.

i am currently endlessly cycling in practice mode to keep up my streak but always too tired and/or busy to feel ready to progress at all

I'm approaching 500 days and might finally give up at that point as I feel it stopped teaching me much quite some time ago. My only motivation now is maintaining my streak.

It definitely gave me a great base for learning a bit more deeply elsewhere though and I would always recommend it. Might try a new language instead to try and bring back the fun of it.

anybody try Rosetta Stone? it was the gold standard for awhile. also cost its weight in gold iirc

https://sites.google.com/site/englishatthetab/_/rsrc/1432922076196/home/esl-resources/duolingo/ESL_Duolingo%20owl.png

Rosetta Stone for Vietnamese was ok, used it for a while. They didn't provide any explanation of concepts, in order to make it totally immersive, which was super frustrating for stuff that wasn't intuitive

I cannot recommend italki enough if you actually want to be forced to speak aloud and figure out what you would likely talk about in another language. When I lived in Lyon, so many French people were like, "why do you know this word?" I kept saying L'INTERNET!

HI DERE

This cross-training/laddering definitely challenging and useful, not just a novelty stunt.

How's yr soft mutation, mark?

lol i "took a break" before xmas and have not yet got back on con ngựa as they say in vietnam

Just made up a bad bilingual joke and am feeling compelled to post it here.

Doesn’t quite work though, so never mind, I guess

Okay, it was something to do with someone offering Steve Martin chocolate covered ants in Paris and Steve raising his hands and saying “Fourmis”?

« Fourmis? »

Almanca dilinde artık %35 oranında akacılığa ulaştın!

I am augmenting my Duolingo practice of Swedish in two ways in 2018:

- signing up for MHz Choice, an Amazon Prime channel that offers tons of international TV shows with English subtitles for $7.99/month; they have tons of Swedish crime shows
- reading Swedish crime novels with a dictionary close at hand; I've been able to find cheap paperbacks on eBay

Cool. Maybe you should start standalone thread for that. But maybe not

Anyone else still doing this? Also, what’s with the crowns?

I'm not doing it at present. My wife's been doing German though. I'll ask her about the crowns.

Oh I see

Yep, still using it. Currently on a 590 day streak and have finished both English to Spanish and Spanish to English courses. It bores me, but I can't stop now!

Sí, todavía lo estoy usando. Actualmente tengo una racha de 590 días y he terminado el curso de inglés a español y tambien el curso de español a inglés. ¡Me aburre pero no puedo parar ahora!

so close!

"también"

Okay, I see the purpose of the crowns is to add more material, but with its implementation two useful features seem to go missing from the iPhone app:
1) when simply reviewing, it doesn’t tell you anymore what skills you have improved
2) When clicking on a skill it no longer gives you the list of weak words

Wow, randomly checking in German I see that one of these Crown levels has 30 lessons.

Abs. Obs. 4, Level 3

Are these actually new questions or is this just a different way of counting the same old questions, I wonder

Perhaps this new format will inspire me to finish the last ten leaves of my Turkish tree

¡Gracias ∞! Normalmente no recuerdo los acentos perfectamente, necesito practicarlos más.

I got the Crowns feature a couple of days ago and it looks like it could be just what I was needing to keep going on Duolingo after finishing both forward and reverse trees. Will see how it goes as I switch to revisiting the Spanish tree for the first time since starting and finishing the reverse.

Was wondering about that myself for trees I had long ago completed and left, asking myself whether the crowns just a way of putting a positive spin on the similar old process of keeping the tree gold. Perhaps that little semantic shift is enough to motivate. Seems like at least they finally got rid of the funny Fluency percentage.