itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

Hindi (grammar) notes and tips start one lesson before the first checkpoint and end with the second checkpoint.

So they finally added Tips (&Notes) to the app, although I can only see for Spanish and Chinese. Although App Store says that they also added Tips for French but I can’t find those.

Indonesian seems to have shown up recently

Jaké jsou tvoje cíle?

Finally finished Hungarian.

Waarom zijn de bananen krom?

Dutch Duolingo appears to radiate a definite 70s vibe for some reason:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RyRRjl39rI

Ha! They also had
Heb jij ooit een rechte banaan gezien?

i have been so bad at this for so long

the owl sometimes waves sadly at me from my phone but i ignore

We miss you, Mark S. Do you still want to learn Welsh?

i still want to learn everything! maybe when my book is out in the world and out of my head (just a few more weeks i hope) (i also haven't played the piano all year!)

We haven’t seen you in a while. Take a 5 minute lesson now!

Rome is niet op één dag gebouwd.

Hm, stopped working this afternoon

The iPhone app, that is. Desktop is fine.

Just reinstalled, seems to work again

Snězte tu žábu!

Sorry, what I really saw was just
Snězte jablko!

Ik zag de astronaut in een zwart gat vallen.

For once, I can’t tie a 70s song to that one, but I’m eagerly awaiting Duolingo serving you “Als het gras twee kontjes hoog is”!

arabic launching next year, which I've been waiting for

Nå må dere hoppe i loppekassa!

Smi mens jernet er varmt!

Er du tospråklig?

haha, very good James

Har vi mødtes før?

nej, det tror jeg ikke...

Falsk alarm

Some of the tones are wrong in the Mandarin course which can be slightly annoying. For the most part course seems pretty nice though in its current form.

Started French on dis ting. Never learned another language before (apart from a D at GCSE). About a quarter of the way through - I presume the easy bit. I'm gonna be an expert in talking about dresses and ducks. I'm supplementing my Duolingo by watching Star Wars in French, listeing to l'equipe's football podcast when I go to bed, and I've ordered a dozen Asterix books.

I am still confused about the crowns and new levels but at least I restarted the spanish and french and trying to power completely up again.

In the end think crowns are an improvement on the prior system.

Took a couple of months off but have restarted Swedish. My reading and writing is pretty good, but I would never dare speak the language out loud to anyone.

I prolly wrote about this above, but I studied french for 6 months on duolingo and then did some skype sessions on italki to practice my conversation. By the end of the first 30 minutes I was soaked in sweat.

I want to get back to my Italian tree. It's in bad shape. I've mostly been wanting to work on French, where Duolingo isn't so useful for me anymore - what I really need are more opportunities for conversational practice.

Yeah, for French I really do think you need native French speakers to speak with. Italian and Spanish seem more phonetically intuitive for americans.

I live in a highly bilingual Canadian city, so I'm not exactly lacking native speakers. It's really just shyness/laziness/fear.

When I speak spanish in spanish speaking countries everyone switches to english or wants to practice their english with me. In France, no one switches to english and everyone corrects me. I kind of love it.

I had 4 years of HS Spanish and did all of Duolingo and live in a Spanish speaking country for the last 2 years. Did all of duolingo for French, had no previous French language background, lived for 4 months in France and go back for a month once a year. My French is probably 3xs better than my Spanish because I was forced more to speak it.

I'm curious what order people do the tree in - do you work through several levels of each new skill or move to the next one ASAP? Do you mainly click manually on individual skills or mainly do timed practice sets? When do you go back to old skills, if you do? and so on

not sure why I ask except I feel I may be doing it ~wrong~, but I guess there is no wrong as long as you're not bored, forgetting a lot of things or out of your depth

for me, the pre-crowns system made it clearer what Duolingo's magic algorithms thought you should be doing next, with the health of old skills fading, and the timed practice seemed to revisit old topics more whereas now it seems to be giving me questions from topics I haven't got to yet instead

I took French in grade school, but didn't use it at all for about a decade. Duolingo was very useful for brushing off the cobwebs. In some ways, though, Italian is psychologically easier since I'm learning it from scratch. I don't go into it with the shameful feeling like I should already know such-and-such.

I keep thinking that a year in France would be ideal but I'm not sure yet how to swing it.

Re crowns: a friend suggested getting two crowns per topic, which is what he does. I have been trying this recently and finding it helpful. More crowns seems to be diminishing returns. In the old system I could get burned out keeping a tree gold or feel bad when it started to decay

Do they still decay? I restarted spanish and am doing it from scratch by just testing out until I can no longer test out. I have the same ocd about keeping everything gold.

I hardly have any gold lessons anymore, I think I did it once or twice in some trees I barely look at, so not sure if and when decay happens

Mine haven’t decayed. Maybe the don’t do that until your entire tree is gold. Please let us know when that happens:)

https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002253131-Crown-level-decay-and-spaced-repetition
No more decay. Also, I agree 100% with the last sentence

oh good. That was kind of the worst. Especially if you did a bunch of modules all in one day so they all lost their gold all together.

Oh yeah, forgot about that.

Thanks, that article is helpful! I like the "two crowns" rule too. I've racked up a lot of crowns on the very early stuff and it definitely feels like diminishing returns.

btw it turned out that "Practice" was giving me questions from skills I hadn't seen yet because I'd tested out of some skills ages ago and forgotten about it - I didn't look at Duolingo for months and then resumed going through them one by one. So I guess it probably doesn't do that normally.