itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

I’ve been trying out Glossika, particularly for Hungarian, and it seems to be helping, I have to say.

Rather than a conversational, vocabulary-based or grammatical orientation it takes more of a functional approach.

Hi James Redd,
Thank you for suggesting “A szüleim őt tisztelik” as a translation for “My parents respect him.”. We now accept this translation!

Duolingo keeps getting better thanks to language lovers like you. We really appreciate your help!

—The Duolingo team

Is Drops actually good? I've been using it for about a month and it seems like all I'm learning is to attach their weird picture language to abstract concepts.

I think it is maybe better for vocabulary than Duolingo, yeah. What language are you using it for?

I have been giving glossika a try and despite testing up to a higher level it still seems to be giving me really basic sentences and I'm not really sure what it is for other than repeating these sentences a lot of times, which has it's merits. (Although much better when I turned off the English).

I think there is a really dearth in intermediate level tools out there. In my case for Japanese but I'm sure for every other language learner. No surprise as there are way more beginners than intermediates out there. I still need support because reading native content is till hard and listening even harder. I need the support to train my ear, eye and brain, and the addictiveness of these gasified platforms is very powerful.

Are you trying it for Japanese? If so I think it won't be too useful. As you say, your level is too high, among other things.

I also didn't like that it was using hard kanji that my predictor wouldn't find in those kind of easy sentences so I stopped using it for Japanese.

Is "gasified" an intentional or unintentional misspelling of "gamified"?

gasified - gamified (over aggressive autocorrect)

Theres' no way of turning off the furigana, it seems. So kanji knowledge is irrelevannt

One of my problems is I've boosted my Kanji (and to a lesser extent my vocab) way in advance of my grammar understanding and listening skills. What I really need is something that structures and challenges me through limiting and reading of more complex stuff. I do have books for that, but the gamification helps me stick at things.

I've been using Drops on Italian, which I already have a pretty good grasp of – and it seems like it's good on vocabulary (and nouns in particular), but it falls apart on phrases – when you're faced with a picture of two people interacting, it can be hard to tell if that particular picture is associated with "excuse me" or "can you help me" or "it's fine" even if you know very well what those phrases are. Things that aren't nouns aren't great either.

Maybe I should just be skipping the phrases entirely? I would like it a lot if it were just nouns.

Drops does inadvertently make me appreciate the better job that Duolingo has done with gender representation – in Italian Drops the subject is always a young guy who trying to interact with a foreign woman.

To be honest I have be finding drops helpful when the vocabulary is really foreign to me. Don't know how good it would be for Italian for somebody who already knows it.

Glossika Japanese does weird stuff like use the kanji like this 此の instead of just この.

That’s definitely in the category of you should know it but you’re never going to see it.

Actually if you are working on your grammar you might want to keep slogging through Glossika. It seems to have a cumulative effect.

I'm closing in on the end of the 1-crown Irish tree, and simultaneously going back through from the top to refresh.
The leagues suckered me into going a little too fast for a couple of weeks, but I keep not quite switching them off. I'm in slightly healthier drill + new stuff patterns now, but still think I should resist fighting my way through Amethyst with sunday night grinding -
There's a good Memrise companion to the course, and I've been getting into that to up the detail (which I feel like I can fudge on Duo). But maybe time soon to switch to something else because I don't really want to be doing the duolingo sentences over and over forever. Downloaded a Pimsleur course that could help with spoken/listening, but may give Glossika a go.

Really never tried to go too far on the duolingo Irish tree, there is no audio on so much of it for one thing. Yeah, Duo and its league tables encourage one to go too fast. Do like to do that league table purple lightning bolt XP Ramp Up Challenge through.

Will also stan for the Duo Welsh course, within which I have resisted the temptation to go too fast. Glossika uses a slightly different Welsh dialect. Still useful though.

I pay no mind to Duolingo tables and such.

I'm back on Scottish Gaelic and started Latin. Both I'm sure not among the better courses on there but relevant to my interests. I want to start arabic up again but it defeated me quite thoroughly my first swing at it

Duolingo Arabic course is mostly about learning the alphabet. Drops has Arabic, been fooling with it but haven't really put the pedal to the metal. I actually learned a bit of it from a book, DK 15-minute Arabic, which also has an accompanying app to help a little with the self-study.

Just got to the sun and moon letters, in the Hobbies unit right before the third checkpoint.

The (Scottish) Gaelic course on Glossika looks pretty good. And is free.

And now I went back to the (Scottish) Gaelic on Duolingo and am enjoying it. Found some pretty good tied in resources as well.

https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_Skill:Body_2
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/35392478/A-list-the-Scottish-Gaelic-words-taught-up-to-the-first-checkpoint-and-their-translations
https://duome.eu/tips/en/gd

Still finding the Gaelic fun.

Arabic gets pretty hard around the Picture 2 lesson, fifth from last.

The IRN BRU glè bhlasta.

The leagues suckered me into going a little too fast for a couple of weeks

this seems right but if you don't then it can be SOOOOO SLOOWWWWWW

I find that if it really feels too slow it is because the language it is already too easy for me in some sense and Duolingo isn't really going to help that much by itself anyway.

i'm only doing french, have studied russian (in school) and german (for grad student reading) but it does give the impression of being pretty breezy. i think they contribute to that by structuring so much of the content in terms of very friendly true-friends (~false friends) that help you think you already know all the vocabulary? which is maybe just natural anyway given the relationships between the languages.

Yeah, despite all the well-known difficulties of getting French exactly right, because of the close relationship it is one of the easier languages for English speakers to learn, especially if they already have experience with or are just not afraid of foreign languages. And the Duolingo course is fine but probably not particularly hard.

yeah it seems kind of cosmically inappropriate that words like 'go' AND 'have' do the same kinds of functionally-overloaded work in both languages! it's like have some self-respect, france

Lol

Wondering when this honeymoon is going to come to an end but for now: Tha Gàidhlig spòrsail!

Also, finally, finally forcing myself to slow down, by almost always pressing on the speech bubble to see the comments and (re)listen if possible and now by looking at those offsite Vocab and Tips and Notes.

Don’t know if we have ever commented on the fact that when Duolingo gives you three choices that more often then not you can apply logic, some sort of um, syllogism, to figure out the correct answer, because the other two are variants of it and it is in the center.

Going further down the (Scottish) Gaelic rabbit hole. Found a blog with a few interesting things on it, including this post about dictionaries:
https://gaelic.co/gaelic-dictionary/

as well as this useful site with lots of learning material, including audio and video:
https://learngaelic.scot/index.jsp

Tha sglèat a dhìth air Calum.

Report from the far corners of Duolingo. Found a few new courses in there, these being
Swedish from Spanish
German from Dutch
Esperanto from French (not released yet)

Also noticed that the TTS for the Catalan from Spanish course seems to be the same voice but cleaned up a little.

Interesting that “glas” means both green and gray in some Celtic languages.

"gorm" means both blue and, when referring to people, black

in Irish Gaelic anyway

Oh yeah. Think I saw that as well

This is interesting, regarding one of my favorite topics: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/4134876/Duolingo-experimented-with-the-use-of-real-human-voices-and-concluded-that-people-liked-TTS-more

Do you already speak Irish, jim?

Also have you gotten to the Body 2 lesson of (Scottish) Gaelic?

I've started doing Italian, but in order to avoid the damage that my learning French did to my Spanish, I'm doing the French course for Italian. I don't really have any reason to do Italian aside from being impressed at how many non-Italians I know who speak it (and wanting to join their ranks), and, of course, the loveliness of the language itself.

Did the French mess up your Spanish? I used to mock college kids coming back from Europe saying things like that but then ultimately I ended up experiencing something similar. Also I resisted that kind of cross-training for a few years but in the end I found it useful, not just a stunt.

Yeah I have a harder time speaking Spanish now. I end up slipping French words into my speech automatically. I should probably do a Spanish course in French again to jar it back. It's not lost---I picked up Spanish from hearing it spoken by my family when I was a kid (it's my father's native language), and only took courses in it to mine it out.

Basically my experience is that I can sort of keep Spanish and French straight now, although I am pretty sure I don't speak either as well as you, maybe can fake Italian a little, but otherwise pretty much every Romance language gets mushed together and every Germanic language gets confused with, well, German. There is a reason people end up speaking Portuñol/Portunhol. Also, think the English to Italian course is not so great anyway and hasn't been updated in ages so you are not missing much.

I started doing the English to Italian and then realized I shouldn't, but the little I did was basically the same.

Normally when I'm in Italy I just speak Spanish with a Chef Boyardee accent and everything goes well enough. I don't give talks that way though, just like, shopping.

It would be good for me to be able to read Italian and I really just want to get the very basics because I bet I can mostly figure out it after that (the technical words will be basically the same as in French, but e.g. pronouns, articles, conjugations, are all enough different to confuse me).

Will be interested how that works. I usually *think* that will be the case but then there always ends up being some linguistic narcissism of small differences that throws me off. But I have confidence that your more systematic academic approach will help you prevail.