itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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.

i don't think the languages even have to be close. i never studied german for speaking properly so i've always had trouble getting numbers to stick—what comes to my tongue when i'm trying to read (where the numbers are very unhelpfully not spelled out) will often be a russian word instead.

Yeah, that kind of thing happens too

yeah I learned French from this software + years of poring over French texts with dictionaries/translation software + spending extended time here. probably won't ever spend a ton of time in Italy (not against it, I just have other countries where I'd rather spend 6 months+ (for which I also should learn their languages!)) but with texts I can make quick enough progress. maybe it's wrong but I feel like between two other romance languages there ought to be enough of those small differences already baked in that Italian won't offer *too* many others.

I just found that which each new language it became harder and harder to immerse myself, physically or virtually or otherwise, in a way that it really soaked in.

yeah we'll see. my ambitions are quite modest for any further language acquisition. If I get further than basic fumbling that'll be great. They're fun games with a bit of practical upshot. That's the privilege of being a (native) English speaker at the time of Globlish.

Sometimes, like just now, I click on Words and look at number of words I have supposedly learned or at least studied or touched somehow and I internally sigh or some equivalent.

In other news Clozemaster did a big update yesterday. Shifted a bunch of stuff around, especially on the app which seems to have been completely redone. In some ways there is more TTS and in some ways less TTS, not sure how I feel about it.

So I am a half dozen lessons away from the end of the Gaelic course. Trying to slow walk it, but maybe will end up rushing it like the center of a Tootsie Pop as is my wont. Always that emotional see-saw between “this is starting to make sense, starting to converge, I got this, smooth sailing from now on” and then “this is impossible, nobody can learn a foreign language properly without living in the place where it is spoken and being immersed.”

Cf. DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the "Spock's Brain" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Oops. Apparently that usage of cf. is problematic.

Tha e cho crosta ri cat-fiadhaich.

No to both of your questions from a few days back, James Redd

Thanks for responding!

that league table purple lightning bolt XP Ramp Up Challenge
This went missing for me after this week's reset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct#Catalan

E•MO•CIÓ

Ah, that explains the name of the Cava grape variety Xarel·lo. Interesting.

Think I need one of those Elvis Costello Spinning Wheels to decide what language to study at any given moment.

HI DERE

https://status.duolingo.com/

All Systems Operational

So I have some kind of advanced/super-geeky/OCD approach to this app I have been using recently if you want to hear about it.

i want to hear about it

Okay, so if I want to go fast, I go over to the League Table and hit the Purple Lightning Bolt for the XP Ramp Up Challenge. More often than not I can tell what section it has me working on so then I can go back to the tree and do lessons- more slowly, since no time bonus, but yes accuracy bonus- from the corresponding leaf in the tree.

i didn't even know there was a purple lightning bolt

I don't get one on the web or android app.

i don't seem to have one either. there's a barbell that seems to generate practice questions in a similar way on the main page, not tied explicitly to any lesson, but it's not timed.

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/37695355/XP-Ramp-Up-Challenge