itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

i was racking up XP like crazy for like 2 months and then suddenly got super bored with trying to max out my lesson-levels at 5/5 for the checkpoint i've gotten to (which is the method i'd settled on, rather than always going ahead—i tested into the next checkpoint a while back, but haven't been opening up its new level-1 lessons), so now i'm at risk of being demoted from wherever i'm at, pearl league iirc, unless i do a bunch this weekend just to stay in the running : /

it would be a real boon if the subsequent lesson-levels weren't such a repetition of the earlier ones.

Yup

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind.

For me racking up lots of XP usual comes from useful review which eventually turns into not-so-useful review and then just gamification whirlpool spin.
.

Right now I am at the top of my Diamond League. I had been up by a few thousand points and now I am up by a several hundred points but I noticed that the guy in second is capable of putting in multi-thousand days on the weekend, if not using a bot to get the points for him so it is kind of pointless of me to try to hard to postpone the inevitable and keep up with him.

I only get the units to level 2 before I press on. But I am not very far: only on present tense verbs 2, a few steps below the 2nd castle.

I've done a few lessons at level 3 & they seem to be a bit more difficult than the earlier ones? More like the lessons it occasionally drops that it offers at a higher difficulty. They're harder in that they don't always have a word capitalized so you don't grok automatically the first word; and they more often force you to type full sentences in the new language, definitely the hardest thing for me to do (and a reason I should do more time on desktop probably).

Easy. Between French and Spanish, both the nouns & the verbs are pretty familiar already. The grammar is also pretty similar. I haven't gotten into any tenses but the present yet, though. Conjugations in the present are mostly regular so far too (except for être and avoir, ha I don't know the infinitives of those verbs in Italian, though I know the conjugations). A, but that's even easier when I already know other very similar languages.

As usual with Duolingo, you get a pretty fractured understanding of things
This is totally otm, even if I force myself to read the tips and notes, etc.

yeah I know that eventually I'll have to look up some conjugation tables etc but for the moment I like the feeling of hacking into a new language like I'm going into some jungle where I only periodically can see the forest for the trees. it's how I've learned all my other languages!

I’ve actually found Wiktionary surprisingly useful for certain languages. Some people have really gone to town in there setting things up.

I use https://www.linguee.fr a lot for figuring out turns of phrase in French that I don't know.

Yeah, linguee is really good too, especially good for certain languages.

This Diamond League showdown going exactly as expected.

I just got a bunch of the earliest lessons up to level 3, should be promoted easily now. It's helping to reinforce genders in both languages, something I constantly need. When I'm giving a class, I frequently end up asking my students the gender of words that I've either forgotten or never knew. Unfortunately for me, genders don't always match up between my three romance languages. Il topo, la souris, par exemple.

Yeah, that is indeed tricky and confusing.

The best way is to memorize the gender upfront, but it doesn't always seem to work out that way.

So my leaderboard rival, as expected, pulled up to the bumper and leveled up so now he is only a few hundred XPs behind me. I assume as the deadline looms he and his bots will drop whatever XPs are needed to pull ahead.

well I'll never be a native speaker so people don't think that much less of me when I bobble a gender orally. in writing I always check when I'm not sure. there are too many words to just memorize things, instead through living the language it becomes intuitive.

Yes, exactly.

Unfortunately for me, genders don't always match up between my three romance languages. Il topo, la souris, par exemple.

Keep coming across this interesting thing
Les fruites = la frutta

Some more gender changes
la glace, il ghiaccio or il gelato
le gril, la griglia

Yes on all of those! They are recurring duolingo favs I guess

Keep coming across this interesting thing
Les fruites = la frutta

And finally let’s not overlook
Le tigre, la tigresse ; la tigre

Another singular plural thing they discuss in that tip/note:
la pasta; la pâte, les pâtes

More gender switches:
la nourriture, il cibo
le papillon, la farfalla

I never knew this French word for penguin, manchot.

Pingouin is more common.

i turned on two languages i've studied before, german and russian, and took the test-outs for them to unlock more than the first lesson in each course. although i only have ~three years of college russian from twenty years ago that is severely atrophied, i was still able to unlock more of the language for that than for german, in which i can read some philosophy tentatively (because of the limited vocabulary—the newspaper or novels are more challenging), because i learned only to read it grad-student style, not to speak it, and am terrible at genders and articles and basic conversational sentence structures ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’d like to learn German next. I can’t even read philosophy in it, but I can hack through math texts with a dictionary. I end up in Germany pretty often too, so I’ll get rl practice.

Don't *think* you will have too much problem with German grammar, but you get much less vocabulary
coming from English than you do for French.

12 minutes to reset.

And I'm through!

I am legend.

Good job!
You finished #1 and kept your position in the Diamond League

it's all downhill from here

Don't I know it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M

How many XP are you getting a week, roughly? I've been coasting in Amethyst league for months as 200-300 XP is my norm.

700 or so?

Euler, I found an French to Italian grammar book I bought a while back that I can recommend to you of you'd like.

Also, would you guys like to know how many XPs I got last week in order to achieve my first place finish? Warning: not for the faint of heart.

reggae mike love (polyphonic)
2y ago
Duolingo is a great way to absorb language basics and grammar rules, but once you have that stuff down and are in the mode of adding vocabulary I found it kind of inefficient.

Sure, I'd be happy to hear the recommendation.

That seems right about Duolingo, but I really just want the basics. I'll never write like Victor Hugo, but I've hacked together my own weird style.

Yeah, I still use it a lot, but that statement is a worthwhile caveat in the face of the temptation to view it as one-stop shopping.

The book I am recommending is Le Robert & Nathan grammaire de l'italien. My francophilia has waned significantly over the years, but man they sure seem to know how to write a dictionary or a grammar book.

Nice. We have a number of student Robert dictionaries around the house, since they've been required for my kids, who are just in regular French public schools. (& boy do they love ribbing me on my French.)

That's good, it means they are picking up the cultural cues and fitting in!

We've been here six years now (plus they spent another year here about 5 years before that), so they're fully integrated now.

Yep, tell us how many XP you needed to back the Diamond #1 slot. I'm sitting down in preparation...

6650. Guy behind me had 5550 but at one point his weekly running total was on the order of 9000 XP.

Ooft, amazing! I might see if I can at least get up to the Diamond League in the next few weeks.