itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

french?

Why the question mark?

i didn't know if you mean the other languages i took placement tests for

this is not hooky!! i am in control!!! ni nieu ni maître!

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/36081770/Tha-balla-aig-an-taigh-seo

*d

Sorry, that is just the forum discussion of that sentence. In the lesson discussion, which I can seem to access directly, there are some frazzled mods complaining about questions from annoying users.

Weird how you can just google certain sentences but other ones you can only see it you are actually doing the lesson. Wonder it’s something in Duo or just Google indexing.

Just found out this morning about a notable polyglot I had somehow never heard of before.

Kató Lomb or Lomb Kató.

Trying to pace myself on the Finnish course to get the most out of it.

So guy at the top of my leaderboard has 30K XP, which includes one 12K XP day. Second place has 21K XP, distant third has 6K XP and I am currently fifth with 2753 XP. Think I may return to my usual practice of waiting until later on Monday to start.

I'm in Pearl league and started late on Monday and only the top two have (just) over 1000 XP. I was too busy to try for a top 10 placing this week, which is a shame as it actually would have been very doable had I bothered earlier.

You can do that next week when you start Finnish.

Less than an hour to go. Calling it quits until tomorrow. Can always review the tips and the recent words in the downtime.

Wonder if and when I will dip a toe back into the pool, venture back into the fray. Maybe I will just follow j.’s streak freeze strategy.

Hey...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxLpEX2bt8w

...and I’m back. They changed the way ramp up thing works.

I'm proud that @duolingo, the most valuable startup in PA, is seen as an inspiration for Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, if the US policies against (extremely qualified) immigration continue, we'll be forced to move jobs (and inspiration) to Toronto @SenToomey @SenBobCasey @billpeduto

— Luis von Ahn (@LuisvonAhn) July 6, 2020

i didn't know that guy invented the recaptcha, seems like the kind of ignominious achievement you'd want to keep to yourself

His right hand man/graduate student/Duolingo co-founder has one of the Great Real Names

No crazy person has emerged on my leaderboard - yet!- and there seems to be only one other participant shaping up to be potential serious competition so I could conceivably win again this week/becarefulwhatyouwishfor

Made pearl league, continuing to ease on down the road

The dark horse pale rider has now ridden up to third place and shows no sign of stopping so I may join you in your stroll

Using the leaderboard comparison feature (have you guys used this?) I can see that this fellow chugs along at a healthy clip during the week and then crushes with a few 3K XP days on the weekend. Aloha, sucker!


And now for some language learning content. Here are a pair Hungarian words I found amusing for some reason, courtesy of Drops:

“Liszt” means “flour.”
“Ital” means “drink.”

well this week i waited until wednesday to get in, and competition does not seem too fierce so far, as i climbed from nothing up to third place in one practice sesh, but the first place person is seven hundred points ahead of me and there are several people online actively accruing points, so it looks to be a vigorous task to come out on top this week. depends how many crazies are lurking as yet unrevealed to the world.

duolingo competition seems intense going by this thread.

do you all find dl really helps your language learning/acquisition or is it mostly just its own fun gamey thing for you? I've never really used it for any great length of time but seems like it might be good for filling time on the bus, light vocab acquisition etc. guess I over-privilege listening and speaking in my learning (though speaking has been tough during lockdown), and am interested in maybe throwing in some dl to bump vocab

i've only really been using it since lockdown started. i went from no french to having enough french so far to puzzle over philosophy, read tweets, sound out poetry, and peruse the newspaper, so i'm pretty pleased. several years back i tried using it for german, which i already had a lot more of, and it was not very engaging. having the huge blocks of time from lockdown surely made a difference.

i would rather not know about the competition, i just want the little badge.

What j. said, for the badge. The competition ain't nothin', especially since a handful of competitors are clearly either cheating or giving in 24/7 to fullblown OCD (DUOCD?), and too many XPs, blindly acquired or not, are actually detrimental to one's learning.

I have found that it helps my language learning. It was very useful as a way to get me up to speed in French enough to start writing without such heavy reliance on a dictionary, and to start speaking with enough confidence to benefit from irl correction. Now I've started dreaming a bit in Italian, in crappy duolingo Italian, but hey.

Just to clarify: you have found the competitive aspect has helped your language learning or just the app in general?

It has definitely helped my language learning. I'm particularly noticing it now that I'm transitioning from Swedish to Norwegian - it feels like I'm learning Norwegian as basically a variant of Swedish, so almost all my previous knowledge seems to apply. There are some words that are different, and the pronunciation is different - if anything, Norwegian is even more grunty and caveman-ish than Swedish, which already felt grunty and caveman-ish compared to English - but the similarities are so strong that I'm actually forced to check myself to avoid spelling things the Swedish way. But I absolutely can read the language(s), and can understand people if they speak slowly (which, unfortunately, the characters on the Scando crime dramas I watch on Hulu and Amazon don't tend to do).

I don't "compete" in any serious way - you people who rack up thousands of XP a week seem insane to me. I've got real work to do, you know?

xp I was answering |||||||||||'s question about duolingo generally. The competitive aspect doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I spent more than a year doing it daily before the leaderboards were introduced.

xp well for me it kinda is "real work", as it would be professionally useful for me to be able to read and speak Italian. but even if it were just a hobby, it's a pretty good one!

Maybe you should try Danish as well, unperson, it will really blow your mind.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that my wife, who speaks German (and Italian, and Spanish), has a much easier time understanding Danish than Swedish or Norwegian.

At the risk of repeating: in my experience Duolingo is great for that first hack through the jungle of a language but doesn't seem to be too great for helping perfect or nail down things, such as vocabulary and grammar. It’s best approached with some caveats.

*checks leaderboard, does a few Finnish lessons, returns to thread*

man! i didn't touch it at all for almost 24 hours and i have my same place but the leader is another 1500 xp ahead of me on top of yesterday's lead

i got other things to do, dang

I am still in first by about 500 XP but I see my current nemesis sitting there in third place waiting to bust a move tomorrow.

I keep falling out of the top 10, whatever, I'll just keep up my normal pace of about 150-200xp per day and see what happens.

Just as long as you don’t want those badges it’s fine.

the badges are the things for which you occasionally get lingots? I want the lingots, don't care about the badges otherwise then.

Truth be told, I was actually getting kind of a buzz from accumulating all those XPs. When I actually settle down to study properly it's noticeably more painful.

Guy is still hanging back. What discipline!

And now he is 2XP behind me, believe he is about to make his move.

But really came to post that I am trying to go really slow with Finnish. Currently it says I have studied two hundred words. Maybe if I go slow I will actually end up remembering those two hundred words, as opposed to, say, the 1100 in Scottish Gaelic, the 2700 in Hungarian or the 3200 in Dutch.

i've got a bunch (well way more than is useful) of french books to read but i got the genius idea of ordering a french translation of wittgenstein to learn on, since i will know it so well i will be able to figure out individual words i don't know yet just from what i know the original says, and now i'm so looking forward to it (it's coming all the way from france so sloowwwwwwwly) that i don't really want to do anything else until i can get mired in les recherches

Cool! Of the Tractacus?

That's a good one to read in German actually.

Just found this crazy thing: http://tractatus.gitlab.io/

And this: http://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/tlp.html

no, the PI (PU actually hem hem). they're both something to read in german but i don't know that the tractatus would have been ideal to try (first) at the stage i was at—too many short disconnected paragraphs whose sentences just link together abstracta. but the PI is very conversational in sentence/paragraph structure yet has the virtue of most philosophical writing, a small (manageable) vocabulary.

part of the point of 'grammar' is that words' meanings are structured by the kinds of things done with them / the kinds of circumstances in which they're meaningfully used, which is not much different from the language-course-designer's principle of grouping together various topic words, so the PU is very gentle about giving language-learners a glimpse of what other words might be associated with a focal one like 'rule' (zum beispiel)

i've read that something like this is reflected in W's spelling dictionary, but it's been years since i've seen a copy of it