itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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

Cool, j! Is there a contemporary French literature on W you’d like to engage? I am sorta in one such crowd but not at all on the grounds of being a W scholar, more because of connections with him and math/proof theory.

I thought you might now something about that - I was tempted to watch one of your lectures the other day- but didn't want to call you out.

xp no, i'm not that engaged. but cavell's translator/defender into/to the french sandra laugier has been publishing a lot, not all of it into english, on olp-related topics. might be nice to have better access to bouveresse's stuff too, i found it was not all super available 10-15 years ago when i was curious.

i'm just advocating for reading books you already know intimately when learning new languages. but there aren't so many french books that i originally learned in english and know extremely well, so i have to go the indirect route. : )

know not now

Ha yes Sandra is exactly who I meant, she’s my colleague and friend. There’s a regular W seminar at my soon-to-be former uni that’s gone zoom that you could join in the fall when it restarts if you want.

James I’m not sure which lecture of mine would be best to watch, don’t think anything recent is on yt but what’s there is still relevant to current work. I’m talking on proof theory by zoom to Australian in November I think, maybe they’ll post that

Thanks, Euler.

Still tilting at the windmill of trying to learn Hungarian. It’s been interesting.

Agglutinative languages, why are they so bad and hated? so logical and yet so difficult!

So I am now right past the edge of where the Finnish tips end and have 277 words in my list. Think I will just beef up related vocabulary in some other apps.

i am trying to learn vietnamese (likely the latest in a series of soon to be abandoned projects), and it's unsettling how much the gamification (the leagues, the rankings, etc) work on me. with that said, i am #4 in my league and I plan to come roaring into what I assume will be the Silver league. i don't know who these people are, but i will learn how the little boy wants the mug and the bee bites the man and how the dirty glove is at the train station until i defeat all of them

not sure how to follow people but i am https://www.duolingo.com/profile/weinventyou

probably commented on ad nauseum itt but the differences between the website and app are interesting. in a weird way, the app is better despite (and maybe as a result of?) the ads

i think a modern thing that people don't acknowledge enough is the feeling of "am i actually a top performer among this random group of 50? or do i just have more free time? or, am i being manipulated by an algorithm or just straight up lying to believe that i am one of the top 3, so that i'll be excited and continue to use the app and eventually decide to pay for it?"

^otm, truth bomb, new borad description etc.

I see that I hacked my way to the first castle in Vietnamese about a year ago, although I remember nothing at all. Feel free to try and refresh my memory since I have no discipline I am always up for a linguistic challenge.

how do i do this challenge? let me think...

CHALLENGE!!!

"That is mine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWDjr9Yejpo

Co áy la cua anh áy

:-O

xin lỗi

...con dê là của tôi

:-O

You have won this challenge! +15 XP

I am Foghorn Leghorn.

Good job!
You finished #3 and kept your position in the Diamond League.

You earned a 1000 gems!

Keep making the top 3 to win rewards

You earned a 1000 gems!