itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

Laddering seems kind of cheesy but feel like it still might be useful.

Yiddish course seems pretty good actually

It’s like German pronounced closer to English and written in Hebrew.

Two substantial courses that have been updates recently that I have my eye on taking up again are Esperanto from French and Scottish Gaelic- now up to nine checkpoints! - but even I, James Redd, have to admit I am stretched too thin.

Has anyone used italki for language lessons before? My current French class has finished so thinking about it giving it a go.

I believe Ed has used it quite a bit. I tried it once and had some success, but I think you have to find the right teacher. I would have continued actually but couldn’t quite make the time commitment.

So about this Legendary thing

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.

― with hidden noise, Monday, May 4, 2020 8:59 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hmm. They changed the way the Dojo works in a way that might be beneficial.

Still doing this. Just passed 1300 days of streak. Still find it somewhat helpful if supplemented with something else, even if sometimes it’s seems like wheel-spinning.

Got the “Legendary” achievement this week, despite a gunner with Plus coming for me hard in the final stretch. I’m really glad I started using this app, I’ve definitely learned more Spanish with it in the last year than I ever did in school.

It’s going to be interesting to see what they do with all the IPO money. You’d guess they’re going to have to monetise the other 97% of their user base by offering something unambiguously worth paying extra for but what form that takes will be fascinating.

Yup

It tickles me that Italian YouTube vloggers address their audience as "guys" as frequently as English ones do

i was so sad the ticker was not OWLY

It’s kind of interesting that 10-15 years into the online, direct-learning model, only Babbel and Rise have ever turned a profit. I wonder if DL will go after the corporate market more aggressively.

Good point

god morgen! snakker du norsk? jeg liker norsk. it's like the same as english with different words.

jeg snakker litt norsk.

not to be confused with

jeg snakker lite norsk

Heh

Some recent improvements I noticed:

New sections on the alphabet for Russian, Korean, Greek, Arabic and Ukrainian, the last course which I’ve never looked at.

Scottish Gaelic course is pretty huge now.

This looks useful: https://www.clozemaster.com/forum/t/new-feature-cloze-listening/12633

Been making some significant improvement by supplementing "book learnin" with watching YouTubes of native speakers. Mostly food/travel vlogs. Playback speed .75x for now.
2 advantages over book learnin: 1) subject matter is much more interesting and 2) get to hear native speakers speaking to a native audience, so get more exposure to idioms, slang, vernacular etc.

Seems like the dictionary feature has been deprecated and the related wordlist is now much less useful.

i know i am asking too much of this stupid app but i'm on a 21 day streak of norwegian and doing pretty well but cannot understand in possessive words when to say like "my book" vs "book my." both are used but in different situations and there is nowhere you can click to have it explain why. i wish there were like little instruction cards for these things. i could just look it up on my own i know!

This wiki page has some useful info though:
https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Japanese

Guess the dictionary is still here, even if not on language menu and not linked to word list:
https://www.duolingo.com/dictionary/ja

Have you tried the "discussion" link, harbl? There's usually ppl asking the same thing I'm wondering in there

Yes! I try to always look at the discussion link.

The one thing that was good about the way the dictionary used to work was that it gave lots of sentences with the corresponding audio.

Guess it still sort of works, although I have a feeling that that will be a temporary link.

Hmm. Works now.

i do use the discussion link but it's always after the question and i can never remember it later. i know where the difference is, it's definite vs. indefinite, but i still can't keep straight which way it goes.

Yeah, I find it useful sometimes for certain things like word order or pronunciation, but other times it goes in one ear and out the other.

I feel like I used to know that distinction in Norwegian but long ago forgot. I can look up in books I still have and post here if you like.

sure, go for it!

the discussion did help me learn to distinguish the spoken "barna" vs "barnet" which i kept getting wrong

Oh yeah.

Okay, book says noun first, broren min is "more oral, concrete and earthly,", whereas the noun last min bror is "more formal, textual and abstract." This is from Louis Janus's grammar book, which I recommend, it's pretty clearly written, although LJ the person was kind of difficult, at least in my online interacts with him.

ok so i'm right in feeling like it's not that easy to to understand. maybe beyond the abilities of duolingo to teach, too!

I tried to see how many google hits I got for each of those two but that didn't help me get a feel for it.

I got 4 million hits for "min bror" but only 260 thousand for "broren min." On the other hand "lots of broren min" in tatoeba but no "min bror" as far as I could tell.

Ah, there is more detail, as expected, in the book by the Strandskogens, also recommended.

I really enjoyed learning Norwegian but then I had some difficulties and it didn’t quite stick. I can elaborate if you like.

^ yes

i think i've figured out the possessive thing, it's just definite noun goes first, indefinite noun goes second. i can't get over the number of words for grandparents. bestparents, fathermother, mothermother, oldmother, something else. then grandchildren is childrenchildren?

Main difficulty was: it was easy enough, what with being closely related to German and English. But I couldn't find a context to use it and practice it. I used to be on a Yahoo Group, two of them actually, but it was usually more for absolute beginners. And then once I tried to write more complicated things and made a few mistakes it would freak out the some of the gatekeeper native speakers and such. Not a guy way to learn or speak a language. Now we have italki I guess.

Best thing to do if possible is to start speaking sooner rather than later but then you need an appropriate person to do that with.

Or course I should practice what I preach but...

yeah i would like to do italki. maybe another month or so.

the lack of speaking is why i can't speak spanish anymore even though i used to be quite good at it when i did talk to people. even though there are TONS of opportunities i could find easily, but i like new shiny things and i want to do a new language. also hate hot weather and want to visit a cold place.