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Old 09-18-2014, 06:35 PM   #76
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So, I've pretty much regained my interest in learning Finnish, as well as attempting to learn Swedish. Anyone got any familiarity with either language?
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Old 09-22-2014, 10:28 PM   #77
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I've been using DuoLingo for about a month now. Since I agree that everyone has different preferences when it comes to methods of learning, I figured I'd provide a review of my own, since I figured it would be nice to have an alternate perspective.

In my case, I've been using DuoLingo for Spanish. I excelled in the language in high school (and actually passed the AP exam after taking AP Spanish 5), but I had no room in my schedule for classes in college, so I ended up forgetting a lot of it. Visiting Panama provided a really stark realization of how bad my Spanish had gotten, and inspired me to get back to practicing. The placement exam plopped me at Lv.6, and I have since ranked up to Lv.9 through both progression and repeating previous lessons.

Personally, I've loved the app so far. I use it on my phone in waiting rooms, before I go to bed, when I'm a passenger in a long car ride... Basically, if I have idle time, I can pull out my phone and use this app. The constant reminders to practice older lessons have been helpful, as language needs constant practice to retain, and having been an MMO addict for years, the XP reward system is something I welcome readily. There's even a competitive aspect to it, as I have a friend who is also very enamored with the app, and I always know if he's been practicing more than me... and it's definitely incentive to step up my game! I've used it every day since I started (save one... and I was really upset when I broke my 23 day streak) and it doesn't take much to keep up the commitment. I obviously practice some days more than others, but I find that I've been keeping up my motivation and learning a lot with this system.

THAT SAID, there are definite flaws with the app, and while Talon has already more or less outlined everything I could say on the subject, I do want to verify that the AI can be finicky and frustrating on occasion. I have also noticed that of the people I recommended the app to, the ones who already had familiarity with their language of choice took to the app easily and enjoyed it, while those who lacked familiarity didn't always take to the app well. Of the three friends I had with little or no previous experience, two found the learning curve too steep, got frustrated and quit easily, while one breezed through the intro lessons and has been leveling up quickly. It is also worth noting that I've been using Correct Your Spanish Blunders (2nd Edition) by Jean Yates, and Prentice Hall's En Marcha (Level 3 and Above) Grammar Workbook to supplement my DuoLingo lessons, since I feel the app doesn't really do much in terms of explaining the syntax and grammatical rules of the language beyond demonstrating through example, and I will probably be looking for more resources as I get more advanced in my learning to fill in the gaps.

So, tl;dr: DuoLingo won't teach you a new language entirely by itself, and may not be the best way to introduce language to new learners, but as a supplement to other lessons, it can be an amazing tool.
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Old 09-22-2014, 10:44 PM   #78
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Just to offer a short status update on my use of Duolingo to refresh my French:

I enthusiastically used the app each day for a period of about two weeks. As expressed in earlier posts, I was not entirely happy with the app itself, but I enjoyed learning a few odd new words here or there and I was especially determined to reach the grammar lessons I so craved.

Unfortunately, I never did make it to those coveted grammar lessons. For me personally, Duolingo is one of those habits that is as easy to break as it is to form. A large part of what kept me going, as silly as this may sound, was the weekly calendar that keeps track of how many points you scored each day. On that same page it reports to you what your current record for most uninterrupted days of study in a row is. It's one of those silly little things that appeals to the child inside of me, makes me want to not give up, want to see just how high I can make the record go. But once I fall off that wagon and the game harshly says, "YOU DUN GOOFED! COUNTER RESET!" I dust myself off and walk away from the game entirely ... well, provided there's nothing else pulling me back in, and in Duolingo's case there wasn't. Nothing sufficiently strong, anyway.

I have yet to use the app since falling off the wagon weeks ago. I've little doubt that most of the new information which had been committed to short term and intermediate term memory has already been forgotten, which is no good! But I want to emphasize the "new" there in "new information." Because I feel like my French, even weeks out of practice right now, is probably better at this moment than it has been in years and that it wouldn't take much practice to get right back in the swing of things with all the words I knew as a boy and had been refreshed on now as an adult.

I agree with Marion Ette that one thing which would be highly motivating, childish again though this may sound, is the light-hearted (?) competition with others. With no active UPNers (at the time) expressing interest in Duolingo, I befriended all of one inactive member (Jeri) and that was it. I think that if I had had a French buddy, I probably would've been motivated to keep going so long as he wasn't too far ahead of me or too far behind me. That's really the key, though, isn't it: the competition feature is pointless if your friend is too far one way or too far the other. You both need to be at around the same skill level for it to not be too demoralizing to the one or the other of you. At least that's the way it is for me. YMMV.
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Old 09-22-2014, 11:19 PM   #79
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Oh, man. I can relate to the point about streak-breaking being a major downer. Seeing that number go from 23 to 1 felt like a major setback when it happened to me, though in my case I enjoy the app enough (and am appeased enough by my overall progress) that I can shake it off... But without that high motivation, I can see it being enough to drop the app. I can understand why they do it, since language requires persistent progress to master, but it can certainly feel like a punishment when your streak gets terminated. I try to focus on my level progress rather than the streak, since they can't take away my level and XP... but again, I enjoy using the app just for the sake of using it, so my resilience with it is naturally higher.

I also remembered a nitpick that I wanted to mention briefly... As I progressed, I started getting pop-ups at the end of new lessons about how I can now read "59.6% of all Spanish text" or some nonsense like that... I'm pretty sure they mean 59.6% of the most commonly used words in the Spanish language, since the same app is telling me that I have mastery of... 697 words. I'm pretty sure that Spanish as a language isn't comprised of only ~1170 words. I realize that's SUPER nitpicky, but the reason it bothers me is I feel that it sets up unrealistic expectations for how much you're learning. In my case, I just ignore it... but I do fear that it might be giving other users inflated perceptions of their mastery of the language, so I would definitely warn others to watch out for that.

EDIT: I mentioned earlier that I was using the En Marcha Grammar Book from Prentice Hall as one of my supplemental materials, but I forgot to mention that the website accompanying the book, and indeed all of the websites accompanying language books from Prentice Hall, are totally free and easy to access for your (predominantly Spanish) language-learning needs!

Here you can find the list of all the books, the vast majority of which are Spanish
Here is En Marcha specifically (which is recommended for students in their third year and beyond)

Last edited by Marion Ette; 09-23-2014 at 02:17 AM.
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Old 09-23-2014, 04:04 PM   #80
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One of my least favorite textbooks of all time, Abriendo Paso, is on that list. I really disliked it because I already knew a majority of the grammar it taught, but once you get a little farther down the line with Spanish, I'd recommend using it since it fills a lot of the holes and cleans a lot of the mess that intro grammar books leave you with.

Also I have had this overwhelming urge to learn German lately, despite the fact that I am still trying to cram my head full of Japanese and French. Someone stop me.

EDIT: hahaha I own the 3 ecce romani books that pearson lists
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Old 10-18-2014, 08:07 PM   #81
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Nations or states we gave the -ish suffix to (e.g. when describing things that originated from those lands):
  • England (English)
  • Scotland (Scottish)
  • Wales (Welsh)
  • Ireland (Irish)
  • Britain (British)
  • Denmark (Danish)
  • Finland (Finnish)
  • Sweden (Swedish)
  • Spain (Spanish)
  • Flanders (Flemish)
  • Poland (Polish)
  • various Turkish tribes (Turkish)
Nearby nations we conspicuously didn't give the -ish suffix to:
  • France (French)
  • Norway (Norwegian)
  • Holland (Dutch)
  • Germany (German) and other Germanic states, past or present
    • Switzerland (Swiss)
    • Austria (Austrian)
    • Bavaria (Bavarian)
    • Prussia (Prussian)
  • Belgium (Belgian)
  • Luxembourg (uhh ... Luxembourgeois? ^^; )
Particularly famous nations we knew about at least a millennium ago but that we also didn't give -ish to, though the names we use for them may have changed over time:
  • Rome (Roman)
  • Greece (Greek)
  • Egypt (Egyptian)
  • Russia (Russian) gonna take this one off the list since Russia was technically founded in the 16th century
  • China (Chinese)
  • Persia (Persian)
  • India (Indian)
The above lists are likely incomplete; and the second and third lists are rather subjective, particularly the third in its choice of nations; but still, I think it illustrates an interesting observation:
  1. we tended to use -ish with peoples geographically closest to England, but there are exceptions
  2. we tended to not use -ish with faraway peoples, but there are exceptions
I'm kind of curious why it is that the Norwegians missed out on the -ish suffix that all three of their Scandinavian brethren received. I'm especially curious as to how/why all of England's immediate neighbors received -ish except the French, and wonder just how much of it might be a deep-seated hatred of or mistrust of the French that is embedded in our language. ("They are not like us. They are ... French.") I wonder how it is that Spain got Spanish yet Portugal didn't get Portugish, or how Poland got Polish but the Slavs got Slavic and the Rus got Russian. If it's a temporal thing, like "We used -ish for the earliest nations we came to know of but then it dropped off in usage," then I would ask why it isn't attached to any Biblical nations; and vice-versa if it's a modern suffix why and how it would shove out whatever predecessor suffix was used to adjectivize England, Scotland, etc.
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Old 10-18-2014, 11:05 PM   #82
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Luxembourgian. This is what I was told it was called when I went to Luxembourg. It sounds really wrong but so does every other word so meh.
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Old 12-12-2014, 01:22 PM   #83
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Does anyone read in their non-native/non-English language on a regular basis? How well does that work for you? Is there something in particular you like reading in a foreign language?
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Old 12-13-2014, 10:40 AM   #84
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I have to read Latin and Greek all the time, does that count?
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Old 05-26-2015, 09:24 PM   #85
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So, American Sign Language buffs: a young lady performs an ASL version of Eminem's "Lose Yourself". I found this via Imgur. The YouTube view count says 25,735 views at the time of this writing but I have a sneaking suspicion that that figure's at least one order of magnitude outdated. ^^; (The Imgur page alone has got its own 176,688 views, so ...)

I'm curious as to how much information is lost in translation. Ignoring her mouthings, it seems like she only conveys maybe one or two out of every three words. Is the information loss really as bad as 50%+? Or is ASL just a really information-dense language and she's communicating nearly everything in the song lyrics in very few hand gestures? Or is she communicating very quickly and it's just too much information too fast for my untrained eyes? Like, I notice that much earlier in the song when she gets to the part "trailer" (as in a trailer park trailer) she indicates a box with wheels, seemingly the trailer; but then when she returns to that very same word later in the song ("but this trailer's got to go," around the 4-minute mark), it seems to be skipped over entirely.

I'm also curious about how fair it is for me to say that we don't get to count the mouthings. How much of a staple are mouthed words in ASL? It makes perfectly good sense to me for close-up communication -- reading mouths is certainly not uncommon, particularly amongst the deaf community -- but when I think about the sign language communicators I've seen at high school and college graduation ceremonies, I think about how they are communicating to deaf members of the audience sitting some tens to hundreds of feet away. At that great of a distance, you're unable to make out anything the lips are saying, I should think, and would have to rely entirely upon the hands' signed messages to understand what is being said. No? Help me out.
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Old 10-29-2015, 03:44 AM   #86
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Thoughts on learning some useful French phrases but not going the whole hog and learning the language? It would be useful to be able to survive in Brussels but when I commit properly it will be to another language I think.
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Old 10-29-2015, 08:07 AM   #87
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You can, but you can also be the typical tourist and bring a travel phrase book. You know the kind: fits in a pocket, has English on one line and French on the other, has sentences like "Where is the nearest restroom?" and "Can you show me how to get to the train station / subway?" It's entirely up to you.
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Old 10-29-2015, 09:58 PM   #88
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So I've begun learning Italian, as I'm taking Level 1 Honors this year. Unfortunately its 95% freshmen who don't take any of it seriously and are almost if not actually worse than the stereotype. However, I think if I were to really commit to the language, I would really enjoy it (especially since I have a great teacher. God bless her for all the stuff she puts up with!).
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Old 10-30-2015, 01:36 PM   #89
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Yea I have a phrase book but... ew. Should do better.
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Old 04-04-2016, 09:02 PM   #90
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So due to a business reason I have started to casually learn some Italian! I bought a grammar and a really massive dictionary (by accident there) and decided I might as well start a Duolingo course just to drill in some vocabulary (and I'm doing it through Spanish which I think is helping me get in the mindset and also is sort of a fun challenge).

It is a lot weirder of a language than I first anticipated lol. Anyone else taken Italian before/are taking Italian? I only really am looking to learn enough to understand basic stuff for the most part but I am also ambitious when learning languages so I will take literally any advice xd
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Old 04-10-2016, 10:40 PM   #91
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Are you learning it for reading understanding, or reading/conversational/writing?
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Old 04-13-2016, 02:05 PM   #92
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Mostly comprehension. But I'd like to go further.
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Old 04-13-2016, 04:05 PM   #93
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I've taken 3 years of Italian in high school and despite not continuing it for my senior year I do remember quite a bit. Not nearly enough to be conversational, I don't think, but some.

Also I really don't like Duolingo, idk why but I just didn't enjoy using it. Maybe because I had started after I had already taken Italian so it forced me to redo things but I couldn't test out of it because there was like the 1 term I didn't know.
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Old 08-03-2016, 04:46 AM   #94
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Decided to go back to evening courses, but this time go for a language that a) I have a foundation in and b) is not inherently super difficult, so I am starting a 'false beginners' German class in October.

Anyone else learning anything at the moment?
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Old 08-03-2016, 02:18 PM   #95
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I can kinda French, but because I'm only learning it through school I can converse, albeit uncomfortably, with Francophones.

I would like to learn Spanish in the near future, though.
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Old 08-03-2016, 02:50 PM   #96
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I know a bit of French and German (though I think I still remember a bit of the latter better because I own Pokemon FireRed, Platinum and Black in German - like, the German word for Caterpie is Raupi - THEY LITERALLY NAMED IT CATERPILLAR LIKE THE JAPANESE NAMED ZAPDOS AND JOLTEON THUNDER/THUNDERS IDK WHY I FIND IT SO FUNNY). The only language I willingly learnt (the shcools I went to were terrible for German/French so I lost interest in that very quickly) a bit of is Japanese, and as it turns out I've probably learnt more Japanese in a year than I ever did with the other languages in the five years I studied them. :P
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Old 08-03-2016, 07:12 PM   #97
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I've been learning Italian for work for the past 2.5 months or so, mostly doing so by drafting emails to send to Italian clients and having my attorney (who speaks Italian fluently) edit them for me.
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Old 07-26-2018, 03:52 AM   #98
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I just started using Duolingo today because I heard that it's been improved recently, and they've also added a bunch of new languages.

I certainly would not recommend it to a novice trying to learn a language from scratch, but it's good for supplementation or getting some reps in 10 minutes a day to make sure you don't forget a language. If you find a lesson too easy or repetitive, you can just click the key icon and test out of a lesson to move on. I'm using my computer, so I imagine it's way faster with a full keyboard instead of a lame phone, so I'm leveling up rapidly.

Talon, I looked you up and added you as a friend boyo! You better get ready to taste my skill!

https://www.duolingo.com/TheSweenz
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Old 08-06-2018, 11:38 PM   #99
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Originally Posted by McSweeney View Post
I just started using Duolingo today because I heard that it's been improved recently, and they've also added a bunch of new languages.

I certainly would not recommend it to a novice trying to learn a language from scratch, but it's good for supplementation or getting some reps in 10 minutes a day to make sure you don't forget a language. If you find a lesson too easy or repetitive, you can just click the key icon and test out of a lesson to move on. I'm using my computer, so I imagine it's way faster with a full keyboard instead of a lame phone, so I'm leveling up rapidly.

Talon, I looked you up and added you as a friend boyo! You better get ready to taste my skill!

https://www.duolingo.com/TheSweenz
>goes in expecting to find Mcsweeney at like Level 1 Japanese
>holy shit he's Level 19 French and Level 12 Chinese
>the best I got (before I got bored with it) way back when was Level 8 French

Hahahahahahaha well shit. How long is it going to take to convince Duolingo I'm already JLPT N2? Now I'm morbidly curious.



HRMPH.

The short answer is, it will take a very long time to convince it I am higher level. Whether everyone's dumped off here or just I've been, I've been dumped off at what looks like ... "We'll give you the rank of Level 1 Cleared in nearly every single course, but you'll need to retake all the courses if you want to level them up further." This is especially bizarre with things like the hiragana writing system, because if I can answer later test questions in pure Japanese (or read them in pure Japanese, either/or), then one would think I am already good to go on the alphabet and cannot possibly level up further. Going to investigate further before I pass judgment prematurely. But suffice to say, as of right now it's not looking too good. It's looking like Duolingo wants me to waste 10-20 hours of my time to prove to it what a simple and well-put-together examination could have done for both of us in just 1-2 hours.

Last edited by Talon87; 08-06-2018 at 11:58 PM.
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Old 08-07-2018, 12:41 AM   #100
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Oh man! I thought that you had given up on Duolingo until I finally saw that you had accumulated some experience points on my leaderboard.

I read your posts earlier in this thread about French, and it sounds like we're at roughly the same skill level. I'll give you a brief history of my French learning so you know where I'm at: I took French from elementary school up to junior high and learned almost nothing at all. A handful of nouns and how to count to 60. No verb conjugations whatsoever. I elected not to take French in high school because I was a dumb teenager and, "French is stupid and gay! Who needs it!" I really regretted that decision later in life, so when I started undergrad, I took four semesters of French: Beginners' French I (where I learned more in one semester than I learned in 8 years of elementary school/junior high combined), Beginners' French II, Intermediate French, and La Grammaire Par Les Textes; this last one I was not prepared for because the professor talked entirely in French and I had no idea what the F he was saying 90% of the time. I always had to ask my classmates what the homework was for each day (most of the students in my class were ex-French Immersion students, so they had a huge leg up on me). This summer, I read my two French textbooks from university cover to cover. I'm pretty good at reading French, but I still struggle badly with listening comprehension.

So, I'd classify myself as intermediate. Like you, I took the Duolingo placement test and basically got put at the very beginning. But that's okay because I want to 5 crown the whole tree anyway. I agree with you that the Duolingo instruction isn't great; they don't explain verb conjugation or grammar at all. They just throw a bunch of phrases at you and expect you to memorize them. If I were doing this as a novice, I would probably have given up after a few lessons and think I'm not smart enough to learn another language. But since I took those French semesters in university already, Duolingo's structure is fine for me because I already learned the fundamentals.

So here's what I'm doing for Duolingo: for each skill, I take all the lessons at level 0, then once I get to crown 1, I click the key icon and take the test 4 more times to rapidly get to crown 5. This probably takes 15 minutes. You should do the same thing if you're finding it too easy. In fact, you don't even have to crown 5 it. Just click the key and test out of every skill once in a couple of minutes. Maybe it will finally get challenging once I get to le conditionnel, le subjonctif, and all that nonsense.

Moving on to Chinese: I know I said before that this isn't a good program for novices to learn a language from scratch, but speaking as a novice, I actually find the Chinese program pretty good. Maybe because Chinese grammar seems super easy, and I don't know what the deal is with verb conjugation, but it's possible that you don't have to worry about it at all, so it's just a matter of getting the pronunciation down and brute force memorizing a shitload of vocabulary without the aid of cognates. This looks right up Duolingo's alley due to its repetitive nature to beat the vocabulary into your head.

Unlike the French program where I take the test to rapidly attain crown 5, I'm taking every single Chinese lesson one by one until I hit crown 4, and then I take the test to get it to crown 5. This can take a long time, maybe an hour. I feel like I need the extra repetition because of the difficulty of learning the Chinese characters. My goal is to 5 crown one skill per day.

I also learned (not from Duolingo) how to install the Chinese language pack and type in Chinese. Before I started this program, I had no clue how Chinese/Japanese people typed up hanzi/kanji; I pictured them with this giant text file opened up on their computer and them having to find then copy and paste each character that they wanted to use or something. I made my own Word file where I track all the new characters I've learned, their pinyin, and English meaning.
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