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Twig

Duolingo - TWO LANGUAGE-O

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In German there is the word Beißkorb which doesn't mean what a Swede would think it does haha (it sounds like bajskorv which means turd lit. shit sausage).

Also the old meaning of rolig still exists in a way in orolig (worried).

I moved to Austria this month and have been trying Duolingo myself to brush up on my German. I'm not sure I like the way it tries to teach you grammar through pattern recognition instead of being more explicit about the rules. I've heard the website version is much better, but unfortunately I'm without a computer for now so I'm stuck using the app. The biggest issue is that it doesn't make you write enough, which I understand because typing on a phone sucks. But it's really not good at helping you remember the genders of nouns, which you need for every conjugation. Memorising the conjugations is a much smaller task than the genders IMO. Memrise is better for that but I'm not loving either.

I think I learn more from textbooks, translating newspaper articles etc. I mean, the sort of passive learning Duo tries to do totally works but it requires a lot of volume and I'm not sure it can provide that. At least the app can't because it's kinda frustrating to use for long periods of time. Gonna try to start a course asap, just want to be competent enough to start at A2 or something so I'm not wasting my time and money.

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I started at A1.2 after a month of intensive Duolingo use. I'm glad I made that switch as pushing further with Duolingo's "guess the rule!" system would have been a waste of time for me. Might work for someone else, though.

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I've found that I'm actually better at learning and internalizing noun gender using Duolingo than when I was taking traditional coursework because repetition and hearing it conjugated and tensed over and over helps the most for me.

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How did I not know about this before? I thought I was going to teach myself Esperanto this year, for no particular reason, but I fell off by February or March. I was surprised to see that Irish is available on Duolingo though, and that it has like two million people trying to learn it. It's a difficult language that does get much use here in Ireland. It also tends to cause more problems than it solves.

 

Anyway, I think I'm going to use it to brush up on my Irish, and then move on to Esperanto and give it another go.

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I've been learning Swedish on Duolingo since early 2015. I'd been using Memrise before that, and had tried to use a book before that, but with less success. I reached the end of the course quite a while ago, but I still try to get my daily 30xp to keep it fresh, and the fact that I routinely get a fair amount of stuff wrong suggests that the practice is very necessary. I know that I'd have to ramp things up with maybe some proper lessons or at least some more time and other tools if I want to attain real proficiency, but I'm pretty lazy and a bit concerned about pushing too hard and losing motivation, which happened with the book. Perhaps it's a back-handed compliment, but one of the most valuable things about Duolingo is that it makes daily practice relatively painless for lazy slackers such as myself. I'm much more concerned with keeping up modest daily efforts than really pushing for faster results, but being unwilling to sustain that momentum.

At least, that's how I justify it to myself.

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Mentioned this in Slack, but last night Duolingo gave me this:

Bjørnen spiser meg!!

 

D:

 

The bear is eating me!!

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I reached the end of the course quite a while ago, but I still try to get my daily 30xp to keep it fresh, and the fact that I routinely get a fair amount of stuff wrong suggests that the practice is very necessary.

 

I'm not sure that's what it suggests. I had the same problem while I was starting to take courses and still using Duolingo. Now I have a feeling that past a certain point it just isn't a very effective method for learning Spanish*, especially with the phone app, just because you learn so little about the rules, and what are exceptions to the rules, and when even the exceptions have structure. I must say that my initial vocabulary was rather good largely thanks to duolingo, though. I didn't learn that many new words during the first half a year of courses.

 

* (and perhaps other languages)

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Yeah so far I think Duolingo's great at teaching me words, but the more I dive into things like plurality and tense and such, the less I feel like I'm learning and the more I feel like I'm sort of guessing. It's okay when a word fits the pattern established, but once it's an exception I'm like "hmm... maybe... this??"

 

I still intend to stick with it, obviously. Super early days for me, and as long as I'm learning it's worth it. I'd love to transition into speech practice with a real person at some point, though. No amount of repeating what the robot lady says will help me actually speak fluently!

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sometimes learning languages is good for a laugh

 

 

 

undertøy is norwegian for underwear

 

"what are you wearing"

 

"nothing but my undertoy"

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I just lost my streak today for no apparent reason. Maybe it failed to synch or something.

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I'd suggest checking to see if there is any forum discussion attached to the questions you're having trouble with, Twig. I don't know how the Norwegian course compares, but I've found that if I'm confused about something, generally someone has already asked about it, and the course moderators are very helpful. It's also worth periodically checking out the topic introductions if you're not already. They're kind of an info-dump compared to the rest of the course, but sometimes they provide some necessary context that would be difficult to gleam from examples alone. I believe they're only available through the website, which is a nuisance.

I'm not sure that's what it suggests. I had the same problem while I was starting to take courses and still using Duolingo. Now I have a feeling that past a certain point it just isn't a very effective method for learning Spanish*, especially with the phone app, just because you learn so little about the rules, and what are exceptions to the rules, and when even the exceptions have structure. I must say that my initial vocabulary was rather good largely thanks to duolingo, though. I didn't learn that many new words during the first half a year of courses.

* (and perhaps other languages)

That's all very valid. In my specific case, however, I'm not sure it applies as much, given that Swedish grammar is relatively straightforward and not too dissimilar to English. Most of my errors are simple forgetfulness: either vocabulary or grammar I know but didn't think of at the time. That said, those errors do make me question whether these algorithmic teaching methods are as revolutionary as they purport to be, and whether I need to be doing more if I want things to stick in the long term. Also, there are occasionally instances where I'm unable to explain why I was wrong even after I've been shown the correct answer, but those are relatively rare.

One thing I find quite interesting about my errors is how they're influenced by the way I speak, even if the question is asked and answered in text. Specifically, speaking with a non-rhotic accent, it would seem I don't attach much importance to whether a word ends with an R or a vowel, so one of my most common errors for a long time was to add an R to the base/infinitive form of a verb when it wasn't required. Also, because in English (or at least the variety I speak) unstressed vowels are often reduced to a schwa or some other tiny vowel, I don't pay them much heed, leaving me frequently unsure as to whether it's an E or an A at the end of a word.

Or perhaps those are problems everyone experiences regardless of their accent. But it does seem to line up quite neatly.

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Another problem with the algorithmic learning is that the specific algorithms may not be that well designed. Duolingo kept showing me the same things I had nailed tens of times, especially when I chose to practice things learned earlier. And some things I had trouble with just didn't come up very often. As we learn from mistakes we need to understand what our errors are, but as you said that's not always clear and maybe nobody has yet developed that algorithm that can understand your mistakes. Maybe Duolingo combined with something which teaches rules would be ideal. But then I personally would probably still need some human aspect to keep me interested.

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I started using Duolingo for Deutsch recently. It is quite fun, but I'm also occasionally a bit frustrated with the guess the rule nature of the app. I really should take the time to check the web version or some other site (any suggestions?) for the rules before going much further. The problem is I usually complete my daily exercises late in the evening, and by that time I'm too tired for proper studying.

 

I also installed the app on my mother's iPad. She has studied several languages (at least Italian, Spanish, French, Deutsch, Estonian, in addition to English and Swedish) to different extents, and I thought this would be a good way for her to refresh her language skills. She started with Italian, in which she is quite advanced at, and is currently breezing through the exercises and seems to be enjoying the experience. It will be interesting to see how she finds the app when dealing with languages that she hasn't studied as much.

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My girlfriend is a course contributor for the Norwegian course. I have done some Spanish duolingo but I can't really keep up with it. You can ask me questions if you are too shy to use the duolingo forums. I can also answer questions about the Norwegian languages if you have any. :) 

 

Another problem with the algorithmic learning is that the specific algorithms may not be that well designed. Duolingo kept showing me the same things I had nailed tens of times, especially when I chose to practice things learned earlier. And some things I had trouble with just didn't come up very often. As we learn from mistakes we need to understand what our errors are, but as you said that's not always clear and maybe nobody has yet developed that algorithm that can understand your mistakes. Maybe Duolingo combined with something which teaches rules would be ideal. But then I personally would probably still need some human aspect to keep me interested.

 

I think Duolingo is a lot less algorithm-heavy than you think. There is a lot of manually adding words and sentences to match certain scenarios and concepts. If the course creators/moderators (volunteers) are lazy you will hit the same sentence multiple times with the intention of teaching you different things.

 

As touched on by a different poster the duolingo website will explain various grammatical rules and language features to you quite well, but for some weird reason there is no way to read these descriptions on the mobile app. 

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okay why does the norwegian word for "red" (and other words, but this is the first one i noticed) have different endings depending on its usage as a oh

 

it's because it's got different endings depending on its usage as a noun or adjective or whatever??

 

also i have not seen on the website where the grammatical rules are explained, even though people keep saying that. i've used the website way more often than the mobile app

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In the web version, when I select e.g. Basics 1, there are 3 lessons and under those a Tips and notes section that gives some grammatical rules. Maybe it is not available for every language (I'm learning German).

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...

 

i never scrolled down

 

...

 

i'll just see myself out

 

...

 

(i guess at least i proved i can intuitively learn some things???)

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I'm Swedish not Norwegian but I can tell you that it's because you inflect them according to the gender of the noun, as well as plural/singular and definite/indefinite article.

edit: whoops didn't see this page

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I broke my streak last night. I just completely forgot to do it!

 

What a bummer.

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I'm Swedish not Norwegian but I can tell you that it's because you inflect them according to the gender of the noun, as well as plural/singular and definite/indefinite article.

edit: whoops didn't see this page

 

Yeah.

 

Some examples: "Et rødt eple" (a red apple), "røde epler" (red apples), "en rød kvinne" (a red woman)

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Duolingo has an affiliated flash card site called tinycards. I mostly use the browser or the windows store app on my computer, but if you have an iOS device, (I can't speak to Android) they have added a functionality to allow you to practice speaking w/ a bot that has a script. I've done a few of these in german and they've been really nice.

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They added Japanese. I think it's not very good. I've also studied Japanese before, so I am biased in that regard, but I can't imagine going into it blind and learning the kanji and how sentences are structured from this method of teaching. It worked really well for Norwegian when I was doing that, because the grammar is pretty similar to English. Japanese is much more different! It doesn't even make an effort to teach formalities, but still occasionally sneaks in some casual forms, and, yeah. 

 

This isn't really a knock on Duolingo, because, like I said, I think Norwegian was working really well. But I just think it doesn't work for Japanese, on its own. Maybe I'm wrong. It was a good review, though?

Not that it matters 'cause I broke my streak by finishing my "day" one minute too late, and that means I can stop.

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I've actually been doing the Japanese course (for 29 days apparently) and... I kind of agree it's not great.  I've never done another Duolingo course before so I don't know how they compare but a lot of the lessons just throw completely new things at you with no pronunciation or any other real way of figuring out what the sentence means other than random guessing.  There's really no attempt at teaching you sentence structure or grammar either.  I understand a good amount of it because I already speak Chinese which has similar structure but to someone without a background in any kind of Asian language I can't really see this helping.  Maybe once the vocab has been built they get into some of that but from what I've seen thus far it may as well just be flash cards.

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