Languages

[Fierce_LiNk]

21 hours ago, will' said:

I tried it many years ago when I first attempted to learn Japanese. My experience was pretty negative, and the study style didn’t gel with me at all. I could barely understand what it wanted me to do, and certainly didn’t learn a thing of the language from it. This was a LONG time ago (I bought it on a disc!), so it may well be different now, but I was not impressed at all.

Yeah, I don't think there's much direct teaching as stuff, so I think you have to work out a lot of the stuff yourselves. It seems similar-ish to Duolingo, although I think Duo does a better job of offering translations and telling you where you went wrong. E.g. if you were to click on the wrong picture or put the wrong string of words to make a sentence, it would give you the correct translation.

Tempted to just stick with Duo and Memrise for know, unless anyone else can offer their viewpoints.

[Fierce_LiNk]

I've got to the end of the learning/skill tree for Italian on Duolingo. Done it for Spanish and Dutch too, so this is my third one. Planning to go through it all again and uplevel things, eventually to level 5. I've also started the Spanish to Italian tree, so that'll be fun and a bit of a mindfuck.

I wish the Italian tree was the same length as the Spanish one. It's too short. The last checkpoint area is much harder because it covers a load of tenses in a short space of time. 

[Ashley]

Bumping this a bit as it's a new year (and in fact there's been two since someone last posted in here) so I thought I'd check in. 

2021 was very much just practice but not progressing. I said to myself I'd stop using Duolingo as that feels like it's giving me a false sense of achievement but I am still using it. I'm on day 1901 and I think I'll bunk it off at 2000 and switch to Memrise as I find that better for actual learning. 

However this weekend I've tried to focus on a particular topic (future tense) and just practice that with books and Duolingo so I think that may be my way forward. 

[Ashley]

I was going to create a new thread as I thought this was too old to bump but I can see I last posted last year so whatever. 

I've recently tried to get into Spanish. Dabbled in the past but now giving it more welly and feeling better about the approach. 

I did dump Duolingo (Italian), as I said I probably would in my last post. I gave up on day 2222 but was using gems to maintain the streak but was without internet for several days in the Galapagos so now that's gone. 

But with Spanish I'm trying to be more active. Found a few YouTubers that I'm finding useful. One does videos for about 20-30 minutes going over a concept and just encouraging repetition, another is about 10 minutes and is a mixture between language learning concepts/approaches and actual linguistic topics. 

In addition I'm reading a book that was highly recommended and is good, although being from the 50s some of the vocab is superfluous (I don't think I'll need to talk about sending a cable or buying a pipe) but it does a good job of teaching through repetition. 

Next week (I'm away for a few days) going to start building an Anki deck as well based on these resources to help and trying to read and watch more Spanish stuff. Plus I've got the finale of The Good Place dubbed in Spanish saved as an audio file of my phone and listening to that as I've heard suggestions if you listen to the same thing like 50 times your ear becomes more attuned to hearing a foreign language. 

Overall I think I've got a better approach to learning now and Duolingo was definitely a placebo affect. Which I had known for a while but didn't make the jump.

[EEVILMURRAY]

To prepare for my trip to Oktoberfest I've ramped up the German learnage. Now doing 2 lessons on Duolingo a day and upped the daily word review on Memrise to 15 (from 5)

I've also come across this podcast Coffee Break German - Coffee Break Languages and have been listening to some of these on the bus to work. Skipped ahead a bit because I had already covered some bits.

[Ashley]

Yeah I've tried a few of the coffee break podcasts over the years and they're always pretty decent. Don't know about the German but I know the Italian one is hosted by some Scottish guy (with an Italian woman) and I'm not normally a fan of the accent but it's very calming in that instance. 

[bob]

I like to use Duolingo to learn a bit of the language for anywhere in planning to go on holiday. Used it to learn some Portuguese, Hungarian, and French.

Going to Corfu in Oct, so I'm learning Greek now! First one I've tried that has a different alphabet though, which makes things trickier. The first 30 days or so are just learning the letters and sounds. Knowing a few Greek letters from algebra helped quite a bit with that.

[Ashley]

Oh yeah Duolingo is fine for a bit of practice or the basics and I tend to do similar if I'm going away somewhere, just not great for actually acquiring a language. 

I attempted Greek a little while ago and used an app to get used to the alphabet itself. I didn't get very far. 

[EEVILMURRAY]

1 hour ago, Ashley said:

Yeah I've tried a few of the coffee break podcasts over the years and they're always pretty decent. Don't know about the German but I know the Italian one is hosted by some Scottish guy (with an Italian woman) and I'm not normally a fan of the accent but it's very calming in that instance. 

Same dude I think, but this time you're "learning with him!"  as he doesn't know any German.

[Ashley]

Yeah that was the kind of thing. A native speaker would tell him something and he'd repeat or whatever, basically standing in for you. Good to know he's learning a lot!

[EEVILMURRAY]

Hats off to the chap, I don't think I could learn many more languages. How some people know 4-5 is beyond my understanding!

[Ashley]

Well I guess if you start early it helps. Plus some languages have a fair bit of overlap. Saw something the other day that said Italian and Spanish have about a 50-60% similarity and I did notice when in South America knowing Italian did help bridge the gap a bit. 

And some people are just smart. 

[EEVILMURRAY]

23 hours ago, Ashley said:

Oh yeah Duolingo is fine for a bit of practice or the basics and I tend to do similar if I'm going away somewhere, just not great for actually acquiring a language. 

I've been thinking a bit about this, and I'm agreeing and disagreeing. I disagree in the sense that I think it's given me a good idea on sentences and how things are said, albeit some can be a bit random... I doubt I will ever need to say something like "The elephant doesn't like to eat meat and sleeps". but one thing I have picked up in the coffee break and Memrise (for the latter I really should've realised sooner) is the in/formal way of saying things, which on Duolingo you may get the hang of if it makes its way onto the article feed, which can be able random bollocks most of the time.

However the more of agreeing with you, and this I think is way more important than the above, is that whilst Duolingo can sometimes give you the option to be in/formal, it never tells you what is the right answer for what they're asking. For example it may ask you to translate "Do you speak German?", which can be either Formal: "sprechen sie Deutsch?" or Informal: "Sprichst du Deutsch?", both are right but it's a 50/50 chance that you'll be giving them the answer that they're looking for, with zero context*. Which obviously is a shitty way of learning a new language.

*Whereas Memrise does give context, but I've found they're moving away more from sentences into mainly single words. They're updating their stuff and I've had a bit of an early access thing where they've moved the videos of native speakers aside, but more interestingly they've got an AI going which you have a small chat with (about 5 messages at a time) and role play. 

 

[Ashley]

Yeah I think apps are good for practice but the needs of their user base are so varied it is never going to be perfect. And that's fine, you shouldn't expect it. 

I guess part of it comes down to linguistics (ironically). What is "learning a language"? Mastering/fluency is clear, but does learning a few sentences for a holiday qualify as learning a language? If so then Duolingo does do that. 

And what I found with Duolingo was you ultimately end up learning the sentences that they repeat at you. It's easy to learn those, rather than learn the reason behind how they work. Which I guess is why apps are moving towards AI-based conversations.