Duolingo

[vijayjohn]

Only the most hardass instructor would ding you on that.

That reminds me of my first Chinese teacher in college.

[mōdgethanc]

How many languages do y'all have on Duolingo? And how many do you work on at once?

I have I think 8 in total and tend to work on maybe 2 of them at any given time. I get rid of ones that I was just dabbling in and stopped doing.

[linguoboy]

I have 20 linked to my account. Generally I’m only actively learning a couple, reviewing a couple more, and using a few more for point farming.

(If anyone wants to add me, my name there is “Cyfleusterau”.)

[Osias]

I never understood why to add people there, there are no posts on a timeline.

[dEhiN]

I never understood why to add people there, there are no posts on a timeline.

Yeah, but it can foster competition among friends. You can see what your friends got in points for the week, where they are level-wise in each of their languages, etc.

[kevin]

I seem to have 22 courses for 20 languages in my account, though that is mostly because I never deleted any after doing the first one or two skills and never touching the course again. Excluding German and English, I have 7 languages over 1000 XP, as an arbitrary number that could indicate that I did more than just the very basics.

I did quite a bit of Latin last week, and nothing for weeks or months before that. That's my usual pattern: I feel like playing a bit of Duolingo and then I do up to maybe two or three languages for a few days, though most often just one, and then nothing again for much longer.

[OldBoring]

I left Duolingo when it considered mistakes the words gonna, wanna etc. that I used in my English translations.

[mōdgethanc]

To add to the list of Duolingo gripes:

Duolingo: Moja babcia kroi pomidora.

Me: This is an easy one. "My grandmother is cutting up tomato."

Duolingo: WRONG. "My grandmother is cutting the tomato."

Me: oh fuck off

Did it only give me the option of "up" so I'd get that wrong? Bogus.

[mōdgethanc]

More Duolingo shenanigans today:

Duolingo: Dzieci dotykają pomarańczowej ryby.

Me: "Children are touching orange fish" Weird and why would anyone say this but alright

Duolingo: WRONG "The children are touching an orange fish"

Me: fucking Duolingo

This is because there are no articles in Polish and "ryby" is also the plural form for "fish" in some cases; I thought it was in the accusative plural but I guess it's the genitive singular? Wtf? Maybe it's a typo?

(Also, why would: 1) children be touching fish at all 2) many children be touching just one fish. How big is this orange fish? How many children can touch it at once?)

[Naava]

(Also, why would: 1) children be touching fish at all 2) many children be touching just one fish. How big is this orange fish? How many children can touch it at once?)

Okay that's golden, not orange, but whatever.

I also hate how you must somehow know which one of the many possible translations has been chosen by the course creators. I flag those a lot but it doesn't let you explain why you think your translation should be accepted and there's no guarantee anyone will ever read your complaint or do anything about it...

[mōdgethanc]

That is indeed a big fish, one that many children could theoretically touch at once, though again I am not sure why they would. I will contact freshwater biologists in Poland to see if this species can be found in central European inland habitats as well.

I haven't flagged anything on Duolingo and forgot that was even a feature but I might try it if I see any more bad translations.

[linguoboy]

I never understood why to add people there, there are no posts on a timeline.

Yeah, but it can foster competition among friends. You can see what your friends got in points for the week, where they are level-wise in each of their languages, etc.

You can also congratulate them on their successes and prompt them if it looks like they’ve forgotten to practice that day. I guess it depends what kind of friends you have.

[h34]

I thought it was in the accusative plural but I guess it's the genitive singular?

Yes, "dotykać" is one of those verbs followed by the genitive case:
https://www.polskidaily.eu/which-verbs-are-always-followed-by-genitive/

[dEhiN]

I flag those a lot but it doesn't let you explain why you think your translation should be accepted and there's no guarantee anyone will ever read your complaint or do anything about it...

There's a good and a bad to the flagging. The good part is that usually the creators (or those who maintain the language, since for major languages, that has most likely changed over time) will make changes to accept these are translations if enough people complain, especially when someone also starts a thread about it in the forum. The bad part is that even if this happens, it doesn't give you back your missed points or anything like that. I would think the least they could do is "reimburse" all those who flagged a translation as incorrectly marked as wrong.

ETA: There are times when a sentence in the target language does have a specific meaning or connotation, and so the meanings that learners think should be acceptable in English really won't cut it. There's a discussion in the Duolingo Swedish forum about "then why" which is translated as Varför då då? which, for me, was in the same vein of translation exercises.

[vijayjohn]

I haven't even looked at Duolingo in so many years I'm no longer sure I can still log in. They didn't have that many languages back when I was trying to use it. Ironically, one of my colleagues from grad school now works at Duolingo.

[linguoboy]

[from the Irish pronunciation thread]

Why does [Duolingo Irish] annoy you? And what's wrong with the Welsh course?

The Welsh course just feels really repetitive and the sentences are mostly pretty boring. In any lesson, the variations on the basic form tend to be rather limited compared to, say, the Dutch course. And whereas the Scottish Gaelic tree has lessons focusing on Scottish geography, history, culture, etc. IIRC, there's only one Welsh lesson focused on culture and mostly what they do is talk about visiting the Eisteddfod. *gapo*

As for the Irish course, the biggest drawback for me is that it's entirely in CO. This is imminently reasonable--all the other courses use the standard variety of the language they teach--but it's still frustrating for me to have answers marked incorrect because I've (sometimes unwittingly) used a common dialectal form. The Welsh course, by contrast, accepts (and teaches) the most common Northern and Southern variants. If it forced me to write dw i isio paned all the time, I'd probably come to dislike it too.

[mōdgethanc]

A lot of the courses I find to be repetitive, especially at the lower levels. God the Polish course was boring when I started. There are only so many times you can translate "men" "women" "cats" "cookies" and "dresses" before you need to move on. (Also, weirdly, "spider".) It's picked up a lot though since I've gotten further and learned more words.

There was the inverse problem for me with Japanese though where I felt it dumped new words on me too quickly and assumed I knew them when I didn't. This also happened with Korean (speaking of dry, I found that one boring too. Japanese at least wasn't boring).

I guess I've never thought about how Duolingo handles a language with a lot of highly divergent dialects (there's German, but they only teach Hochdeutsch in it and I don't know any other dialect) but it sounds like a pain to be marked as wrong for just saying something that's just not standard.

One more gripe: I wish there were a way to tell Duolingo "yes I fully understand this language's writing system, now let me move onto learning words". That was a big part of why I found Korean so dry. I know how to read and pronounce it, I just don't know how to say anything useful.

[linguoboy]

One more gripe: I wish there were a way to tell Duolingo "yes I fully understand this language's writing system, now let me move onto learning words". That was a big part of why I found Korean so dry. I know how to read and pronounce it, I just don't know how to say anything useful.

I liked the way they did it with Japanese, making kana-learning exercises a separate form of lesson all their own. (I have an opposite problem to a lot of learners I know, which is that I learned a lot of vocabulary and some grammar without ever learning to read the writing system, so I was thrilled to discover these.) It makes substantially less sense, however, for the Yiddish course, but at least that's an easy source of point-grubbing for when I just have to pip someone in the rung just above me.

[mōdgethanc]

I kind of wish I had the same problem as you. A big sticking point for me that's kept me from getting anywhere with learning languages is that I tend to end up hyperfocusing on how nifty the writing system is and nitpicking the phonology while learning random words but I find it hard to learn the grammar (I mean things like morphology, verb conjugations, tenses, things that "matter" when learning to speak). It's gotten better, but for years all I did was kind of fuck around and mostly put off learning how put words into sentences. Duolingo at least makes me do that.

[Hoogstwaarschijnlijk]

I'm using Duolingo again and that's why I thought about you all here, because I'm connected to some of you and started wondering how you are all doing (but that's for another thread).

I'm doing Latin (at a very low level...) and French now. There's also a French course in Dutch but it's quite short, I had all the courses in level 1 and still felt like I didn't learn anything new, so now I'm doing the English one and that's more fun, with nice grammar courses and stories.