I just finished my Duolingo Arabic course, and upon finishing my course they awarded me their “Golden Owl”. Have any fellow Straight Dopers tried Duolingo yet, and if so, what language(s) did you study? I wish they had Farsi, because I’d like to try that language next.
I did. Presently running a 550 something day streak learning Italian.
I tried Rosetta Stone and Babbel and it was hard for me to catch on. Duo really helped build a vocabulary and teach me important grammar. Better for reading and writing than for speaking. That said, I also use Babbel as an adjunct because to me, it fills in blanks that Duolingo has, and I find Babbel much easier now that Duolingo “arms” me with vocabulary and grammar that makes Babbel easier to use where once I foundered.
As common ( so I’m told ) learning a new language, I’m comfortable and getting much better with reading and writing Italian, but speaking spontaneously is tough: Too much pausing in my mind to construct what I want to say. Can’t hold a conversation like that. It’s a work in progress.
I signed up when it first started, doing Spanish. I took Spanish in high school and have visited some Spanish-speaking countries. I can read a newspaper slowly and hold a halting conversation with someone who’s patient.
I don’t practice regularly, but sometimes I’ll spend a few weeks with daily streaks, then forget about it for a few months or years. I’m not going to become fluent, but it’s still fun and I learn something.
I’m annoyed with how game-ified the app has become. Originally it was just progress through lessons or test past them. Now it’s all hearts and stars and gems and lifelines and nonsense. I don’t need to earn bonus points when I learn words. I’m already learning words!
I’m almost halfway through French on Duolingo. My listening comprehension is terrible. I wish they had the option to hide the text when audio cues are used. I’m pretty good at reading so it is too easy to rely on reading and not listen enough.
I like that they added stories and listening/pronunciation (phone only) exercises.
I really like Duolingo.
I’m also watching Disney+ in French occasionally.
If you use Google News, you can switch to Google in French, then bring up Google Actualités and read the news in French. Since the format and the news feed are similar, it’s pretty easy to skim through.
I use Google canada Actualités, so it tends to be Quebec-centric, but the more you use it and pick international or US stories, the more the algorithm will feed them to you .
Thanks, but my vocabulary isn’t good enough for that yet. I read a French news website for kids though.
Before my first trip to Japan, I tried teaching myself basic hiragana/katakana characters so I wouldn’t be entirely useless. It didn’t work. You can learn characters with flash cards, but unless you learn words and grammar as well, those characters aren’t much use.
OTOH…
I’ve been hammering on Duolingo for about a year and a half now in an effort to learn (very) basic Japanese. My wife, born and raised in Japan, tells me that it occasionally is wrong in pronunciation (kanji characters are pronounced differently in different contexts), and that it sometimes utilizes kanji characters that hardly anyone in Japan uses. Despite those flaws, its “gamification” (the scorekeeping, competition, colors/lights/sounds and positive reinforcement) of language instruction, together with the incredible convenience of accessing it on my phone, is the thing that finally motivated me to start learning and to stick with it. We visit Japan at least annually, and while English is fairly common as a second language on signs and in spoken interaction, it is by no means universal; I’ve been very reliant on my wife to provide translation services in the past, and my hope is to become a bit more independent, for the convenience of both of us. During our last trip (before the pandemic), it was pretty cool to walk up to a sales clerk and be able to say “I bought these glasses here yesterday, and I would like another. Do you have more?” Probably with shit grammar and pronunciation, and bereft of appropriate honorifics, but he was able to understand me so I’m putting that in the “win” column.
So far I’ve earned about 520 crowns, with about 200 left to go before I’ve completed the entire Japanese module. I worked my way up into the diamond league after a few months, and have stayed there ever since (it’s easier to stay in than it is to get in).
Welcome back to the SDMB, @rippingtons_fan. I remember your name from way back, though I don’t remember if we ever interacted.
I have an unhealthy obsession with Duolingo. At one point I had a 1300+ day streak going. I finished a lot of trees in Germanic and Romance languages. The grammars and vocabularies of those languages feel familiar and I pick them up pretty quick, at least on the fairly superficial level that Duolingo requires. I think I did German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin.
I’ve tried a lot of non-Germanic, non-Romance languages like Welsh, Finnish, Polish, Hebrew, and Korean. I find them very difficult and I never made much progress. Indonesian is the only one in this class that doesn’t feel incredibly hard.
I lost my golden owl in French when they added hundreds more lessons. I have been going through them very gradually trying to get my owl back. I taught myself to read French before Duolingo existed, and practiced by reading some of the books of my favorite horror novelist, Patrick Senécal from the Eastern Townships (L’Estrie) in Quebec. Duolingo has helped a lot with listening comprehension, but not to the point that I can follow normal French conversation or broadcasts. I have sometimes listened to News in slow French. Similar services are available in other languages. Another trick I’ve tried is to get a physical French book, download the unabridged French audio book format and play it at slow speed while I try to follow along with the text in my hands. I still struggle with it, because French has so many homophones and near-homophones.
OMG Yes! I would really like a resource that tells me which words are homophones and which words are only near homophones.
how exactly does it work? from posts in this thread it sounds likes sort of a gamer approach? is that right?
I wouldn’t call it barrel-full-of-monkeys level fun, but I find it a lot more enjoyable than the traditional classroom experience. It’s not exactly a game, but it’s an example of gamification, so it has some of the elements of a game. These include competition, score keeping, leader boards, badges that you can earn, goals, social interaction, and so on. If you’re not into competition against other users, you can ignore the competitive elements.
If you’re really interested in the nitty-gritty, here’s how it works. You pick one or more languages to study. For English speakers, there are currently 36 to choose from. You are presented with a page holding the “tree” for that language, which is made up of typically 100 or 200 “skills,” such as travel or past tense. Each skill is made up of typically about four lessons, and each lesson has about 20 questions. The questions are a mixture of listening comprehension, reading comprehension, pronunciation, and written translation relating to the skill. Those who already have some familiarity with the language can test out of some skills. There are grammar tips you can read for many skills to help you understand the topic, but these are optional. Each lessons takes about 5 or 10 minutes to complete. When you’ve finished all the lessons in a skill, you reach level 1 in that skill. You can choose to keeping working on the same skill up to a maximum level of 5 (the questions get harder every time) or move on to the next skill. When you finally reach at least level 1 in all skills of the tree, a golden owl appears at the bottom of the page, indicating that you have completed the course. The whole process probably takes something like 100 hours of activity over several months for most languages. Some languages like Latin and Hawaiian have much shorter trees with fewer skills, so they’re quicker to finish. A more ambitious learner may choose to reach level 5 in all the skills of the tree, which is called a “golden tree,” which takes something like 500 hours for most languages.
All the while that you’re learning, you’re moving up and down the leader boards (leagues), earning points (xp), proficiency scores, badges (achievements), and virtual currencies (gems, lingots). You can also interact with other users on the forums and in comments and questions about the individual questions of the lessons.
This: That is one of the best things about it IMO. If you have a question or wish to discuss a question about an exercise or just grammar in general, those more familiar with the language, including many native speakers are more than happy to provide you with some very thorough explanations, even provide links to other sites for access to different videos, tables, charts etc.
As the skills/lessons grow in complexity, I’ve found that it was a great help to take notes and retain these for future reference. As to myself, my time spent there is generally 20 percent learning a new skill on the tree, and 80 percent practice of the skills already at level 5. I’m finding that the more I practice, the less and less I need to refer to my notes. I recall when ( this is Italian ) that verb conjugations, prepositions, and possessives were very difficult for me; now I’m comfortable enough to rip right through them. Currently I’m finding clitics ( pronouns ) and past tenses my newest and seemingly insurmountable challenge. I’ll get there.
One more thing I just thought of. Some users have noted that some times the questions and phrases used in the exercises can be silly or nonsensical, something like “the turtle has thought about eating my electric shoes” or somesuch thing. I’ve come to learn that there’s a method to the madness in that such a sentence forces you to understand and translate what’s being said, not being guided by context or to rely on memorizing phrases. Clever trick.
You can download it to your tablet or phone and use it for free, so give it a shot. If you’re willing to pay about $80 for a year of usage, it unlocks more options for you.
bibliophage sort of explained it, but the general idea of gamification is that it keeps track of your progress and puts you in competition with other users. You earn experience points (“XP”) for completing lessons, and crowns for completing skills (groups of lessons). There are maybe ten different competitive league levels, starting with bronze and working up to diamond. Each week, you start competing against a random allotment of 50 other users who are in your league. At the end of the week, if you’re near the top of your league (as measured by the XP you accumulated that week), you advance to the next higher league; if you’re near the bottom, you drop down to the next lower league. Users can compare their progress to that of other users, as measured by total XP, XP for that week, crowns, what league you’re currently in, how long you uninterrupted usage streak is (so far I’m on a 514-day streak), and various other achievement metrics. The tracking of progress and the competition with other users is an important motivator that helps many users stick with it
Some users appear to have found a way to cheat. Every now and then I end up in a league with someone who is racking up a couple thousand XP per day. ISTR reading that it is (or was) somehow possible to do this by taking a “jump ahead” quiz, then quitting the language, then restarting the language and taking the quiz again. And again and again. Apparently they’re motivated mostly by “winning” and not by learning the language. I will admit to having gone back and redone earlier lessons over and over again (which boosts my XP), but I don’t consider that cheating: that repetition has been useful for reinforcing my learning of basic hiragana and katakana symbols, speeding my recall a little bit each time. It’s starting to get to the point where I hear the sound when I see the symbol, which is something that I take for granted when it comes to the English alphabet.
I’m a couple months in, and I’m really starting to wonder what I’m going to do with all of the damn lingots that I’m racking up. There’s almost nothing to actually buy with them. You can buy a thing that will allow you to skip a day without wrecking your streak of consecutive days and … yeah, that’s about it. A little while back, the site offered a couple of lessons you could buy involving fun slang and idiomatic phrases, and I thought that similar offers would happen on a regular basis, but they never did. I thought maybe this would change once I got to the higher leagues, but I’ve ascended pretty high and it hasn’t. It’s a little ludicrous.
Yeah, I guess lingots are one of the metrics of a user’s “street cred”. I know lingots are sought by some, and I’ve given a few to users whose information and guidance given on the discussion forums really helped me a lot…really filled in the blanks, as it were.
But it is like having lots of money but little to spend it on, though I found the ‘Weekend Amulet’ cheap insurance if one projects a busy weekend. It all reminds me of where I grew up, and we, and all the neighbors had vegetable gardens. We all had more tomatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers, radishes than we knew what to do with. It was almost like a game: people would surreptitiously leave bags of produce as “gifts” at each other’s doorsteps. You have so much stuff, can only use so much, but you hate to throw it away.
I’ve been going through the German lessons recently. I had four years of German in high school and two semesters in college, but that was 35 years ago and I have forgotten so much. Duo has helped me rebuild my vocabulary some, but there is still so much I haven’t learned or don’t remember. In conjunction with Duo, I’ve been listening to the podcast “Coffee Break German”. That has been very helpful for relearning sentence construction and grammar rules. For practice, I try to read news articles on the Deutsche Welle website. But again, I have to look up many of the words in Google Translate because I just don’t know the vocabulary.
To me, that’s what makes it so fun and engaging. I’m on Unit 3 of Spanish after about 48 hours. The gaming parts of it are an endorphin rush for those who are already video game fanatics.
Una mesa para dos, por favor.