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Duolingo?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A's and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these - probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn't keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students - incredible.
Is this actually real? This can't be real. This has to be a parody.
Oh my god it isn't.
Okay, credit where credit is due. Using gamification to ~~trick~~ incentivize people with nothing else better to do to moderate your community without having to pay actual moderators or community managers is clever in a very manipulative sort of way. So good job with that.
But here's a question: have you thought about the sorts of people who will be attracted to this unpaid job? Because let's be honest, they're not joining you for the Heroes Convention or whatever it's called.
Edit: So yeah, here's a video that does a proper job of explaining this thing and its implications. I confess, I had no idea what the YouTube Creator Community was, and I just assumed that YouTube was handing out powers to persistent trolls. And that was far from the only thing I knee-jerked on.
Finally, I actually think that crowdsourcing captioning is a grand idea. I just wish they'd do it in a better way than this silly leveling system. Off the top of my head, partner with Duolingo. You learn new languages by translating things that people need translated. People in need of translations pay money for their translations, and people learning a language pay with their time and labor for their language education. From what I know, it actually works.
There's Duolingo. It's like a better Rosetta Stone, and free, but limited in how many languages it has. It is expanding, and will have more in the future. However, learning a language requires you to talk to someone at some point, so make plans to travel or find an online Skype buddy. I doubt you can truly be fluent without communicating with someone.
Learning a language. Use a tool like Duolingo (free and has a mobile app), and just do 15 minutes or so every day when you wake up/before bed. I think if you stick with it and try to do at least one new lesson each day, you could easily finish an entire language course in a year. (I'm on day 563 of my streak, and have finished one course and am maybe 2/5 through another).
The other day I was reading someone's book over their shoulder on a tube journey, and it wasn't until I was halfway through a page that I realised I had been reading Italian. It was super satisfying, and made me feel especially proud of the progress I've made since day 1.
Learning another language. The internet is full of resources (unless you wanna start with something super obscure). Start with Duolingo to get the basic, some Memrise or Anki for the vocabulary, and then find someone on italki or other sites to practice speaking with you. You don't need to have years of training to actually converse with people, you just need to overcome your own mental block. Have fun!
For anyone looking to learn a new language, check out Duolingo. I find it works very good to get the basics down, and it's pretty fun as well!
EDIT: Some have pointed out that it doesn't have all languages, but it does have a good portion: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Polish and Welsh for English speakers
EDIT2: And vietnamese
Try Duolingo. It's available online and as an app. It's really useful when trying to learn a new language, and I'm pretty sure German is one of the courses that they provide. And it's free!
You can do it, go to this website. I'm just an average guy but I managed to learn English, well, enough to reply on Reddit. By the way, English is my third language. If I can do it, you can do it.
There's certainly no lack of interest in Japanese on Duolingo, nor do I believe that there is any lack of contributors. After all, English for Japanese speakers is already in beta.
The reason it hasn't been added probably has more to do with the writing system(s). Duolingo is a forced-repetition engine, and adapted for teaching isolating languages with compact alphabets. Teaching Japanese to English speakers requires a different approach to be effective (although the system could still be used for vocabulary practice for people who already have some familiarity with the language).
On top of that, there are some technological issues that's keeping Duolingo from introducing Japanese for English speakers; see Kippis' response to this thread.
| English | Irish | Literal |
|---|---|---|
| fox | madrín rua | little red dog |
| otter | madra uisce | water dog |
| jellyfish | smugairle róin | seal's snot |
| pinemarten | cat crainn | tree cat |
| wolf | mac tíre | son of the land |
| spider | damhán alla | fierce mini stag |
| freckles | póigíní gréine | little sun kisses |
| laptop | ríomhaire glúine | knee enumerator |
Here's the announcement of creating an offline mode a year ago, and there's no mention of it being a paid feature.
And here is where they announced they were introducing a paid service, which was a whole 10 months after they introduced an offline mode.
We're adding some of the user suggestions given in this thread.
Since this means adding words, the progress rate went down a tiny bit, because each of these words requires three sentences which we need to come up with. (:
The return to 98% is actually a great thing and nothing to worry about: it means we're listening to you and improving/editing the course accordingly. :)
Duolingo has designers, engineers, marketers, community outreach specialists, a QA guy, and a finance guy. They don't have linguists on staff, as far as I can see. Available evidence suggests that they either don't know or don't care about the actual science of second language acquisition.
This looks pretty great. I know the site is a work in progress, so you are probably well aware of its current limitations, but I'll go over what I noticed after playing with it for a while:
The video player is a really great idea and has some great features. Audio and subtitles in the target language, instant translation on demand, and it keeps track of all the words in the video and whether you've seen them already or not. Now I just want a bigger selection of videos to choose from.
Duolingo import is cool and useful, but clunky. I can see what the function does, but pasting code into a console is something that people should be wary of. Is the same information not in the user's json data in duolingo? The json that is at [link] ? The data there is public, so all you would need is for the user to provide their username.
In text/learn/cloze: the feedback is confusing on correct vs incorrect answers. Whether or not you get the answer correct, three of the buttons turn red and one turns green. The practical result is that you click a button and see a bunch of red on the screen. So it feels like you got the question wrong every time. There should be some more positive feedback on a right answer. Maybe even just gray instead of red so that the green is more prominent.
Also, when you click finish after a close lesson, nothing happens. Yes, it brings up the summary overlay, but it really should launch the next lesson, or at least give you a easy choice of next lesson / do something else.
There is no information up front about what the contents of the site are. Fine, it's a work in progress, but all the content was behind a registration wall. Because of that, you got fake info from me. It would be great if you could use the site without registering, and then have the option of registering to record your progress.
A very promising start. I will certainly be checking back in to see how things develop.
Original link: [link]
This is just an isolated post on a Duolingo thread, but since I'm living in Pakistan at the moment I thought it’d be fun to share some South Asian badling wholly unrelated to Sandscript (crazy, right?). This kind of badling, where Urdu’s relationship to Arabic and Persian is exaggerated, is extremely common among South Asian Muslims.
The most egregious badling in this is the claim about Urdu having almost all sounds simply for having adopted some phonemes from Arabic that weren’t previously present in most Indo-Aryan vernaculars. It’s true that normative Urdu has a number of phonemes that are optional in Hindi: namely, /z/, /x/, /ɣ/ and /q/. However, many Hindi actors and singers maintain all of them but /q/ (as is the case of most Urdu-speakers in Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab), and /z/ at least is not uncommon in urban Hindi. This however is nowhere near the entire sound inventory that would be possible in a language -- (most) Urdu may have a couple more phonemes than (most) Hindi, but both certainly have less phonemes than Ubykh, for example. Puristic, Sanskritised forms of Hindi may also show phonemes that Urdu lacks, namely /ɳ/, /ʂ/ and /ɲ/. The idea that Urdu-speakers will be better at learning pronunciation in other languages is thus completely spurious.
The post also touches on the myth that Urdu has lots of Arabic and Persian loanwords because it was originally spoken in caravans and camps by Islamic conquerers. Colloquial Hindi is not much less Arabised than colloquial Urdu (the written language is another story), and other Indo-Aryan languages like Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, etc. are also chock-full of Perso-Arabic vocabulary. Therefore, there’s no reason to posit a strictly military origin for Urdu’s loanwords, nor are English or Perso-Arabic loanwords unique to Urdu in the Indian subcontinent.
Anki is fantastic. I also recommend Duolingo for whatever languages they have (incidentally Japanese is one of the few they don't have).
I learned from Duolingo in two months what university courses taught me in a semester, with extra vocabulary to spare.
Hi! Thank you for finding it out :) One of the course contributors / Duolingo staff here. Some updates:
1) We are not just teaching Romaji, we are teaching "real Japanese" with Hiragana, Katakana, and even some basic Kanji. We are working on a new, better way to teach scripts.
2) We designed our course very carefully, basing it on a research-backed CEFR-like framework called JS Foundations and also covering vocabulary and grammar for JLPT N5 (equivalent to CEFR A1). Every skill is thematic ('food', 'transportation', 'hobby', etc.), meaning there will be no boring 'grammatical skills' such as 'present verbs', 'prepositions', 'past tense' etc.
May 15th, 2017 is not just an estimate, it's a real target (I know it's aggressive). We are working hard to deliver a high-quality course as soon as we can.
And last but not least, we are looking for contributors! If you speak both Japanese and English and are passionate about teaching Japanese to the world, please apply here!
Quoted from moeka518, one of the administrators: >We created a spreadsheet with all the words and some sample sentences. All we have to do is move those into the incubator, which is still a lot of work, but totally doable in three months.
Hi Luis,
I was hoping you might be able to give us some insight as to exactly how new languages are chosen to be added to the incubator, as I'm sure you're going to be inundated with questions in this AMA from people wanting more languages added. I hope you understand that from our point of view, it seems like the way Duolingo builds courses by using volunteer contributors means that adding courses requires little effort from the Duolingo staff themselves. I'm sure that's not true, but I was just hoping you could explain why some courses are selected to be added to the incubator and others are not.
I'm aware that there is a section on the Duolingo forums explaining this, but that post says that voting for course suggestions on the forums will get them added. It's therefore confusing that the Finnish request post, which is the second most upvoted forum post of all time has seemingly been ignored by Duolingo.
So my question is: how do you make the decision on which courses get added to the incubator?
Just want to give a shout-out to the awesome and totally free language-learning site DUOLINGO!
I can now add to my LinkedIn profile that I am 18% fluent in Spanish. LOL! :)
That post is from 7 months ago, I'm not sure if they still doing that. Recently the CEO of Duolingo explained here how they are experimenting different ways to make money.
PSA: The app "Duolingo" is working on a korean course for English speakers. so keep an eye out for that.
Also, last time I checked it said it would be in beta around April 30th but they changed it a few days ago for some reason.
Have you tried DuoLingo?
It's a pretty good way to get the basics of a language down, after which you can inflict it on natives and get them to reflexively respond while they're staggered by the butchering of their tongue. I've been using it for Swedish and it's great.
I don't have any current interest in polish but damn I love how fast they're adding courses these days. Russian just came out, hindi, welsh and vietnamese are coming in the next six months, and after that we'll have swahili, indonesian, and korean before the end of next year. Not to mention catalan for spanish speakers is out and guarani for spanish speakers is coming.
Obligatory plug for /r/LearnDutch - recommended in the course mods' Helpful external material thread. We have plenty of learners at all levels, and a lot of helpful native speakers who'll gladly answer questions and give advice. We've seen a pretty nice growth recently, presumably the Duolingo course attracting new learners. Feel free to join us. :)
Pasted from here (updated 4/29 with other poster's feedback):
Turkish 200
Ukrainian 209
Esperanto 241
Irish 292
Polish 298
Welsh 317
Vietnamese 320
Spanish 322
Swedish 325
Danish 340
Dutch 340
Russian 350
French 358
Italian 405
Portuguese 406
German 462
Norwegian 513
This is only the courses of English -> X.
Following this post last week calling for Duolingo to help out with the migrant crisis, and setting down in virtual ink the names and language levels of experienced people who were willing to commit themselves to this.
Looks like Duo was impressed with this group too! Brilliant news!
I'm using Duolingo primarily. It's free and has a nice UI, but the best feature for me is that it keeps track of how many consecutive days you've used it; this motivates me to use it every single day. They have Norwegian too.
I have a small book covering the essentials of Dutch grammar. It is a useful reference.
I've recently started watching Dutch kids TV shows (with Dutch subtitles if available). I still can't understand half of what I hear.
If it's an option I sometimes change the language on menus and interfaces (like the stair machine at my gym).
Duo's listening and speaking resources aren't very good in any language. You may want to find additional audio resources, like podcasts or a cheap copy of Pimsleur or Michel Thomas Portuguese.
Yeah, it's awful. They do absolutely nothing to reinforce genders or the related declension tables. On duolingo itself you can basically only learn grammar through trial and error.
None of this is available in the mobile app. Some of it is scattered through the lessons in various spots "The", "Accusative Case", etc. but I still haven't seen complete tables anywhere.
Learning German from the ground up on duolingo sounds like an absolute nightmare, luckily I'm just brushing back up from college. They really need feedback like "'Elefant' is masculine and being used in the accusative so it's 'meinen grauen Elefant'" instead of "Sorry, you're wrong. Have fun practicing this lesson every day for the next month".
Here's a link: [link]
I can't click the start course button. It doesn't work.
I feel I should of course give credit to /u/CJ105 for having the common sense to post a link instead of a picture like I did
Pick up a hobby, an instrument, something.
I've been learning to play bass this summer in some of my free time. My roommate has also been learning guitar, so there have been some impromptu late night jam sessions and collaboration on learning certain songs.
I also got into making my own soap, which sounds stupid (and it kinda is), but it's something for me to do, I'm making something creative and unique (something that I need to have an outlet for), and I can share it with people or try and hawk it on the internet for some extra cash. And honestly, I won't say I'm an expert, but I devoured tons of books and how to's about it, so with the combination of actually doing it, it's something that I can talk about too.
Otherwise, shit man, here's a quick list of shit to do:
- Read books
- Learn an instrument (Songsterr
- Join a club
- Learn a language (Duolingo)
- Work out/Run
- Make some art (paint, draw, sculpt, print)
- Write (poetry, short stories, essays, a journal)
- Get good at making at least 3 mixed drinks (25 Basic Drinks)
- Practice cooking ethnic food
- Find another job
- Go see a movie
Shit man, there's so much to do. Just find out what you like to do, and do more of it. And honestly, the more unique and different it is, the better. Find something that you're passionate about and get into it. Be able to talk at length about something you enjoy.
Anxiety... that's something that you'll need to work on, but improving yourself and enjoying doing things you want to do is one hell of a way to get a head start on that issue too.
That is not at all true. The Turkish and Russian teams are dealing with the issue of having to teach a language that is very different from English. The incubator is not flexible or advanced enough for them to fully create a course (of the right quality) yet and there are issues with teaching the alphabet also. It's not as easy for them to make progress at this point.
I thought Selcen's explanation about the causes of the perhaps rather slow progress that Turkish is making, in this thread, was very enlightening: [link] :)
Yes, some of the team members of these teams may be busy, but so are some of ours. Often this has little to do with motivation but merely reflects life catching up with you. ;)
A member of Duolingo actually addressed this issue in the first comment of this post about the English for Japanese learners course:
> The biggest problem, I think, is that Japanese does not use spaces to divide words, and it's extremely difficult for making the computer recognize individual words automatically. We're kind of cheating in this course, by treating every single hiragana, katakana or kanji as an independent word, and by registering blocks of letters as idiomatic phrases when we want to add popup hints. This has to be fixed when we're creating a Japanese course, which is going to take a while.
> There are other problems, which we're actually suffering from right now. At least half of the English sentences in Duolingo have more than a thousand possible Japanese translations, many of which exceed 3,000 - and the Duolingo system doesn't allow us to have more than that number of possible answers. In order to get around this, they've adopted a system that converts kanji into hiragana, and also an auto-converter for common synonyms, but it often doesn't go well.
> However I'd like to stress that Duolingo is working seriously for the realization of a Japanese course.
We were just talking about this yesterday. Apparently it's a score based not only on how many words you know, but how well. Here's an explanation from a Duo employee.
- Editing Wikipedia.
- Transcribing your favourite music.
- Transcribing your favourite movies into script-form, maybe comparing what you wrote to what the actual script looked like.
- Games night with friends and/or family, playing cards, charades, and so on.
- Learn a new language on Duolingo.
- Playing free-to-play (or just free) video games.
- Drawing.
- Writing short stories, poetry, etc. (maybe do a first draft of your autobiography)
- Gardening.
- Baking cakes.
- Going for walks.
- Swimming.
- Fishing.
- Visiting an animal shelter and playing with the kittlets and pupplets.
- Volunteering in some form, charitable work etc.
- Wanking.
- Je reste positif
- Je tente de la fermer
- Je mange veg/bio/local/de saison dès que possible
- Je consomme si possible chez l'artisant ou en coopérative
- Je code en MPL2 ou GPL
- Je seed
- J'apprends l'esperanto (5/10 minutes par jour sur Duolinguo)
- Je partage mes connaissances dès que possible
- Je combats l'hégémonie du grand capital
If you're a Spanish speaker, Italian is pretty easy to learn (and vice versa). There's a very very high lexical similarity coefficient.
[link] is pretty damn good for people who want to learn Swedish. After you've gotten a solid grasp of the basics I can recommend hopping on #sweden on IRC to chat, trying your best to keep it to Swedish. Don't be afraid to speak english though, plenty of people do that there as well.
Once you're comfortable reading and writing the next step is speaking, and the only way to practice that is to talk to Swedes. For that I can recommend taking a trip to Sweden.
Here is a statement by the founder himself. It's only on the Duolingo forums, so I don't blame you for missing it. Sadly, it looks like the gems and the annoying health mechanic are here to stay.
Klingon is actually pretty well developed, in fact it's probably the most developed artistic conlang.
High Valyrian, on the other hand, is going to be improvised. The course is developed by the creator of the language and he's making it up as he goes.
I'm placing this here just in case anyone is interested in seeing what Esperanto is like.
Duolingo has an Esperanto Duolingo Course available here: [link]
Additional Resources can be found at lernu.net
A while ago you guys said:
>We're doing it internally to see what it's like to build Asian languages. There will be more Asian languages coming to the Incubator soon!
in reference to the English for Korean speakers course. Do you still work on it internally or is Korean -> English and the (hopefully upcoming) English -> Korean 100% a community effort now? Since Korean uses an alphabet, it can hopefully get a course made quicker than Japanese and Chinese.:)
Source for comment.
>After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into Esperanto as well as writing original prose and verse, the first book of Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw on the 26th of July 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian Empire and Central Europe, then in other parts of Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan.
Here is the course page, if you wish to be notified about its release.
"Klingon is the constructed language spoken by the fictional extraterrestrial Klingon species in the Star Trek universe. Created by Marc Okrand, the language itself is centered around spacecraft, warfare, and weaponry — but it also reflects the directness and sense of humor of the Klingon culture. For example, the closest word you can use to express "hello" is "nuqneH," which actually means "What do you want?". There are also plenty of insults, as it is considered an art form.
The mastery of Klingon is extremely uncommon on Earth. Join the galactic elite and start learning this fascinating language."
bitteschön! ;)
German university is quite a different atmosphere from (i'm assuming, correct me if I'm wrong) American Colleges/universities. If you are seriously considering Germany as a choice for post grad studies, be sure to know what you're getting yourself into. However, any engineering course is highly reputable in any German 'state'. If you're planning on doing a year abroad for undergrad stuff, I don't think the language barrier will be a problem - initially. Pretty much all students speak English to a certain extent. Perhaps, at most, a culture shock. However, if you're thinking of transferring, you'll need a b1 German speaking certification if your course is non-english ( and I highly recommend you don't do this. Aim for the english speaking courses!!). Nonetheless, I'd still suggest you keep speaking to this girl. Write to one another, get to know each other. You only spent a week together and whilst you might feel like you're in cloud nein ( he heh). You should really decide if it's something you actually want to do.
I'm pro-"lets experience culture" and I'd say go for it, like everyone else here and I'd say go for it. But it shouldn't be just for a girl, it should be for yourself.
Hope springs eternal, but despite nearing 100% completion, the Irish and Dutch courses are still works in progress, and are waiting for certain features of the Incubator to be released before they transition into beta.
Have you tried Duolingo?
They have English for Polish speakers in beta testing, but it is pretty mature and stable by the looks of things. You can do a couple of sessions a day for fifteen minutes or so. There are apps for Android and iOS, as well as the web app. Plus, you could pick a new language from the English Speakers courses (French, Italian, etc.) and learn something new alongside her.
Honestly, Esperanto could also help. Esperanto has influences from Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages. And besides, it's proven that learning Esperanto can help any language learning.
The main qualification is being fully bilingual, as in bilingual enough to write a few paragraphs in the application fluently. Judging by this post your english is plenty good enough. It takes a LOT of time so you'll have to take that into account. Duo will use a combination of ease of course/similarity to offered languages/number of contributors to decide when to call up all of their applicants and stick it on the site.
Did a tiny bit of digging, both mine and your translation appear to be correct. It's suggested in this Duolingo comment chain that the closest idiomatic translation of "no comment" (in the sense of what a politician would say if asked a question he didn't want to answer) would be "pas de commentaires."
Actually, Duolingo is the one making the Japanese course.
Edit: "Out of Duolingo’s 70 employees, about half spent the last six months working exclusively on making the Japanese course a reality." [link]
Yeah I think I made it through the whole course in maybe 3 months? not 100% sure about that.
here's a whole post on duolingo about what to do when you finish the course. They'll even send you a couple free esperanto magazines if you fill out the form! I still have mine, they're good to read every now and then to refresh the vocab.
Other than that, I went to some meetings at my local esperanto group. Really helpful to practice actual speaking and listening. When I went on vacation to New York I met up with someone there and we sat in central park and spoke for a couple hours about random things in Esperanto. Was a cool experience
I've just been keeping an eye on the user count here [link] its been going up around a 1000 per day :D
Also look at this chart and look at how much growth there has been since February [link]
Actually just took todays figures and found out growth since feb 28, there has been 60000 new users meaning over the 36 days since about 1600 people joined per day :D
Surprisingly, there was no official announcement made by either the Duolingo team itself nor the Swedish team. You'd think that such an occasion would warrant a post about it from at least one of the two groups. Perhaps they will get around to it later.
This news comes not even a day after the Swedish course finally obtained their on-screen keyboard.
I have had it confirmed by Duolingo staff: the beta of these courses, and all others, will be open for all. :)
Once the course is out in beta you can select the language course from your settings (> learning language > select language) or this page with the overview of all courses, provided by Duolingo.
In the beta stage the incubator moderators and contributors receive the feedback & reports from users and improve the course accordingly. When these course creators and the Duolingo staff are 1) convinced that the course has improved enough and 2) have observed a certain stability of the course, in terms of reports and other issues, it 'graduates' from beta and reaches phase 3: that of an official, graduated (previously incubated) Duolingo course. :)
The French Creole spoken in Louisiana by about 4,500 people is a distinct language from Cajun French, which is spoken by over 100,000 people.
> Statewide, out of a population 5 years and older of 4,152,122, some 179,750 people reported French as their home language, while 14,365 reported "Cajun". A further 4,465 who reported French Creole are not counted below. from Wikipedia
I Google'd how mutually intelligible different dialects of French are out of curiosity anyway, and in the first result a European French speaker describes watching and deciphering YouTube videos in Cajun French. She says that, "I could understand a good part of what was said, except for some words, as well as names and places," and elaborates a bit on the differences she hears (basically, grammar and words borrowed from English). She compares it to a Quebecois accent.
If only there was a recording of "Bob Evans" speaking French... I am certain that pinpointing his accent/dialect in French would be a much stronger lead than trying to place his westwashed American English accent.
Duolingo has a Danish course, which I've heard is pretty good. I have no idea if it is also for spoken language or if it only focuses on the written part :)
In general I'd say the language hobbyist community skews male. Michael Erard, author of Babel No More, noticed some common threads among people who learned many languages (though not necessarily Esperanto):
> If somebody were to come up to me and say, I know somebody who speaks 15 languages, I would say, If you told me that person was left-handed, I wouldn’t be surprised. If you told me that person didn’t drive a car and got lost very easily, that wouldn’t surprise me. If you told me they were male, that wouldn’t surprise me. If you told me this person was [introverted, pragmatic and independent], that wouldn’t surprise me either. The other part that is potentially controversial is the link with homosexuality. If they told me that person was gay, that wouldn’t surprise me either.
Of course, these are just tendencies; one of the other contributors to the Duo Esperanto course was Judith Meyer, who claims 13 languages. We don't really know how or why these traits are more common. I suspect some of it has to do with aptitude*, some with socialization, some with the need to reach beyond one's own community.
* Aptitude in language learning generally isn't a matter of can or can't. It's more a matter of how quickly you pick it up: what Alice learns in her first 100 hours, Bob might need 120 hours to learn, while Charlie gets it in 90 hours. They'll need different degrees of perseverance, and it won't be effortless for any of them, but they can all get there.
You are on the Internet. Distance doesn't matter.
Duolingo does a decent course. It's not enough by itself, but it'll get you a solid baseline.
Living there and conversing constantly is just another way of phrasing immersion. You can do a lot of that at home.
Reading: You can set Reddit to display in German. It doesn't alter your subs and the interface is familiar and simple. There are German subs for reading natives. Check out bookcrossing.com and see if you can get someone to post you some easy German books, or just but one off Amazon.
Listening: I stalked your comments. Outside of politics, it seems you are interested in football so you could watch Euro 2016 on German TV instead. It would be a really good choice because the commentators are talking about things you already know and are describing things you can see happening.
Subscribe to podcasts, either directly educational or just about things you are interested in.
Speaking: There are skype groups available for speaking to people. Or team chat if you play video games. If you want classes, you can hire a tutor over the Internet to round out your education, and if you ever go to another town you can see if there's an expat group who might be willing to help you practice in return for a cup of coffee or something a bit more refreshing. Check out meetup.com or facebook groups.
Writing: It really shouldn't surprise me, but I found /r/de_writingprompts.
It's going to be lumpy and a bit shit when you start, especially when you start speaking to people. Deal with it. Practice a little every day and it'll change your world.
The Duolingo course was launched at the end of May 2015 and one year later there are 400,000 people using the course. This is absolutely amazing and fantastic progress.
Duolingo has a German course. If you're not familiar with them, they're pretty awesome and free.
/r/german is a thing, and they also have their own resources list. 4chan's /int/ wiki also has an article for German.
Grammar should be pretty intuitive. It's a Germanic language, like English, so if it feels intuitive to say something, it's probably-more-or-less-kinda-sorta grammatically correct, even if you're a complete beginner.
Really, not much else to say. If you've already learned three other languages, just keep trucking the best way you know how.
*some advice
I'm actually quite interested in learning Kannada and other Indian languages. I've tried using the Kannada Baruthe app that gets mentioned here a lot, but found that it emphasizes rote memorization over a proper explanation of grammar and conventions that makes language-learning so much fun. It's hardly worthy of being called a language-learning app; it's barely useful as a phrasebook. I also enrolled for free Kannada lessons with an NGO here (again, mentioned in a Reddit post a while ago), and found them to be both poor in quality and badly mismanaged.
The people who set up a lot of the newer foreign-language courses on Duolingo are people like you who were seemingly passionate about keeping their language alive in the midst of growing immigrant populations. So I suggest you get together with a few like-minded folks and write to Duolingo about beginning a Kannada for English/Hindi speakers course. Hell, I would've pitched in had I known any Kannada myself; I'm a total language geek. I've applied for moderatorship of the Hindi for English speakers course multiple times because I'd love for more people to be able to read Hindi literature.
But let me guess, you don't really care that much about people learning Kannada, do you? I mean you obviously can't be arsed to help set up systems for people to be able to learn the language well and proper. You do however, care just enough to take unnecessary offence and make snide remarks on people ask for genuine help on public forums. Because that's so much easier, right?
edit: I found someone looking for help with creating one such course
I can't say exactly why it has taken so long aside from common guesses like the volunteers creating the course haven't had the time to update as frequently as they would like or perhaps a few dropped from the course (though I cannot confirm these things). The course did add a new moderator several months ago, and in the past couple of weeks seems to have been picking up quite a bit of steam.
The course seemed to have been stuck at around 16% for quite a while, but about three weeks ago has seen that total increase to 18% then 22%, as seen in the last weekly update ([link]).
This week they've gone up another 4.3% ([link]), so we may have hope for the course yet! If they keep up this pace, maybe we will finally see the Polish course this year, which would awesome because this is the course that I am most looking forward to. :)
They're having trouble finding a suitable Text-To-Speech system with decent Swedish pronunciation. They specifically mentioned the issue with de / dom in the welcome post in the discussion here, as well as the pronunciation of är being a bit odd.
There's no mention of predicate adjectives that I could see -- not even by name, but in terms of how they're different. The course seems to skim over the idea that you use a different inflected form when you say 'The cat is big' ('De kat is groot') than you would if you said 'The big cat eats' ('De grote kat eet'), but I've never studied a language that makes that distinction before and so it didn't seem obvious to me.
Also, the notes say that 'Dutch adjectives are usually made by adding an -e to the end of the word.' Adding -e to the end of what, exactly? Now I know that it's the uninflected form, but I didn't at the time. It wasn't until I checked another website for an explanation that it made sense, and I think that's a downside given that Duolingo seems to be marketed as a one-stop beginner course. Still, it's an easy fix, at least. The 'de' and 'het' thing is way more of an issue.
Duolingo is highly reviewed (from what I understand) and is free to boot.
You can also take advantage of the program developed by the United States to teach foreign languages to their diplomats. Also free.
There is a duolingo for english-russian, I am doing that one: [link]
Edit: Oops appears I have linked the one for spanish speakers, wait up trying to fix it. Edit2: Ok hope this one works.
Zacznij się uczyć nowego języka, trzeba czymś zając mózg [link]
Nie dyskiutuj o o depresji z anonimami przez internet, rozmawiaj o tym z ludźmi przez telefon albo twarzą w twarz.
No i rób coś z ciałem, pakuj, biegaj, ćwicz - to wyzwala endorfiny i pomaga w kontaktach z płcią przeciną lub tą samą w zależności od preferencji.
Duolingo is probably the best online free language learning platform. I use them for two languages now. And they are open to contributors adding more.
Since most people can't/won't make time for a formal language course, duolingo is almost perfect. A few minutes a day (more if desired).
If you haven't already I suggest you check out the platform and maybe contact them with a suggestion for Xhosa. I'm sure many of us here will provide additional motivation if needed.
Landing page here; [link]
For adding languages go here; [link]
>hideki 2 hours ago
>commented on Japanese course in the Incubator
>“The page was automatically generated by accident when we were testing some configurations. Sorry guys!”
Evidently it's not happening afterall.
Yes, I think you’re right, languages become more popular when their native country rises in status -- for example, Latin, French, English. Esperanto hasn’t had a country’s political, economic, or cultural force to promote it, so right now it’s just early adopters and hobbyists who speak it.
But Esperanto becomes more valuable when more people use it. Perhaps after a critical mass of people learn Esperanto, we will pass a tipping point and suddenly many people will want to learn it… at least that’s what network theory suggests 🤞. I think Esperanto is in a growth phase right now, especially with Esperanto Duolingo now available.
[link] It's an international auxillary language created by L.L. Zamenhof in the late 19th century. It's pretty popular among leftists, and many Esperantistist-Communists believe Esperanto is crucial for a stateless society. Also, there's several theories regarding the origin of the Soviet Red Star, but one of the two most common conceptions is that Trotsky made a red variant of an Esperanto star pin that he saw Nikolai Krylenko wearing. If you're interested in Esperanto, you should try to learn the basics over on Duolingo. Also, a comrade over here once linked me to /r/Esperante, which has a good bit of socialists, though I've yet to participate over there.
Interesting to notice that with this course of German for Arabic speakers, German will soon have a total of 8 courses (to speakers of 8 different languages), that's second only to English. Spanish will have 7 and French 6.
I counted - correctly I hope - all courses: ready, in beta and in the incubator.
As far as I can tell it's still accepting incorrect spellings as detailed here: [link]
I imagine those who aren't familiar with Ukrainian probably all have some degree of difficulty distinguishing between и, і, ї, й etc so I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to do a course that won't correct you if you use the wrong one! On the other hand, if you just want to learn Cyrillic, it's probably fine.
Edit: As far as input goes, if you don't care how your keyboard looks then I strongly recommend adding Ukrainian input to your computer and just writing the characters on the keys with a sharpie. The most frequently used letters will wear out first, and that's how I learned to touch type.
They are doing A/B testing to figure out what to do with people having too many lingots: [link]
As you may guess, you have been randomly chosen to test what happens if there's no reward for long streaks.
This was pretty comprehensive. I want to elaborate a bit on the "learning a language" recommendation by plugging Duolingo, which is a pretty painless way to put time into doing something productive, and it's getting better by the month.
Also, the key to starting hobbies that might seem troublesome or difficult to maintain at first (like exercise and cooking) is to keep your expectations somewhat in check. Don't go in thinking that you'll be a master chef or an athlete in a day—the most important thing is that it becomes a part of your routine. Set goals low and realistic at first, and hopefully the habit will blossom into something wonderful!
It's not just an assumption: Luis actually said they would, and even mentioned a timeline (which Duolingo normally never does), in an interview given a couple of years ago.
Here is a discussion with a link to the interview (which is in Spanish): [link].
Just goes to show that Duolingo's plans are all over the place. They do things they say their not going to (they said for ages they couldn't bring out Japanese, even when they were already working on it, and then popped it out pretty suddenly), and don't do things they say they will (there was never a comment or an explanation to what happened to Mayan).
I've used Duolingo for French and Spanish and liked it. It's coming soon for Chinese!
I learned some Chinese when I was at university. I didn't learn many characters, I just did pinyin. It's a way of writing down the sounds without drowning in unfamiliar symbols.
A repeat post I made to a previous request, all these are good:
And this sub /r/learnwelsh/
I definitely am! The more languages to learn on Duolingo the better! Of this post gets more upvotes I'm sure it would! [link] What other languages are spoken in Ethiopia apart from Amharic? =)
If there are any more courses you'd like to see, have a look for them here and give them an upvote. It's a good way for Duolingo to see which courses are the most wanted: [link]
I'm not OP, but I've got some info you may find interesting:
There's a study that claims that Duolingo is more effective than learning at college or Rosetta Stone.
Also, it varies per person and per skill, but on average people get to an A2 level on the CEFR scale after completing a Duolingo course, according to this AMA.
So I would say it's pretty decent for getting started on a language, but you definitely need other resources to get more in depth within the language.
Nope, that sentence makes absolutely no sense in Spanish. Directly translated to English it does, but it doesn't in Spanish. Other examples of this is "En un minuto." which means "In one minute." If you say "En uno minuto" you sound like an American who just started to learn Spanish (no offense meant.)
Source: I'm a Native Spanish speaker.
A little more detailed explanation: [link]
Come join us on /r/Esperanto and you'll see it's still active and growing! Almost 700,000 people have joined the Duolingo course after only a year and a half, and roughly 1,500 new people join every day.
Time to learn French!
Reminder that Duolingo is a free language learning service and makes things super easy to learn. Its also fun! You can find it online, on the App Store, Google Play, and the Windows Store.
For the last few days, I've been shown these ads after completing a lesson. As Luis mentioned, they routinely test new monetization techniques and it doesn't mean they're permanent. I thought others might be interested to see this example.
"Our team is not really approving this way of learning Ukrainian, but there's an option for you, anyway..."
It seems it wasn't a request from the team but pushed through by Duo. Again it seems to part of their push to increase user retention regardless of whether this leads to a dumbing down of the content.
I really enjoyed Duolingo.
It put me way ahead of one semester of College Spanish, and I only had to fill in vocabulary for my Spanish class that Duolingo didn't teach, and get a bit of practice on listening and speaking through the class. Without effort, all of my homework assignments ended up getting As. I credit Duolingo for this.
I believe my experience supports Duolingo's claim that "34 hours of Duolingo = 1 University semester".
I think Duolingo, a good dictionary and grammar guide for reference, a language exchange partner, and Anki, Memrise, or some other SRS flashcard system for vocabulary building is a great way to learn a language to a high A2 / low B1 level.
I haven't used Assimil, but what I described above seems rather superior than trying to rely on any other beginner material's that I've tried.
Overall, I think Duolingo is great for the "first steps" in picking up a language. I think it'd compliment Assimil, a college course, or any other beginner's materials: using Duolingo to get a head start working in many aspects of the language, and your other materials to master the concepts Duolingo introduced and to get experience in parts Duolingo glossed over.
That said, Duolingo is deficient in listening and speaking practice, is ok at writing, but is most effective at reading.
The grammar and the written form of the French language is the same everywhere French is spoken, including Quebec, so go on studying standard French, it won't be lost at all.
For the accent though, there are many resources. Here are two aggregates of them on the subject : A comment with some resources posted some time ago and a list of resources I compiled in a Duolingo discussion (no need to sign up to see it).
Be aware though, that in real life, if a Quebecer notices you have trouble with their accent, they will articulate more to give you a chance at understanding them.
Edit : also, if you're moving from outside Canada, the gouvernment offers free French classes to immigrants.