What is Reddit's opinion of
Duolingo?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
➔ Duolingo website
By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:
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 who wondered like I did, Tuesday is "Terça-feira" and the rest of the week days are numbered as well. Only the weekends (Saturday and Sunday) are not numbered. It has something to do with religious observances. Here's a link: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/9681881/Why-Are-The-Days-Of-The-Week-Different-in-Portuguese-Compared-To-The-Other-Romance-Languages-D
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.
They only use the Spanish flag, instead of the Mexican, to avoid confusion with the Italian flag, they already explained this years ago... their logic doesn't shock me at all, they use the most spoken versions of the language and apply the corresponding flag (except for Spanish due to the reason explained).
Edit: But for instance they also use a Mexican pyramid on the graphics, not a Spanish monument. Like they use the Liberty statue for English and the Rio's Jesus for Portuguese.
PS: Another reason is also that they don't use a specific Mexican variant, but a kind of pan-American standard of Spanish.
let's fight back. We aren't soldiers but neither are they.
Edit: I don't know if this link will work for you but you can learn russian for free on www.duolingo.com. https://www.duolingo.com/skill/ru/Alphabet-1/1
| 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.
http://freerice.com/#/identify-countries-map/899
Freerice is a website where you answer quiz and trivia questions for free, and for every correct answer, some rice gets donated to people around the world who need it.
Duolingo is fantastic, I'm currently learning Portuguese with it. It's also free.
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 https://www.duolingo.com/users/foo ? 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: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8699437$from_email=comment&comment_id=18372551
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! :)
I am also 13 and I have been using Duolingo but I can tell you that it won't get you to 100% fluency. I also use sites like Memrise and ItalianPod101 because Memrise teaches basic conversation phrases first and ItalianPod101 starts off with pronunciation and how to write. ItalianPod101 also has many lessons to choose from. I would also recommend listening to Italian music or watching Italian movies or TV shows when you get more advanced to see if you can understand them.
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.
I guess they typed https://www.duolingo.com/Swedish, maybe hoping to get to the page of the Swedish language, but it links to your profile as your username is Swedish, and links to user profiles are https://www.duolingo.com/username
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: https://www.duolingo.com/course/nl-NL/en/Learn-Dutch%20(Netherlands)-Online
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
I would also recommend http://www.codeacademy.com for learning programming skills easily. That or https://www.duolingo.com for basic understanding in other languages.
Both of them and KhanAcademy are great resources for self improvement.
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: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3310174 :)
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.
>Not only that, but there are many testimonies of older folks who have preferred the change to vernacular compared to the Latin Mass as it reinvigorated their faith due to better understanding,
The Church has shrunk massively since Vatican II, and outright rejection of Church morals - among Catholics, in Catholic institutions, and among clergy - has skyrocketed.
Now and then we can find people who live to 100 and they cheerfully attribute their longevity to their laid back attitude with smoking and drinking. People who died at 68 to lung cancer can't really reply.
>The Latin Mass has a special place in the Church. It has been used for a long time and carries a long line of tradition behind it, but I gotta say that hearing "This is my body" rings truer and more powerful than "Hoc est corpus meum", because it's as if I was there at the table of the Last Supper
Christ didn't speak English. Nor Spanish, for that matter. Will you feel dissatisfied with "Este es mi cuerpo"? If the answer is 'Yes', welcome to problems with "The Vernacular", because that doesn't mean "English". If the answer is "No", then Latin should either be no problem, or even better.
Really, the "Christ spoke to the Apostles in their language" view doesn't last in a world with so many languages. Latin is the language of the Church (and science and medicine, historically - with a lot of that carrying meaning now). If we really want to understand Latin, we also live in a world where all it takes is time and dedication to do so, for free.
And just think if you did: then you'd understand everything Christ was saying, and the traditional mass would be back. Best of both worlds. It covers every base you mentioned.
Do you mean in real life or online? If there were an Ulpan type class near you, I would say try that. But there are also plenty of online resources like https://www.duolingo.com/course/he/en/Learn-Hebrew-Online and https://www.loecsen.com/en/learn-hebrew
- 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.
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/9584000/Lexical-similarity-extent-of-languages
https://www.duolingo.com/ 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.
Duo should only be one tool in your kit anyway. You don't have to give it up completely, just make other sources your primary focus and use it more casually: e.g. 10xp a day to maintain your streak, using the generic skill strengthening.
Also there are a couple of things that may give Duo somewhat of a new lease on life for you:
Doing the reverse tree (Spanish -> English)
This upcoming feature: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/25615588
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: https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online
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.
https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online
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." https://www.duolingo.com/comment/23437301/Thank-you-Hideki-staff-and-volunteers-for-Japanese-for-English-speakers
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 https://www.duolingo.com/courses 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 https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo#Statistiko_pri_lernantoj_la.C5.AD_lingvoj
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. :)
These are both right, but Arnauti, a native speaker on Duolingo, wrote this explanation: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6365770/gillar-vs-tycker-om
Looking at the comments on Duolingo has been very informative for me. If you see explanations from Arnauti or devalanteriel, read them. They're extremely useful.
Edit: corrected devalanteriel's name
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.
QQ more.
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8027766
>Hi there! We have those languages in the reverse direction. English for Korean, Mandarin and Japanese. That's the first step and they will then reverse. It's not Klingon over Mandarin, but really Klingon + Mandarin and all the other languages. Check out: Incubator.
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.
Spanish is probably the easiest language for English speakers to learn as the grammar is simpler than other European languages, it's also Indo-European like English, and you don't have to learn a different alphabet. You already have some idea of what it sounds like and some vocab, which means you won't be starting from scratch, and the listening exercises will be easier than in something you've barely heard before. You get way more opportunities to practice and hear and see it locally, which if you want to get better at it, is important. And countries nearby where it's the main language.
You would learn more Spanish in the same time than you would if you tried something like Finnish (non Indo European) or Russian (different alphabet).
But whether or not you go for Spanish, use Duolingo - there are a lot of different languages available on there for English speakers to learn - it is free, gamified and can make learning or relearning languages kind of addictive. There are also subreddits r/languagelearning, r/duolingo and individual subreddits for learning some langages (listed on the sidebar in languagelearning).
*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 (https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7934734).
This week they've gone up another 4.3% (http://www.moviemap.me/duoinc/), 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.
Some of those a different words, and some are not.
Different words:
- Ej is a formal alternative to inte. Forget about it until your Swedish has reached an intermediate level.
- Därför is an adverb meaning ‘therefore’, and därför att is a conjunction meaning ‘because’.
- För (apart from meaning ‘too’) is a conjunction meaning ‘because’, and för att is a conjunction meaning ‘in order to’.
Same words:
Adjectives must inflect in Swedish. They normally have a dictionary form which is used for common-gender nouns, a form in -t which is neuter, and a form in -a which is for any noun in the plural. Additionally, there is the definite form in -a which is used regardless of gender and number. All this applies to ny, svensk and the vast majority of adjectives. You are probably studying with Duolingo. Here is the tips & notes page for the relevant lesson. Just continue the lessons and it will teach you in context. Also, you can look most adjectives up on Wiktionary and see a chart with the complete inflection of the word.
Adjectives referring to countries are often used as nouns referring to the associated language. These get -a on the end in Swedish, probably due to being derived from the definite form of the adjective, e.g. det svenska språket. By the way, in the closely related languages of Danish and Norwegian, they don’t do this with language names: they say norsk, dansk, svensk.
There is a duolingo for english-russian, I am doing that one: https://www.duolingo.com/course/ru/en/Learn-Russian-Online
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 https://www.duolingo.com/
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.
Gratis: https://www.duolingo.com/
Cu plată: http://www.rosettastone.com/learn-russian/ (recomand, eu încă mai rețin cuvintele învățate prin metoda lor în urmă cu 2-3 ani, deși nu am apucat să termin cursul).
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; https://www.duolingo.com/
For adding languages go here; https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204979660-How-can-I-suggest-a-new-language-course-
>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!”
https://www.duolingo.com/hideki
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto 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.
Haha!
A user created a dark theme that can be downloaded for Firefox and Chrome. They posted about it here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/1853274
Also, if you haven't seen this and you're interested, here are some scripts created by users for Duolingo: http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Userscripts
As far as I can tell it's still accepting incorrect spellings as detailed here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8726406
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: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8129285
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!
Both δ and θ, make a sort of “th” sound in English. Think of θ like a “hard/sharp th” and δ as more of a “softer th” almost resembling a softer “d” sound. Here are some examples of English words that resemble both characters, hopefully after saying them out loud you will be able to hear the difference.
θ: Th-ink Th-eory Th-read
δ: Th-e Th-en Th-at
(Hyphen to emphasize the “th” part of the word. Try saying these words slowly with exaggerated pronunciation and breaking up the words into the two parts as I’ve done above. Try to apply what I said about each pronunciation above the examples if you really can’t hear a difference)
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): https://www.duolingo.com/comment/9609404/Mayan-will-come-to-Duolingo.
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/
This happened to me 11 days ago - I lost a 180 day streak and I took a screenshot showing that I had even hit my XP goal for the day.... Best of luck recovering your streak. I'll update my post if my bug report amounts to anything.