171–180 of 274 posts
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I'm french, and I've never heard of that connotation for pleine. OTOH, if you tell me "je suis plein/pleine", I'll take it that you're drunk.
I was unaware of it until it happened. Was told it's a Québecois thing. They also taught me the helicopter joke.
I study French, German and Russian at uni, and for doing translations, or even just writing letters or speaking, this is not good enough. You want to be comfortable in a language, and that comes with a rock solid grammar foundation, as 'dull' as it seems.
As many have said, Duolingo should be a tool amongst many. It has actually been really helpful for drilling through particular problem areas where I get a case wrong here or there.
What they really need to do is get listening and reading comprehension out there; working alongside some people who really never understand grammar explanations, they can often work it out in their head after reading through a passage with a few examples, it makes it personal to them and they can see the 'point' of the rule.
Also they need to get a better vocab tool, memrise/anki style. Sometimes I just wanna practice shopping items because I'm on the bus to get 'groceries' and I wanna make sure im all sured up.
I did Duolingo seriously for more than 370 days in a row. Spanish: I speak french and English so Spanish is relatively easy to complete. After completing the course, I tried having conversations with people (with friends but mostly uber drivers) and I was surprised how many times i learned it all wrong. I had to read a lot or children book to remedy that. French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta cours…
Looks like fun, but not a tool that would teach you to speak a language correctly.
What really bothers me about Duolingo is its Rosetta Stone approach to language learning. For adults, learning by osmosis is not a thing for languages. The creator has said that the reason the grammar notes (as bare bones as they are) are not available in the apps, is, that he wants, users to pick up the grammar through the exercises. I study French, German and Russian at uni, and for doing translations, or even just…
I did Duolingo seriously for more than 370 days in a row. Spanish: I speak french and English so Spanish is relatively easy to complete. After completing the course, I tried having conversations with people (with friends but mostly uber drivers) and I was surprised how many times i learned it all wrong. I had to read a lot or children book to remedy that. French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta cours…
Having completed the Duolingo Spanish tree a couple of times, I found that it gave me enough of the basics to work my way through books and follow some basic plot of TV shows with closed captioning. It hasn't done a whole lot for my listening or speaking skills, but to be fair I often disable the listening and speaking exercises since I tend to do the exercises at work while I'm waiting for something to compile. Duol…
Anyone have advice on learning French?
I did the following: * Start the Duolingo tree * Start Pimsleur French around checkpoint 2 when I realized I couldn't speak at all * Start taking classes at Alliance Francaise when I started struggling with the grammar, starting at 103 * Spend at least a week in immersion in a Francophone country to solidify the learning * Start drilling nouns + gender with Anki when I noticed that native speakers kept correcting my…
Anyone have advice on learning French?
Backpack in Morocco and West Africa. And when I say backpack, I don’t mean just follow the hostel trail and stay with other foreigners. Try to stay independent and maximize your contact with the local people. (I learned active French over several months hitchhiking in the region, for example. Before going, I had a decent passive reading knowledge like any bookish European). I highly recommend learning French there be…
What really bothers me about Duolingo is its Rosetta Stone approach to language learning. For adults, learning by osmosis is not a thing for languages. The creator has said that the reason the grammar notes (as bare bones as they are) are not available in the apps, is, that he wants, users to pick up the grammar through the exercises. I study French, German and Russian at uni, and for doing translations, or even just…
I have found that a combination of Duolingo / Rosetta Stone in combination with the FSI Courses ( https://www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-courses.php ) gives a good combination of Grammar + Speaking material to learn a language.
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Once you have the basics down, I like anki or memrise better for picking up vocab. You can do decks based on JLPT levels or do Core 2k/6k. Here's the memrise course series I am using (6000 words broken up into chunks of 500, frequency optimized): https://www.memrise.com/course/1091685/sgjl-05-core-2k6k-voc... (first of 500 of 6000) https://www.memrise.com/course/1125407/sgjl-07-core-2k6k-voc... (next 500 words) https…
Nice resources. I should probably elaborate on my actual study methods: - Vocabulary study with Anki - Kanji study (RTK order) with a script that shows vocab on my desktop - Grammar study via Tae Kim - Listening practice with regular consumption of Japanese music & television - Reading/writing practice by engaging in Japanese discussions on Mastodon, IRC, 2channel - Reading practice with Japanese manga and novels - R…
Another great way to learn to speak fluently (mechanics, not content) is to shadow other speakers. I recommend going to someplace like http://news.tbs.co.jp/ (news site). Most of the stories are written and they have the video above. The commentator reads exactly the same thing that is written. Create an understanding of the text, watch the video a couple of times, then try to read along with the commentator. News is super hard, but if you google you should be able to find some readings of children's books, etc as well (I eventually found some when I was looking years ago, so I suspect there is more now).
Finally, I don't recommend RTK order for Kanji. I learned to recognise and write the jouyou kanji with RTK. Then I learned vocabulary. Yes, being able to recognise all the kanji was useful... but it's an obtuse way to do it. Worse, by the time I was learning more complex vocabulary I had completely forgotten the kanji (because it takes years and years to learn a language). Unless you have some strategy for keeping your kanji recognition current, I think it's a waste of time. The RTK approach is awesome, but the order is pants. I recommend doing chapter 1 of RTK and then throwing the book away. Then learn vocabulary, memorising the kanji as you go. Make up stories using the radicals and feel free to revise stories as you go. Once you see kanji regularly, you won't need the stories anyway -- so optimising order to make your stories consistent is a wasted effort. My 2 cents. Other people I know did RTK the RTK way and had no problems -- however, I think all of the people I know either did shodo as a hobby or were really active in studying for the kanji kentei. So they had a way of keeping that knowledge current.
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I was unaware of it until it happened. Was told it's a Québecois thing. They also taught me the helicopter joke.
Québécois here, never heard it either. Maybe it's a regional thing or it was a different word.