Do they have Sanskrit?
Unfortunately not. The only Indo-Aryan language I can find listed on DuoLingo is Hindi and that hasn't yet started beta testing.
Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
241–250 of 274 posts
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#242I still find their spaced repetition lacking. I never see some of the words again after seeing them for the first time.
Perhaps that's because they have too many words? If you look at some of the core languages like German the course has a 'words' tab and it shows you exactly how strong it thinks you know each word and when you saw each word last. It could be different between languages, and who knows how well it works.. but it's definitely something they seem to be working on and putting thought into.
Thing is, I do less than 1 lesson per day. Probably 3 lessons per two weeks. Meaning that I press Practice button about 100 times in that two week period.
After about 40 days, I went back to go through some of the previous lessons, given their new Crown update, and realized I haven't seen some of the words at all.
Despite having around 400 words learned so far.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
>for an English speaker, there probably won't be any need to explicitly learn the grammar, since it works mostly like English // For a period in the UK there was no English grammar taught in schools. This caused me great problems in Russian class (second high school language) as I had no idea there were cases in English and so had no reference for why a case was needed and what it did. The entirety of my English gram…
Having left school 3 years ago, I can confirm there is still no grammar taught in english lessons. It was all taught to the AQA exam we did. I studied french and german too, and all my grammar knowledge comes from there and from languages at uni. There's obviously basic things in primary school but that's like where to put commas, that's it.
Well, now they teach made up nonsense about "fronted adverbials" ("Stupidly, they do it too early.") in primary school, they spend quite a bit of time on sentence structure and labelling the parts of speech. It's too much IMO and comes easy too early.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because English grammar is either obvious and doesn't need teaching or is inexplicable and isn't worth trying to make a pattern out of. I ran, she ran, he ran, they ran, we ran, y'all ran. I run, she runs, he runs, they run, we run, y'all run. I'll run, she'll run, he'll run, they'll run, we'll run, y'all'll run. I thought I'd run, he thought he'd run, they thought they'd run. We'll have wished we ran, they'll h…
Also everything in English has dozens and dozens of exceptions that you just need to memorize.
A good way to teach that for native users might be to teach why that is the case and leave the specifics to happenstance.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
пива (as partitive gen.) here sounds really weird to me, like you're pouring it out of a can into something else, and putting that in the fridge. If it's a can you can emphasise it with a number e.g. я поставил одну банку пива в холодильник :) not a native speaker, just living and studying russian in moscow
The partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.
So you would say that though? Like I've just never heard my хозяйка квартиры say that is all. I hear it often in things like "would you like some tea/beer?" etc or "i'm going to buy some tea/beer" but never like that. My impression was that outside of those contexts it's not popular. Mind sharing some examples? Would be really useful! :)
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having left school 3 years ago, I can confirm there is still no grammar taught in english lessons. It was all taught to the AQA exam we did. I studied french and german too, and all my grammar knowledge comes from there and from languages at uni. There's obviously basic things in primary school but that's like where to put commas, that's it.
It's because English grammar is either obvious and doesn't need teaching or is inexplicable and isn't worth trying to make a pattern out of. I ran, she ran, he ran, they ran, we ran, y'all ran. I run, she runs, he runs, they run, we run, y'all run. I'll run, she'll run, he'll run, they'll run, we'll run, y'all'll run. I thought I'd run, he thought he'd run, they thought they'd run. We'll have wished we ran, they'll h…
So verb forms are not the only part of grammar. In these examples you've covered sequences of tenses, mood, word order, and it could be argued aspect. Ask someone to point out the parts of speech and they'd be able to point out the pronoun and verb, that's usually it.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been on duolingo since the beginning and am sure that I've spent more time with the site and app than 95% of the userbase. I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language. There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses. #1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking. This is j…
No way will Duo Lingo get you anywhere close to A2 for writing or speaking. MAYBE A1 if you try hard at it for a long long time in a language it well supports. To get to A2 you need a real tutor and real communication experience. I used Verbling to find a tutor and I traveled to Eastern Europe over the summer to practice and only after hundreds of hours of practice was I able to communicate in Russian to any degree e…
>To get to A2 you need a real tutor
No you don't. I'm French, I dropped out of school at 16 and picked up English later in life without using any formal method of learning. I started by memorizing enough vocabulary to read simpler English, after which I began reading popular fiction and watched movies with subtitles (in English) until it clicked. My understanding of the language is more based on intuition (sheer memorization of exposure to it through cultural mediums) than on memorizing the grammar rules book. The brain makes the connections as to what seems correct or not based on patterns. I don't think my skills are good enough to write literature but surely communication isn't a problem.
Duolingo didn't exist at the time, but I believe it would have helped me learn faster considering the way it introduces languages is quite similar to how I started learning and it does so in a more interactive, fun manner.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I successfully learned Esperanto, extensively studying solely on duolingo for 3 weeks, then jumping on to other material. It was one of best things that I did for myself. I particularly recommend Esperanto to HN readers as the language itself is "hackable".
ĉu vi povas rekomendas la aliaj materialojn ke vi utilis? Mi jam forgesis plej de miaj studisoj...
Mi forte rekomandas ke vi legu Gerda Malaperis ĉe lernu.net. Fakte, mi trovis ĉiu materialo sur lernu.net tre utila. Kaj tiam vi povas provi legi rakontojn de Fratoj Grimm, denove sur lernu.net. Alie, vi povas vidi videojn de Evildea sur Jutubo kaj aŭskulti podkastojn ĉe kern.punkto.info. Ne forgesu aniĝi al Duolingo Esperanto Learners ĉe Fejsbuko, se vi havas konton tie. Bonŝanson :)
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even just "indo-european" bias, it's just that word-for-word translation of sentences without any context only gets you so far. Even for something as "simple" as English-to-French it breaks down when the languages don't map 1:1 with each other. For instance there's no single way to translate "I ran" in French, it could be "j'ai courru" or "je courrais" depending on context and depending no the lesson Duoling…
Which is fine. It is about being understood. You are never going to get fluent from a course. Language changes, and even native speakers are learning new things.
Sure but my point was that Duolingo basing all of its courses on translating from one language to the other seriously limits its ability to actually teach you a language. My native language isn't English but as I'm writing these words I'm not translating, I think in English directly. If I switch to "translating" mode I'm a lot slower and I end up with unidiomatic English.
Any decent language learning course should try to immerse you in the target language as soon as possible, forcing you to actually think in the language instead of your own. There are many ways to do this, for instance making you answer questions. Instead of telling you "translate 'the cat is black' in French" they'd show you a picture of a black cat and ask you "Quelle est la couleur du chat?" and you'd have to answer "Le chat est noir". No English involved, like in real life. The problem of course is that such an approach is hard to correct by a dumb algorithm, especially as the concepts being taught become harder.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps that's because they have too many words? If you look at some of the core languages like German the course has a 'words' tab and it shows you exactly how strong it thinks you know each word and when you saw each word last. It could be different between languages, and who knows how well it works.. but it's definitely something they seem to be working on and putting thought into.
Thing is, I do less than 1 lesson per day. Probably 3 lessons per two weeks. Meaning that I press Practice button about 100 times in that two week period. After about 40 days, I went back to go through some of the previous lessons, given their new Crown update, and realized I haven't seen some of the words at all. Despite having around 400 words learned so far.
Don't forget to take into account that new words are added to each course regularly. For newer languages and any of the beta languages, the words you are taught can change very frequently.