151–160 of 352 posts
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If your native language is english, surely romance languages are going to be easier than something like japanese
even though english is a germanic language?
You can convert many English sentences into a sensible (if not idiomatic) Spanish sentence by translating one word at a time.
German has not so forgiving been :)
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> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages). In my opinion it's the other way around. Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach. Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want. Reading instruction is strongly amenable to…
> So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow. TV, movies, anime etc can fulfill the listening purpose. But you have to do it in copious amounts and turn off subtitles.
I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…
Can you talk about the resources you used to learn in the classroom? I learned German using the Foreign Service Institute handbook and I thought it was great introduction to the language. I'd love to know what's in use nowadays.
The materials were mostly (all?) developed in-house.
If they were learning Dari, they would have been better off just using externally-produced Farsi textbooks since they have a more robust history of development.
The specific recommended materials for an introduction to a language depend on what your goals are for learning the language.
Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
1. So it looks like they lost $14M on revenue of $71M in 2019, and $16M on revenue of $162M in 2020. Revenue more than doubled YoY, which is impressive. Costs also grew (by a smaller percentage), but they're presumably spending a lot to chase after the growth opportunity and can dial back later. 2. They had positive free cash flow of $14M in 2020, which may be a better metric to look at when assessing their financial…
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I've learnt both English and German at school, for pretty much equal amounts of time - about 12 years each. And well, I can speak fluent English, but barely any German, despite usually having at least ~2 hours of lessons a week, plenty of homework, oral exercises..... For me, it has everything to do with actually using the languge in practice. English was and is everywhere - it's much easier to practice when all your…
I find it fun to learn language on Duolingo as a kind of game. But unless I have a need to regularly use the learning, I know for sure it won't stick. And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags.
I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well, so it’s easier to spot non-native speakers.
I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…
Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of people. The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks. I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful enough to look beyond Duolingo.
I think this is an issue of mismatched expectations. For actually getting to know a language a tool like Duolingo is too limited, as knowing a language is an umbrella term comprising multiple skills and Duo helps with only vocabulary, a bit of grammar and pronunciation to some extent (but I have no experience with that aspect). If someone starts a course thinking they'll be able to speak the language once it's over, no wonder they eventually end up disappointed. What Duolingo is excellent at, however, is kickstarting the process of learning a language you're interested in. Hard to find a better tool for that.
Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
I think that these language tools work best when you have a mixture, because they can complement each other and keep on feeding into the novelty factor.
(In particular Memrise and Duolingo operate on different sort of teaching strategies so just those two together is really interesting)
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I in fact did indicate that reading is the easiest in my post. Speaking is harder than listening because it requires you to produce language and convey ideas from your own mind, with proficiency in pronouncing it in such a way that a native speaker might understand you. Things like idioms you may be able to infer meaning from interpretation when you are listening or reading but you will never use them in speaking unl…
According to the test specifications. You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or using words you have no knowledge of. Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages, and the same for my fiancée who is a native English speaker with one secondary language.
...Which define proficiency nearly identically between the different skill sets. Your relative proficiency for speaking is expected to be worse until you reach native proficiency, where you are still worse at speaking than reading or listening, but it doesn't very much matter in most situations.
> You will not speak what you don't know.
Yes, and what you don't know with speaking is invariably greater than what you don't know with listening and reading, hence why everyone scores lower in proficiency with speaking relative to their ability in listening or reading.
> Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages
If all my utterances in English were "I go school," "I eat pie," "I clean teeth," native speakers will easily understand what I'm saying. That doesn't mean I'm proficient or that it's easier to speak than it is to listen, just that I can create coherent and correctly understood sentences in English.