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Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

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Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#231

Post by twixfel »

watwut wrote: post #184
twixfel wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integ…

No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.

Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.

And no we really don't care, or at least I don't. I am a native English speaker who goes months at a time without speaking to another native English speaker. I would never judge someone for it. I would be ashamed of myself to just stop listening to someone for mixing up word order slightly or dropping a preposition or picking the wrong conjugated form of a verb. If I understand them, then it's fine. If I can help them improve their English, by pointing something out, I will. It's because I'm not an arsehole. Ignoring someone as soon as they mess up a verb conjugation is honestly detestable.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#232

Post by twixfel »

foldr wrote: post #202
JackFr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article in the Economist 10-15 years ago about the prevalence of English throughout the world and the typical explanations for it were listed: the British Empire followed by post WWII American economic and entertainment hegemony. But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

>But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly. Surely this is just a consequence of that fact that the majority of the world's English speakers speak English as a second language. As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized.

No post body was provided.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#233

Post by poulsbohemian »

klodolph wrote: post #73
poulsbohemian wrote: post #22

Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the n…

I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right. This extended to v…

>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly

Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#234

Post by HenryClerval »

beezlewax wrote: post #155

It's more like a game than actual learning.... which would be great if it worked. I found myself recognising patterns and subconsciously "cheating" while using that app. Nothing beats full immersion in a language and actual real life teachers. I moved to Spain a few years ago and Duo Lingo had me thinking I understood loads of things when I really didn't. Not in a real life setting. It is good as a side lesson but no…

What sort of cheats did you find? The only one I could find in the Finnish course was that the correct first word from the word bank would have its first letter capitalized, and that was almost never be the word that was difficult.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#235

Post by dplgk »

sharker8 wrote: post #33

Followers of Krashen know that it's sensible input that results in language acquisition. Duolingo gamifies the frequency of sensible input. Therefore Duolingo will work if frequently and consistently used. Fluent is an outdated term. It probably takes about six months to achieve any lasting result. Illusion of progress is impossible to prove or disprove probably.

Six months of what to achieve what result?

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#236

Post by klodolph »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #233
klodolph wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right. This extended to v…

>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.

Oh, for sure. The apps don't provide good guidance for how to get you past the block.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#237

Post by watwut »

twixfel wrote: post #231
watwut wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.

Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.…

We are talking here about using wrong grammatical gender throughout your speech. That is a bunch of very noticeable mistakes that affect multiple words in the sentence. Just because English does not have grammatical gender does not mean it does not matter in German.

The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affects other words.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#238

Post by watwut »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #222
watwut wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really does matter for spoken language as much as for written. Yes people will be able to understand meaning most of the time, but no, you will sound as bad as if we're writing. It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way. Accent and ignoring g…

Note that if you're coming from a non-gendered language you'll mess it up frequently even if you care. There's a reason Chinese people are notorious for getting gender wrong!

You will mess it up even if coming from other gendered language, because the genders will he different.

But it is one of things you do end up memorizing the same way you memorize the word itself or its conjugations. It just does not make sense to go "I don't care about this stuff and won't learn it" and then demand language app will accommodate your refusal to learn gender.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#239

Post by Koshkin »

aix1 wrote: post #125
Koshkin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French and the English, the neighbors who cannot pronounce a word of another’s language…

Wait, about 30% of English vocabulary is of French origin (not to mention other Romance influences). :-)

This probably only has served to exacerbate the issue on the English side.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#240

Post by twixfel »

watwut wrote: post #237
twixfel wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.…

We are talking here about using wrong grammatical gender throughout your speech. That is a bunch of very noticeable mistakes that affect multiple words in the sentence. Just because English does not have grammatical gender does not mean it does not matter in German. The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affec…

I know it's not a gender mistake, but a mistake in the case is generally more meaningful than a mistake in the gender. A mistake in gender is even less important. I agree one should try. I certainly try. I can often look at a word I've never seen before and "somehow" know the gender, but it is ridiculous to just ignore someone who makes mistakes. And it makes no difference what the nature of the mistake is, grammatical gender isn't special, it's not acceptable in English to treat someone like shit because they used the wrong conjugated form of "to be", it shouldn't be acceptable to treat someone like shit for using the wrong gender in German.

English doesn't have gender or anything but a vestige of a case system, but it's still just as complex a language as German. Your comment that you wrote right there is simply incorrect English at worst and unidiomatic at best, and you made a number of grammatical mistakes, but I wouldn't think to ignore you for it, because that would be completely ludicrous. In fact I'm only even mentioning it because of the conversation topic at hand. And if you're making so many mistakes whilst writing English then I'm certain you're making loads whilst speaking it. Still wouldn't ignore you or discount what you're saying because of it. In fact I wouldn't care at all because I understand that learning a language is not easy.

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