111–120 of 138 posts
I run alone (at a slow conversational pace) for 5-6 hours a week, and see that time as an opportunity to learn conversational German. Any ideas what I could be listening to... maybe a listen & repeat type app ?
I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language. When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner. Someone suggested the free language lea…
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I had 4 years of high school French and could read passably, write some, but was never really conversational. Probably if I had lived in France for a summer I'd have gotten a lot better. I was actually talking with a (French and English-speaking) friend who now lives in Serbia and they were saying they pretty much just picked Serbian up and didn't sweat all the fancy verb conjugations and so forth.
I had four years of high school French and one year at university, and I was pretty conversational. How much did you use the language outside of class? A bunch of us high school French students would speak with each other outside of class, even just to make silly jokes in the language, which helped with retention.
Not at all. Which I think was my basic point. It was a class. I had no plans to move to France. Or any particular plan for French to be integral to subsequent education or career objectives.
I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language. When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner. Someone suggested the free language lea…
Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over three years aided your ability to jump start your conversational ability. Very few folks can start from scratch and watch shows in a new language without subtitles in just a few weeks. Then there's the issue of accents. There isn't a single Spanish language des…
I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language. When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner. Someone suggested the free language lea…
I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language. When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner. Someone suggested the free language lea…
Ai is going to be a game changer there I imagine because the biggest impediment to learning a new language is being able to practice and getting corrected without social embarrassment.
She wouldn't suggest it for a total novice, but as a B1 French speaker she's pretty happy with it. It's great practice, and is helping her pronunciation, vocab, etc.
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I'm 250 days into the Duolingo French programme and feeling similar things— I traveled to Quebec City recently and was only very barely functional at the simplest tasks. Duolingo goes to great lengths to make you feel productive, but I think it's prioritizing the wrong things— particularly if you mostly care about spoken communication, there's just a ton of stuff around verb conjugation and gender that really doesn't…
Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.
There's also the guilt factor, where the meter says "you must be THIS active to be serious about your goals", so disappointing the meter means (supposedly) you've fallen short on something that matters to you. Framing it as "back to square one" doesn't help.