211–220 of 252 posts
I learned Spanish on Duolingo and used it to travel through Cuba (where very few people speak English).
It worked well enough, I was able to communicate. Not knowing Spanish would make things much more difficult.
Of course I have by now mostly forgotten it, a language that isn't used frequently (best via immersion, living where it's spoken by plenty of people) will atrophy...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles) For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack. In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very g…
In the case of Charo and Sofia Vergara, the accent and grammar mistakes are a cultivated part of the brand.
Has anyone tried "Language Transfer" to learn a foreign language? I've done a few of the lessons and it's so incredibly intuitive. They use concepts and patterns in the listener's native language to learn concepts in the target language. Surprisingly, It's completely free (please donate if you can) https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish
Outside of being immersed in the language, Language Transfer (which I'm currently using to learn Spanish) is easily the best method I have ever used. It relies mainly on recognizing patterns, rather than memorization, which is right up my alley. Maybe others do better with memorization?
It's also free, and very convenient (lessons are on YouTube, SoundCloud, downloaded MP3 files, or Android/iOS app). I'm a Patreon supporter, because I believe in it.
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…
In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep…
When I did the full Spanish tree from zero about 5 years ago studying ~1h per day for 3 months it didn't get me very far. I then moved to a Spanish speaking country and started taking 4h of language classes per day immediately. I felt that I could have learned about the same in two weeks there instead of using Duolingo. Some people came in with 0 knowledge and could speak a little after 2 weeks, Duolingo never got me…
> Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly. This is the only way to learn. You repeat things you know many times to commit them to your memory.
Duolingo has no way to only work on your weekness. It's more time effective to put them on a piece of paper and to go through them a couple of times.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I’d push back on this idea, and instead say that some people learn really well from the current tools, and some people can’t. 99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else. Naturally there are differences in the population, but I would posit that if you learned a language once (or twice or three times - I k…
> 99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else. They have - over the course of many years, completely submerged in the environment of their mother tongue, when they had an abundance of leisure time.
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 once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this. I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
Turns out the clerk did know some English--but her pronunciation was so bad that I couldn't understand her even when I knew what she was saying. I never saw a spelling mistake, though.
Two bits of advice from something of a polyglot here: Languages aren't something you learn, they are something you join. With Duolingo, take a second language along with the primary one. No, not German or French. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and select Latin, or Klingon, or Dothraki, something really short and just for kicks. That way when you are stuck in your primary language, you can switch to the fun lan…
> you get to learn another 'language' But "languages aren't something you learn" right?
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 agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff. I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.
If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)