Learning languages with Duolingo

I have a 23 day streak . I like to spend some time on it every day, repetition is important in recovering and maintaining function after brain injury, whether cognitive or physical. And it’s fun too.

I am on various mailing lists by choice.

A link to the following arrived today.

LINK > www.dictionary.com/e/hardestlanguage

Duolingo have updated their website. On my laptop I can't seem to get back to the exercises I was on until today, although on my phone I can.

Anyone else affected in this way?

The units look to be arranged differently but I haven’t tried to do my next lesson yet.

Duolingo is a very good app, I learned Spanish there at one time

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Where is StarDreamer when you need him?

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I have been using Duolingo since I first saw this post, but frankly their German course is appalling.

They write their English sentences to be translated into German in such slangy American English that at times they are incomprehensible, they expect you to translate the simple past tense to the German perfect tense, even in instances where no native German speaker would, a good many of their listening exercises are so inaudable that you cannot avoid making mistakes, and they use slangy German expressions quite often in preference to more correct German.

I find these things infuriating, and there is no way you can complain to whoever runs duolingo that I can find.

Most maddening of all, they adore sentences such as "When are you leaving?" and only accept one out of three possible German tranlations. As there is no reading exercise or any other form of context "you" in this kind of sentence could mean either "du" singular informal, "ihr" plural informal, or "Sie" singular and plural formal German pronouns.

I put up with this as I am using it to revise my knowledge of German, but as they never explain grammar at all, I doubt you could actually learn the language properly using duolingo.

And they insist upon telling us what else we could have written in English - rather unnecessarily as it is German we are trying to learn!

FannyCornforth

JackyB if I were to learn a language it would probably be Polish.
A gentleman that I randomly met in Waterstones told me that for English speakers, Polish was one of the hardest languages to learn.
What are your thoughts?

For me the hardest is Welsh. I feel like I’ve been doing Duolingo forever. My favourite activity is learning French as a Dutch speaker.

ixion

Where is StarDreamer when you need him?

In a distant Galaxy, far, far away?

I would like to stop but have a 247 day streak and am reluctant to break it. I started just to keep my mind active, I should really do something that would be of more use to me.

I still don't feel that I can speak or understand spoken french well but am ok at reading and writing it.

It is possible to listen via podcasts but I don't.

I’ve been learning Spanish for over 2 or 3 years continuously with DuoLingo.

I have only recently started to pay an annual fee as it said I could make more than 5 errors and it would be tailored to my weak areas. Well the errors bit is right but they haven’t changed the format or given me tips when I make errors. I’m rather disappointed.

I like their Guide Books but would like a hard copy to re-read and learn from. In the end I have found online some grammar rules which I have printed off.

Lastly they keep adding new words and verbs which I write down in a book but they don’t repeat them enough for me to learn them at 76 !

To be honest I’m feeling rather disheartened but I won’t give up.

-I put up with this as I am using it to revise my knowledge of German, but as they never explain grammar at all, I doubt you could actually learn the language properly using duolingo.-

Grandtante, have you tried listening to “Easy German” ( a misnomer imo) where native speakers go auf der Strasse and chat with other native speakers on various topics. Subtitles are given. I use this quite a lot. I gave up on Duolingo.

I tried learning Italian with Duolingo during the pandemic but found its “phrase book” style without any indication of the grammar underpinning the phrases pretty useless.
A whole session of saying “I am a man/woman” was pretty boring too! As a linguist I appreciate a balance of colloquial phrases, an idea of the grammatical framework to support building my own phrases or sentences and a variety of vocabulary.
But deep down there is no substitute for listening to and speaking a language if possible in the country in question for the full immersive experience.
I remember our French teacher at school saying “Go to France and get a French boyfriend, that’s how to learn French”
(Other countries and nationalities of boyfriend are of course available.)

They are indeed, Foxygloves 😊

It has inspired me I have to say. I'm off to the Gaelic college on the Isle of Skye as a result of a mix of Duolingo and an online course.
My DS is learning Italian the same way