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So, who else here is on Duolingo? I'm doing Spanish, Swedish, and Portuguese. Looking forward to the upcoming Norwegian, Greek, Catalan (from Spanish). I live in hope for an English -> Basque, one of these days...

https://www.duolingo.com/BryanAJParry

I understand that it's cost-prohibitive, but I wish the recordings were performed by real people instead of robo-synthesizers

GreenBowTie wrote:I understand that it's cost-prohibitive, but I wish the recordings were performed by real people instead of robo-synthesizers

Some (upcoming) courses are actually using real people. Which is good news.

Apparently, the Irish pronounciations are all wrong (no surprise there!).
Which has lead me to look at other sites that pronounce Irish, both by speakers and by synthesisers, which inform me that, indeed, as expected, not only can I not pronounce Irish sounds, but I have no sodding clue how to tell the difference by listening to them...

Salmoneus wrote:Apparently, the Irish pronounciations are all wrong (no surprise there!).
Which has lead me to look at other sites that pronounce Irish, both by speakers and by synthesisers, which inform me that, indeed, as expected, not only can I not pronounce Irish sounds, but I have no sodding clue how to tell the difference by listening to them...

Google "facloir" for an online dictionary with sound files in the three main dialects

Thank you. Still can't make head or tail of it, but thanks anyway. [Though it's annoying that it doesn't give meanings for the Irish words (so you can't tell the difference between the suggestions) and that you can't get inflected verbs spoken].

For what it's worth, the other two places I was looking were forvo and abair.tcd.ie (the speech synthesiser from trinity). If nothing else, the foclair samples are at least more audible!

However, the most striking thing I've learnt from that site so far is that people from munster are all very angry...

Salmoneus wrote: However, the most striking thing I've learnt from that site so far is that people from munster are all very angry...

In the same way maybe that Italians sound emotional (to Brits at least) and Germans seem to be always giving orders? I wonder how much received 'national characteristics' depend on misinterpretation of prosodic features?

Is it something about the Munster accent putting the stress on final long vowels??

Wonder how Scots G. would sound to you. Google "faclair beag" and hover over the icon for about 1s. There are not that many sound files yet, but they're being added and some are for phrases. However for some odd reason the sound only seems to work on about 2 days out of 3, so if nothing happens you just have to come back another day.

Well, I've been playing around with the site a bit now. Getting sidetracked by the terrible discussions. Most comments I've seen so far? 80, for the sentence "Wir sehen jedes Ei" - questions of pronunciation, semantics, morphology, the usefulness of duolingo for daily life, and the terrifyingness of the NSA. Sadly nobody mentioned the egg marketing board, which in the UK was briefly given complete access to all the surveillance powers of the state under anti-terror legislation...

I used to use Duolingo for German, Portuguese, and Irish. I quickly dropped Irish after it was clear the pronunciations were horrible. I dropped German shortly after (which I had just been using to maintain, not to learn) as I became more and more frustrated with the limitations of what was an acceptable answer for translations (I admit, I did skip like 3/4 of all the sections by doing the pretest so I wasn't really "primed" to give what the program was looking for, in most cases), and then eventually I got bored and dropped Portuguese as well.

Overall, I'd say it was fun to pass the time but I don't really remember anything I learned. I might start it up again to learn Portuguese but for now Tagalog is far higher on my priorities and they don't have a Tagalog course.

I tried Portuguese and Dutch, and I think I also started the Irish course but the learning curve was too steep and not clearly enough signposted. I basically gave up because it was eating my time - like, Japanese is basically more important.

Also, I wanted to use it for French and German because I haven't practiced those languages in a long time... but when I did the placement test, it put me at a way lower level than I actually am because I don't know lists of vocabulary very well - like I don't really care whether I can say all the names of clothes or not, for instance.

finlay wrote:I don't know lists of vocabulary very well - like I don't really care whether I can say all the names of clothes or not, for instance.

This is my big problem with learning languages. Grammar is easy-peasy, but remembering words is my worst nightmare

Well, thanks to the thread I've signed up, and am liking it so far.

I'm doing German and Irish.

For German, I made the mistake of doing the test, so it thinks I'm better than I am - I knew enough to get to Level 5 on the test (and on a vague level I know a lot more than that, too), but the breadth of my vocabulary is paltry. And it turns out that my ability to produce German is way behind my ability to understand it. I'm finding myself doing even really stupid things like forgetting genders. I find German a problem because I know too much of it: I'm always thinking 'oh yes, I know this, this is easy', and rushing through and making stupid mistakes.
Anyway, I'm not hoping for fluency, but if it could push me back up to a level where I could start thinking about maintanance/vocabulary expansion, with a solid base, that would be good.

For Irish, just a vague awareness will do. I don't mind the pronunciations having and English accent, because I'm never going to be speaking it anyway - and if I did, it would presumably be with a non-native speaker with a terrible accent, so that doesn't matter too much. From my point of view, having it spoken helps me over the 'having to spend ten minutes to work out how each word should vaguely sound' barrier, even if it's not 100% native in places.

It may be stupid to do two languages at once, but I'm hoping that the languages are different enough, and my level of knowledge is different enough, that it won't be a problem - I think my german, while completely atrophied, is still fixed enough in my head that I can 'file' the languages appropriately. And anyway, I was learning three languages at school and didn't seem to mix them up, so maybe that's just not a big problem I have...

Yeah, I don't think it happens to everyone: I'm doing french and german and experiencing no interference. ich parle allemagne schlecht

/aI~ m@nu?n bI?@/! /I? Ab@ aIn@ klaIn@ prQb"leImoU/... /{vEk diz@ r@"lIdZi.oUneIz/...

xD nice

LIRLAT

Eddy Izzard's Martin Luther impression.

Well, my impression of of Izzard's Luther impression, at least.

I'll also add that, like those spaced repetition flashcard apps like Anki and Memrise, it can get really daunting if you miss a day or more due to personal life or whatever issues that make you unable to log in for a while. Everything piles up and it can become overwhelming to have so much to review all at once, so this really only works if you have the time to commit at least some time to it every day. This was also a pretty big factor in why I ended up abandoning it several months ago.

Useful sentences in duolingo:

Tá an fear sa chuisneoir (I think, may be getting it wrong) = The man is in the fridge
Grossvater ist nicht mein Vater (should be eszett) = Grandad is not my father

I feel fully equipped to travel in Nightmare Ireland and Creepy Germany!

KathAveara wrote:

finlay wrote:I don't know lists of vocabulary very well - like I don't really care whether I can say all the names of clothes or not, for instance.

This is my big problem with learning languages. Grammar is easy-peasy, but remembering words is my worst nightmare

This, is the same for my learning Spanish.

Salmoneus wrote:Tá an fear sa chuisneoir (I think, may be getting it wrong) = The man is in the fridge

Cf. Tá an fear ina chuisneoir. "The man is a fridge." (Currently, that is. He may not have been a fridge before.)

the esperanto course just went public

GreenBowTie wrote:the esperanto course just went public

It was all over my Facebook; I am not sure if the format is appropriate.

Salmoneus wrote:Apparently, the Irish pronunciations are all wrong (no surprise there!).

She sure doesn't sound like the prof I had in my two semesters in college, and given that it was twenty years ago the fact that I can even tell should indicate the degree of disparity. ;)

Duolingo tells me I'm 23% "fluent" in French. I may yet die laughing.

Salmoneus wrote:Useful sentences in duolingo:

Tá an fear sa chuisneoir (I think, may be getting it wrong) = The man is in the fridge
Grossvater ist nicht mein Vater (should be eszett) = Grandad is not my father

I feel fully equipped to travel in Nightmare Ireland and Creepy Germany!

I had one the other day that was "The cat has a red boot".

Why does the cat have a boot? Why does it only have one boot? Is there someone somewhere with very small feet and a missing red boot?

I NEED TO KNOW.

I find it funny when you do the placement test and then it tells you what you know and you're like "Oh do I now?" Cool!

I've been screen capping funny sentences. I might post some of them sometime.