Haha nice. I am doing the Duolingo course for Norwegian and sometimes I'll randomly get some unrelated-to-the-topic sentence as well! Like it'll be "Time" and I'll get "Ducks drink water"...
So I hope you don't mind me asking but you're the only person I know using Duolingo right now (I tried it after seeing your mentions of it) but how effective how you found it in teaching you the language? I've ended up having to supplement it with Memrise to learn the vocabulary and another course to better understand the grammar; I end up having to repeat the Duolingo exercises several times before I start to learn the words. Do you end up doing this (or am I missing something about the courses)?
It's not just you. Completing a course (Spanish) gave me a good start, like a year or two of HS Spanish, but I'm only at about 40% reading comprehension in the real world, and that only because of the high percentage of cognates. Listening comprehension I only get an occasional word, and attempts to speak are ahahaha no.
With Welsh, which has a few cognates (bacwn! fferi! pasta! helo!) but drastically different grammatical structure (VSO, nouns before adjectives, the to-be verb marking not just person and sg/pl and tense but also declarative/negative/interrogative), I've been going to other sources a lot. Duo doesn't explain *why* enough, especially in the mobile interface.
I like that Duo doesn't involve lots of memorizing charts (verb forms or noun endings or whatever) but at the same time it's not really enough. It's worked best for me with German, where I used to be fluent and then forgot a lot of it but am refreshing more than learning new.
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So I hope you don't mind me asking but you're the only person I know using Duolingo right now (I tried it after seeing your mentions of it) but how effective how you found it in teaching you the language? I've ended up having to supplement it with Memrise to learn the vocabulary and another course to better understand the grammar; I end up having to repeat the Duolingo exercises several times before I start to learn the words. Do you end up doing this (or am I missing something about the courses)?
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With Welsh, which has a few cognates (bacwn! fferi! pasta! helo!) but drastically different grammatical structure (VSO, nouns before adjectives, the to-be verb marking not just person and sg/pl and tense but also declarative/negative/interrogative), I've been going to other sources a lot. Duo doesn't explain *why* enough, especially in the mobile interface.
I like that Duo doesn't involve lots of memorizing charts (verb forms or noun endings or whatever) but at the same time it's not really enough. It's worked best for me with German, where I used to be fluent and then forgot a lot of it but am refreshing more than learning new.
Is memrise good? I haven't tried it yet.
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