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Post by Liiisa on Oct 22, 2021 21:08:00 GMT -5
true psw, except that some of us here have met vinny IRL and can attest to his being a primate
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Post by Q-pee on Oct 23, 2021 2:59:03 GMT -5
I may have found a picture of Vinny the Primate
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 23, 2021 6:13:17 GMT -5
Wow that is a very good likeness Q
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Post by vinnyd on Oct 23, 2021 14:47:56 GMT -5
He's a little jollier though.
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Post by tzarine on Oct 25, 2021 13:54:53 GMT -5
you were not carrying the staff
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Post by rikita on Oct 29, 2021 18:26:33 GMT -5
i used to like learning languages for fun, though in the last years i didn't have time any more for this ... just before traveling i try to learn a bit of the language - which reminds me, i should start brushing up on my swedish, as i hope to be able to go to sweden in the summer ...
a. has started having english lessons at school this year, though, and she's always been doing an online course for a while. mainly just playful learning, just a few words and phrases ...
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Post by lillielangtry on Nov 3, 2021 8:49:09 GMT -5
There's an article in the Economist that Duolingo is going to introduce Zulu and Xhosa, which use clicks. Cool for potential learners of African learners. Although given that Duolingo offers Klingon and Elvish, I wish they'd do something about Farsi, with its 60-70 million native speakers! *whine*
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Post by rikita on Nov 3, 2021 17:48:32 GMT -5
hm, i tried a bit of duolingo once, mainly looking at languages i already know, though, just to get an idea of how it works, and i found he sentences they used really strange.
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Post by vinnyd on Nov 3, 2021 17:58:13 GMT -5
My hovercraft is full of eels?
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Post by lillielangtry on Nov 4, 2021 1:56:19 GMT -5
I think they crowdsource the sentences somehow, so they can be slightly odd. But they are constantly tweaking them. The only app I've found for Farsi is Mondly, and it only offers one level, at least for free - a sort of lower intermediate - and every few months it seems to get to the end of its material and just repeat it.
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 4, 2021 5:27:55 GMT -5
That is frustrating that they don't offer Farsi. I was going to say that maybe it's about the alphabet, but they offer Japanese and Arabic, so surely that's not it. Maybe they just haven't found enough Farsi speakers who want to develop it yet?
Up until now I've only used it to practice languages I'd already studied in school (French and Spanish), so this German thing is interesting. I surprised myself by being able to tell one of the German software engineers we're working with to feel better when she had to cancel a meeting because she was out sick, and I've even finally (pretty much) figured out the word order! I wouldn't use nothing but that if i were moving there or something, but as an amusing distraction it's pretty cool.
rikita the sentences can be very strange, which amuses me, but yes
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Post by sprite on Nov 4, 2021 10:12:08 GMT -5
I think they crowdsource the sentences somehow, so they can be slightly odd. But they are constantly tweaking them. The only app I've found for Farsi is Mondly, and it only offers one level, at least for free - a sort of lower intermediate - and every few months it seems to get to the end of its material and just repeat it. I think Memrise has Farsi.
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Post by snowwhite on Nov 4, 2021 15:50:28 GMT -5
There's an article in the Economist that Duolingo is going to introduce Zulu and Xhosa, which use clicks. Cool for potential learners of African learners. Although given that Duolingo offers Klingon and Elvish, I wish they'd do something about Farsi, with its 60-70 million native speakers! *whine* Do they have a Twitter account or similar? I reckon contacting them that way might be a way forward?
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 4, 2021 16:15:23 GMT -5
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Post by tucano on Nov 4, 2021 17:18:51 GMT -5
Thanks Liiisa, I've now discovered that the Duolingo owl is a Tiktok star.
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 4, 2021 17:24:02 GMT -5
Ah yes - I saw something about that Tiktok situation yesterday but never quite figured out what was going on.
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Post by lillielangtry on Nov 5, 2021 1:56:54 GMT -5
I'm not aware of that one, sprite, I'll have to look into it.
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Post by sprite on Nov 5, 2021 12:06:09 GMT -5
I've used it before, but mostly as a teacher--I made up courses based on what we did in class, and encouraged the students to compete with each other. My vocab is slipping, so I really should get back into it.
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 7, 2021 6:53:42 GMT -5
My mom (who has studied German) phoned yesterday and pero answered the phone, and I was able to say "ich möchte mit meine Mütter sprechen!" which made her laugh and made me very pleased.
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Post by shilgia on Nov 7, 2021 7:12:25 GMT -5
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 7, 2021 7:37:29 GMT -5
OMG yes, I follow that twitter account
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Post by lillielangtry on Nov 7, 2021 7:48:56 GMT -5
I also used a Farsi sentence in context on Friday, which I was very proud of. It was "I am tired". To which my boyfriend responded "I'm tired too" and that was more or less the extent of our Farsi smalltalk. But you have to start somewhere don't you?!
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 7, 2021 9:38:37 GMT -5
That is lovely lillie
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Post by sprite on Nov 7, 2021 11:53:12 GMT -5
There are days where the extent of our Spanish is "Hola!" So no judgement here.
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bb81
No fig, no jam
Posts: 83
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Post by bb81 on Nov 7, 2021 13:22:49 GMT -5
I'm learning Finnish on Duolingo. I've finished the course but I definitely do not know Finnish. I feel extremely proud if I catch a word or a phrase in a movie or understand a word in an IG caption. Anyway, I took my dog (a Finnish breed!) to the park the other day and a Finnish man walking his dog struck up conversation with me (in English). And it didn't even cross my mind to say a word in Finnish. Only as I walked back home did I think of a couple of things I could've said. Oh well. The 6 months I spent in Finland in 2006 definitely help. If I actually read the explanations about grammar etc. would help too. Oh well, I'm just learning as I go. Lots of repetition is almost as good. Oh, and learning a foreign language in another foreign language, e.g. learning Finnish in English, no matter how fluent one is in English, is extra weird: some concepts do not exist in English, but they do exist in my native tongue AND in Finnish. I'm telling myself my brain gets extra exercise that way.
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Post by psw on Nov 7, 2021 14:10:49 GMT -5
bb81 - "Oh, and learning a foreign language in another foreign language, e.g. learning Finnish in English, no matter how fluent one is in English, is extra weird: some concepts do not exist in English, but they do exist in my native tongue AND in Finnish. I'm telling myself my brain gets extra exercise that way." This reminds me of a conversation I had with my Israeli Hebrew teacher who also taught classes of native speakers of Russian, a language I know pretty well. There are also concepts absent from English that exist in both Hebrew and Russian. When my teacher noticed how quickly I understood one of these I told her that it was the same in Russian, which she hadn't known, but she had observed that her Russian students caught on quickly. (I actually took notes in Russian when it came up.) We had a very useful and informative discussion on this topic, and more generally on who made what kinds of mistakes in Hebrew.
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Post by vinnyd on Nov 7, 2021 16:14:59 GMT -5
I once had a book that came with records called Wir lernen polnisch sprechen. There was a long explanation about how to pronounce the Polish ł, along the lines of: "Say 'Moskau ist,' and the sound you make just before the i of 'ist' is the ł sound." I worked on it for a while before I realized they were just describing an English w sound.
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Post by psw on Nov 7, 2021 16:44:31 GMT -5
vinnyd - if this explanation was for German-speakers, wouldn't that have been a glottal? not a Polish ł at all to my ears.
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Post by vinnyd on Nov 7, 2021 17:33:44 GMT -5
I probably remember the explanation incorrectly. I do know that Moskau came into it.
How do you tag people here?
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 7, 2021 17:58:42 GMT -5
vinnyd just put an @ there like on Twitter Like I said earlier, I have no idea if Duolingo is genuinely helping me with language acquisition, but as video games go at least it's more constructive than shooting aliens or driving cars around.
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