I have the worst fucking time with the Turkish DuoLingo. I usually use DuoLingo for other languages I know fairly well and just want to keep fresh; I could tell that i wasn't really grasping Turkish in that format. Specifically, I was having a hard time remembering the vocabulary, and DuoLingo is kind of shit at reinforcing individual bits of vocabulary. So I supplement DuoLingo with Memrise (the "official" Turkish course), and that seems to be going better.
Yeah. Also, sometimes you just want the bloody rules explained. It would be nice if it slipped that in. When I started learning English, they were using that "don't explain anything" philosophy... So we had words for "the person who speaks", "the person to whom you speak", "the person about whom we speak", which were puzzling me to no end until I learned (MONTHS LATER) that these words were simply translated to "je, tu, il". Like, are you trying to make language learning IMPOSSIBLE?
Ugh, yes. Computer DuoLingo has something like explanations or lessons before the exercises, but I find the computer DuoLingo exercises so tedious that I exclusively use the DuoLingo app, which has NO lessons/explanations whatsoever. (Never mind that often those explanations are . . . not the greatest.)
I also like Anki for vocabulary purposes, but then you would have to go through and manually create a flashcard deck, and ain't nobody got time for that. At least I don't right now.
So we had words for "the person who speaks", "the person to whom you speak", "the person about whom we speak", which were puzzling me to no end until I learned (MONTHS LATER) that these words were simply translated to "je, tu, il".
There have been a lot of times where I've explained some Swedish point or other to a fellow native English speaker just by saying, "Look, use honom whenever you would use him in English." or whatever and THERE GOES THE LIGHT BULB! Of course, we study Swedish in a blended classroom with easily a dozen different mother tongues
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I was (as frandroid knows) learning Russian for a couple of years, using DuoLingo to supplement learning in the classroom (and random online stuff, etc.)
In that specific context, I found it was super helpful. I could get the theory, etc. in class, then use DuoLingo not as a learning tool so much as a fun/easy practice tool.
So I didn't need to worry so much about the bizarre theory-explanations that were given (or to the extent that I did, I could use them to give me a different perspective/viewpoint on the theoretical stuff I'd already learned). I could just settle in and use it to give me my daily 1/2 hour / 100 XP of practice time.
Worked brilliantly for that.
Then later (September-November) I ended up wanting to learn Polish. Tried using DuoLingo for that but without the classes to complement it and provide a theoretical grounding, it was pretty hopeless. I was even in Poland (and so being semi-immersed) at the time, but nope. Completely useless. (I did learn some Polish, but that had everything to do with using it on a daily
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I'll check out memrise, thanks.
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I also like Anki for vocabulary purposes, but then you would have to go through and manually create a flashcard deck, and ain't nobody got time for that. At least I don't right now.
So we had words for "the person who speaks", "the person to whom you speak", "the person about whom we speak", which were puzzling me to no end until I learned (MONTHS LATER) that these words were simply translated to "je, tu, il".
There have been a lot of times where I've explained some Swedish point or other to a fellow native English speaker just by saying, "Look, use honom whenever you would use him in English." or whatever and THERE GOES THE LIGHT BULB! Of course, we study Swedish in a blended classroom with easily a dozen different mother tongues ( ... )
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In that specific context, I found it was super helpful. I could get the theory, etc. in class, then use DuoLingo not as a learning tool so much as a fun/easy practice tool.
So I didn't need to worry so much about the bizarre theory-explanations that were given (or to the extent that I did, I could use them to give me a different perspective/viewpoint on the theoretical stuff I'd already learned). I could just settle in and use it to give me my daily 1/2 hour / 100 XP of practice time.
Worked brilliantly for that.
Then later (September-November) I ended up wanting to learn Polish. Tried using DuoLingo for that but without the classes to complement it and provide a theoretical grounding, it was pretty hopeless. I was even in Poland (and so being semi-immersed) at the time, but nope. Completely useless. (I did learn some Polish, but that had everything to do with using it on a daily ( ... )
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Java."
LOL!
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