Language

Language

2023 – Language Learning and A Five Year Duolingo Streak

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I’ve posted a few times on this blog, sometimes in passing about my language learning goals. How language has always been interesting, but then, I feel like I find EVERYTHING at least somewhat interesting, which is kind of a curse. In 2023, I vowed to become, not fluent, but at least, “pretty good” with at least two other languages by 2030. My New Decade’s Resolution, among a few other (I have not learned any piano yet).

Duo does Year in Review deals, like a lot of apps. Here’s mine.

I’ve actually been super slacking on my learning this year, sometimes barely doing one lesson each day. This has become even more apparent because my Aunt and Uncle recently started using Duo and we became, whatever Duolingo Friends would be called. My uncle made like 2x my yearly total XP within a few months. Granted, they are both retired and thus have more time to learn. Also they both travel, they recently took a trip to Europe, which I am pretty sure inspired their learning.

At least I still have them beat for the streak, because that one increases at the same rate for everyone. Technically by the end of the year I was at a 1826 day streak.

Exactly 5 years.

I’ve primarily been learning Spanish in those 5 years, and the middle half of this last year, though Duo keeps changing the tree layout (it’s been like 3 layouts since I started) and it’s a little disenfranchising when it happens because it feels like I’m losing progress. I actually have an achievement for getting level 1 nodes in an entire tree. But that was like 2 revisions ago when each note had 5 levels to it. The current tree is literally a path with no choices, which sucks because I always would skip around the pain in the ass verb crap en Español.

I started off the year still on my Norwegian kick. I’m less excited about that one these days, mostly because it’s less practical in a lot of ways.

For the last month or so, I’ve picked up my third choice to learn with Duo, Japanese. I’ve actually been enjoying learning again, so it was a good course. I’m not super sure Duo is the best choice for a beginner to learn Japanese with, some of the methods don’t feel like they are very clear on some thing, but fortunately for me, I took Japanese in High School. While I don’t remember a lot of it, but it feels like “riding a bike.”

It’s all very familiar, and I breezed through a lot of the “learn the Hiragana page.”

I don’t only learn using Duo, but it’s the main conduit. For Spanish I’ve read through some books in Spanish, and occasionally watch movies in Spanish. I’m still not great at the hearing part, but I’m pretty good at the reading part. Case and point a bit, on New Years Ever, I was poking around on streaming looking for some New Years shows, and Hulu had a stream from New York going. The part I caught was doing a ball drop for the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and was almost entirely in Spanish. With the closed captioning on, I could read and understand the majority of what was going on. Which was fun.

Anyway, I don’t plan to drop Duo anytime soon, and I have more than the normal number of Streak Freezes because it occasionally gives you bonus freezes, if I get caught up and can’t learn. I’ll probably do most of 2024 in Japanese over Spanish though, I kind of feel like I’ve plateaued there for a bit.

Language

One Year of Duolingo

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So, I have just reached a 1 year, 365 day streak, on Duolingo. Technically, it’s been a little longer than that I think, because I believe I broke some short, earlier streaks. I’ve also, occasionally, used a Streak Freeze item, which you can use to skip a day. Still, the point is, I have effectively used Duolingo, for 5-15+ minutes, each day, to learn a foreign language.

The vast majority of this time has been spent learning Spanish. I very briefly toyed with the idea of doing Japanese at the same time, but never bothered to get past the first set of challenges. I took 4 years of Japanese (maybe it was 3, I think it was 4), in High School. I still know the general idea of Japanese, but I am rusty enough that I couldn’t really understand it with any speed without some work. More recently, I have also started doing a little bit of the Norwegian tree, along side the Spanish.

Surprisingly, Norwegian is closer to English than Spanish. I guess if you look up some actual language relational trees, both English and Norwegian are on the same larger branch, and Spanish is on a seperate branch.

So the question is, do I feel like I’ve learned anything? I would say, yes. Early on I was doing a bit of research on what it means to “know” a language, and it’s essentially 4 parts. Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening. My weakest area would definitely be speaking. I seriously doubt I could speak Spanish well at all to anyone beyond some basic stuff. Part of this is because I don’t exactly have any way to really practice speaking Spanish to anyone.

“Always it’s sunny” versus
“It’s always sunny”

I would say listening is probably my second weakest area, but more because I’ve found that natural Spanish speakers, talk very quickly. I sometimes will run a Spanish TV channel or Spanish HBO in the background while doing other things and I can sort of pick out words I know, but they get jumbled among words I don’t know.

Writing is a little easier. My problem with writing is that I still get messed up on the tenses or whatever they are called for the verbs. Eating, eaten, will eat, he eats, I eat, that sort of thing. I still get kind of lost on which one to use where. I imagine I could get the idea across, but it would come off as broken Spanish.

Lastly is reading. I feel fairly confident in the reading department, at least if I know the vocabulary being used. Part of this is because I can get the idea of things like eating and eat and eats, using context clues. Como, Comer, comes, all just become “something to do with eating”.

The app itself overall, does an alright job, but it’s not perfect. It does a really good job of pushing memorization of the same handful of phrases, but it’s not so great at encouraging the free forming of sentences. I’m not sure that would even be possible though, since the App isn’t going ot be able to effectively evaluate open ended questions.

In a previous exercise, “Preferred food” was wrong, even though favorite and preferred are synonyms and obviously “Preferida” is the same root of “Preferred”.

I also wish there was a way to just do the matching mode with words learned so far. Especially with verbs. Like give me all the variations of “eat” and let me match them up, so maybe I can get a better handle on which is which. There is a separate app that sort of does this, but the format is a little different and it doesn’t directly sync to the main app.

It also gets a little less literal with it’s translations that I like. I have seen other people comment on this a bit on the Duolingo forums, and there are arguments for both ways. Some people will argue that making the translation more natural English is better, because it gets the point across more. I would argue it makes for poor learning, and encourages memorizing phrases instead of actually learning translations. One common one is with words like “Always” and “Never”. You may get the phrase, “He is always happy”, which in Spanish would be, “El siempre esta feliz.” Except it’s not, not directly, in English, “El siempre esta feliz”, is “He always is happy”. The placement of “always” in the English version is valid both ways, though it would be more common to say “is always” than “always is”. I feel like if Duolingo emphasized the “Always is” translation, it would better emphasize how the sentence structure works in Spanish. Since spanish is “siempre esta”.

Another synonym issue with plate and dish.

Another way more common example of this is the omission of “the”. A lot of the Spanish uses “la/el” in the sentence. “Me gusta la escuela”, which duo translates to “I like school”, even though it’s more literally, “I like the school”. Now, granted, I am learning Spanish, and it may in fact be perfectly valid to just say “Me gusta escuela”, except Duolingo, in the app, would mark that incorrect, for missing the “la”. These little inconsistencies drive me nuts and frankly, are probably one of the biggest reason I miss some of the questions. It also does make a difference int he long run, since “I like school” and “I like the school”, are arguably completely different phrases. One can like going to school and learning (I like school), or one can like a particular school (I like the school).

Anyway, I can deal with the little weirdness, but there are times when it’s annoying, it also feels a little inconsistent on it’s enforcement as well.

I plan to keep going on my learning expedition. I have been also doing a bit of LingoDeer Spanish, for a fresh perspective and methodology. I have a couple of Audiobooks for learning Spanish that I got in a Humble Bundle a while back I want to listen to. I hope to reach at least a mild level of competency in Spanish, and maybe eventually some other languages as well, eventually. I don’t have any particular reason for it, other than I have always liked the idea of learning other languages and, in general, I enjoy learning new things.