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Double Dutch
It is just over 2 years now since I dipped my forked tongue in the Duolingo pool. So many languages and all for free. Such a change from the ancient old days when the only half decent language learning tool was Linguaphone which was ridiculously overpriced for what you got unless you were a cheapskate like me and got it from a library.
Linguaphone was pretty much the only language learning course with audio. Unless you were lucky enough to be living in the land of your target language or had native speakers as teachers, it was really the only option available for a very long time.
So it seems a bit mean to get all those freebies but to constantly ignore Duo’s endless offers of paid upgrades. But that is another feature of these times. There are simply so many other distractions and ways to spend time online and Duolingo is just one of them vying for my attention.
There is Twitter and my subscription to the Washington Post not to mention all those tempting online courses that I sign up for but never complete. Never mind completing. Most of the time I hardly even finish one week’s lectures if I even visit their website at all.
Not sure if it is old age or what but the serpent single-mindedness and powers of concentration are pretty much nonexistent these days.
Duolingo did manage to lure me in when they brought in the bright shiny Leaderboards some time back in March. Or what is more likely, I finally got around to updating the software and that’s when they first appeared on the screen.
I quickly moved from bronze, to silver and then gold. In order to do so, I went from a daily quota of 2 or 3 lessons per day right up to 6 or 7 especially when I discovered the dark art of testing out of a skill. At the lower levels this was free and at the higher it cost 20 points per jump. But that was cheap considering the return could be anything from 60 to 120 points and lots of red apples where only green ones used to be on the tree.
I got strategic and took to targeting only the high value fruit until one day I noticed that the score never went up by more than 20 points for each test.
I assumed it was some glitch until I heard through the grapevine that a whole bunch of folks were complaining about this new rule.
I was primarily there to learn stuff rather than to score points so had no great incentive to blitz my way through the branches of each tree except to avoid boredom and too much repetition.
Once the rules changed, I no longer bothered playing the game and just went back to the usual schedule with the odd extra lesson here and there just to avoid getting demoted.
Then one day I kept getting messages to do a lesson in order to activate the latest leaderboard. But no matter how many lessons I did, the little owl just kept on sleeping. (The Duolingo week seems to run from Monday until Sunday. In this bit of Oz the week starts at 8am on Monday morning to be precise)
Then on Thursday he finally woke up and I realised that only a short burst of extra effort would be required to finish in the top ten for the week since the late start had made it harder for the marathon runners to clock up their giant unassailable scores.
This happened twice so I found myself at the top of the tree in the Ruby league. But I soon learned that the 400 points that were sufficient to get in the door from the previous level were way short of what was needed not to get booted out. So I decided that this game was once again not worth the bother. So much so that last week when the difference between staying in Silver and getting tossed out was a mere 4 points, I just did not even bother to make the effort.
In the meantime, I have started on my latest project for the Goblin New Year. I had considered trying Indonesian in order to try a language that is supposed to be really easy but completely unrelated to any European language. So that would be a true test of the effectiveness of this new way of learning. But in the end I decided that it makes more sense to put that one on the long finger and do Dutch instead since I intend to visit Amsterdam late next year and it will be amusing to be able to snoop on conversations between my sister and her daughter without her knowing that I am listening.
It has been such a long long time since starting a language from scratch on Duolingo that I had forgotten just how easy it is to rack up the low hanging purple fruit and the piles of points that go with them.
With no effort at all I have ended up in the top ten of the bronze league and there I was going out of my way to get out of the game
Not lurking long enough to make too many judgements but it is a pleasant change to escape the whole male chauvinist piggery of Spanish where the male default is totally on steroids.
Such a pity because written Spanish looks so elegant and the spoken language sounds so musical while Dutch looks like vowel soup and sounds like a frog with laryngitis
While there are apparently 3 genders in Dutch, it seems that the male and female are so similar in every way that the only thing distinguishing them are the pronouns.
Unlike German and Russian which also have neuter, male and female grammatical genders but it invariably turns out that the male and neuter are almost identical and the female is the complete deviant. The Dutch on the other hand, have the male and female being almost identical and the neuter being completely different.
I really think that the plural should count as a gender in its own right since thankfully in all three languages there is no longer a need to indicate male or female in the plural pronouns or verb endings.
I suspect it makes a big difference to be familiar with both English and German. Dutch seems to be half way between them or rather two thirds of the way on the dial in the direction of English.
Wondering how long it will take before it starts getting sneaky and tricksy.
Linguaphone was pretty much the only language learning course with audio. Unless you were lucky enough to be living in the land of your target language or had native speakers as teachers, it was really the only option available for a very long time.
So it seems a bit mean to get all those freebies but to constantly ignore Duo’s endless offers of paid upgrades. But that is another feature of these times. There are simply so many other distractions and ways to spend time online and Duolingo is just one of them vying for my attention.
There is Twitter and my subscription to the Washington Post not to mention all those tempting online courses that I sign up for but never complete. Never mind completing. Most of the time I hardly even finish one week’s lectures if I even visit their website at all.
Not sure if it is old age or what but the serpent single-mindedness and powers of concentration are pretty much nonexistent these days.
Duolingo did manage to lure me in when they brought in the bright shiny Leaderboards some time back in March. Or what is more likely, I finally got around to updating the software and that’s when they first appeared on the screen.
I quickly moved from bronze, to silver and then gold. In order to do so, I went from a daily quota of 2 or 3 lessons per day right up to 6 or 7 especially when I discovered the dark art of testing out of a skill. At the lower levels this was free and at the higher it cost 20 points per jump. But that was cheap considering the return could be anything from 60 to 120 points and lots of red apples where only green ones used to be on the tree.
I got strategic and took to targeting only the high value fruit until one day I noticed that the score never went up by more than 20 points for each test.
I assumed it was some glitch until I heard through the grapevine that a whole bunch of folks were complaining about this new rule.
I was primarily there to learn stuff rather than to score points so had no great incentive to blitz my way through the branches of each tree except to avoid boredom and too much repetition.
Once the rules changed, I no longer bothered playing the game and just went back to the usual schedule with the odd extra lesson here and there just to avoid getting demoted.
Then one day I kept getting messages to do a lesson in order to activate the latest leaderboard. But no matter how many lessons I did, the little owl just kept on sleeping. (The Duolingo week seems to run from Monday until Sunday. In this bit of Oz the week starts at 8am on Monday morning to be precise)
Then on Thursday he finally woke up and I realised that only a short burst of extra effort would be required to finish in the top ten for the week since the late start had made it harder for the marathon runners to clock up their giant unassailable scores.
This happened twice so I found myself at the top of the tree in the Ruby league. But I soon learned that the 400 points that were sufficient to get in the door from the previous level were way short of what was needed not to get booted out. So I decided that this game was once again not worth the bother. So much so that last week when the difference between staying in Silver and getting tossed out was a mere 4 points, I just did not even bother to make the effort.
In the meantime, I have started on my latest project for the Goblin New Year. I had considered trying Indonesian in order to try a language that is supposed to be really easy but completely unrelated to any European language. So that would be a true test of the effectiveness of this new way of learning. But in the end I decided that it makes more sense to put that one on the long finger and do Dutch instead since I intend to visit Amsterdam late next year and it will be amusing to be able to snoop on conversations between my sister and her daughter without her knowing that I am listening.
It has been such a long long time since starting a language from scratch on Duolingo that I had forgotten just how easy it is to rack up the low hanging purple fruit and the piles of points that go with them.
With no effort at all I have ended up in the top ten of the bronze league and there I was going out of my way to get out of the game
Not lurking long enough to make too many judgements but it is a pleasant change to escape the whole male chauvinist piggery of Spanish where the male default is totally on steroids.
Such a pity because written Spanish looks so elegant and the spoken language sounds so musical while Dutch looks like vowel soup and sounds like a frog with laryngitis
While there are apparently 3 genders in Dutch, it seems that the male and female are so similar in every way that the only thing distinguishing them are the pronouns.
Unlike German and Russian which also have neuter, male and female grammatical genders but it invariably turns out that the male and neuter are almost identical and the female is the complete deviant. The Dutch on the other hand, have the male and female being almost identical and the neuter being completely different.
I really think that the plural should count as a gender in its own right since thankfully in all three languages there is no longer a need to indicate male or female in the plural pronouns or verb endings.
I suspect it makes a big difference to be familiar with both English and German. Dutch seems to be half way between them or rather two thirds of the way on the dial in the direction of English.
Wondering how long it will take before it starts getting sneaky and tricksy.