part 363 paper snowflakes

[aphanon_meme]

It's... December! I can't believe it's almost the end of another year. Time is weird. Anyway! There's been a lot of neato Hetalia news in the meantime! That game (that I can't get working but will look at videos and screencaps of so I can play vicariously)! The image of the first doll! The musical promo images!! What are you most excited for?

Enjoy part 363!

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Comments

ITT: Duolingo

[(Anonymous)]

Duolingo just released the Welsh course in Beta a few days ago! Are you interested?!

Also let's just chat it up about Duolingo in general - what courses are you taking? Weirdest sentence it has made you translate? Leery about duolingo but self-studying (or class-studying) a language? Tell Meme!

Re: ITT: Duolingo

[(Anonymous)]

I just learned how to say "I'm a dragon" in Welsh so this is nice.

I've signed up for a lot of courses, but my main ones are Turkish & Spanish. I tried to do French, like earnestly tried but gave up in frustration because I couldn't hear the plurals and it kept counting me as wrong.

I got a sentence yesterday like "The men eat salt" which is pretty ew. I also got "You know nothing, Jon Snow" once, except I'm pretty sure they translated the "snow" part into the language.

Re: ITT: Duolingo

[yuuago]

It doesn't run very well on my computer, so I'm very ehhhh about it.

After hearing that the audio in the Norwegian version of it is really bad/pronounced incorrectly, I decided to turn the audio off. Most of what I do with norsk is text-only, anyway.

Made some vague attempts at French but... hmm, I don't know.

The Norwegian version of it is weirdly obsessed with people eating turtles.

Re: ITT: Duolingo

[desuraven]

Oh Duolingo, I'm always of two minds about Duolingo.

Like, when I first decided to try learning German on a whim I used it and I progressed pretty far. It's well designed as far as Grammar-Translation Method language learning goes (which, fun fact: used to be called the Prussian Method before it got a more PC name) and I know lots of people who use it to great success, especially for minority languages it's a great tool. I have a friend who moved to Ireland to live with his bf and he used it to study Irish in passing, which would have been damn hard to do casually before Duolingo because it's taught so poorly in Ireland itself let alone to non-Irish.

Buuuuuut, you know the internet adage "if it's free then you're the product"? Yeah, well, Duolingo was created by the guy who created Recaptcha, and just like Recaptcha is used to crowdsource book digitization for free, Duolingo is used to crowdsource translation for free. Most of it is harmless, like the sentences in the lessons by and large come from wikipedia and other places that no one would ever pay to get translated, which is great for improving access to information on the internet especially those that go English -> Something Else. But at least when Duolingo launched it lauded CNN Español as one of its biggest customers, and as a professional translator that scares the shit out of me.

All that being said I do usually recommend it to people and I keep contemplating going back to it now that I'm taking proper German classes or maybe even start brushing up on my now non-existent Spanish. But I'm fairly lazy and I mostly stopped because I just fell out of habit, not over my moral objections lol

As to your actual question anon, lol sorry for the tl;dr, super excited about Welsh because I hope it does well like Irish has and maybe I'll peek at it to torture Austria-mun with baby sentences. Currently signed up for German but haven't really touched it in over a year.

Re: ITT: Duolingo

[reaperangelique]

oh...............i could use a brush up.........my level of non-fluency is probably worse than a baby anyway

i pity people trying to learn it from scratch