Duolingo

[Hokuspokus]

I (re)learn French with Duolingo for some days now. It's great fun and it works well.

Out of curiosity I started Polish and Italian. I wanted to see if I could learn a language out of English and not my native German. There are only few language courses out of German. Even though I don't speak it and never tried to learn it I'm in a way familiar with Italian, having learned French and a bit of Latin, listing to Italian Opera all day and reading the menu in the restaurant. That might work well once I'm through with French.

Polish is completely unfamiliar to me. I know not one word, never heard it spoke (not consciously) and never learned another Slavic language. This is going to be hard! Duolingo uses the same phrases for every language course. Even in the first 3 lessons (that's about 15 -30 min learning time) you come across very difficult words, 5 unknown letters and declination without much explanation. Would have been better if they created the first lessons to introduce the specialities of the Polish language one at the time. I don't think I can learn Polish from Duolingo alone. Not even the basics.

Learning from English instead of German seems quite doable.

[glennobrien]

Sounds much like my story, just replace Portuguese with Italian.

Didn't you have problems with your language sounding like "portuńol" though? I know I spoke and wrote "itańol" at some point, which was the main reason why decided to quit Spanish (and I'm still figuring out how to come back to it without having those mixed up again...).

Portuñol/Portunhol (Portuguese and Spanish) and Cocoliche/Lunfardo (Italian and Spanish) are examples of what is known as "interlanguage".

[SonOfTheExiles]

I was taught a bit of Russian by an pre-1991 immigrant from the USSR to Australia. While I managed to get my head around the declensions, I never could get a feel for the perfective/imperfective verb system.

SOTE

[Piotrek81]

I never could get a feel for the perfective/imperfective verb system.

Yeah, I heard that this is the greatest problem. (In Polish we've got verb aspects too).

[SonOfTheExiles]

About six months since this topic was active, so ... how are everyone's language studies progressing?

They do say that you are really getting a handle on a second language when you start to dream in it.

Not quite an L.O.T.E., but ... I can remember at Uni, back in 1983, programming in Pascal by day, and dreaming in it at night. That was a fairly freaky experience.

SOTE

[Piotrek81]

I registered a week ago and I've kept my streak running since then. Today is the 8th day
I would like to see more exercises testing grammar (e.g noun gender, which is an important thing in German), but I like it nevertheless. But then, I don't have great expectations after all that I've heard about DL.

[SonOfTheExiles]

Under the influence of the Danelaw, English lost most of its inflections. I'm given to understand that Lithuanian has retained them the most.

SOTE

[Piotrek81]

I had to learn the grammar of Old English at the uni and I think it was comparable in complexity to German.
As for Lithuanian, I also read that they kept a massive numer of inflections.

[aerikbjornsson]

I have used DuoLingo for several languages, although I've only completed the Norwegian and German courses. Through Duo (also films and music), I am nearly bilingual in Norwegian when it comes to reading and writing, but still only around B1 or B2 level speaking.

Jeg har brukt DuoLingo for flere språker, men jeg har bare fullført norske og tyske kurs. Med Duo (også filmer og musikk), jeg er nær tospråklig i norsk når det kommer til lesing og skriving, men bare B1 or B2 snakker. (my grammar is probably still not perfect )

[Piotrek81]

I added Spanish to my DL. It's time to brush up what I neglected.