neuer Mann.

Klingon should be on the poll.

Added you biscuitman. pv4, sent you a pm on facey with my username. Add me on there. Anyone else into learning some shit and competing, get the app and send me your username

You've inspired me. No Chinese on the app so I'm doing Spanish. Username is mcjules520.

Yo soy un hombre :cool:

Edited by mcjules: 10/3/2016 08:09:51 PM

What a thread

Added you. My username starts with S,

Okay lads, I created a DuoLingo "classroom". It helps us all track our scores and lets us see each others so we can compare.

Here's the link.

It'll be in Spanish because most people seem interested/familiar with that.

Edited by Draupnir: 10/3/2016 09:18:15 PM

I've already got the app but just got really slack and stopped :lol:

I can't speak highly enough for Asian languages, especially if you've got some kind of passion. For practical reasons, Chinese has to be one of the best languages to learn. My father tried to make me learn it.

When he was at uni, he did Japanese. He would also spend his holidays in Japan, working. He got basically "fluent". We actually lived there for about 4 years when I was small. He's so good at it that he once called a Japanese restaurant before we ate there to ask about the menu (he wanted to establish that it was owned by Japanese people). When we went there for dinner the woman who owned it was staggered that he was Australian. She had assumed he was a Japanese man from the nicest parts of Tokyo.

But the thing is he got a job in a mining company as the dude who negotiates deals. You see, in the late 80s and early 90s, Japan was such a huge economic superpower (it's still significant enough). Our mining companies were trading a lot with Japanese companies.

But back then you needed to speak Japanese fluently not just for communicative purposes. As somebody above has said, only if you understand the language can you understand general trends in the psychology of the people. Only if you understand Japanese language can you understand the way Japanese people think. And this ability is critical to successful trade with Japanese companies.

So speaking Japanese is what got him into his job. He does commerce kind of stuff. But he doesn't have a commerce degree. Most of his colleagues are geologists, engineers or have commerce degrees. His pathway was rather different and it was down to Japanese.

Now they deal every bit as much with Chinese companies (probably more). But speaking Japanese opened that door at the time.

Chinese would be the most useful now, apparently.

Cbf checking, and haven't had the chance to yet..

Does duolingo work offline?

You can do your courses offline, but learning a new language or other fun things need to be online.

I'll probably just do my courses then wifi any updates I want to do

When i was using Duolingo years ago i found that it was really light on the grammar side of things. It was great for learning vocab, but when it came to constructing your own sentences it seemed to let me down and i would have to go out of my way to read comments on cases and sentence structure. Might give it a crack again now



Strange how they have literally made up languages in Esperanto, plus Irish for some reason yet they dont have the largest language on the planet

EDIT: Anyone who is doing German add me on Duolingo if you're not chicken. I'm level 6 already, just sayin:-"
ScotchandCoke.

Edited by scotch&coke: 11/3/2016 10:46:07 AM

I think it's because of the learning method, particularly having to understand characters and tones. They could probably start with pinyin like most chinese courses do but I think the structure of lessons would still need to change a bit.

Up to 13% fluency in Spanish already, obviously having a very good understanding of Italian is helping a lot. Because they never directly teach you the grammar rules (unless you click to get an explanation), it'd be interesting to compare how proficient a person that's never done another romance language is at this stage compared to someone that has in terms of constructing your own sentences.

I did a bit of a google and found this:

http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Chinese

Duolingo sounds good, might have to brush up on my German! It's been years

10% of the Spanish course is still a few million. They took the time and effort to create a course for an entirely made up language which only has a few hundred thousand learners. Chinese isn't that difficult to begin with, the grammar is incredibly simple and in some cases extremely similar to english. The characters are the only hard part and that simply takes a bit of commitment to learn

Yeah I think the demand part is a bit disingenuous, particularly comparing it to spanish which is widely prevalent in the US due to it's neighbours.

I agree that most of the grammar of chinese is simple compared to euro languages but there are some complicated things there too. I can see why characters and tones might require a lot more custom development to integrate into their app over simply inputting a new vocab for languages like esperanto or irish.

I've always wanted to learn Korean or Japanese so I can accompany my hellfire with some class banter

:lol: Draup what is the method to your madness? Your timeline is like:
- levelled up to level 3 in Spanish
- learnt a new skill in Norwegian
- learnt a new skill in German
- levelled up to level 5 in German
- learnt a new skill in French
- learnt a new skill in Spanish
- levelled up in klingon

Edited by MrBrisbane: 17/3/2016 10:15:08 PM

Draupnir, check your inbox. PM'd you :d

Done!

German for the last 8 years including 7 living in Germany. Hannover had a few good points one being that it's considered a place with the clearest standard German.

The regional dialects are a bit fun but as an ESL teacher I practice what I preach and try to get it right. Not a perfectionist but it should be spoken as proper as possible.
I can understand some Dutch. I wouldn't like to learn any other languages really. A few phrases for a holiday would be fine.

How's everyone going with duolingo?

I'm loving it. Still hitting my daily goal, although it's set at around 10mins a day or thereabouts.

Things are starting to get tricky at times. But enjoying it. Loving the comment section too

Happy to share I learnt German by listening to football radio. I also read about things I was interested in. I use my environment and ask myself if I know the name of everything. Once I've just said something in English, I wonder how would I communicate that in German.

Memrise is a popular site for vocabulary.

English is too hard, the grammar doesn't make sense.

I'm not sure whether it's worth speaking it anymore. I don't know why I bother.

Duolingo lol. Somehome i became fluent in 3 weeks. Not to mention there were a few responses that were not permitted.

I haven't been keeping up at all.

Sorry :cry: