2018 is the year that I’m learning all the new languages. Literally, all of them, with the exception of Japanese, Turkish and Greek. I’m saving those for 2019.
I’ve been using Duolingo because it’s convenient and easy and because they give me little yellow stars that tell me I’ve hit almost all of the learning goals they’ve set out for me. There’s a web app that I use to do a few drills while I’m at work. Mostly, however, I use the mobile app. The exercises are a bit different on each platform; the web version has a great text explanation of the lessons that is incredibly useful. I haven’t found the same info on the mobile app yet.
I thought it’d be fun to write short updates on my struggles and things I’ve learned as I go, so hopefully this will be the first in a series of posts about language learning.
I’m currently ‘studying’ Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), French, German and Russian on Duolingo. I already know Spanish and Portuguese — I’ve tested out of all of the Spanish lessons and am about 15 lessons away from the end of the Portuguese track.
I do at least 50xp worth of Mandarin a day, and then try to hit up French every other day, German every day if possible, and Russian when I’m feeling ambitious. Mandarin is my main focus, German is the hardest, French is pretty easy. The Russian lessons on Duolingo, at least the early ones, are so incredibly difficult I find that I have to spend an incredibly huge amount of time drilling in order to remember anything. Maybe it gets easier. I’ll keep you posted.
Mandarin
The Mandarin is really fun, but I’m finding that the Duolingo drilling isn’t giving me enough practice on associating the pinyin with the characters. I can read characters into English pretty well, and have a general idea of what characters I need to make a sentence. Not knowing the pinyin is problematic, however, when I want to type out messages or leave a comment about a question in the app. Android has an amazing Pinyin keyboard — you type in the pinyin and it pulls up all the characters that are associated with that ‘sound’. But! Since I don’t remember the pinyin, I can’t write very well.
I recently bought a book of character / pinyin flash cards and have punched out about 75 different characters that I’ve seen so far but haven’t actually spent any time going through them yet. There’s a total of 2,000+ character cards in the book I’ve got; 75 is about 3%!
Duolingo recently released a flashcard app called Tinycards that seems like it’s built to specifically address this weakness in Duolingo itself — the difficulty of drilling. It’s got all the languages I’m studying except for Chinese, which is still in beta, so I guess it’ll be paper cards for now.
I thought I was doing really well on Mandarin until I realized that most pinyin sounds have more than one character. And that some characters have more than one pinyin ‘sound’. Or if not the exact same character, at least one very close to it. With a few weeks of flashcard drilling though, I’m confident I can sort this all out.
Honestly, I find the grammar and phrasing of Mandarin the most straight forward out of all the languages I’m currently studying. Not having verb endings or articles that change or hidden silent letters is a real treat.
My friend Maggie helped me figure pick out characters for my name in Mandarin: 丽莎
Russian
Somehow, the beginning Russian lessons on Duolingo are incredibly difficult. I don’t know the alphabet yet, but the beginning Russian lessons expected me to be able to spell words like ‘bicycle’, with the Russsian keyboard. I must have wasted a good ten minutes trying to remember how it was spelled while trying to find the right letters on the Russian keyboard. It was murderously hard, and to add insult to injury, I didn’t feel like I was learning anything other than Duolingo sucks at teaching you the Russian alphabet.
I ended up buying a Learn Russian book just to figure out what the different characters of the alphabet were, and had more fun with the book than with Duolingo. I’ve been able to go back since and had more success with the Russian lessons, but the lessons still feel like they’re throwing me off into the deep end with regards to both vocab and assumed familiarity with the alphabet.
The book, on the other hand, is way more fun. So why do I not just use the book? The nice thing about Duolingo is the pronunciations. The double reinforcement of seeing the phrase written plus hearing how it’s pronounced is incredibly useful. Hopefully it’ll get better, but for now I’m finding it useful to jump between Duo and the book I bought.
Using the book, I figured out how to write my name in Cyrillic: Лиса.
German
German vocab and phrasing aren’t too exceptionally difficult, but the endings have been an absolute and complete nightmare. I’m really struggling to figure out the rules here and the Duolingo lessons aren’t really helping. I can’t imagine figuring this out without some outside studying or drilling. Duolingo’s lessons have been absolutely useless in terms of helping me figure out what the rules are around when a thing ends with an ‘s’ verses an ‘e’ versus an ‘er’. It seems to literally come down to memorizing a noun’s gender. I tried Tinycards but it’s just not easy enough to flip through them quickly — plus typing on a mobile phone is really miserable. I get the feeling I’m going to end up making actual paper flashcards for these.
French
French is so similar to Portuguese and Spanish that I’m really just using Duolingo for grammar and vocab — which it’s incredibly good at. The only thing that I’ve really struggled with up to now is how to phrase questions, but I think I’ve mostly figured out what’s going on here. In French, you’re very polite when you ask questions, so they’re usually done in the phrasing of ‘Is it that you would like pie?’ or ‘What is it that you are doing?’.
In fact, learning the ‘phrasing’ of how you say a thing in a language is, I would argue, one of the biggest parts of figuring it out how to sound ‘natural’. In Mandarin, when you’re talking about when something happened, you typically place the ‘timing’ at the front of the phrase. For example, ‘I went to the supermarket yesterday’ would, in Mandarin, be phrased as ‘yesterday I go to supermarket’. Or ‘My younger sister eats lunch every day’, would be ‘every day lunch I of younger sister eats’. (I’m not totally certain where lunch goes in this, but I think it usually goes before the subject.) Once you’ve got the phrasing nailed down, it’s simply a matter of remembering what characters or words to use!
Ok that’s all I’ve got for today.
à bientôt!
