tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH!
“Courses” is a strong word for what Duolingo offers. It just shows you flashcards, but never explains grammar/syntax rules. Lingodeer is far superior.
Perdonally I’ve heard a ton of good things about Language Transfer despite not using it myself
Thank you for sharing this it looks great. They’re iOS app requires minimal permissions too which seems to be rare for language apps
their
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Thanks for the recommendation! Difficult to find genuine and good language apps these days that don’t cost to much money and or are riddled with ads and intrusive tracking.
I really noticed my Spanish improved after watching videos on Dreaming Spanish link
Seems like it’s just audio files. I’ll check it out tonight
Duolingo does have that function. It’s much more obvious on desktop web, but in the phone app, you tap the notebook icons to the right of the headings. I mean, they’re not necessarily excellent explanations, but they’re there.
They removed that feature, at least for Finnish.
They removed the comment section a few months ago too. There were some really excellent explanations in there!
You might say that feature is finnished
Lingodeer is a technical mess with popups, banners and lock or crown icons everywhere. There are situations where it just won’t let you continue to the next lesson and the flow inside the exercises is very janky. Turning off the animations helps a lot but it’s nowhere near the ease of use of Duolingo.
The problem with all these alternatives is that the language selection is extremely limited. You want to learn English, French, German, or Spanish? Great, there are a million options for you! But if you go a bit more niche like Finnish or Irish, your options are much more limited. Of course there are ways to learn those languages - and much better ways than Duolingo. But Duolingo’s strength is offering a bunch of them, for free, in one place.
Note that I’m not trying to defend Duolingo, but rather deploring the lack of alternatives.
I use Duolingo (and actually pay for it) and I agree 100% with this. The app is primarily about keeping you engaged and on the app. The method is by attempting to teach you a language.
Fascinating that Duolingo tries to teach Navajo. The language is incredibly tonal and with sounds not native to most languages. I imagine it’s incredibly difficult to teach through an online service
Idk how duolinguo works (at all), but if the app can play the sounds for you and judge on your pronunciation, that would be quite enough to do the job. If it can handle mandarin (idk if it can) than any tonal based language is fair game.
I would think any decent speech to text could do a decent job determining pronunciation, if there isn’t a dedicated thing for that… either it registers or it gets garble and you try again.
I almost found a way to get university credit for learning Klingon. My downfall was that the Klingon Language Institute was not an “accredited” learning institution. I wonder if that’s changed yet…
Try the Khan Academy next time.
KHAAAAAN!
Duolingo probably has an accreditation programme by now, considering most high schools use it.
But still no European Portuguese 😠
Prolly more people who want to learn elvish than European Portuguese. Oh, leaderboards
Last time I looked it still did a weird mix of American and European Spanish, too
It had me pick Latin American or Castilian Spanish when I started using Duolingo, I couldn’t tell you exactly how accurate it was though.
When was that? Last time I tried it was a couple of years ago.
As for the difference, outside of Spain the conjugation of Vosotros (you, plural) isn’t used, but speaking to strangers is much more formal. Also, there’s a lot of vocabulary differences which can be confusing for non-native speakers.
Good luck with your learning, it’s a great language :-)
As somebody who doesn’t naively speak Latin American Spanish but was exposed to it a lot growing up, the “th” sound for some words with “c” (like “gracias”) in Castilian Spanish really disturbs me. It sounds like everybody has a lisp.
It is a lisp, albeit on purpose … to further confuse things in parts of Spain with different languages the shared words don’t necessarily have that lisp!
About two years ago for me as well, they might have rolled it out shortly after you tried or maybe I was part of some A/B testing or something. But the setting seems to be saved because I’m never given exercises with vosotros in them.
¡Gracias! Vivo en California, así que hay mucha gente para practicar hablando conmigo, pero estoy tímido y practico solo con Duolingo por ahora.
Best thing would be to go to a Spanish speaking country for a holiday, once you’ve been forced to use it on strangers you’ll loose your language anxiety and it gets much easier (I live in Spain and work in Spanish, I’m not very good, but also no longer worried about muddling through).
Wtf is European Portuguese, Portugal is in Europe.
Wtf is British English, England is in Britain.
🇬🇧: English (Traditional)
🇺🇸: English (Simplified)
Not our fault the posh snobs wanted to sound different and the commoners copied them.
There’s brazilian Portuguese
Also courses for the language of the imaginary land of Finland.
I mean come on they call themselves Finnish.
Finnish, finish, finish line. It’s like they think we’re all stupid.
Removed by mod
High Valerian also doesn’t have all the ingredients to become an actual language. All I did was translate words in sentences into the language for the show, but Klingon, it is an actual language and has been developed enough that you can call it a language
Yeah, Klingon was deliberately designed to have object-verb-subject word order (among other unusual features) just to make it more alien.
I’m waiting for them to add Icelandic
Removed by mod
i wish they would spend more time fixing vietnamese instead of shit like this
Just get a cracked version of lingodeer
Lingodeer premium for life was 75% off this week. They provide me a lot of value so I don’t mind paying for it.
Language learning apps work only to give you an overview over a language, to look if a language is worth learning. You really wanna learn? Search for someone who’s mother tongue it is in your vicinity and contact him. You’ll be surprised, how much fun that’ll be, your friendly Klingon in the neighborhood, crashing your door in at 3 a.m., hellish drunk, just to show you his new Gagh recipe, or you’ll find yourself as a slave in the fictional world of an obese old creep. Learning new languages is awesome, right?
Still more native speakers than Navajo.
That’s what multiple genocides get you. A language rated as Vulnerable in UNESCO.
Still, there are about 170,000 people who speak Navajo, with about 8000 who only speak Navajo.
And there are only 2000 fluent speakers of Hawaiian, let’s go colonialism!
Also doesn’t help that Navajo is an INCREDIBLY divergent language compared to basically everything else, even other languages native to North America save those of related languages.
It’s probably as close to a natlang ithkuil as linguistic science may have ever discovered, so acquiring it non-natively is A TON of work.
Also I may be confusing it with another indigenous language but IIRC there are some Navajo nation communities in which teaching the language to outsiders is seen as a GRAVE offense.
You can guess that the course on Duolingo isn’t exactly regarded as on par with their French and Spanish courses. That and their attempt at Hawaiian and the ensuant backlash over how bad both were are partially responsible for why Duolingo has yet to expand into a significant number of new languages.
US: kills all the Navajo speakers
Also US: “Wow, there are so few Navajo speakers! We should use it as a secret military code!”
It wasn’t just Navajo. It was also encrypted/coded in Navajo to make it even more complicated on top of an already complex language. The code talkers were incredibly important to the war effort. The code was never cracked either. Makes me really proud of them for doing such a good (and dangerous) job.
Anyone know a good place to learn Farsi (Persian). Duolingo doesn’t have it yet, if ever
I used Mondly fully free a few years ago. It was good. I don’t know how it is now.
I also used Anki flashcards.
Does anyone happen to know of an app or site that is good for learning Tagalog?
The app Tandem (Language Exchange) has Tagalog as an option! It’s a pretty cool app. It connects you to native speakers so that they can have conversations with you and help you learn your chosen language.
Thanks. I will check it out.
Seconding
I’m still hoping for a course in Mando’a.
I’m unsure if there’s enough words for it to count as a full spoken language yet.
That’s too bad. From some.of.the books it seemed to be pretty close.
Can I put it on my resume?
I saw a resume with just ‘Military Spouse: 27 Years’ on it.
You can put whatever you want.
Let me know when they get Phyrexian
