itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

Wie wil er een potlood?

My kid is now doing duolingo too. Il y aura compétition entre nous deux. Elle gagnera, j'en suis sûr.

Probeerde je mij iets met jouw dans te vertellen?

I think it accepted that, although it’s preferred answer seems to be:

Probeerde je mij iets te vertellen met jouw dans?

The first sentence is in the “correct” hierarchical word order, and sounds slightly stilted, the second one is more conversational.

tbh, that stiltedness also stems from the needlessly emphatic “jouw” where “je” would have been preferable (in both sentences).

Urgh I even have a problem with word order in dutch and it's my first language! And I really need to say gewoonte (habit) instead of gewente which is RONG (and dialect).

Wonder if they use dutch pronounciation in duolingo (as opposed to flemish, which sounds much softer).

I'm at ten days now. Getting progressively harder. But j'aime apprendre le francais. C'est pour utiliser dans ma profession.

Thanks. Yeah, seems like the first word order is more, um, Germanic.

Actually just found this in German grammar book

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES sometimes follow the verbal bracket, especially in colloquial speech.

So same thing, I guess

I’m learning Japanese, which is unsurprisingly hard though I’m making progress! I’m actually grateful for the repetition so I can get the sounds and characters down.

I also have Irish, but more to improve on what I already have? The Irish woman on there is from Donegal though and her spoken Irish throws me :(

Does it have kana and kanji??? Jealous. Nihongo wa muzukashii deshoo neeee

Not sure yet but assume so. Think they start you with hiragana so you can understand the importance of syllables.

Can you switch between languages? Want to brush up my japanese too.

You definitely can - have three I switch between.

Hurrah. Nihongo benkyo shimasu!

Ganbatte kudasai! (That's 50% of my Japanese knowledge right there, so any excuse to post it)

Is the Irish course Donegal dialect content-wise or is it just the audio accent? Someone complained in the comments that it sounded like an English person speaking Irish and I wasn't sure if that should bother me, as an English person hoping to... well, not speak Irish so much as look at Irish words and make a decent guess at pronunciation. I wish there were audio clips for more of the words.

(I also wish Duolingo had more guidance about accents and regional variations in general. If I learn Portuguese via the Duolingo course with a Brazilian flag on, would I then sound weird in Portugal? And so on.)

I don't seem to get on very well with learning whole new languages on DL, though. I've abandoned about 5 of them. Still plodding away at German, and I think it's good-ish practice for genders and word order and maybe vocab too, but not sure how much I'm actually learning.

Other people have complained about the Irish content previously not accepting other ways of writing things, so I’m unsure. I’m not sure about how they teach it because sometimes they ask you to write something and I know that writing this word will now have a h as opposed to the standard spelling, but then you’ll get it wrong if you’re a beginner because you don’t know that.

Arigato!

De hoeveelste is het vandaag?

De vijfentwintigste. Waarom vraag je?

Because I just learned the word “hoeveelste.”

I love that word! Wonder how you pronounce it.

I lost my ten day streak due to being sick. J'avais mal à la tête. Atama itai da yoooo

Dommage!

Some Dutch things I recently came across that I found interesting or amusing, not through Duolingo:
The words
paalwoning and
maggiblokje®

The word order in the sentence
Ik ben de stad in gefietst.

Interesting French locution I just came across in Le Petit Robert:
Inconnu au bataillon

Another fun Dutch word:
Pinksteren

I’m learning Japanese, which is unsurprisingly hard though I’m making progress! I’m actually grateful for the repetition so I can get the sounds and characters down.

Duolingo is a bad place to start learning Japanese and I don’t think the course is very much cop. LingoDeer isn’t a bad place to start though. You need more explanation of the mechanics of the language and LingoDeer has that. There are however a bunch of tools that are way worse than Duolingo; tools that try to shoehorn Japanese into a European language template - so bad.

I agree with Ed.

Started doing Japanese w memrise (while continuing w duolingo). It's meh but better than nothing.

Het is zo helder als koffiedik.

Het is zo helder als koffiedik.

No, dict.cc

More useful coffee-related turn of phrase:

http://www.projects.science.uu.nl/ubv/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/koffie.jpg

https://static.mijnwebwinkel.nl/winkel/hello-bird/image/cache/full/789e31ffe6d4af0459320960ee774375f9192875.jpg

that one is advanced level lol

voor gevorderden

I don’t even know how to interpret the first word.

it’s supposed to be “plat Amsterdams”. The first word is actually three words: “waar is m’n...”

Heel erg gedankt!

Aargh, heel erg bedankt

niks te danken!

Bakkie! Haha. We'd never use that word in the Flanders.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSuxJBbswMfWqKE0Tm7RLdkUWsuWvkihVd26k9XSoaFIc8UqlQ

Duolingo is a bad place to start learning Japanese and I don’t think the course is very much cop. LingoDeer isn’t a bad place to start though. You need more explanation of the mechanics of the language and LingoDeer has that. There are however a bunch of tools that are way worse than Duolingo; tools that try to shoehorn Japanese into a European language template - so bad.

Thanks for the tip - I’ll check it out. I’m a bit eh over it atm - not sure of the usefulness of repeating the same eight or nine words over and over for AN ENTIRE MODULE.

Russian is killing me, but that’s really my fault for not revising the alphabet before I started.

The fact I'm studying french from english is weird. Like I need to first translate to dutch. But I'm loving it.

Just found another meaning for “bakkie” - “radiozendapparatuur”

translated as “rig” in English.

Also a third meaning, “aanhangwagentje” or “trailer” in English.

Oh, it seems the second meaning is a CB radio.

Bakkie doesn't feel like it's Algemeen Nederlands (official dutch). Certainly not in Belgium. We would say "bakje" (-je means small). Don't take my word for it though. Lol

“Bakje” is the diminuitive for the word “bak” in Standard Dutch, “bakkie” originates from the (influential) West Netherlands dialect. In the South of the Netherlands and in Flanders the most common dialect equivalent would be “bakske”.

“Bak” is used in many different (idiomatic) ways, most of them related to the core meaning of “(usually rectangular) container”.

This is a fun (and I’m sure not nearly exhaustive) map about the local variants of “kopje/bakje koffie”:

https://www.mijnwoordenboek.nl/dialect-vertaler.php?woord=kopje%20koffie

(an *interactive* map, no less)

Well, there's even a difference between East-, West-Flanders and Antwerp. Bakske is sth we'd rarely if ever use here (in the West-Flanders).