ME: I took three years of Spanish. I grew up in Los Angeles. Could you please just teach me some more nouns and help me with the subjunctivo?
DUOLINGO: You didn’t know this one phrase that was used exclusively in one part of Caracas 40 years ago, so no. Back to “donde está la biblioteca” for you!
DUOLINGO: You didn’t know this one phrase that was used exclusively in one part of Caracas 40 years ago, so no. Back to “donde está la biblioteca” for you!
Comments
We got to Madrid and met up with an old friend whose Spanish and teaches languages, he can speak a ridiculous amount of them.
Laura tried out some of what she learned with him.
Alex laughed so hard, saying her language was like 18th century Spanish
But I had the exact same problem there, where I'm like ¿Cual es la diferencia de ojalá y espero? And it's like "perro means dog!" 😂😂😂
However it adds a layer of "well, i'll have to go learn how to ACTUALLY pronounce that later..."
And we never got a clear picture of when the hell we use “-áis.”
But Duolingo uses 3rd-person for both 2nd- and 3rd-person plural forms.
Pretty sure it's a regional difference.
https://youtu.be/mV9q_KdtQfc?feature=shared
Es un bigote grande, perro, manteca
Decades later, I meet someone from PR and I can understand perfectly. My professor taught his PR dialect but didn't tell us how different it was. Completely.
PfuckingR 🇵🇷
So what you’re saying is you’ll never be hip enough for Duolingo, then
It’s a “game” first model, learning is secondary
I'm deleting the app as soon as I lose my streak, but stubbornness prevents me from just letting it lapse.
Also, watching/reading things in the language can help, too.
Rosetta Stone is quite good, but expensive.
Me: most of my immediate family is dead and I graduated school 15 years ago.
¿Donde esta la playa nudista?
Estoy muy borracho y me quiero morir.
https://www.google.com/search?q=spanish+grammar+cheat+sheet&client=safari&sca_esv=8ee07bb068160570&hl=en-us&source=univ&udm=28&ved=1t:6869&ictx=111&biw=393&bih=741&dpr=3
By the end I could read parts of Don Quixote, but I’d fumble words in a supermarket.
To this day I couldn’t tell someone what my full time job entails in Spanish.
I’m a technologist and don’t know even basic IT terms beyond “computadora”
I googled a few real quick and I would think they were someone who didn’t know the language just guessing the Spanish words e.g. base de datos is database.😂
Computer is just “math doer”
Science is just “understanding”
You’re ready to conquer the subjunctivo, but Duolingo’s like,
“Nope, you missed that niche Caracas phrase. Back to square one!”
Classic. Keep at it, though—the biblioteca might just hold all the answers. 😉📚
It’s super cheap and is based on the work of linguist Stephen Krashen (comprehensible input).
It’s also luckily the EASIEST way.
Do you really need a victory bell every time you get something right? 🫨
If you’re really serious about learning a language, do yourself a favor and invest a few dollars.
Try Pimsleur or Paul Noble on Audible.
I'm not associated with the seller at all, I just have it in three languages and really like it and others I've told about it have really liked it too.
私わかってますか？
ストリークおめでとう
I guess I understand more than I think I do 😂 although it did take me a while to translate everything
And I should say that I also have Genki 1 and 2, wanikani, and I just started Human Japanese. So I get a lot of extra help
元気まあまあかなけどわにかに初めまして
B-O-R-I-N-G!
Best choice in my life
That app is so Pay to Win right now
It’s essentially solipsistic social media.
i hate streaks as a concept. don't guilt me into using my phone. i'm busy
I mean....
Other than Duolingo, I highly recommend following teachers on Instagram and YouTube. There's a ton of free information available on the internet for learning another language. Удачи вам)
they want you spending as much time as possible using it
30 min audio lessons. Perfect for the morning commute.
I still use it to practise French and Spanish, but have given up on it for learning any more Japanese.
A(ah) E(eh) I(e) O (oh) U(eew), El Gato de Peru
Then read spanish childrens books.
Facil
It’s up on AppStore and PlayStore called “Spanish for Travel by Bridgely”. Hope it’s more to your liking!
We use a mixture of generative AI and photo editing tools to create our images.
We looked at hiring artists to produce the images but found the number of iterations required to make quality visual mnemonics made it totally unworkable (and why this didn’t exist pre text-to-image AI)