14 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
  2. Oct 2023
    1. duolingo poll .t3_17h6wfs._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      I was a subscriber of Duolingo specifically for Cymraeg until about a year ago. Updates, while they seemed nice, seemed to keep putting me farther back than my previous level, and spending 20 to 30 minutes a day didn't seem to be getting me anywhere. Ultimately I gave up on Duolingo in favor of Say Something in Welsh which seemed to be a bit more challenging and improved my spoken grasp of the language. Now I need to spend some more time with some of the finer points of the grammar, but Duolingo really isn't the best place for that either.

      Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of the movement on some languages on Duolingo was taking advantage of free labor of volunteers. Duolingo seemed to be getting a lot of help on the Cymraeg front which they may not be getting now and this may be a play for financial support that they probably don't really need given the usage they're seeing. Given my experience with the app and where they've placed their resources in the past, I'm actively suspicious of their motivations.

  3. Jun 2023
  4. Feb 2023
  5. Nov 2022
    1. Localisation ≠ Translation To start with, we have been researching, publishing, and producing articles on the topics of localisation to gain a wider understanding for implementing it. Here's some of what we published with @sophie authoring:

      Have you thought about crowdsourcing localization via weblate? It includes DeepL and can also be a learning ground, such as Duolingo Immersion.

  6. Jun 2022
  7. May 2022
    1. https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/what-language-s-are-you-studying/73190

      I've been studying Welsh on and off now for just over a year.

      I've been using a mix of Duolingo for it's easy user interface and it's built in spaced repetition. I like the way that it integrates vocabulary and grammar in a holistic way which focuses on both reading, writing, and listening.

      However, I've also been using the fantastic platform Say Something in Welsh. This uses an older method of listening and producing based teaching which actually makes my brain feel a bit tired after practice. The focus here is solely on listening and speaking and forces the student to verbally produce the language. It's a dramatically different formula than most high school and college based courses I've seen and used over the years having taken 3 years of Spanish, 2 of French, and 2 of Latin.

      The set up consists of the introduction of a few words which are then used in a variety of combinations to create full sentences. The instructors say a sentence in English and the listener is encouraged in just a few seconds to attempt to produce it in the target language (Welsh, in my case), then the instructor says the sentence in Welsh with a pause for the student to repeat it properly, another instructor says it in Welsh with a pause for a third repeat. This goes on for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. The end result is that the learner gets into the language much more quickly and can begin both understanding the spoken language as well as produce it much more rapidly than older school based methods (at least in my experience, though I have known some college language labs to use a much more limited version of a similar technique). Each lesson adds new material, but also reviews over older material in a spaced repetition format as well so you're always getting something new mixed in with the old to make new and interesting sentences for conversation.

      SSiW also has modules for Manx, Cornish, Dutch, and Spanish.

      I find that the two done hand in hand has helped me produce much faster results in language acquisition in an immersive manner than I have done previously and with much less effort.

  8. Mar 2022
    1. More than that, Krupska has been shocked by the user numbers of the courses she helped create. Ukraine’s president recently declared 2016 a “year of English” for his country; nearly half a million people have used Duolingo’s English-for-Ukrainian-speakers app. Amazingly, 395,000 to date have tried out the Ukrainian-for-English-speakers app. The whole thing, says Krupska, has been “win-win” for everyone involved.
    2. Krupska and some team members applied for Duolingo’s incubator and set to work. Krupska’s chief interest was in building a Ukrainian-for-English-speakers program, but the incubator’s structure required that her team build an English-for-Ukrainian-speakers program first.
  9. Apr 2018
  10. Jan 2016
    1. Double or Nothing

      If you get this after you achieve your daily goal, today will not count towards the Double or Nothing streak.