Monthly Archives: March 2017

March 25, 2017 · 11:29 am

Levels, fluency and difficulty

I already mentioned that Swahili is hard, at least for Europeans, at least compared to European languages. And yet I am already at level 6. Actually, I am still near the start of People, the 4th topic, so why am I already level 6? Because in Duolingo, levels don’t say anything about how far you have come, just how much work you have put into it. Even that is not quite exact. Levels depend on how many XP you have gained in that language, and you get 10 XP for completing each exercise unit (estimated time: 5 minutes). But even that is not a precise measure of your effort: If you challenge yourself and move ahead fast, you will make more mistakes and therefore spend more time on completing each unit. Also, the web exercises are generally harder than the smartphone exercises.

How far you have come is measured by another variable, fluency. I have only seen that in French, probably because I have not gotten far enough in other languages before giving up. The first information about fluency came when I reached 24%, I think? May have been 22, but I clearly remember 24% because I joked that it ought to be 2.4%.  I did not feel fluent in French at all, and really I wasn’t. Now at 52%, I still think the number is exaggerated, but there is no denying that I can read simple French texts for children. It is not just a jumble of words that I translate into English (or Norwegian “Nynorsk”, my mother tongue). So fluency is a thing, and it is calculated based on the size of your vocabulary and your mastery of the total acquired vocabulary. (I use “vocabulary” loosely here, to also include grammatical forms.) Regular readers may remember that I was stuck at 50% for months even though I added new words almost daily, because Duolingo reasonably assumed that I would not be able to remember them all with only 10 XP worth of repetition each day. Seems the game has now started to doubt that assumption, since it upgraded me to 51% and then shortly after to 52%.)

So in short, level shows how many exercises you have completed in that language, and fluency shows how much vocabulary (and grammar) you have gotten out of it. Once you reach a level where fluency is relevant, you should be able to get a pretty good measure of how difficult each language is for you. For instance, my 52% fluency in French has required 10572 XP so far, which lands me at level 17. If I ever get to the same fluency in Swahili, it will probably take three times as much practice, if not more. I don’t really see that happening.

Japanese, perhaps, if they actually manage to get that to beta, I might spend thousands of 5-minutes exercise on that… The time estimate is still May 15, but I believe that when I see it. Swahili may be hard, but it is written in the most basic Latin alphabet. In contrast, Japanese is written in three different scripts, none of which is so simple as an alphabet. Good luck with learning that with less than hundreds of thousands of XP… But hey, there are people who spend more time than that on just messing around in single-player games. At least language is not a single-player game. Well, not until you get married… (Just kidding! I hope.)

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Filed under Features, French, Swahili

March 18, 2017 · 11:17 pm

Web is still free

My previous post was rather negative, not because I think it is bad to ask for donation when giving a free service. That is fine. What was disgusting was suddenly putting the donation button in a spot people were used to clicking, and then not offering an exit from that page without buying.

What makes this even more puzzling is that the Duolingo on the Web is still free and contains no ads (at least for now). In fact, you can also access www.duolingo.com from a smartphone or tablet. This not only bypasses all ads and donation screens, but also lets you use the smartphone or tablet keyboard for the relevant languages. On a PC, it may be hard to find the special letters that many languages have, since the keyboard shows the letters for your own language. But the on-screen keyboards for mobile phones and tablets can easily be set up to show the letters for the language you are trying to learn, and will often also give you predictions so you don’t need to remember exactly how a word is spelled. (This could be good or bad, I guess, but in some languages such as French it has very little influence on your reading comprehension, only on your writing. If you are mainly going to read anyway, then remembering all the accents is not a priority. And once you have read a thousand books, you are likely going to remember the accents too. Probably.)

Even apart from the keyboard problems and spelling, the web version of Duolingo is a bit harder. The app version has exercises where you just pick words from a list to write a translation, or even just pick matching words or phrases in the two languages. Also if you fail a question, you will get it again at the end of the lesson.  In the web version, you will simply lose a progress point and therefore get more questions, but not necessarily the same. So if you think the app version is too easy and the web version is too hard, you may want to try the web version on a tablet or high-resolution smartphone.

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March 16, 2017 · 11:57 pm

STOP THAT, Duolingo!

Today I found out to my horror that Duolingo has sent their ethics on vacation and decided to try to trick their mobile users. Now, I totally understand that they need money. When you have hundreds of millions of users, “free forever” just doesn’t work anymore. Especially since they gave up on the original “translate the web” thing. Not sure what went wrong with that, but there was probably a good reason for it.

Advertising is fine. Servers for hundreds of millions of people don’t just fall down from Heaven complete with electricity and Internet super-broadband. Selling unnecessary virtual objects like streak repair for real money is also fine (except for the many parents that have probably encouraged their kids to use Duolingo and suddenly find that there is small expense on their credit card). Begging for money would have been fine. Sending me mail begging for money would be fine. Actually, even if you ran a profit and still asked me for money for beer and pretzels, I would probably have given you some, because I really like Duolingo. I like the idea. I like the implementation. I like the strategy of letting volunteers add more languages. But I don’t like trickery. And I don’t like the mass desertion of volunteers and enthusiasts that will likely follow this.

The story is that for some months, Duolingo has shown ads for unnecessary apps not connected in any way to Duolingo and not to my life (your life may vary). You could download the app, or skip the ad. Today, the field for “skip this ad” was changed to “go ad-free” and took me to a page where I could buy an ad-free month for a modest sum. That was an unpleasant surprise. I mean, it is OK to offer people to buy and ad-free month for real money. They had this already. But it is not OK to deliberately trick people into clicking on it. But it gets worse. There is no legitimate exit from that screen. No “perhaps later” button or anything like that. The only way out, as far as I could see, was the back key on the phone. Which brought up a message that this would cause me to lose the progress in that unit. Now, that’s just 10 points, or five minutes, so obviously I did that. But it is still extremely petty and passive-aggressive.

(The new way to close ads is an x in the upper left corner, by the way. For as long as it lasts.)

This is not about me being cheap. I already gave them money not too long ago, by skipping a day and buying a streak repair. I would have done it again. Not so motivated for that now. “Sneaky”, “underhanded”, and “dastardly” are not words I like to use about my friends. Duolingo really should not have forced me to warn the people I have recommended them to. But here it is. Be warned.

I still intend to use Duolingo, by the way. Probably. But the enthusiasm is gone. And I can’t in good conscience recommend it to total strangers anymore, since total strangers may not be smart enough to  get around whatever trickery Duolingo may be up to next.

 

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March 8, 2017 · 11:54 pm

Swahili is hard

Yeah, that should be a big surprise…

Duolingo announced Swahili in beta recently. It still doesn’t have sound, but they’re working on it. The text is supposedly complete though, but errors are to be expected at this stage, and some alternative correct translations may not be recognized. Anyway, my natural curiosity made me check it out.

Good news first: It uses plain Latin alphabet, the same letters as in English, no extra letters, not even accents and umlauts so far at least. The pronunciation is much more regular than in English, you can basically read the words out loud even if you have never seen them before. And for the most part the language has simple syllables without long strings of consonants that you see in some Slavic languages and to a lesser degree some Nordic languages. Some of the most common words are even made by duplicating simple syllables: “Mimi” = I, “wewe” = you etc.

Bad news: The vocabulary and grammar is different from anything I have ever heard before. And because of the distance (I live in Norway) I don’t even know it from songs or movies. (Except Baba Yetu, the team song from Civilization 4.) As I said elsewhere, they don’t make anime in East Africa. Perhaps they should, but they are kind of busy staying alive and getting out of poverty right now, so it may take some time before they can start projecting their culture worldwide, I guess.

It is now my third night with the new language. I mostly got the “intro” 10-point module that I did a few times the first night and repeated last night. The next, Greetings 1 of 4, I did a couple times last night and it was blank now. I recognized most of the words but had no idea what they meant, which was pretty much the same thing I experienced with the first lesson yesterday. So presumably a day from now I may actually remember this too, or most of it. Still, it is pretty disconcerting to stare at words I knew 24 hours ago and not have a clue what they mean. If I live long enough, I suppose this will happen to English too, but that’s a different story. Luckily being bilingual does give some protection against dementia, so says the science. Hopefully not an issue for a good long while, but at least now I have an idea of how it must feel.

There isn’t any real reason why I should learn Swahili. I hope to never go to East Africa, and I would prefer if East Africa did not need to come here either. That said, I had a bunch of obvious East African guys living upstairs less than two years ago. I don’t know if they spoke Swahili, probably not among themselves as it seems to be more of a lingua franca, a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different. Anyway, for now I am just curious. The language seems approximately as hard as Turkish, not easy like French or unreachable like Hebrew. It may take a few more days to make sure.

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Filed under Swahili