Monthly Archives: February 2018

Yes, English is a funny language. Streaking does not actually have anything to do with maintaining a streak, at least not anything obvious. Anyway my “streak” of consecutive days on Duolingo is today 387, which means I failed to notice my 1-year anniversary in January. Duolingo, you could have mentioned it at least!

For some reason I got 37 lingots for maintaining a 370 day streak, but nothing for the week after or the several weeks before. Perhaps that was their way of celebrating my 1-year streak, or perhaps they were just experimenting again. They seem to do that a lot.

Then again, I experiment too. For the last few weeks, I have been learning German. We had it as a second language (or actually fourth, after the second Norwegian language and English) in middle school and high school (where French was the fifth). It is also a Germanic language so fairly easy to understand, at least when talking about simple things. It is quite hard to speak or write, though, because of the strange grammar. Grammatical genders are partly based on physical sexes but mostly based on the ending of the word. For instance Mädchen (girl) is neuter, because the diminutive ending -chen is neuter, and then cultural gender doesn’t matter. And sometimes gender is based on tradition or something, so you just have to memorize it.

I wanted to give it a spin and see how easy or hard it was. It is not like I actually have any use for it, it is just an experiment. After all, Germans don’t make anime. At least not anything worth seeing, as far as I know.

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The Japanese make anime, of course, and manga and games. They are kind of famous for that. And so I keep struggling with Japanese as well.

I know I keep telling you every time I bring up Japanese that it is really hard. That is because it is. Even though I have heard it for years, it is still really hard. And unlike Hebrew, it doesn’t even have the excuse of being the Holy Language of a world religion or two. (Ryuho Okawa and his worshipers would disagree with that, obviously, but this is how it is for now at least!)

On the bright side, this learning process quite closely fits the description of “deliberate practice” as described by Ericsson et al: It is not fun, it requires concentration and is therefore mentally exhausting, it is outside the comfort zone but not into the panic zone, it is focused on weak points, and it includes immediate feedback. This is the kind of practice that makes you a world class expert after 10 000 hours, so say the experts. Unfortunately I don’t think it would work that way for Japanese even if I had 10 000 hours to use: Partly because Duolingo and similar training schemes only cover the basics, but mostly because there are more than a hundred million Japanese ahead of me in line for being Japanese experts. ^_^

Still, it is an interesting experience. I can do it, but it hurts. It hurts in my willpower. Supposedly that should get stronger with practice, but after more than half a year there is still no sign of that. So I use other tricks, like listening to upbeat Japanese pop music before practice.