Category Archives: French

June 16, 2017 · 11:25 pm

Le chat bot

When Duolingo launched Japanese for IOS but not yet for Android, I set off to secure for myself an affordable IOS gadget. Well, affordable by the standards of the unnecessarily overpriced brand that is evidently Duolingo’s favorite. I find it mildly amusing that Duolingo, who talk like they’re some kind of charity, still offers more free bonuses to the rich than to the poor. But I guess that’s the American way. And it’s not like I can’t afford it. I’m Norwegian, not Nicaraguan. I’m used to playing Real Life on the easiest level anyway, I just found it amusing given the way Duolingo promotes its brand.

Actually it took so long for me to procure an iPad, that in the meantime Japanese was already available on Android (as mentioned in my previous post). So instead I decided to try out another IOS-exclusive feature, the chat bot. These have been around for months on iPad and iPhone, but not on Android, which is one reason why I did not expect Japanese for Android to show up as early as it did. (The other reason was Tinycards, a more generic flashcard program by the same company, that is also IOS only.)

The chat bot was not available for Japanese. I am not sure whether this was because I am still a beginner (I would pretty much have said little more than “konnichiwa”) or whether the chat bot simply doesn’t exist for that language. (It probably doesn’t, since there is no chat for Swedish, which has been around since last year at least.) There was for French, though, where I have slid down to 46% while studying Swahili, and then came Japanese and pretty much made me forget French. But now thanks to the chat bot, I got to practice some French again.

As far as I could see, the chat is all in writing. The bot is not even reading out the text, as the app often does otherwise. And even “writing” may be too strong a word: You pick from a list of alternatives, pretty much all of which are reasonable options. You can string some of them together, like “Oui” and “merci”. If you start typing, the list of alternatives will try to adapt based on the first letters you type. I guess you can type out your answer in full if you prefer the extra exercise.

The bot takes the initiative and maintains it all the way through. There are no awkward pauses where you are supposed to think of something to say. All your lines are in response to something written by the bot. Your answers are graded immediately. Extremely simple answers, like “Salut” (hi) as a first greeting, may not give you any points at all. Basic answers give 1 point, while more complex ones give 2 points, at least if they make sense. By complex I mean something like a full simple sentence, at least at the level I am now. (Still 46%.)

The number of points you get count toward your daily goal. So far I have managed to get over 20 points in each conversation, which is enough to fill my daily goal. It definitely takes less time than doing two training sessions, and is probably easier too. But I still recommend it for learning purposes. The reason is that the normal exercises are very disjointed, with random sentences at best, often just matching individual words or phrases. In contrast, each chat focuses on a specific topic and continues in a logical progression of questions and answers, which is the closest thing to “natural” that Duolingo has produced so far. After Duolingo killed off the translation exercises, this is the only type of exercise where you get to see and use words in context, the way language is used outside of the game.

Because of this, I consider the chat bot a great addition and I recommend trying it out if you already have an iPad or iPhone. But it is not worth buying such a gadget just for this feature. It is not absolutely necessary, and it seems to only exist for certain languages.

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Filed under Features, French, Languages

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

February 19, 2017 · 10:53 pm

Still at 50

I seriously think I may finish the French course (if I live long enough…) and still have a rating of only 50%. This is how I am doing it currently: I do 20 points a day, starting with a “weight lifting” exercise (repetitions picked by the machine). If I don’t do better than about 80% right on first try, I do another such exercise. But almost always I do better than that, strangely enough, so I do the next 10 points from the next available lesson. Even though I learn a handful of new words or phrases six days a week or so, I am still at 50% as I was last fall when I wrote about this. Now I kind of wish to continue like this and see if it really holds as I learn hundreds of new words. Actually I’ve probably done that – if  each new lesson teaches 5 words (and I think that is a minimum), that would be approximately 30 words a week. And having been 50% for about 5 months now (with the occasional dip down to 49%), that would be in the range 600-700 words at least, while still remaining at 50%. So naturally I am curious as to how long this will keep up. Well, that’s one form of motivation!

(It is not actually a bug though – the more you have learned, the more you have to repeat. So if I had a randomized test of what I have learned so far, I actually might fail at half of it. It is hard to say, since Duolingo makes sure to never make the questions too hard, for fear that people might give up. I know I have gone through much harder stuff than what I get quizzed in.)

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Filed under Features, French

October 22, 2016 · 1:49 pm

50% – the uphill begins

At a supposed 50% fluency in French, the vocabulary started getting much harder. Now I get words I have never heard before, and more of the strange sentence constructions that you don’t find in English. And again, despite doing my 20 XP per day, I eventually fell back to 49%. This does not affect the new words I get to learn, I guess the vocabulary is arranged in a fixed order. Perhaps I even have used up the familiar words, those I have heard in song lyrics or that are similar to English. (Although given how many English words are imported from French, that seems unlikely at just over 1200 words.)

In contrast, the “dumbbell” repetition are pretty easy. Like “Òu est ta chambre?” (Where is your [bed]room) or “L’Allemagne est en Europe” (Germany is in Europe). As opposed to in today’s new phrases: “Il est l’heure de vous lever” (It is time for you to rise, literally “He is the hour of you to rise”.) Who speaketh like that? “Je venais de recevoir votre lettre” (I had just received your letter), I really don’t know what that would literally translate to in English, but it would not be English as we know it, that’s for sure.

I am mildly amused that it is impossible to exceed – or even maintain – 50% fluency in one of the easiest languages (probably THE easiest language for English-speakers)  by doing the 20 points (2 units of training) per day that is the default goal in Duolingo. It would indeed be amazing if Duolingo was so effective that you could learn a language in 10 minutes a day! Hopefully by the time you have come halfway through the game/course, you will be motivated enough to spend more time. If you’re still interested at all.

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Filed under Features, French

October 8, 2016 · 1:36 pm

Running to stay in place

Today I am once more “50% fluent in French”. I’ve been that a couple times before, but it gets harder and harder. Ironically, it seems that for every week I practiced my “1+1” tactic (learning one new bite-size lesson and doing one repetition lesson) I fell further behind. The last week I have done only repetitions, several repetitions each day on average, and finally got back up to 50% today.

This makes a certain sense: The more vocabulary I have learned, the more I forget each day. At the same time, the program (especially on smartphones) seems worried about scaring me away with too difficult exercises, so it mostly sticks to things I know. This works as intended in the sense that I usually fail 0-2 sentences out of 20, and feel good about my French. But my day to day exercises lag far beyond the “horizon” of what I have learned, so that the most difficult words are not part of my daily practice at all. That is, if I just press the “dumbbells” (exercise icon).  I can specifically pick some of the almost empty bars a bit above the edge of where I have come, but I wanted to see how much it took to get back to 50% using just the standard exercises.

Look here: The upper golden bars are those I have repeated and supposedly remember for a while because of that, including most of Present 3. (There are also a few more pages of gold above them.)

french50

Then down here at Possessives 3 we see the recently learned lessons, which are hopefully not forgotten yet. And between them is the “sea of grey” which Duolingo does not show me yet. (I manually revisited Directions, as you can see, to see if I had forgotten it.) If I use my 1+1 tactic, the grey sea keeps growing wider and wider, and my fluency dips lower the more I learn.

I hope this was interesting! “The more you know, the more you have to maintain.” C’est la vie!

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Filed under Features, French, Strategy

August 27, 2016 · 10:03 pm

Pardon my French

When people don’t update a blog like this for a long time, I generally assume they have lost interest in the topic rather than just the blog. This is not one of those cases, or not entirely. I have stopped studying Turkish, partly because I was only interested in finding out how difficult it was, and partly because, well, Turkey kind of actively went out of its way to encourage us Europeans to revert to the practice that served us well during the late Middle Ages: If people are speaking Turkish, run for your life and hide behind a sturdy wall. At least I know enough Turkish now to know when it is being spoken, more or less.

I have tried my hand – or brain – at Hebrew a little. Not that this is a language that increases the life expectancy of people who practice it carelessly, either. (My upstairs neighbors are Muslims. I should probably not practice singing the Israeli national anthem, just in case.)  Anyway, before trying Hebrew, I thought Turkish was difficult. Sorry, Turkish! I was wrong. Hebrew is difficult. While Turkish has a few extra letters, Hebrew has its own alphabet that is not used for any other language. Just remembering the keyboard layout is a major undertaking. It is also written from right to left. Oh, and while the language now has written vowels, you still need to remember which vowel from context, it seems: The letter א seems to mean “some vowel” and changes from word to word, at best. That’s things I have observed from the first ten words or so. Is this a language or an IQ test? I can kind of see why so many Jews become Nobel Prize winners. Evidently literacy has been a big deal in Jewish society for a couple thousand years now, so people of normal intelligence may have failed to get married in the first place. (Those who survived, but that is another story.)

Now French … French is super easy. Well, except for the accents, but for the most parts they don’t turn complimenting someone’s food into insulting their parents. But I have gotten into the habit of doing one repetition exercise each day and one new vocabulary exercise. It gives me my daily 20 points streak, and I generally only fail 1-3 sentences on my repetition when using the smartphone. (A bit more on the PC.) That is an acceptable failure rate. I have read that you should repeat stuff when you remember 90% of it, although one source said 80%.  As things are going, it seems like I can just coast along and eventually I will be able to read French the way I read English. (English is my third language, after the two Norwegian languages.) Not sure why I would do that, but “because I can” seems to be a socially acceptable answer in my circles.

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Filed under French, Hebrew, Languages

February 9, 2016 · 8:00 am

Plodding along

My motivation is pretty much dead, but I’m still throwing in my two exercises per day for each of the two languages.  Today I got 7 lingots for a 70 day streak, so I am mildly curious as to how long I will be able to keep this going.

In all fairness, I am getting better, at French in particular. It is just that I am getting better at something that I have no actual use for or fascination with.

Back when Duolingo claimed that I was 25% fluent in French, I joked with my friends that it missed a decimal point, it should have been 2.5% fluent! Now I am up to 42%, and it is still obviously embarrassingly optimistic. I would never imply in front of a native that I was anywhere near that fluency, as I still struggle with the weekdays. But the difference between imaginary fluency and real fluency is shrinking. It is certainly more than 4.2%, perhaps even more than 14.2%, although I would not bet my last € on that.

I have no estimate for fluency in Turkish, which is OK since I have no fluency either. I am still struggling with fairly basic topics. I am at level 10, versus level 11 in French. This is because I have generally put more work into Turkish especially at the beginning, and levels measure only how many exercises you have completed, not your fluency. I knew that Turkish would be harder, that was why I picked it actually.

I still use the Android app pretty much all the time for Turkish, but lately I have done French on the computer. The “weight lifting” exercises are harder on the PC, with more writing exercises instead of constructing sentences from a list of words. The latter is a type of exercise that only exists on the app, and the same goes for matching up word pairs from a list. Another curious difference is that if I get a translation question wrong on the app, it will show up again at the end of the exercise, exactly like the first time. I believe this was not always so, and it is not how it works on the PC. But I kind of appreciate  it in Turkish, because at this stage I sometimes just have to memorize things and hope I will understand them later. Well, if I keep plodding along, that is.

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Filed under Features, French, Turkish

December 19, 2015 · 11:05 pm

Carefully, very carefully

For the last three days I have added one 10-XP unit each day, slowly making my way through the basics of possessives and “to have” in Turkish. Evidently Turks prefer not to use their verb for “to have”, but instead like to say things like “My one cat doesn’t exist” instead of “I don’t have a cat”. Actually that’s pretty cool, I could get used to that.

My daily quota (which I think is the standard, as I don’t recall setting it) is 20 XP a day, so I have to do one more 10-XP exercise. In practice I usually do a few more. I almost exclusively use the dumbbell icon now. The exercises there are harder than when repeating an individual learning unit. I will probably mostly use those for learning new things, and for the first repetition of it the next day. After that, I rely on Duolingo’s database to figure out which are my weakest points. It seems to be pretty good at that! Especially on the website. The app is easier. I am able to reliably do dumbbell exercises on the website too now, although it takes longer since I make more mistakes. Especially when writing in Turkish, which is no small feat. I miss the intelligent keyboard from the smartphone, which will propose valid Turkish phrases when I type something similar without accents.

I still continue my French streak too. French is noticeably easier, so I generally only do my 20 XP a day, or perhaps 30. I  do one dumbbell exercise, and if all the circles are golden after that, I do 10 XP of new material. Otherwise I continue with dumbbells.

I could definitely ramp this up more, but I don’t want to get in the situation where I have to spend time I don’t have just to avoid losing everything. So I am taking it slowly for now, until the basics have settled in my brain at least.

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Filed under French, Languages, Strategy, Turkish

December 11, 2015 · 12:39 am

My history with French

I am a Norwegian and a European. Learning a couple extra languages in school is considered the normal thing to do around here. While English was mandatory from grade school and German recommended in middle school, I did not get to French until high school. Our teacher was quite old and about to retire; her eyesight and hearing were failing at that time, and concentration was flagging as well. Years of dealing with teens had not raised her expectations very high, I’m afraid. I did get a decent grade, but with no reason to practice it ever again, only a few scattered phrases – mostly from songs – remained in my memory after almost 40 years, when I discovered Duolingo.

To be honest, I have no particular need for French. Google Translate does a great job with French, unlike non-European languages. But it seemed a good place to start to test Duolingo, at a time when only a few languages were available.

I did what many first-time users of Duolingo do: Start out with full sails, and then got distracted and used the app less and less. Every few months I would return to the game, refresh the basics and learn a little more. And then I would forget about it again.

In retrospect, this may not have been such a bad strategy, especially for a language that I already had a vague memory of. After some returns, I had a pretty good grasp of the basics, and could quickly get to adding new words and concepts.

But I still could not say for sure how much was due to Duolingo, how much to my almost forgotten high school days, and how much to French pop songs that I have enjoyed over the years even if I did not understand them. So that’s why I decided to try a language I had never known a word of. But that does not mean I have given up on French. I am still filling my quota of 20 XP per day, at least for the time being.

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Filed under French, Languages