Category Archives: Languages

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

June 10, 2017 · 11:19 am

Japanese, finally!

Ever since Duolingo came out, Japanese has been the most requested language. But technical problems made it much harder to implement than European languages, which were prioritized first. Some time ago, as mentioned on this blog, Hebrew was released, written entirely in a non-Latin script from right to left. Still, this pales against Japanese with no alphabet as such but two syllabic scripts and one iconographic script with over 1000 icons. Japanese is also extremely context-based, where the same short phrase or sentence could have dramatically different meanings depending on the sentences that surround it. This is a problem when your main method of teaching is short sentences without context.

On May 18, though, Japanese was released for the ios operating system (Apple phones and tablets). Rather than at least a modicum of gratitude, the response was largely an overwhelming condemnation for not releasing it simultaneously on the Web and the Android app. You’d think someone would be happy to let the rich and fashion-conscious be the guinea pigs. However, around the start of June, Japanese was gradually rolled out to Android as well. I first found it on my Samsung Note 2, which is fairly old by today’s standards, but it worked nicely.  It is now universally available on Android devices. If you don’t find it, update your app in the Play Store.

While I don’t self-identify as an otaku, I do watch anime pretty much every week (legally, on Crunchyroll.com) and I have been hoping for Japanese on Duolingo since I learned about Duolingo. So naturally I am putting all other languages aside to learn Japanese.  I used to do 20 points a day (two 5-minute sessions) of either French or Swahili, some days both. Now I typically do 20 points in the day and another 20-30 points before bedtime, which is the recommended time to learn language for some reason. Science shows that you learn better if you sleep right afterwards, perhaps because you dream about it? Not that I remember doing that.

I breezed through hiragana, which I have learned before (repeatedly, as I forget them after some months). I was a bit dismayed to see that they immediately after introduced katakana, the less used syllabic script. (The two are not interchangeable in practice, although Japanese will be able to read a text easily in either of them. Katakana is mostly used for foreign words, also for scientific terms and for emphasis (somewhat like we use italics, although it is a lot more different than italics, more like the difference between upper and lower case letters, or between typeface and cursive handwriting.) My concern was that by introducing them immediately after each other, people would mix them up unnecessarily. If you waited a couple months the brain would find it much easier to archive them separately. I would in fact recommend introducing kanji – the Chinese icon script that has been adapted to Japanese – before katakana.

Not to worry: After enough katakana to spell a couple names, the app started on kanji. Interestingly, it does not seem to start with the most common necessarily, but rather the ones that are used in common introductions, like the two kanji that make up Nihon (Japan) and the three that between them make up gakusei (student) and sensei (teacher). Normally you would start with kanji that are routinely used on their own, like the kanji for “day”, then later show how to combine kanji. In reality, of course, most Japanese words written in kanji are combinations of two kanji. If you had to learn a separate kanji for each Japanese word, you would not get far with 1000 kanji, which is approximately what kids learn in public school over there. (Duolingo will not teach all of those, I am not sure how many but I seem to remember reading 80. That seems a bit low. Hopefully I shall live to tell you more.)

So far, so fun!

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Filed under Japanese

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 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

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

February 12, 2017 · 10:53 pm

Too hard, too easy, and just right

I mentioned in an earlier entry that I had dropped Turkish (for more or less political reasons) and picked up Hebrew (because it is super difficult and I wanted to see how that felt.) Well, I gave up on Hebrew. I don’t really have the motivation. I would guess most people who study it via Duolingo are motivated by religion, although I suppose hopeful tourists might also exist. Anyway, once I saw for myself that it was as hard as I imagined and then some, I dropped it after a few weeks. Obviously, I would not have done that if it was my holy language. Or so I think. We shall see if Japanese ever comes out. (There is currently an attempt to make it, finally, but it is slow going.)

I also studied Swedish for a few months.  It is a much easier language for an English-speaker to learn, but I am not even an English-speaker primarily. My mother tongue is Norwegian, which is so close to Swedish and Danish that I can read them without remembering the next day which language I read in, even though I remember the content. They are not as close as British, US and Australian English, but probably more like Spanish and Portuguese. (Actually I don’t know those well enough to say for sure, but just looking at them they seem fairly close.)

In the end, I dropped Swedish because I don’t need it. It was super easy, but harder than I expected: I can translate from Swedish easily, but writing in Swedish is much harder. Anyway, I can understand Swedes and they can understand me, so the effort seems a bit wasted. When I ran into a busy patch and had to prune my hobbies, Swedish fell by the wayside. It should be easy enough to pick back up if I ever get that much time on my hands. Probably not unless there is some breakthrough in radical life extension though. But if you want to go to Scandinavia, by all means pick it up. Almost everyone here can speak English, but at least you will know what people say about you behind your back. ^_^

I am still doing my 20 points a day of French though. I don’t really think I’ll ever need it, but it is just hard enough that I can’t read it without learning it, and easy enough that I can breeze through my daily quota without much effort.

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Filed under Hebrew, Swedish

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