February 18, 2018 · 9:14 pm

Unpunished streak break

As one might expect after writing repeatedly about my streak being more than a year with daily Duolingo exercises, it did not take many days before I skipped a day. (I decided to not do any exercises until late in the evening, then slept through that.)

Duolingo helpfully offered to sell me a streak repair for a noticeable amount of real money. (Around $20 – I am not sure if that was exact since the price was quoted in my country’s currency, Norwegian Kroner. But it was pretty close at least.)

Now that we don’t get huge amounts of lingots every 10 days for a successful streak – actually we don’t get any lingots for streaks at all except possibly for a 1-year streak, as mentioned before – there is zero reason to shell out real money for this. Well, if you have friends you compete with, I suppose you could try to trick them into believing you had not forgotten that day, but that would not even be ethical, even if it worked.

Actually, with the vast fortune of lingots that I have, and them being nearly useless, there was no reason to pay real money in the first place. I did it once before to support Duolingo, but now that I subscribe on a monthly basis I have no interest in giving them more. Quite the opposite. It is quite overpriced compared to other online services I have subscribed to. Google Play Music, with literally millions of songs, costs less. Netflix costs more after the recent price hike; it is also too expensive for common people now. Luckily I am single and fully employed in one of the world’s richest countries, so I can afford to waste a bit of money on supporting good ideas I don’t want to see fail for lack of money. But Duolingo is not actually worth paying that much for, and I can’t shake the feeling that they would probably have three times as many subscribers if they halved the price. But for all I know, they may have done science to it and found out that only idealists pay for these things anyway.

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February 11, 2018 · 3:54 am

More streaking, nun mit Deutsch!

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.

***

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.

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December 4, 2017 · 11:31 pm

320 days streak so far

The past few months I have studied almost exclusively Japanese, because that was the language I wanted to learn in the first place, and the others were really just to test out Duolingo. (It passed the test, obviously.)  And Japanese really needs a good learning tool. It is hard. It is really, really hard.

If you want to quickly see how hard Japanese is without learning it, try taking a paragraph of a Japanese online newspaper and run it through Google Translate. Over the last months, the artificial intelligence of Google has become ever more powerful. It used to just print broken gibberish, often with random Japanese characters still in it, but now it looks mostly like complete sentences with the right parts in the right places. Except after reading it, you will still not know what it tried to say, likely as not. Or at least you need to be pretty creative.  Like this random example:

In the United States, there is a culture that selects a movie to become “a medicine that sinks a mind” from the standpoint of psychiatry. On the other hand, even though it is evaluated as “masterpiece”, there are also movies that become psychiatrically “poison to sink”.

Perhaps Japanese just think weirdly, but somehow people who actually understand Japanese are able to translate to English and actually make perfect sense, sometimes even get across jokes or subtle nuances. At the current speed, I should be able to do this in a couple decades. ^_^

I typically do 20 points (two sets of exercises) per day, which is what I need to continue my “streak” on standard learning speed. (You can choose easier or harder streaks.) Generally if I manage to finish the first exercise without any errors or with only “not really” errors like pressing the wrong word by accident, I learn a new set of words or grammatical feature as the second exercise. If I make errors because I genuinely don’t remember or understand, then I choose repetition for the second exercise as well.

But the truth is that even when I get everything right, it is very rare that the exercise is easy. In French, exercises were generally easy when I got them right. In Japanese, they are still hard, and I am uncertain whether I was right until I get the answer. (This is mainly true for translating sentences, especially into Japanese. Matching sounds to signs is generally easy for me, but at this stage you don’t get a whole set with just those.)

I have worked through 23 topics and they are all “gold” (meaning there is no urgent need to repeat them) and have 16 still ahead of me. And I still feel like a toddler. I think it is safe to say that a “Japanese II” course would be very warmly received.  Not sure if I will be able to understand simple texts if I finish the course or whether I will need to move on to some other form of learning, we’ll see if we get there.

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October 14, 2017 · 7:12 am

200 XP weekend challenge

I am pretty sure it was 150 XP last week and the week before. For some reason, Duolingo gives out extra lingots for doing much more practice on weekends. I think this is a terrible idea for the same reason I have written about before (about going out too hard from the start) but gradually less terrible the longer you have come.

That is, if you gain those 200 XP by practicing where you are lagging behind – if your skill tree is not completely gold for instance – I think this may be worthwhile. But the thing that really counts is your daily streak, doing a little each day. And I am afraid people will lose that because they overdo it in the weekend and get fed up. Ideally you should look forward to your daily play if you want to stay motivated.

But in particular it is a bad thing to race ahead down the skill tree. A few days later you will find yourself struggling because your brain will have forgotten much of what you learned during the weekend, and you will be looking at a sea of words that you don’t know how to get across.

I suppose I could use the weekend to maintain my French, but I am definitely not planning to do 20 exercises in Japanese where my skill tree is already pure gold each day. And I am not happy with how they are lifting the bar from one weekend to the next. It seems like they are using us for lab rats again, to see how far they can push before people give up and delete the app.

If they wanted to do something genuinely useful, they should give a higher XP for the web exercises (for those languages that have web versions – I think all non-Asian languages have this). The web exercises are harder but also contain more explanations, so you learn more from them, but they take longer time. But hey, you can’t expect the people who make Duolingo to be as wise as me. I am really good at things others do, I just happen to suck at the things I do myself. ^_^

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October 13, 2017 · 11:56 pm

Level 12 Japanese

The weeks become months, and I only very slowly advance down the skill tree in Japanese. It is not even a snail’s pace. I am currently level 12 in Japanese, but this is just a measure of how much work I have put into it, not how much I have actually learned. And even then it is wrong if we compare it to French, for instance. Doing the daily quota of 20 XP in Japanese takes much more time than in French, because it is just much harder.

Even reading Japanese is still difficult. I rarely misread hiragana anymore, but I often have to guess on katakana and kanji. And evidently there is a longer stretch than I thought between understanding the symbols and reading fluently without sounding out the letters at least in my head. Even in Turkish and Swahili, I could pretty much read a sentence out loud even if I had no idea what it meant. In Japanese, I am back to where I was as a toddler, reading letter by letter. Oh well, this too shall pass, one way or another.

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August 14, 2017 · 9:35 pm

Japanese still has me on the ropes

Since last I wrote, the Duolingo app has gone back to saving up the wrong answers for repeat at the end of the session instead of immediately, so I guess it was only a test. Perhaps it was not even rolled out to all the students. They do this from time to time, try new features and then remove them when they don’t work better. Same as they did with the timed-only exercises.

I am still studying Japanese. Trying to do only 20 points a day, as I did with French, is clearly not enough. Most days it will barely be enough to repeat what I have already learned. My practice is like this: I don’t move on to learn something new unless I have got a full 10-point lesson right or at least almost right (more than 90% at least). Actually scientists seem to disagree on whether 80% or 90% is the ideal rate: If you do better, repetition was probably not necessary; if you do worse, you should probably have repeated it before. But it is supposed to be in that range. Well, 20 points a day is usually just barely enough to achieve this, so days go by without learning anything new. That is OK and to be expected, since I started out doing well above 20 points a day for the first weeks. If I want to keep making progress, I need to put in more time. But I am not in the zone where I am falling more and more behind either, because I restrained myself from zooming too fast forward.

And it is still fun, even when it can be challenging. For example today, I stopped at the Japanese phrase “わたしはかのじょのおとうとです” (watashi wa kanojo no otouto desu). I know that I am supposed to translate it “I am her younger brother”. But it could actually mean a couple different things that we have not learned. Kanojo can also mean girlfriend (and this is how it is usually used in anime). In Japanese it is much less common to use personal pronouns at all: If it is not clear from the context who you are talking about, you would use their name or title (with appropriate honorifics) rather than a pronoun. I am not sure how this is practiced in dialects, but that’s the party line. So Duolingo is here actually using the word kanojo in order to make the sentence more similar to English, but in practice that could cause confusion. The sentence could also translate as “I am your girlfriend’s younger brother” for instance, which could become quite embarrassing.

Anyway, Japanese is really difficult, like Hebrew level difficult or worse, if you are not already familiar with it. Even looking at a familiar word I can’t always know how to pronounce it, because some of the words are written using kanji (Chinese style ideograms) which we have not yet repeated often enough for me to remember how to pronounce them. Pronunciation and understanding are trained separately, so I can translate some sentences I can’t pronounce, or (more rarely) the other way around. Because of my hyperlexia I actually learn understanding easier than pronunciation. It is the same in English: I not only understand but write many English words that I don’t know exactly how to pronounce. But at least I am pretty close, any English-speaker should be able to guess what I try to say. In Japanese, I am sometimes completely blank. I can see what it means but can’t remember even vaguely how to pronounce it. Hopefully that will pass with more practice. The only limit to how much practice I can get is my lifespan (or that of Duolingo, whichever ends first) – and my patience. At the time of writing, neither of them has run out, long may it last.

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July 18, 2017 · 12:17 pm

Correcting immediately

This morning I noticed a feature change in the Duolingo app. When I made a mistake, the same question came up again immediately. In the past, the app would move on to the next question but would save up the wrongly answered questions and present them again at the end of the lesson, in the order they first appeared. I rather prefer that, to be honest. Getting it immediately after having been given the right answer seems just too easy.

I guess it is part of the process to make people feel good about using Duolingo so they don’t quit. I can certainly appreciate that, because once you give up, you learn nothing, and anything is better than nothing. But for me having to hold the correct answer in my working memory for a minute or four seemed to make it more of a learning experience and less simply a mechanical act of tapping it on the screen.

This was in the Android app. I tried doing some exercises on the iPad to see if it was the same there, but after five full 10-point exercises I still hadn’t had the chance to find out. Because you can’t go wrong with Apple. (No, but seriously I am starting to wonder if the IOS version is just plain going easy on users.) Anyway, I fell asleep in my chair at that point and woke up deciding that it didn’t matter whether it’s on this or that platform. I really think it is a bad idea no matter where you do it: If people can’t learn from a mistake to the point of getting it right after four minutes, they have probably run far ahead of themselves and need to slow down and repeat things. Besides, if you get it wrong the second time, you get the same question a third time. It has happened to me, but very rarely.  Seriously, if this is a problem, the solution is not to make it impossible to go wrong a second time, but to go back to the basics.

So say I, but I am not a highly trained expert. It may just be my smart privilege talking.

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July 8, 2017 · 9:35 am

Yay! The dumbbell is back!

The Android app no longer uses 1-minute timed exercises as the only option for general practice. Evidently it was a test (some people never had it at all) and it seems to have failed the test. It was universally hated on the forums, to the point where people went back to earlier version of the app and installed it from unofficial sources rather than deal with the hassle. Hopefully they have disabled it for all users by now.

So this means I now get the standard 10-point exercise and have all the time in the world to finish it. The experiment came at a particularly bad time for me, since Japanese is more time-consuming than any of the other languages I have tried except possibly Hebrew. Like Hebrew, Japanese has its own script (except Japanese actually mixes 3 different scripts in normal text) so you first need to decode the writing system. Since you keep learning new kanji throughout the course, there will never be a time when you can just look at the text and know how to pronounce it, the way you mostly can with French after a few days.

Anyway, the app is better now, long may it last!

Also, I bought a subscription. It is as expensive as a full-fledged online game, so it’s not remotely worth it. But if I as a Norwegian doesn’t pay for it, who will? People in Guatemala or Vietnam? Since Duolingo in practice is nonprofit, at least with the current owners, the more subscribers the less they need to show ads and the more they can invest in expanding the services.

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July 5, 2017 · 4:46 pm

Japanese vs Manganese

Observation from the Duolingo Japanese course:

If a sentence translates as “My girlfriend’s older brother is a an elementary school student”, you should probably go back to the drawing board.

In this case, a fellow student made this translation with “彼女 の お兄さん は しょうがくせい” (Kanojo no oniisan wa shougakusei) and commented, rightly so, that “This ain’t right.”

Grammatically it is possible, I suppose, since “kanojo” can mean both “she” and “girlfriend”, but it sure ain’t *right.* Also we haven’t learned the “girlfriend” translation yet. So he probably picked up that from anime or manga.

As an anime character so aptly put it: “A little shoujo manga is a dangerous thing.” I hear several people tell that the Japanese you learn from manga and anime is not entirely safe to use around actual Japanese people. Perhaps it is better to think of it as a special dialect that you only use among your own kind.

(Yes, I am aware that manganese is a chemical element found in the periodic table. I just used the word as a pun on “manga” – comics – and Japanese.)

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June 27, 2017 · 5:45 pm

Don’t try this at home, kids!

Actually, this is something that the highly trained professionals at Duolingo have warned about themselves, but I’ll repeat it here. There is one thing you can do, and have a high risk of doing, that could seriously mess up your learning experience. Actually two things, but the first is the worst.

Don’t rush out from the start at a speed you cannot maintain. Well, a little more than you can maintain is probably OK, but I am talking about spending hours racing down the language tree, learning topic after topic on the first day or two. That is fine only if you can spend that much time later too. Because the more you learn, the more you need to repeat.

Repetition is an interesting topic in its own right. Unless you are a super genius, there are basically four ways to learn things: Repetition, association, understanding, or crisis. Repetition is the only one of these that you can control in detail. Science has a pretty good idea of how repetition influences learning, and how often you should repeat (modified by your general ability to learn). Association is something you can try to do, by thinking up images or stories, or it could happen automatically if a word is similar to a word in another language, for instance. The other two are very hard to control.

Learning a language in Duolingo is not like a grocery list. The learning is constructed in a logical way, where you add new features one by one, increasing complexity.  If you race ahead and you are not a super genius, you wake up the next morning and much of what you learned is gone. So you start the app and suddenly you are surrounded by exercises that are way too hard for you. This is really frustrating. Especially the web version is bad in this regard, because if you make a mistake, they will make the current lesson longer. So instead of getting, say, 15 sentences, if you make errors in ten of them you get 25. If you make errors in the new sentences you get, it adds even more, so you could end up with 30 or 40. One unlucky forum writer was unable to finish his daily exercise at all because it just kept growing longer the more he did. Luckily the smartphone app is more forgiving: It will simply ask the same question again at the end of the lesson, until you get it right. Still, that could take some time if you are deep in enemy territory, so to speak.

A similar problem could happen if you take a long break, for instance a vacation without Duolingo. (Who would want that??) In my case, I returned to Turkish after working on another language for a while. Suddenly I found myself “behind enemy lines”, seeing exercises in a language which definitely looked like Turkish but I only understood a little of it. Translating to the language was completely impossible.

What people naturally tend to do in this situation is run away and never come back. What you can do instead is start from the top (or wherever you are confident) and practice individual bubbles (topics). It is not quite like doing it the first time, because Duolingo remembers where you have been and may throw in things you learned later, but most of the exercises should be about that topic. Just work your way down the tree again at a more comfortable speed. You will gradually regain your confidence as the language comes back to you, and you rack up points. (I eventually quit Turkish not long after, but that was mainly because my daily exercises reminded me of what was going on in Turkey at the time.)

I hope this is was useful! Slow and steady wins the race. Or preferably fast and steady, but try not to start a marathon like a sprint, or you will not be able to complete at all.

 

 

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