June 26, 2017 · 11:08 pm

Japanese on Duolingo – not perfect but still great

There are features I have seen on Duolingo that would be particularly welcome for Japanese. One is the “turtle speed” for the spoken sample, where a native speaker is saying the words exaggeratedly slowly and distinctly. French has this, for instance, and it has been very useful especially at the start. Japanese is the fastest spoken of the major languages, and the speech samples in Duolingo certainly don’t slow down for newbies, at least after the first minutes.

One option that was available in the Android version from the start was the option to go directly to the discussion board after doing a single sentence translation. Students would ask why a phrase was worded this particular way, or whether it could also be translated in a certain way, and more experienced learners or even native speakers would explain. Now that we only have 1-minute stopwatch for general practice, this option fell by the wayside, although it is still available when you practice a particular bubble and most importantly when learning a new bubble (topic). Unfortunately this feature is missing in the iPad version, which is the one which still has non-timed general practice. I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too, as you say in English! (The Norwegian phrase is “i pose og sekk” – in bag and sack, by the way. Which is more applicable here, because you could get in bag and sack if the giver was generous enough.)

A third gripe is, as I mentioned before, the absence of grammar. The other courses have simple grammar lessons in the web version, at the point where a new grammatical feature is introduced. But Japanese does not have a web version; it is announced to arrive “much later”.

Despite these complaints,  Duolingo is still the most fun, engaging and effective way I have tried to learn Japanese. I realize it is somewhat unfair that I have tried before with Memrise and Anki, a software course that only used Latin alphabet, and various friendly and helpful websites. I guess every time you try to walk the same path, it gets a little easier. But to me, Duolingo is just more fun, even when it is hard. I know I can always choose my own balance between repetition and learning more, and in each case still experience a sense of progress (as well as racking up points to increase my levels and reach my daily goal). Duolingo is pretty good at choosing what to practice, but if there is something I particularly feel I need to get better at, I can choose that topic manually and still get my points. But most of all, I just seem to learn faster this time around.

There are still a couple things you can do that will really mess up your learning, but I will cover that in my next journal entry.

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Filed under Features, Japanese

June 23, 2017 · 8:09 am

Ads on the website

Just discovered an ad in the web version of Duolingo. Not sure how long they’ve been there, but I think that’s pretty recent. And it was of the sleazy type that pretends to be a system message, but it stood out since it was in the local language where I live but my computer and browser are set up with English.

Well, servers must have electricity and workers must have food. As Adam Smith said, we don’t rely on the benevolence of the baker to provide us with bread. Luis von Ahn might have a dream to bring free language education to the world, and I may have a dream to fly by flapping my arms, but we wake up and gravity reasserts itself.

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June 22, 2017 · 9:27 pm

Japanese – just the right challenge?

I don’t self-identify as an otaku, but I’ve watched some weeks or months of anime in total over the years. And I have made the occasional attempt at learning at least a bit of Japanese. But it has never gone beyond a few words and phrases. And I have learned the hiragana several times and forgotten them again (although it does get easier to learn them for each time).

Unlike some approaches, Duolingo teaches the hiragana right away. And if you’ve not learned them before, you should probably stop right there and practice them every day until you can read them without help, even if slowly. Because when you move on to kanji (the Chinese-like characters), they are never spelled out in Latin alphabet, only in hiragana.  And soon enough you get started on real words, which are spelled either in hiragana or katakana or kanji or some combination of kanji and hiragana. Soon enough you get into sentences, and in true Japanese style these are written without spaces. If the individual hiragana don’t leap out at you at that point, you will learn the true meaning of the phrase “wall of text”. Unlike its spoken form, written Japanese is quite compact. Some punctuation has been introduced, but mostly you just look at long strings of kanji and hiragana, with the occasional word in katakana.

Speaking of katakana, the first of them are taught immediately after hiragana. This is a problem if you are not super familiar with hiragana, because for the most part they symbolize the same sounds. So you have two different signs for “i” for instance. (You have that in English too: I and i. But the usage is very different in Japanese, as katakana is mostly used for foreign or technical words, although it CAN be used for emphasis.  In the course katakana have so far only been used for foreign names, and are taught sparsely and in between kanji. I think that is a good idea, but I would actually teach the first kanji before katakana, to make sure there is a long gap between learning them. Otherwise it might be too easy to mix them up in our heads. I am happy that I have been through hiragana several times before so I recognize them as hiragana on sight, regardless of whether I instantly recognize which hiragana.

OK, after a few days I can recognize each hiragana too, although I sometimes struggle with ha / ho / ma especially. I need to take a second look at those.

Since I had learned hiragana before, I forged ahead faster than I normally would do for such a difficult language. I have completed 11 bubbles so far, down to and including Time 3. But I really feel the crunch now. Most exercises are “wall of text” now, either translating one such compact string or making one from parts. There are still scattered exercises of matching hiragana or katakana to normal Latin letters (or rather syllables, usually at two letters each and sometimes three). Those matching exercises are just brief respites, though, and then there’s another compact string of weird squiggles again. I have to say, it feels daunting. But when I concentrate, those walls of text break down into familiar parts and I can translate them into English and put them back together in the right order (which is usually not at all the same as they appear in Japanese). Almost miraculously, so it seems to me, I usually get them right. Almost all the time actually. But each time I get a new one, it doesn’t feel like that at all.

Now about the change they made to Android  where you only have timed exercises. That may work great for a language you already know pretty well, but when you need to pick apart a long string of runes and sigils and you don’t even know where the words begin and end until you have stared at them a while, the last thing you want is a timer that runs out while you are halfway through the process. It is a particularly terrible combination. By coincidence or providence I happened to purchase an iPad just before all this (well, actually I bought it because I was not sure when Japanese would come to Android), and it still has the old exercises, long may it last. If any of your loved ones is studying Japanese on Duolingo and only has an Android device, it may be time to brush up on your self defense skills before you walk in on them. There is a thin line between just right and maddeningly difficult, and a small distraction can be enough to make the difference.

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June 17, 2017 · 9:34 pm

Complain, complain…

“Complain, complain, that’s all you’ve done, ever since we lost” says Leonard Cohen in his song The Captain. And unfortunately it is that time again, as Duolingo keeps losing the qualities that made it the number one educational software of the world. How long they will be able to fend off the competition is uncertain at this rate.

The other day I discovered that on my Android smartphone and tablet, the training exercises have been replaced by 1-minute timed exercises. The duration of the old ones were approximately five minutes by my estimate, and they each gave 10 points, so two of them added up to my 20 points of minimum daily practice. The new timed exercises seem to give a higher point yield per minute: For Japanese, I get about 5 points for each. Japanese is kind of hard though as long as I still need to spell my way through the Hiragana rather than read them fluently.  In French, I get around 10 points, or the same as the much longer exercises we had before.

In any case, what we have now is a much higher advertising-to-practice ratio. And as the Swedes say, “Vem är det som tjänar på det?” Who is it that profits from that?

That said, Duolingo claim to gather a lot of information about the effect of various approaches, using A/B testing where some users are given one way of doing things and other users are given another, and they then roll out the most successful approach to everyone. What I am not sure of here is whether the success is for the learners. Financing a service with 150 million users is hard, and perhaps it does require showing ads every 61 seconds. So that could be one reason.

Or it is even possible that neurotypicals learn better under stress. Certainly a lot of them seem to go out of their way to place themselves in stressful situations, whether when playing games, or in traffic, or in their love life. It is as if they don’t really feel alive unless primal emotions are running high. Certainly the amygdala is more active in stressful situations, increasing learning dramatically. Unfortunately, amygdala-learning mostly consists of learning what to avoid. I am not sure Japanese introductions should fall in that category!

For me personally, stress mostly motivates me to find and eliminate the source of the stress, and this does not bode too well for my relationship with Duolingo. But for the time being at least, the timing of this new disturbance could not have been better: I can still do the old type of practice on my brand new iPad, ironically. Admittedly the ability to go directly to forum discussions from an individual exercise does not exist there, and has basically been disabled across the board for Japanese which does not have a web version. I miss that, as there were often helpful comments from people who were much more fluent in the language. But it is not bad enough to abandon my favorite language course right after it came out. So that’s something.

UPDATE: I am happy to announce that you can still get the longer exercises by choosing topics to practice in the skill tree, rather than using the default practice at the overview page.  I just scrolled down to the part of the French skills that were all gray (meaning they badly need practice) and just picked one to practice. Sure enough, I got the old long, non-timed practice. It seems to be only when you let the machine pick what to practice, that you get the timed exercise. I did not notice this in Japanese, because I don’t have any topics yet that are below full strength. ^_^;

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Filed under Features, Japanese

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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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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