February 26, 2017 · 7:43 pm

You’re making it look easy!

Woo! I am now 51% fluent in French (by the rather modest standard of fluency used by Duolingo, I should say.) So eventually you do progress if you keep at it by doing just 20 points a day. (OK, I had a couple days with 30 last week, but no more than that.) Took me less than half a year to go from 49 to 51 too. Or somewhere around that.

One new feature that showed up this year was the occasional appearance of Duo the green owl peeking in from the side of the screen to say: “Keep it up!” “You’re making it look easy!” “Six in a row, look at you go!” Thank you, Duo, for not putting pressure on me or jolting me out of my rhythm … ^_^;

Of course, it is actually Duolingo that goes to great lengths to make it look easy. This is particularly true for the app, not so much the web edition. While the webpages have more explanations of grammar and such, the exercises are quite a bit harder. Not only do you have to type without auto-correction, which makes it hard to get all the accents, but you have more typing exercises in general. On the smartphone app, many exercises consist of just clicking on the right words from a crowd of words to string them together into the correct sentence, and sometimes you just match words or phrases in the two languages. So the app is great for those who want it easy and have a fragile ego. The web is better if you like a challenge. For instance I used to do Swedish on the web when I did that, because otherwise it would be too embarrassingly easy.  For French, it is mostly a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into it. (The more effort, the better you learn.) For Hebrew, just finding the characters on the PC keyboard was an adventure, so definitely smartphone / tablet for that one before I gave up.

Making it look easy is probably the only way to keep people like me who don’t have any special motivation to learn a particular language. Now if Japanese appears – which it is supposed to do this summer, but I believe that when I see it – I might actually want to make an effort. I have tried so many times in so many ways to learn some Japanese, but it keeps hovering just out of reach, understanding just scattered words and not being able to read or write them. But Japanese is for the future, if any. If they can make that look easy, I take my hat off. Hey, it is better than tearing my hair off!

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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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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

January 25, 2016 · 8:00 am

The alternating streak

Duolingo records how many continuous days you have done your minimum number of exercises (the standard is 20 points, or 2 set of exercises, per day, but you can set your own goal). It keeps track of this to motivate you, and you also get lingots (the in-game currency) depending on your streak. For 10 days, 1 lingot. For 20 days, 2 lingots and so on. Not sure if there is an upper limit to that. Not that I need lingots for anything anyway, but I appreciate the attempt at gamification.

I am currently on a 54 day streak, so the website says. Except I am 95% sure I missed Turkish one evening a couple days ago, when I was planning to do it on my tablet later so I did not have to change keyboard language on my smartphone. Various things happened and suddenly it was past midnight. The same thing happened with French a couple weeks ago, as far as I remember. But evidently Duolingo remembers this differently, because it seems to have forgiven and forgotten both of these infractions.

So my current theory is that if you are studying two languages, the streak is combined. If you remember do do at least one of them, the streak will be unbroken. This fits with the fact that I only got one set of lingots on round days (5 lingots for 50 days, not 10, not 6 for one 50 day streak and one 10 day streak).  In other words, streaks are for people, not for languages. Or that is my tentative conclusion so far.

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January 17, 2016 · 10:32 am

Artificial “intelligence”

Duolingo uses “spaced repetition” to improve long-time learning. This means that rather than drill a word a number of times and then assume we have learned it, the program presents the word occasionally so that we don’t forget it. The ideal time to show the word again is just before we forget it, and there are a number of spaced repetition software (SRS) packages available for money or for free, which are most commonly used for vocabulary (although they can be used to learn a great number of things). They use various ways to measure how often to show you a particular phrase. The most obvious is that if you get it wrong, it has been too long. Ideally you should have to stop and think, so if you can answer without thinking, it was too early. Programs such as Supermemo, Mnemosyne and Anki ask you to rate how hard it was to remember, and adjust the schedule individually for each word/phrase/fact.

Duolingo boasts a similar ability to keep track of weak points and bring them up more frequently. How does that work? Not too well. The program tends to wait too long before the first repetition: Unless I manually select that particular topic later in the day or the next day, it can take days before it comes up, at which point I won’t remember it unless I happened to associate it with something memorable.  Normally you need to repeat things within minutes first, then perhaps an hour (OK, it seems unreasonable for the program to wake you up after an hour) and then the next day, before you start on a long-term schedule. Duolingo is rather more optimistic.

Generally I don’t find any signs that Duolingo actually keeps track of my weak words or features. Perhaps it is just hiding this really well, but getting a word or phrase right every time does not seem to keep it from recurring. It seems more likely that Duolingo uses an average of the experience of many users: I find for instance that it tends to bring up longish less common words like kaplumbağa (turtle) rather than shorter, more common words like inek (cow), even though I actually learned the longer word almost instantly (because of a game I play) and actually fail the shorter word because it shows up so rarely. Despite this, the text has been crawling with turtles almost from the start. ^_^;

So there is definitely room for a competitor to disrupt Duolingo with a superior artificial intelligence. Hopefully that competitor is Duolingo’s own shadow research team, which is supposedly working to do just that. It would be a shame to not make use of the work that has already been put into Duolingo, even though it is still a work in progress and far from perfect. (Then again, neither am I…) Either way, the selling point of Duolingo is not really its technical excellence, but the fact that it is free so anyone can get started with it, and fun so anyone can continue with it.

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December 29, 2015 · 12:38 am

Holidays slowdown

I continued my Turkish to include “Occupation”, which in this context means jobs, not occupying territory or being preoccupied with something. It was all vocabulary and no grammar, so it should not make it much harder to review older stuff.  (When learning new grammar, Duolingo tends to use the new forms also in earlier lessons, except the very first such as common greeting phrases.)

After this, I have mostly done 20 XP a day in both Turkish and French, which is really only basic maintenance. I actually felt myself slipping a little on Turkish after a couple days this way. I think I need at least 50 XP a day just to water the field I have already sown. But I have faith that eventually the basics will be so obvious to me that I can expand without much need to look back, much as in French. There is short-term memory, there is long-term memory, but there is also what I call lifelong memory (although dementia might of course trash even that – but dementia tends to arrive years later in bilingual people.) Even though English is my third language, by now nothing short of massive brain damage could erase my basic English conversational skills. There is no reason this should be different with my sixth language if I integrate it into my life. Of course, that is a rather big if. Turkish is really just a whim for me, I don’t have any use for it. Or not that I know of. Sometimes we don’t see the use for what we learn until after we have learned it!

Anyway, currently on maintenance mostly. Not sure if my French streak is still unbroken, since Duolingo stopped reminding me of it, but Turkish is at 27 days and counting.

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