One year ago, yesterday, I was on the bus to the Incheon airport after a short sojourn in Seoul. I’d been visiting friends and was returning from a multi-leg trip down to Australia to see my mom, who’d been having health problems.
I was annoyed with myself because I’d realized during my short visit that I had forgotten even more Korean than I thought I had. I wanted to figure out some way to make a habit to study Korean at least a little bit, so even if I failed to advance, I’d at least not lose ground, now that I lived in Alaska.
I downloaded and began using the Duolingo app. I reviewed my experiences with Duolingo twice: here and here.
So the app, which “gamifies” the langauge-learning process intensely, reminded me of my one-year accomplishment.
My rating of the app remains low, considering how loyally I use it. 3 stars out of 5 – if not lower. I’ve considered paying for it several times, wondering if it might improve the experience, but, although the ads are annoying, they’re not the most annoying aspect, and so I suspect if I was paying for it it would just make me more annoyed, because then I’d be paying for an annoying experience. The most annoying aspects are that it’s often enough clearly wrong about some aspect of the languages I know well (English, Spanish), in the translations it offers. So I naturally suspect that the languages I don’t know well are probably wrong too, in similar ways, and that means I’m learning wrong stuff. Separately, the app also annoys me because it actually crashes (on my Android phone) more frequently than you’d expect from a “mature” app. It’ll just stop at some step and sit there. I have to go into the phone’s setting, kill the app, and restart it. Why would I pay for that?
Nevertheless, I use it everyday. Foremost, I do my Korean lesson (or several). I think it helps me to cement my stale Korean vocabulary, and I can say it’s definitely exposed me to some new Korean words and grammar features as well. I won’t say it offers any kind of feeling of fluency or facility – it’s more like a kind of passing familiarity – but that still counts for something.
I like that each “lesson” is not a major time commitment: a few minutes. And I can skip the listening parts if I’m doing it somewhere I don’t want to be annoying around other people (like at the store, or around Arthur).
Then, I distribute my time among the 9 other languages I’ve started. I decided that as a kind of “extra” challenge for myself, I’d try to keep my point totals for each language as close to the same as possible. Generally, I can keep all the languages within 100 points of each other – except Korean, which gets a higher level of attention and which I leave out of this extra constraint.
Here is where I stand right now – languages ranked in descending order by point totals.
I will always do the language lowest in the list. That keeps them all roughly at the same point totals.
Bear in mind that point totals aren’t what you think they might be: specifically, they are not indicators of effort or progress or ability or anything like that. Mostly they are a correlate of time spent, roughly, but there’s an element of luck in how the points are distributed (because of time-based point doubling and point tripling schemes). Over the long haul, they do more-or-less represent time spent on each language. But even there, the levels and details of each language are not at all correlated – though I’ve started all of them from lesson 1 (Korean is the only one I started deeper into the language). If there was a single thing I’d like different about the app, it’s that I’d like the points you get to be a more accurate indicator of, at least, effort, but even better, of actual knowledge or progress.
These language experiences are not all the same – not at all. Clearly the language series are designed by different people, with different types of focus. With the same amount of time invested, I’m still learning Arabic pronunciation and spelling, while I’m discussing the weather in Welsh, complaining about food in German, and talking about seemingly anthropomorphic animals in Greek. Maybe I’ll write a little summary / commentary for my feelings about each language.
Ukrainian. This was the first language I added, when I realized I could do more than one language, a week or two into using the app. It’s only coincidence that it’s the top of the list, here, though. I have a genuine interest in the language, and it’s not too difficult, because of my 2 years of college Russian – I didn’t have to start from scratch on the alphabet, and lots of vocabulary is pretty transparent. I think the way it’s done it would be quite difficult for someone not used to cyrillic – they don’t really teach you letters or sounds, unlike the Arabic or Greek lesson plans.
Greek. This also isn’t too hard, since I took a bit of Ancient Greek in college. I quickly refreshed on the alphabet, but modern pronunciation is a bit “weird” for someone who studied the Ancient language, and the vocabulary and even grammar are radically different. I’m surprised by how many loanwords there are from e.g. Italian, French, English, etc. I enjoy the wacky over-determined determiners (which is to say, it seems like the Greek equivalent of “the” does a lot more work in Greek than it does in English)
Swedish. This is slightly harder because I’m learning from Spanish. But my Spanish is sufficiently fluent that it’s not really an impediment. The worst aspect is that it’s clearly peninsular Spanish, whereas my dialect(s) is/are all Latin American. I find Swedish spelling to be a bit random relative to the phonology I hear. Maybe there are rules? I can’t figure it out. Of course, an English speaker has no room for complaint, here. The verbs are super easy (unconjugated, so far), but they make up for it with their wacky noun declensions. Gender? Yes, linguistically speaking, but uncorrelated with human gender. So: common vs neuter. And definite articles are suffixes (like Romanian?). I enjoy the weirdness of the grammar. I suppose I enjoy the weirdness of all languages’ grammars.
German. I actually started this to work more on my Korean. That’s because I’m learning German from Korean. This is hard. My Korean vocabulary isn’t quite strong enough for things to be transparent. Sometimes I have to look up the Korean word being offered to explain the German word. Sometimes, I actually know the German word but not the Korean one. Part of the issue is that the Korean being taught to me, as an English speaker, is not actually the same Korean being used as the L1 for learning German. The vocabulary doesn’t always overlap – they teach me different ways to say things (“Korean for foreigners”) than they assume natives use, in the German app. But there are also weird things going on because sometimes the Korean is strange and stilted and unnatural – the consequence of trying to translate German grammatical concepts into Korean. So: pronouns getting used in ways no native-speaking Korean would use them, just to make clear what’s going on in the German. German itself isn’t that hard, but this is the language I make the most mistakes with, because the overlap of German with Korean, I’m most likely to mess something up.
French. This is fun because I’m learning this from Portuguese. Arguably, I have intermediate ability in both these languages already, so this tends to be a bit of a glide. It’s a bit of lite Romance-language amusement.
Welsh. Welsh grammar is famously freaky. Fortunately, I’ve been exposed to it before (Medieval Welsh, in university). So I know what’s going on – even if, as linguist, I can just stare in amazement. There is a huge amount of cognate-with-English vocabulary – once you get used to the way the Welsh like to spell things. It’s not too difficult for me. But unlike any of the other languages, the lesson plan was clearly designed for children. That’s strange. Was there some kind of Duolingo contract with Welsh education authorities, when the package was put together? Or is it just that that’s what the course designers thought they were supposed to do? Lots of colors and shapes and emotions and summer holidays to Aberystwyth.
Vietnamese. This is the absolute hardest for me. I would have been pleased if they had actually bothered to teach me how to type the wacky Vietnamese diacritics, or if they took more time with the introduction of the seemingly infinite variety of noun-qualifier-thingies (what are these, grammatically? I have no idea! Maybe I’ll have to actually research outside of duolingo). Unlike any of the other languages, I simply cannot hear what’s said and write that down in the writing system required. I would have appreciated the laborious approach to spelling and pronunciation being offered in the Arabic course – see next.
Arabic. I studied Arabic a bit on college, so this hasn’t been hard, so far. I was rusty on the alphabet, but it comes back. I’m actually annoyed with how slow it’s going – as commented above, if only Vietnamese (and maybe Greek?) had bothered to spend this amount of time and effort teaching me the writing system and phonology, I’d have appreciated it. It’s weird how inconsistent these various different language courses are with respect to each other.
Italian. Another Romance-language-nerd lark. Not hard at all – learning Italian from Spanish. Half the time, the vocabulary is identical. When it’s not, I’m familiar enough with Italian to immediately know. I almost never make mistakes with this language – it’s the easiest, by far, though I’ve never formally studied Italian, I have formally studied: Latin, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. With all of that, not much challenge. But I like Italian. So it’s fun.
Anyway, it’s all good, light entertainment for a language nerd like myself. I rarely spend more than 20 or 30 minutes a day, which is about 3 or 4 lessons. One Korean in the morning, and 2 or 3 others at night. If you’re not a language nerd, probably it’s not your cup of tea. Or at the least, just do one language, right?
Maybe one of these days I will try paying for it and see if it annoys me a little bit less, or a little bit more.
