Duolingo Report

[moon_custafer]

Continuing to work at it every day, hoping at some point it will click. One of the reasons I’ve been doing this is that I wanted to see if I really am as bad at learning languages as I feel I am. I’m still undecided— I’m reasonably good at doing the exercises in the course, but a lot of the time I feel like a Chines Room— like I can fill in the missing word, etc., correctly without actually understanding the overall sentence at a glance.

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

I think the gamification is a problem for actual language retention. I do several languages every day. I use the phone app in some cases because one gets to speak to it (to have pronunciation judged) but otherwise I use the browser version on the laptop for Spanish because actually typing the words seems to be the only way for me to learn how to spell. For the languages I do with different alphabets, it's too easy to use the multiple choice guessing method to get the right answer - they only give a small number of incorrect words in the word bank for each question, and if you know some of the words and grammar, it's often possible to eliminate the wrong words and act like you know the whole sentence. Which I guess is what you were saying. I am trying harder to force myself to stop tapping on sight words so quickly and make myself say things out loud so that eyes and ears and mouth are working together.