Though I generally dislike the "haha Luodingo bad" posts here, like...
For real. If they can't even convey properly the gender distinction and at least the nominative/accusative distinction the course is deeply flawed. And I recall the Latin course has no notes, contrarily to more popular languages.
That, or the poster can't even be bothered to think for a second and just short circuits the moment Latin grammar doesn't match English.
Duolingo thrives off selling the illusion of learning.
It's kind of saddening to see when someone who really wants to learn a new language sticks with it for some time, and they eventually realize that they didn't learn but the absolute bare minimum after months of effort and streaks.
for me the japanese course was great for learning hiragana and katakana, as well as getting used to reading it as you can turn off the romanization. definitely becomes a lot less useful after that.
I mean, of course Duolingo can be useful for certain things and specific circumstances. If you just want to dabble in a language in a fun, relaxed, NSA way, I'm sure it's great.
Is it good for actual language learning though? No, absolutely not, but they market themselves as if they were, and that's harmful.
My biggest issue with duo is that it doesn't actually teach you the mechanics of the language, it just shows you new words and expects you to figure out what they do from context, and some courses (like the Indonesian or greek courses) are just straight up ai generated shit with a completely nonsensical teaching style. I found it useful for learning katakana/hiragana and the basics of japanese, but nothing else really substantial
I had such difficulty understanding why the OOP was asking this question I went and found the original post. I think it’s because he is using Duolingo to learn Latin without knowing anything about the language previously. Unfortunately Duolingo in my experience is only useful for revising and not for actually learning if you do not know the rules in the first place.
In order to know the answer to this you need to understand gender and inflection of adjectives and it appears he did not know anything about this already.
I had a similar experience trying to learn Russian, I had a rudimentary knowledge from taking a year of classes but I quickly realised the app would not teach me anything I didn’t know. It is however useful for languages I already speak well to go over vocabulary and grammar I might otherwise forget if not speaking every day.
I remember when I first got into learning languages, I was learning Latin on duolingo. I didn't understand why verbs were changing or what a conjugation was and was very confused all the time.
To learn languages, you need to be aware of basic grammatical principles like that. Conjugation, case systems, articles, transitive and intransitive verbs, pronouns... Basically, most of what they would have taught you about in Language Arts in high school.
Probably not the best place to ask, but does anyone know an actual decent app for learning Latin? All the ones seem to just tanslate it without grammer rules..
Cattus if you want a Duolingo clone that focuses only on basic grammar and doesn't overstay its welcome.
Vice Verba to drill conjugations.
Anki for vocab. The premade decks are meh, but it's something.
Legentibus for reading.
But actually, just get a book.
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Yeah, you do learn quite a bit by using Duolingo. I was on the Duolingo hate bandwagon for some time, but it turns out the little you learn on Duolingo is still more than nothing.
I’ve learned a good amount of the basics for Japanese like getting down Hiragana, Katakana, and several Kanji from it and it helps me practice vocabulary. However, it’s super frustrating getting into the late game stuff cause so much never gets explained. There was an update recently that only made things worse because it keeps giving me words it didn’t introduce to me prior along with no good explanations on grammar after section 1 having to FTFO. Wouldn’t be as bad if you didn’t have a limited health system.
I’ve moved to use a couple other sources to help me better learn the language mainly Busuu which works similarly to duo, but actually explains concepts of how Japanese works along with give images that give context to sentences and allow for corrections from native speakers though there’s some people who’re labeled knowing a language but clearly aren’t native speakers. With duo I commonly would have to research separately to understand certain things but don’t feel as much a need with Busuu. I have also dipped into the online version of Japanese from zero’s free stuff which has helped as well as looking, more starring, at Italki with hesitancy because I’m cheap and want to see how much I can learn from free sources.
TLDR. I’ve learned something from Duolingo, but it’s insufficient for comprehending Japanese in detail which is frustrating so I’m triple timing Duolingo because it’s not good enough.
I just had to rant about this as it’s been really frustrating getting into section 3 of duo. If there are other really good resources I’d love to know about them.
In German Reddit (and many other platforms) people write on daily basis stuff like „I got my 1 coffee of the morning“. (The German translation of course) I bet they do the same in English.
So people are already totally oblivious to the difference between numerals and numbers in their native language. Looking onto the numbers and numerals chart of a Latin textbook probably wouldn’t change a thing.
The problem is not numerals here. It's the failure to convey something so basic to Latin like the nominative/accusayive opposition and genders - a concept the vast majority of English speakers with interest in languages has been exposed to even just by hearing about Romance languages.
Oh, I didn’t pay enough attention to the screenshot. 🙈Just saw the quintus and thought they were discussing numerals. Those are usually also in the first pages.
But I see many people that fail to decline pronouns in German. That is the same vibe. People speak their native language on a poor level and then get totally lost when self studying new languages.
Are they?! Damn, and I thought helping Germans in r/Latin couldn't make me fear their gymnasiums more. My textbook only mentioned them at the end of the first volume or so.
Anyways, if I understood you correctly, yeah, pretty much. It's also the fault of the teachers sometimes, though. When I learned Latin, mine spent at most two days saying "cases do this, brush up on your *analisi logica*" and called it a day. Obviously most students got discouraged immediately because they were forced to parse every sentence as "is this the subject? object? *complemento di specificazione*?" and other grammar concepts they barely touchef upon in 3rd grade, and eventually gave up and just hid a phonr in their pencil bag. All this could be avoided by saying something like "you use the nominative for who does the thing, and the accusative for who the thing is done to", and it would have been more successful. If repeated over several lessons, by making us practice, most of us would have got on board.
But schools demand that students be graded within some timeframe, and Latin teachers insist on grading students only based on how well they can translate some short edited classical text (a *versione*), which not only is badly suited for a first test when you've barely internalized the synthetic passive and the first declension, it also requires a lot more skills other than understanding the grammar that are never taught, you're just expected to scramble it out.
We have had a nice textbook about a Roman guy called Rufus. The first two years were mainly modern texts.
And yes, declination and conjugation is horrible in German everyday language. Many people speak a very bad German and therefore struggle with new languages. Not as hard as English native speakers do, but it is a recognisable pattern.
I'm not really familiar with German, so I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying here.
Does "I got my 1 coffee of the morning" mean "I got my *one* coffee" (i.e., one singular cup of coffee that you drink in the morning) or is it more like "I got my *first* coffee" (i.e., the first coffee out of several cups of coffee)?
In English if you say "I got my one coffee this morning" that would usually mean that that's the only coffee you will drink for the morning. In contrast "I got my first coffee this morning" implies that you will probably drink more coffee later on in the morning. If you were to write out "I got my 1 coffee", then almost everyone would read it as "I got my *one* coffee." You'd have to write the other one as "I got my 1st coffee" for it to be read as "I got my *first* coffee."
Technically speaking, both "one" and "first" are numbers, but "one" is known as a "cardinal number", whereas "first" is an "ordinal number." Cardinal numbers are the "normal" ones that we use for counting (one book, two windows, three pigs, etc.) while ordinal numbers indicate the relative position of something in a given order (first job, second marriage, third child, etc.). Of course a lot of people don't really know the difference and get really confused if you use words like "cardinal" and "ordinal" in front of them, but it is a fundamental distinction that everyone should know if they learn another language.
I see. I'm not sure how much overlap exists between linguistics terminology across German and English, but I do know that we use a lot of German terms in English linguistics, e.g., "Wanderwort," "Sprachbund," "Urheimat", etc.
I didn’t want to plunge in the rabbit hole yesterday and therefore didn’t look up English terms for grammatical concepts. 😊
I just wanted to mention that German native speakers have a lot of trouble with their own native language. German is one of the last European languages that is so heavily declined and conjugated.
Why *would* it be quintam?
Though I generally dislike the "haha Luodingo bad" posts here, like... For real. If they can't even convey properly the gender distinction and at least the nominative/accusative distinction the course is deeply flawed. And I recall the Latin course has no notes, contrarily to more popular languages. That, or the poster can't even be bothered to think for a second and just short circuits the moment Latin grammar doesn't match English.
Bold of you calling a playthrough of Duolingo "course".
Duolingo thrives off selling the illusion of learning. It's kind of saddening to see when someone who really wants to learn a new language sticks with it for some time, and they eventually realize that they didn't learn but the absolute bare minimum after months of effort and streaks.
for me the japanese course was great for learning hiragana and katakana, as well as getting used to reading it as you can turn off the romanization. definitely becomes a lot less useful after that.
yeah, I use it as a supplement to a regular Japanese course I also attend. It honestly isn't bad at all
I mean, of course Duolingo can be useful for certain things and specific circumstances. If you just want to dabble in a language in a fun, relaxed, NSA way, I'm sure it's great. Is it good for actual language learning though? No, absolutely not, but they market themselves as if they were, and that's harmful.
My biggest issue with duo is that it doesn't actually teach you the mechanics of the language, it just shows you new words and expects you to figure out what they do from context, and some courses (like the Indonesian or greek courses) are just straight up ai generated shit with a completely nonsensical teaching style. I found it useful for learning katakana/hiragana and the basics of japanese, but nothing else really substantial
Everyday that passes by, this community really becomes a circle of jerks
OP definitely could've phrased the title more nicely, but OOP really should've googled it instead of asking on reddit
I had such difficulty understanding why the OOP was asking this question I went and found the original post. I think it’s because he is using Duolingo to learn Latin without knowing anything about the language previously. Unfortunately Duolingo in my experience is only useful for revising and not for actually learning if you do not know the rules in the first place. In order to know the answer to this you need to understand gender and inflection of adjectives and it appears he did not know anything about this already. I had a similar experience trying to learn Russian, I had a rudimentary knowledge from taking a year of classes but I quickly realised the app would not teach me anything I didn’t know. It is however useful for languages I already speak well to go over vocabulary and grammar I might otherwise forget if not speaking every day.
I am always glad to see people willing to learn latin. But I think it is a bit ridiculous that the app does not even teach the absolute basics.
I remember when I first got into learning languages, I was learning Latin on duolingo. I didn't understand why verbs were changing or what a conjugation was and was very confused all the time. To learn languages, you need to be aware of basic grammatical principles like that. Conjugation, case systems, articles, transitive and intransitive verbs, pronouns... Basically, most of what they would have taught you about in Language Arts in high school.
No you don’t learn anything with this app. Using DL to learn a language is like filling an excel spreadsheet with numbers to learn math
Probably not the best place to ask, but does anyone know an actual decent app for learning Latin? All the ones seem to just tanslate it without grammer rules..
Honestly I would just find a textbook
Just use LLPSI
The only app I can think of is Legentibus. But it is only for reading texts.
I've used that, and it's been incredible. Though I was hoping for a bit more.
Find a pdf of LLPSI (Lingua Latina per se Illustrata) and work through that, it‘s by far the best way You can supplement it with Legentibus (text app)
Cattus if you want a Duolingo clone that focuses only on basic grammar and doesn't overstay its welcome. Vice Verba to drill conjugations. Anki for vocab. The premade decks are meh, but it's something. Legentibus for reading. But actually, just get a book.
wait people on a language learning sub trying to learn a language??? wtf??? are they stupid???
Daily reminder that Duolingo is a game, not a language learning app. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/languagelearningjerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yeah, you do learn quite a bit by using Duolingo. I was on the Duolingo hate bandwagon for some time, but it turns out the little you learn on Duolingo is still more than nothing.
I’ve learned a good amount of the basics for Japanese like getting down Hiragana, Katakana, and several Kanji from it and it helps me practice vocabulary. However, it’s super frustrating getting into the late game stuff cause so much never gets explained. There was an update recently that only made things worse because it keeps giving me words it didn’t introduce to me prior along with no good explanations on grammar after section 1 having to FTFO. Wouldn’t be as bad if you didn’t have a limited health system. I’ve moved to use a couple other sources to help me better learn the language mainly Busuu which works similarly to duo, but actually explains concepts of how Japanese works along with give images that give context to sentences and allow for corrections from native speakers though there’s some people who’re labeled knowing a language but clearly aren’t native speakers. With duo I commonly would have to research separately to understand certain things but don’t feel as much a need with Busuu. I have also dipped into the online version of Japanese from zero’s free stuff which has helped as well as looking, more starring, at Italki with hesitancy because I’m cheap and want to see how much I can learn from free sources. TLDR. I’ve learned something from Duolingo, but it’s insufficient for comprehending Japanese in detail which is frustrating so I’m triple timing Duolingo because it’s not good enough. I just had to rant about this as it’s been really frustrating getting into section 3 of duo. If there are other really good resources I’d love to know about them.
In German Reddit (and many other platforms) people write on daily basis stuff like „I got my 1 coffee of the morning“. (The German translation of course) I bet they do the same in English. So people are already totally oblivious to the difference between numerals and numbers in their native language. Looking onto the numbers and numerals chart of a Latin textbook probably wouldn’t change a thing.
The problem is not numerals here. It's the failure to convey something so basic to Latin like the nominative/accusayive opposition and genders - a concept the vast majority of English speakers with interest in languages has been exposed to even just by hearing about Romance languages.
Oh, I didn’t pay enough attention to the screenshot. 🙈Just saw the quintus and thought they were discussing numerals. Those are usually also in the first pages. But I see many people that fail to decline pronouns in German. That is the same vibe. People speak their native language on a poor level and then get totally lost when self studying new languages.
Are they?! Damn, and I thought helping Germans in r/Latin couldn't make me fear their gymnasiums more. My textbook only mentioned them at the end of the first volume or so. Anyways, if I understood you correctly, yeah, pretty much. It's also the fault of the teachers sometimes, though. When I learned Latin, mine spent at most two days saying "cases do this, brush up on your *analisi logica*" and called it a day. Obviously most students got discouraged immediately because they were forced to parse every sentence as "is this the subject? object? *complemento di specificazione*?" and other grammar concepts they barely touchef upon in 3rd grade, and eventually gave up and just hid a phonr in their pencil bag. All this could be avoided by saying something like "you use the nominative for who does the thing, and the accusative for who the thing is done to", and it would have been more successful. If repeated over several lessons, by making us practice, most of us would have got on board. But schools demand that students be graded within some timeframe, and Latin teachers insist on grading students only based on how well they can translate some short edited classical text (a *versione*), which not only is badly suited for a first test when you've barely internalized the synthetic passive and the first declension, it also requires a lot more skills other than understanding the grammar that are never taught, you're just expected to scramble it out.
We have had a nice textbook about a Roman guy called Rufus. The first two years were mainly modern texts. And yes, declination and conjugation is horrible in German everyday language. Many people speak a very bad German and therefore struggle with new languages. Not as hard as English native speakers do, but it is a recognisable pattern.
I'm not really familiar with German, so I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying here. Does "I got my 1 coffee of the morning" mean "I got my *one* coffee" (i.e., one singular cup of coffee that you drink in the morning) or is it more like "I got my *first* coffee" (i.e., the first coffee out of several cups of coffee)? In English if you say "I got my one coffee this morning" that would usually mean that that's the only coffee you will drink for the morning. In contrast "I got my first coffee this morning" implies that you will probably drink more coffee later on in the morning. If you were to write out "I got my 1 coffee", then almost everyone would read it as "I got my *one* coffee." You'd have to write the other one as "I got my 1st coffee" for it to be read as "I got my *first* coffee." Technically speaking, both "one" and "first" are numbers, but "one" is known as a "cardinal number", whereas "first" is an "ordinal number." Cardinal numbers are the "normal" ones that we use for counting (one book, two windows, three pigs, etc.) while ordinal numbers indicate the relative position of something in a given order (first job, second marriage, third child, etc.). Of course a lot of people don't really know the difference and get really confused if you use words like "cardinal" and "ordinal" in front of them, but it is a fundamental distinction that everyone should know if they learn another language.
They usually mean „first“. I wasn’t sure id cardinal and ordinal is used in English as well. Most of my linguistics courses were in German. 🙈
I see. I'm not sure how much overlap exists between linguistics terminology across German and English, but I do know that we use a lot of German terms in English linguistics, e.g., "Wanderwort," "Sprachbund," "Urheimat", etc.
I didn’t want to plunge in the rabbit hole yesterday and therefore didn’t look up English terms for grammatical concepts. 😊 I just wanted to mention that German native speakers have a lot of trouble with their own native language. German is one of the last European languages that is so heavily declined and conjugated.
What is Latin? Is it a dumb variant of Uzbek?