I'm on my second trip through the French course on Duolingo.
The first time I went through it, I used the free course, and learned basic things about grammar, as well as establishing a lexicon.
This time through, I signed up for Duolingo Max (it's about $150/year). This gives me help with errors, explaining what I'm doing wrong; it also lets me "talk" to the characters, via phone calls and role play. There also seems to be more talking and listening involved in the lessons this time through -- before, I was mainly reading and writing. Now about half the lessons involve speaking and listening.
That's made a big difference. I can (mostly) understand spoken French now, and because I get feedback on my spoken French, I can see where I'm fucking up.
It's also helping me with reading French -- I can now read French stories and novels if they are not too hard, and with the occasional help of a dictionary.
I've started trying to learn Russian, but that course doesn't give as much help as the French one does. The Latin and Greek courses as similarly useless, giving almost no help with the grammar or with errors. And I've been learning chess as well -- that course is pretty good, at least so far. (I knew the basics of chess, but nothing about the strategy or why certain moves were better than others.)
If you can justify spending the money, I'd go for Duolingo Max, is what I'm saying.
6 comments:
My DH loves the paid duolingo as well. He's been doing little bouts prior to trips (currently working on Greek) and I think keeps Italian on in the background because we haven't been yet. He's usually got at least two languages going at a time. He did find that he forgot a lot of French between going to France and going to Montreal though. (Me, I still only have English and Spanish and my Spanish is not that great anymore.) --n&m
I mostly do French and then one other language or chess lesson a day. The Russian is hard because of the alphabet, mostly.
I highly recommend "journal de 18h" from radio france if you want 15-20 minutes a day of listening practice. Usually you can slow down the podcast if it's too fast for a beginner! (I have a bachelor's degree in French and have worked as an interpreter.)
That's an excellent suggestion! Thank you!
I recently stopped paying for DuoLingo (I'd read they started treating their employees poorly). I think most of the changes you described happened for everyone--they're always updating the course. In fact, I completely finished the Spanish course once; now it's 3 times as long! With the very latest change, I feel I'm getting less practice than I want--I feel like there are only 2 normal lessons per unit and the rest is all review or straight vocabulary or that little interactive speaking thing. After the listening exercise, I really like the writing exercise--AI grades it and they almost always guess right on what I was trying to say. So I'll deliberately write things I'm not sure how to write if I think of them just to see if I get good feedback (unlike if I were trying to make a good grade in a class).
DuoLingo super is still great for not having ads. So you can do things when you have the time and energy.
I'm so impressed that you can actually read things. Even kids' books are still over my head, though I do usually understand the small amounts of Spanish that are in English books, and I often understand little phrases here and there. Spanish spoken in the wild is still almost completely bewildering (sometimes I understand short sentences that very small children say, like "No!" and "Mine!").
It was to get rid of the ads that I decided to start paying. With Max, you can do as many "phone calls" as you want, as well as the role plays. There's a little icon for both. Being able to read French is my favorite part so far!
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