this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
3 points (80.0% liked)

Language Learning

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A community all about learning languages!

Other Lemmy language communities:

Japanese

Chinese

Duolingo

Other communities outside Lemmy:

Unilang

A language learners' forum

founded 1 year ago
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I know they sometimes get a bad rap (especially recently with the lay offs https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/10/duolingo-ai-layoffs/), but it's still a nice app to use to get started with a language

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's hard to find a big tech company that hasn't been laying off like crazy lately. I just hit 200 days yesterday learning French.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Félicitations !

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That’s crazy. Can’t imagine to stick to a routine for 5 years consistently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I couldn’t imagine myself doing it either tbh, but I started learning on Duolingo as a personal challenge: to prove to myself that I can still learn something new every day and allay my irrational fear that I’m getting too old to improve at anything.

And it worked. That fear is gone now, but the streak goes on. Not letting it go cause I’m that stubborn.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Very impressive indeed

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Would you say you're fluent in a language as a result of this?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I think so? But it’s not like I spent more than 5 minutes a day practicing in the past 3 years or so. My sessions certainly go down depending on how busy I get.

Also fun fact: I had to practice German during my wedding. Didn’t go well with the wife but now she gets it. Hehe

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

2200+ fire streak since I joined 10 years ago (multiple languages). Lost the streak a few times before. I'm not fluent but maintaining it helps me to improve a bit every day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Impressive, which languages are you learning?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks. A few of them but main focus is Spanish. What about you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm learning Spanish too! We should create a community to practice ha ha

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Good idea. That's what I'm missing about Duolingo tbh. Let's start it. Maybe we should make a discord or alternative?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I was more thinking about a Lemmy community, I asked about a Spanish instance a few days ago on [email protected], seems like there isn't any at the moment.

I have been thinking about it for a while, I'll keep you posted about the potential options

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What's wrong with this community if you want to keep it on Lemmy? I think it would fragment the community unnecessarily

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We are not talking about the same thing, I was thinking more about a Spanish-specific community, where we could practice in that language :)

To my knowledge, there is none active so far, (https://lemmy.ml/c/espanol and https://lemmy.ml/c/spain being quite dead), there is one recent message on [email protected], but I'm not a fan of having all communities on LW

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I understand now, but I think this method wouldn't be an efficient one, except for sharing articles about learning that language but I think this c already is good enough for it. What I'm missing is a chat for group of people studying the same language, and where we can also converse orally. That's what DL is missing, and alternative I tried was full of unmotivated people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, it we were to speak the language, I guess that would work.

That's more or less how I learned English, by commenting on forums in English. The oral part indeed would need something else, isn't there any Discord existing already to practice?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

0, I quit

Before I killed it, I had 443, and easily could have kept going if I had desired

The layoffs and AI thing are only a partial reason for me leaving The whole volunteer shutdown when that happened, hiding 4 of their courses, and some other minor bad decisions made me stop Not to mention, Duolingo is very slow at times and doesn't teach any grammar unless you happen to be learning one of the 3 top languages

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Makes sense. Are you aware of any open source alternative?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Librelingo is the only thing I've seen close to what Duolingo tries to be, but sadly it seems under-developed and doesn't offer anything other than very beginner Spanish so far

https://librelingo.app/