tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH!

  • @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    561 year ago

    “Courses” is a strong word for what Duolingo offers. It just shows you flashcards, but never explains grammar/syntax rules. Lingodeer is far superior.

    • @lugal@sopuli.xyz
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      21 year ago

      The old tree had grammar bits (for some languages only in the browser) but the new one is just bad

    • @boredtortoise@lemm.ee
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      21 year ago

      Lingodeer is a technical mess with popups, banners and lock or crown icons everywhere. There are situations where it just won’t let you continue to the next lesson and the flow inside the exercises is very janky. Turning off the animations helps a lot but it’s nowhere near the ease of use of Duolingo.

    • @zerofk@lemm.ee
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      21 year ago

      The problem with all these alternatives is that the language selection is extremely limited. You want to learn English, French, German, or Spanish? Great, there are a million options for you! But if you go a bit more niche like Finnish or Irish, your options are much more limited. Of course there are ways to learn those languages - and much better ways than Duolingo. But Duolingo’s strength is offering a bunch of them, for free, in one place.

      Note that I’m not trying to defend Duolingo, but rather deploring the lack of alternatives.

    • stinerman
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      11 year ago

      I use Duolingo (and actually pay for it) and I agree 100% with this. The app is primarily about keeping you engaged and on the app. The method is by attempting to teach you a language.

  • ComradeSharkfucker
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    321 year ago

    Fascinating that Duolingo tries to teach Navajo. The language is incredibly tonal and with sounds not native to most languages. I imagine it’s incredibly difficult to teach through an online service

    • Apathy Tree
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      11 year ago

      Idk how duolinguo works (at all), but if the app can play the sounds for you and judge on your pronunciation, that would be quite enough to do the job. If it can handle mandarin (idk if it can) than any tonal based language is fair game.

      I would think any decent speech to text could do a decent job determining pronunciation, if there isn’t a dedicated thing for that… either it registers or it gets garble and you try again.

  • Smuuthbrane
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    261 year ago

    I almost found a way to get university credit for learning Klingon. My downfall was that the Klingon Language Institute was not an “accredited” learning institution. I wonder if that’s changed yet…

  • @crashoverride@lemmy.world
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    241 year ago

    High Valerian also doesn’t have all the ingredients to become an actual language. All I did was translate words in sentences into the language for the show, but Klingon, it is an actual language and has been developed enough that you can call it a language

    • @grue@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      Yeah, Klingon was deliberately designed to have object-verb-subject word order (among other unusual features) just to make it more alien.

  • Sagrotan
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    211 year ago

    Language learning apps work only to give you an overview over a language, to look if a language is worth learning. You really wanna learn? Search for someone who’s mother tongue it is in your vicinity and contact him. You’ll be surprised, how much fun that’ll be, your friendly Klingon in the neighborhood, crashing your door in at 3 a.m., hellish drunk, just to show you his new Gagh recipe, or you’ll find yourself as a slave in the fictional world of an obese old creep. Learning new languages is awesome, right?

    • chaogomu
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      261 year ago

      That’s what multiple genocides get you. A language rated as Vulnerable in UNESCO.

      Still, there are about 170,000 people who speak Navajo, with about 8000 who only speak Navajo.

      • @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        21 year ago

        US: kills all the Navajo speakers

        Also US: “Wow, there are so few Navajo speakers! We should use it as a secret military code!”

      • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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        11 year ago

        Also doesn’t help that Navajo is an INCREDIBLY divergent language compared to basically everything else, even other languages native to North America save those of related languages.

        It’s probably as close to a natlang ithkuil as linguistic science may have ever discovered, so acquiring it non-natively is A TON of work.

        Also I may be confusing it with another indigenous language but IIRC there are some Navajo nation communities in which teaching the language to outsiders is seen as a GRAVE offense.

        You can guess that the course on Duolingo isn’t exactly regarded as on par with their French and Spanish courses. That and their attempt at Hawaiian and the ensuant backlash over how bad both were are partially responsible for why Duolingo has yet to expand into a significant number of new languages.

    • @WhistlingGhost@lemmy.world
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      61 year ago

      The app Tandem (Language Exchange) has Tagalog as an option! It’s a pretty cool app. It connects you to native speakers so that they can have conversations with you and help you learn your chosen language.

      • Smuuthbrane
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        31 year ago

        That’s too bad. From some.of.the books it seemed to be pretty close.

  • Neato
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    41 year ago

    I don’t think High Valyrian is an actual language…