Duolingo!

[paulypepper]

I took German in high school for four years some 40 odd years ago and am now brushing up thanks to Duolingo...and thanks to all the free jingerites that mentioned this, I'm having so much fun

[Gobbles]

I also love it! I currently learn Danish (finished, level 14) and Spanish (5). I started with French (3) as well, but only to see if I'd use that or Spanish. And of course I also had to do the German course because it is my native language. I think about Dutch as next language once I finished Spanish. And I really need to finish German. It is annoying to read that I'm not 100% fluent in it.

I'm patiently waiting for the Croatian course. I hope they make one one day. 

There is a German duolingo as well, but with less languages. So I'm learning a foreign language with another foreign language. Not that easy. I make most mistakes in Danish and German in the English translation, confusing "a" and "an"...

[Foudeb]

I'm addicted to Duo! same user name as here.

It's a great way to brush up on a language you're already familiar with imho.

[FrumperSeamstress]

I love Duolingo! I'd started French on there, but I haven't done it in such a long time. I may need to re-download it!

[GeoBQn]

I love exploring languages and seeing the connections between them.  I minored in Yiddish in college and studied Hebrew when I was in Israel, so I am looking forward to those courses.  It is hard to keep up your skills if there aren't a lot of speakers around (or in the case of Yiddish, the speakers are dying off.)

I am re-doing my German tree now that they've added new lessons, and also started Danish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish.  My last name is an actual Polish word, so I want to see if it is included in the course.  I took Danish because I was watching Borgen at the time, and it was fun to recognize words in the dialogue.

[SadieJane]

I am going to start with some polish. You all have me sold on this.

[Jeebusismycopilot]

I love duolingo! I have been using it to "retrain" my german. I took german through OAC but I haven't really used it for anything since graduating high school, so it is more than a little rusty. I've also been trying to teach myself spanish. It's entertaining and fun

What I really want to learn is welsh. My dad used to try and teach me bits and pieces when I was a child. I would love to be able to say more than the usual "good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night" etc. 

[Alicja]

I just started Polish today! I was fluent in middle school but I eventually lost that I'm also using Duolingo for French. Hopefully they'll release Arabic soon, because I really wanna learn it.

[Geechee Girl]

I'm also looking forward to Hebrew & Arabic. I'm currently on French, German, and Latin American Spanish.

[onlyme]

Yes! I'm doing the Spanish (I took a few years in high school but forget more than I remember.) Then I want to do Swedish. 

[religiouslyconfused]

On December 13, 2015 at 8:02 PM, Cactus said:

Esperanto is a fascinating look into the world of early 20th century language idealism (I just wish he'd used some more common diacritics, seeing as ĥ is a PITA to find in Unicode). I once tried to teach myself out of a book as old as my grandmother and remember precisely one word: kuirejo (kitchen), only because it was the one word in the book I couldn't pronounce.

I need to get back into the habit of using Duolingo daily. I'm forgetting all my German

Esperanto is an interesting language and Benny from fluentin3months.com said you can get ahead of your target language by learning esperanto for 2 weeks. I don't know how reliable is his service, but I like the idea of hacking languages. 

[Cactus]

9 hours ago, religiouslyconfused said:

Esperanto is an interesting language and Benny from fluentin3months.com said you can get ahead of your target language by learning esperanto for 2 weeks. I don't know how reliable is his service, but I like the idea of hacking languages. 

That assumes 1) you have little to no second language learning experience and 2) your target language is Indo-European, or one of Esperanto's source languages. If you've already learned three languages and subsequently want to learn Japanese, two weeks of Esperanto will do nothing for you.

To be honest, if you've never learned a second language before I would first take the time to really know the grammar of your first language. It will make learning the grammar of the second orders of magnitude easier.

(source: I have a linguistics degree)

[Geechee Girl]

I've recently started Japanese to get ahead of the curve as I'm taking the course next semester.

[religiouslyconfused]

5 hours ago, Cactus said:

That assumes 1) you have little to no second language learning experience and 2) your target language is Indo-European, or one of Esperanto's source languages. If you've already learned three languages and subsequently want to learn Japanese, two weeks of Esperanto will do nothing for you.

To be honest, if you've never learned a second language before I would first take the time to really know the grammar of your first language. It will make learning the grammar of the second orders of magnitude easier.

(source: I have a linguistics degree)

Good advice!

[choralcrusader8613]

Just found this thread, and I'm using it to get my German better (as well as listening to Youtube, reading German news, etc.), as well as learning Welsh and Irish. i'm also going to try and learn Hebrew once that comes out on Duolingo this summer.

[Witherwings]

I use it to brush up on my German and French. I am excited about Hebrew as well, although I don't know that I will become near fluent from duolingo. I honestly cannot personally imagine learning a language without a good bit of immersion.

[choralcrusader8613]

Since it's relevant to people posting in here, I thought I'd share some things I'm doing to get better at my target languages:

I completed my target language tree in Duolingo, so now I'm doing the reverse tree, a.k.a. the tree for my language in my target language. I'm working on English for German speakers right now, since I've completed German for English speakers.

I like reading language blogs for my target languages. It's really helpful.

I also listen to Disney songs in German (as well as other German music) and watch German Youtube channels, read German newspapers (or try to anyway, haha).

Speaking in German is honestly the worst part for me, not because of pronunciation issues, but because I just get nervous, so I'm trying to find ways to work on that part of it and become more confident.

[Sweet Fellowship]

I have Duolingo installed to help me learn Danish. Sadly I haven't logged in for a while (baby and such). I should actually log in again and get learning.

[Cannelle]

My people! I've been going through the Norwegian tree since October (I missed a day due to my son's appendectomy). LOVE it. I'm looking forward to being done with it, though, and using the Norsk books that I've pieced together. (I can only handle so much new vocab and grammar at a time, so Duolingo wins out as my primary source until I've finished the tree, and then I'll just use it to maintain vocab and start going through my grammar/vocab books more reguarly.)

I picked Norwegian because all the relatives on my dad's side came from Norway in the early 1900's.

[Rachel333]

So now that Hebrew course is out, has anyone started learning it?

I've got too many courses going right now to start a new one. I've finished French, German, Esperanto, and Danish, and am working on finishing Spanish and Russian. I've studied French and Russian before, but the rest I started with Duolingo.  Once I finish Spanish and Russian then maybe I'll add something else.

By the way, for a limited time if you've finished the Esperanto course on Duolingo you can get several Esperanto magazines for free: http://duolingo.esperanto.net/

[clueliss]

So Duolingo is a fundie?

[adidas]

I hope it’s okay that I bump this old thread?

Dows anyone have any recommendations for very easy French podcasts to listen to, to go along with Duo? My French is VERY, VERY basic.

The Duolingo French podcasts are too hard for me, I don’t have the vocab yet. I listened to this one yesterday and couldn’t follow the story except for the English narration. I could identify some individual words and a few basic phrases. 

I think 5 minute chunks would be better for me, rather than 20 minutes of sitting there feeling overwhelmed and bewildered.

https://podcast.duolingo.com/episode-18-surfer-au-senegal-surfing-in-senegal

[clueliss]

Have you tried watching some of the Netflix shows that are available in French?  (and doing so in French perhaps with the Close Captioning on?)

[Vivi_music]

2 hours ago, adidas said:

I hope it’s okay that I bump this old thread?

Dows anyone have any recommendations for very easy French podcasts to listen to, to go along with Duo? My French is VERY, VERY basic.

The Duolingo French podcasts are too hard for me, I don’t have the vocab yet. I listened to this one yesterday and couldn’t follow the story except for the English narration. I could identify some individual words and a few basic phrases. 

I think 5 minute chunks would be better for me, rather than 20 minutes of sitting there feeling overwhelmed and bewildered.

https://podcast.duolingo.com/episode-18-surfer-au-senegal-surfing-in-senegal

For two seconds I was like.... OH I KNOW a bunch! But these are podcasts for french speakers so never mind me. ?

I could help writing you in French tho but I suppose that doesn't help you for speaking and pronounciation.