i hate the duolingo leagues mechanic because i am... honestly not all that competitive, but i AM an achievement completionist and theres an achievement for finishing #1 in the diamond league, so. here i am. in the goddamn diamond league

but i suspect hardly anyone is being like... strategic? about xp collection? because to ME the obvious strat is to do regular lessons until you get the 2x xp bonus and then blast through as many timed challenges and legendary challenges as you can, because THOSE normally give you 40xp but with the bonus it's 80xp and you can get through a good number of them in the 15 minutes before the 2x bonus expires (and redo the timed challenges as many times as you want to farm xp). so you can easily get like thousands of xp this way with a pretty trivial time investment? but even the people who put the little gold trophy emoji on their leaderboard icon (not ME. i put the 🇨🇳 to indicate im learning chinese because i have TASTE) mostly do not seem to be doing this and i dont get it. how can you possibly expect to get the fucking gold trophy this way

that said, my other Strat rn is to study chinese until i get the 2x xp bonus, then switch over to german to farm xp, because i tested really far into the german course (ages ago i was using it to review grammar, i mostly did not learn german off duolingo) and didnt do any of the timed challenges or legendary challenges (i didnt care to farm xp but im also not sure they even existed at the time). honestly its pretty decent german review because i continue to be terrible at grammar :/ i'm sufficiently fluent in german that i can finish the challenges faster so it's really good for xp farming, but i'm also kind of annoyed with myself for letting my original goals of learning chinese and japanese be distorted by incentives into reviewing german

changed my phone language to (simplified) chinese the other day (i was bored at work). don't really know what anything says now and google maps directions are incomprehensible except for "left" and "right", but i HAVE now learned the word for "post" (as in tumblr post)

essential vocabulary: 帖子

i love that i can say stupid shit to zeezee like 这是我的猫!!! and she blinks at me lovingly yet uncomprehendingly exactly the same way she blinks at me when i say stupid shit in english

me: girliepop you are so soft!!!

zeezee: 🥺

me: du bist eine kleine kätzle!! ja! ja ich glaube, wir haben eine katze-situation auf unserem händen!!!

zeezee: 🥺

me: 谁是我的小猫？你！！你是我的小猫！！！

zeezee: 🥺😌🥺

love when @combat-epistemologist is practicing icelandic and translates something into english and then i translate it badly into mandarin

ok i did some reading abt german nonbinary pronouns and im rly vibing with "iks" but "es" is probably my second choice. which is kinda weird because i DO NOT WANT it/its pronouns in english at ALL

and X也 is rly cool but hard to type :( the sacrifices we make for cool gender,

semi-recently started using the skritter app to learn chinese (it's good! highly recommend!) and they've got all these premade decks of flashcards for, you know, normal shit. HSK vocabulary! computer terms! kangxi radicals!

meanwhile i am attempting to learn to read tropey xianxia novels, so i'm making a deck of xianxia terminology for myself and i keep needing to add new words to the skritter dictionary for stupid bullshit (latest word i added: "dual cultivation"), and it feels like. sorry hi hello i'm in this temple of learning exclusively for stupid bullshit purposes, don't mind me,,

have started writing sentence fragments in my work notebook in probably grammatically incorrect chinese, as shorthand. this is also where kanji came from i think

kanji fucking me up once again... how are you guys managing to take a single perfectly innocent character and drag it out for like four syllables. this is too much. the japanese language is not cute!! the hanzi are exhibiting stress behaviors

(admittedly as a native english speaker it's incredibly bold of me to criticize other languages' orthography, but i'm going to do it anyway)

*squinting at unsimplified chinese characters* i know this man is my blorbo-in-law but who IS he

i love when i google a chinese expression i've been seeing in various books without very satisfying explanations and wiktionary is like "oh, yeah, it's from a 2200 year old foundational book on legalism. don't worry about it"

people (and by people i mean anki) are always asking “what is the chinese measure word for flat things” and not “WHY is there a measure word specifically for flat things”

is it like. are certain categories of thing always measured with the measure word for flat things or if there’s say a particularly flat cat

can you say 这是一张猫

useful & relevant vocabulary

WAIT i forgot to tell you guys new coworker saw the katakana duolegends on my work keyboard and was like “oh you speak japanese??” which would be a reasonable assumption but i had to be like yeah no i tried it briefly but didnt get far. i like to learn random languages when im bored. currently working on chinese. and he was like ??? that seems harder

i can see why he would think that; however, kanji are fucking stupid, and hanzi are actually way more sensible. tones are not too bad if you have perfect pitch. best of all, no goddamn noun genders!! no declination! in fact there isnt really even tense. it’s a great language. you guys could probably cut back on some of the characters though. also please stop distinguishing your 8 billion fricatives using aspiration i’m in hell

chinese has this VERY fun feature where you often get a two-character word meaning X that uses two different characters that both mean X. e.g. 朋友, “friend”. sort of like reduplication, but not? anyway i would *love* to know more about the etymology of this (my searches for an english-language resource on chinese etymology are thus far unsuccessful) — like, are they words from two different regional dialects, so the construction would originally have increased the chance people would understand you? or was it a construction originally for emphasis that grew legs? or was it to help distinguish the word from homophones? or was it just for fun/bc it sounds better?

love that, because i now know a few chinese characters, when i see a random piece of japanese text the ONLY parts i have any hope of reading are the kanji. the kana are just like… wow thats some squigglies!!

german as a language has a LOT of fun features, but for my money nothing can really beat “doch”. just TRY expressing the level of injured self-righteousness in english that you can get out of “hab’ ich doch!!”. runner up is “das gleiche” vs “dasselbe”