the Duolingo update has me fucked up. it put me in an advanced section that I have barely any knowledge of and it says I’ve completed levels I definitely haven’t. the progress is also no longer displayed as linear, it’s several pages of non-linear lessons where you start in the middle of the section...so it’s hard to tell which lessons are building on each other. i’m still going to use it because it helps me get valuable practice, but I feel like I’m more confused than ever before and it’s really discouraging

I get that it's extremely frustrating when language learning programs add fictional languages before they add certain real ones, but I also think it's important to point out that fictional and real languages are NOT comparable in terms of learning difficulty or creating courses.

Fictional languages don't have hundreds and thousands of years of history and culture behind them, they don't have numerous dialects (some of which are only spoken in very small communities), they don't have a ton of cultural and social context and nuance from developing slowly over time, etc. Most fictional languages even have complete written guides by their creators; others are only partial languages where people just want to learn them to understand some lines from their favorite shows or books.

Is it frustrating and hurtful that Duolingo has languages like High Valyrian but not my tribe's very real language? Sure, of course, but Anishinaabemowin isn't fictional; it's a hugely complex language that is difficult to learn and that needs to be treated with thoughtfulness and respect, and I don't WANT it to be added to language learning programs of it's going to be half-assed, done incorrectly, or involves exploiting the labor of Aninshinaabe speakers.

Guess what I had art block and made a kid for my notp and now the art block’s fixed and I got a free au out of it

(there’s more weird art under the cut)

Common whizbang w

She’s a cervitaur bc I’m embracing the cringe and thought Lucifer’s wack genetics would meet up with Alastor’s and remember Charlie’s and say “let’s square the hooves on this one!!” so here we are

Anyway,,,enemies to coparents shenanigans,,

They’re trying their best

I promise,,

I kinda love how much Duolingo have just embraced the “scary owl that eats monolinguals” branding

Well, if I suddenly disappear you’ll know who to blame

duolingo terrifies me actually. "safe"?? "any means necessary??" what does this mean duo??? what does this mEAN??11!1!!!1

Apologies to @sleepycrowhours for stealing the tags but i want to make a point about learning irish (and I think it applies to language learning as a whole) Duolingo (especially the app, the website is better to be fair but not by much) shouldn't be your primary, or even secondary resource for language learning, it should be a supplement, like flash cards because that's basically what duolingo (Esp. the app) is. It's electronic flash cards, it's nice for vocabulary but horrible for learning grammar, it's yes or no, right or wrong, and language is more fluid than that.

In colloquial speak, if you get it more or less right, the speaker will probably get it, (especially with something as minor as séimhiú and urú which is the english equivalent to switching his/her/their, while duolingo will tell you a sentence is a complete bust if you replace gcat with chait with cat which contexually, speakers will fix themselves and probably won't even mention it to you. Not to mention language is fluid, speakers won't talk like a text book, they'll use conjunctions and phrases you dont know, they'll invent words on the fly.

You should always be learning from books, movies (Yu Ming is ainm dom or cáca milis for irish aimed at young children, an cailín ciúin for more general cinema), poetry (géibheann, an gnáthrud, etc.), music (Teir abhaile riú, oró sé do bheatha 'bhaile, an dreolín, etc.), tv (all of TG4, they have spongebob), RTE player is available for free online.

Buying an irish enlish dictionary, using focloir and teanglann, and reading grammar books will help, writing irish helps too because it makes you look up words you dont know. I had no idea how to use the subjunctive and imperative before, now i do.

All of the info i wrote about séimhiú's and urú's can be found with google, and all of my words of the day are on focloir and teanglann.

tl;dr, using only duolingo is going to give you more robotic speak that even textbook, your vocab will be kind of weird and hyper-specific (kinda like how only learning in a classroom only teaches you to speak about yourself and your family and nothing else). Read irish, write irish, live irish. Remember, you weren't taught your native tongue formally, 80% of what you learn comes from just picking up and talking to people, family, friends, teachers, and maybe 20% was taught in the first few years of school (and a lot of that is written/spelling anyway not actually communicating)

young royals duolingo, 9/?

(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)

I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI.

*shaking the dutch language by the neck* when het instead of de??? tell me!!!

edit: hey uuuhh this was just supposed to be a little haha funny vent post bc I got frustrated in the moment but everyone in the comments and reblog has been so nice about it and tried to help me?? 😭 thank you guys so much I honestly didn‘t expect this you are too kind

dt17 conspiracy

hot take: Louie’s hoodie is just the duolingo hoodie

my biological peer reviewer (sibling) called this theory “fun” and said i should send it, so here goes

my personal theory is the feds ((”federation”)) created the eggs because they decided the best way to enforce “you can never leave” was to give the people something they couldn’t lose, like in the post by tumblr user alexaloraetheris (no relation to the smp) where their friend who might be a deity had said,

"When you die you descend to the underworld with nothing to lose. To keep you, they give you something to lose. When you want to return, they will demand it back. That's why nobody ever leaves. The only way out is to never enter."

i’m thinkin that on egg D-Day, at the end of the countdown, the feds weren’t gonna give the eggs back. they were just gonna hide them forever, or do something else, anything else, just keep them away from their surrogate parents, because then the people would just be STUCK, because people could theoretically take their eggs and leave, but if the eggs are missing, gone without a trace, then the residents CAN’T LEAVE, because presumably the eggs are STILL THERE, SOMEWHERE, IN NEED OF HELP AND RESCUE, if only the residents could find them ON THE ISLAND. if they leave the island while the eggs are missing, they are abandoning these things that have become their children.

but then in came the brazilians. and shit went south. because see, the spenglish (spanish / english) streamers were INVITED, but the brazilians CRASHED; the feds didn’t INVITE THEM, they weren’t EXPECTING THEM, but they can’t let these guys leave either, so they PANIC, and they scramble to give the brazilians the same thing--something to lose. the new egg had a brazilian jersey, homie was TAILOR MADE for them to pack bond with. the feds didn’t have time to send out multiple eggs, it was all or nothing, so they picked something they could reasonably assume all five of them would find endearing because they don’t know shit about these guys--they had a week to observe the OG batch, but all they know about these newbies is the brazilian flag on their boat--and so they sent the little egg out to become THEIR THING, the thing they couldn’t afford to lose.

it leaves open why the eggs are cracked too, bc idk what’s going on there lol, either 1: the eggs cracked because they’re hatching and the feds picked that date bc they wanted to yoink the eggs before they got Too Powerful, or 2: the feds were the ones to crack the eggs as an excuse for why they vanished--returning the eggs untouched would open too many questions the feds don’t want them asking; this way, instead of being concerned specifically with “why were the eggs missing”, the residents presume they know the answer--the cracks.

but yea i’m just gonna add as an aside that personally i think cucurucho / osito bimbo / the white fucker is way more active again because the feds are still scrambling to keep up with the brazilians (which, again, the feds weren’t expecting), and the binary fuckwad came in to put the fear of god into the newbies--maybe so they didn’t get too focused on the morse code transmissions; iirc max was theorizing that both osito and binary were part of the federation ? and if so it does make sense that the binary entity went to fuck with cellbit immediately after cellbit was introduced to the conspiracies of the island, yknow, a warning shot. i think they want them to be focused on the eggs.

BUT THAT’S JUST A THEOr

It is really astounding how many times a person can see the word "unprecedented" and somehow still not lose their goddamn mind.

How did you learn Chinese, like did you use a specific program like Duolingo or did you take classes? How hard was it to read Priest's novels with where you were at in your language learning journey? I want to get back into learning (been wanting to since I watched The Untamed,) but I gave up about 8 months ago 😭

Hey ovo)/ so uh. That's a big question. I have a studyblr @rigelmejo so if you really want the full on journey lol its on there, steps i took and what I studied and progress and study tools I found and used and stuff I've linked for people.

For the shortest tip I can give you? Would be to check out the Heavenly Path site if you're interested in learning to read novels. You'll need to figure out your own way to study about 1000 common hanzi, basic grammar, and basic pronunciation (I link resources on rigelmejo), but after that point the Heavenly Path site has reading resources for graded reading, easier kids novels, easier manhua, webnovels by difficulty level, all the way up! So you can at that point just follow their recommendations and use reading tools they link (like Pleco and Readibu apps which I suggest you download asap - they include tools where you can click a chinese word when reading for translation and audio pronunciation and pinyin). So yeah at 1000 hanzi, just start reading from their suggestions! (Also consider downloading Bilibili Comics app as it has English and Chinese free manhua, so you can start reading manhua earlier, and youtube/viki.com learn mode and Any platforms with dual english/chinese subs and start trying to look up 1 word every 5 minutes or more as curious and practicing reading the chinese words in subs you've learned). I suggest you check out all pages on the Heavenly site, they link a ton of resources.

The short-ish version of what I did the first year I studied chinese? I fumbled a lot, read through an entire grammar guide summary in a few weeks here http://chinese-grammar.com/, watched some YouTube tone videos and went through a pronunciation guide here https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin which took a week or two and I'd do it every few months, read through the book Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1-3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters by Tuttle publishing in about 2 months (I really liked their mnemonics to help me remember hanzi), started Ben Whatley memrise decks 1000 Chinese common words and 2000 common words (took about 2 weeks to finish one then I took a few months break then studied the other 1000, mainly focusing on studying new words and not reviewing until the last week if I had time - in retrospect I think learners would do better with the Chinese Spoonfed Anki deck but the memrise courses I used worked fine for me). I was watching cdramas as usual most weeks, English subs with the Chinese hardsubs on the video file like most youtube cdramas, with Google Translate app on my phone to look up a word every several minutes as curious. Once I was 3ish months in and learning the memrise Ben Whatley 2000 common chinese words, I read some Mandarin Companion graded readers in Pleco app then some more 300-600 word graded readers in Pleco. That gets me to like month 6ish. Then I started reading manhua and looking up words in pleco or Google translate when I needed to in order to grasp main idea overall (or was curious about a particular word). Kept reading graded readers in pleco.

Around month 8 I tried 天涯客 and 镇魂, both brutally hard. I was reading in Pleco in the Clipboard Reader (from websites) or the Reader tool (i bought it for like $20 dollars along with handwriting recognition, OCR, and expanded dictionaries). Mandarinspot.com has a good reading tool too that can add pinyin if you need it, and Readibu in some ways i prefer to Pleco depending on your particular reading needs on a given day. Tried a few easier webnovels, tried a pingxie fanfic 寒舍 which was hard but easier than priest novels (love that fanfic). I kept bouncing between webnovels then around month 10 天涯客 novels took about 1.5 hours to read through a chapter. At that point I brute force tried to read it or 寒舍 daily with 1 chapter a day, got 28 chapters in before i burned out with 天涯客 and 60ish chapters into 寒舍. It was about a year in. I cram studied 500 hanzi in some common hanzi deck with mnemonics I found on anki over a month, hoping if I improved vocab I'd read easier. I also was gradually trying to watch more cdrama with only chinese subs, around month 6 I finally watched Granting You a Dreamlike life full episodes with no eng subs (about 5-10 word lookups an episode), watched 15ish eps, then after that shows got less daunting to try watching.

A little over a year in Word of Honor came out and I watched it in chinese first because I was too impatient for eng subs. After that went decently I got braver about reading, tried Listening Reading Method (see @rigelmejo for those experiments), more stuff etc like extensive reading with no word lookups.

In retrospect I WISH I'd started with easier novels Heavenly Path recommended. However on the other hand? I've seen people who read their first cnovel with Pleco as early as 3-6 months in which blows my mind. So me picking hard novels to start isn't the Hardest thing in comparison lol. This past year (so at start of year 3 studying lol) I actually read like 10 things on Heavenly Paths easier recommendations and it helped immensely in filling in gaps in vocab and reading fluidity I had. So if you do pick a priest novel as your first novel and manage to chug through it without giving up, be aware "easier" novels may still have stuff you can learn later so don't rule them out as reading materials later on.

I've also seen people do literally no study except maybe some curious Google searches on hanzi or grammar or pronunciation, then brute force read novels in Readibu until they improved. A brutal way to do it but possible. (I really recommend at minimum learning hanzi are made of radicals though as it makes recognizing and remembering them so much easier).

I think the best thing I did for learning to read was just being Brave and Trying to read regularly. And it gradually got less hard.

Got inspired by a new word from today's duolingo lesson. Not sure if it's correct tho lol

Lapset: Äiti, saisimmeko suomen kielen kurssin?

Äiti: Meillä on suomen kielen kurssi kotona.

Suomen kielen kurssi kotona:

Duolingo has reeeally gone down in quality lately.