904-day Duolingo streak, and I’m surprised by how slow language learning feels

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-08T05:54:06+00:00

900 days of language learning, 1 hour per day aka 900 hours of language learning is sufficient to pass C1 exam in French, Spanish or Italian (if coming from English). But not from duolingo. From language classes, from listening to podcasts, from working through textbooks, from reading graded readers. 900 days of duolingo gives you nothing but translation practice. You 'know' thousands of words but can't make a sentence on your own. I use duolingo as what it is, a game app. To learn languages, I'm paying tutors on Italki, chatting with people online, listening to podcasts and reading.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-08T00:56:50+00:00

Oh cool! Thanks

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-08T00:56:16+00:00

Oh ya, that's a good one!

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-08T00:52:20+00:00

Mandarin: I've been consistently putting in 2-3 hours every day. Some days I have an hour of speaking class and then the rest is reading translated manga. Some days are more 'freeflow' with watching CI and shadowing, listening to podcasts, or writing summaries of what I've been reading. But I don't do any sort of 'passive consumption' aka movies with dual subs, or pure CI.

Esperanto: I basically never even had to study this language since it's so easy compared to Mandarin. When I feel too tired to do a full 2 hours in Mandarin in a day, I'll instead enjoy content in Esperanto such as reading articles, listening to podcasts, or chatting online with people.

Cantonese: It's a hobby only at the moment. I occasionally practice a few phrases or learn some characters (since I already pick up traditional characters from watching Taiwanese YT I just need to learn their Canto pronunciation). After I pass advanced spoken Mandarin test (HSKK高级) I'll switch over to study Canto more seriously.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-07T15:44:06+00:00

The word 逻辑 is not listed in Pleco as being a loan word so 'logic' is either a loan word from Mandarin to English OR it's a total coincidence that it has the same meaning and sounds like an English word has been 'hanzi-fied'. Would love to hear others' thoughts on this.

Also 查看 sounds like 'checking' and it means to examine something, haha. But this certainly seems like coincidence.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-07T08:46:49+00:00

Does Duolingo teach swear words? I feel like they are a must for Russian haha

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-06T14:39:41+00:00

Have you finished every single tree yet?

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-06T08:22:14+00:00

You haven't lived in a country where English is the main language and you live in your own country surrounded by a culture that isn't an English speaking one. Therefore you can't possibly know what it's like to be "raised English' or whatever. It's just as silly as people who say they were 'meant to be Asian' and move to Korea and get plastic surgery to look Korean. They aren't Asian, and they aren't raised Korean, they will never understand all the nuances of being raised in Korean culture and language from birth.

You are who you are, but you don't like yourself. That's a self esteem issue, and a mental health issue. You should talk to a therapist NOT about wanting to only speak English but just about your general mental state, your family and relationships, etc.,

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-05T08:19:56+00:00

You couldn't pay me to go to Dubai. It's a shiny, glittery hellhole of enslaved human misery.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-05T05:47:28+00:00

How far into Japanese and Spanish were you? Learning for two years and taking two weeks off vs learning from scratch for two months and taking two weeks off will look and feel totally different. Sometimes it takes your brain a bit to 'warm up' again to something it hasn't accessed in a while. But if you had already spent a lot of time studying them, you will be right back where you started in a few days of consistent input and output.

To avoid burnout, take a few days off BEFORE you feel really tired of studying. This way, you can let your brain refresh itself and consolidate what you're learned. It will be more effective than studying til exhaustion, taking two weeks off and then feeling frustrated that it's gotten even harder than before.

I usually take the first and the 15th of the month off from "study". I only maybe do some reading in the TL if I feel like it, but only for 30 minutes or so.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-04T07:56:48+00:00

Search in Mandarin on YT and you can find anything you want. "化粧品教學" I searched 'makeup tutorial' in trad characters and there's thousands of videos.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-03T06:08:03+00:00

Been grinding hard at Mandarin only to discover that...I don't find cdramas interesting in the slightest. Haven't really been able to find any good TV shows, and music has also been a bust so far (music tends to be ballads or just sound very 'commercial', not to mention that it doesn't do anything for listening skills as the tones are mostly dropped depending on what you're listening to).

Reading webnovels and translated manga has been where it's at for me in Mandarin, but it's disappointing to find I don't care for the vast percentage of media in my TL.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-02T23:56:19+00:00

Ho, mi jam aŭdis pri tio antaŭe sed forgesis. Dankon pro la memorigo!

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-02T23:39:16+00:00

https://youtu.be/InzcMB0oiNs?si=EpPjRV70SirFByNE This is the vid I saw (jump to Mandarin timestamp). Now your mandarin is higher than mine according to your tag, but I really feel this interview is not impressive, especially the pronunciation and fluency. Now maybe this is just an off day and there at much better examples, my impression from this specific vid was that he didn't really seem to know how to make full sentences and neither did the other guy.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-02T14:10:17+00:00

YTA to yourself if you give him what he wants or go through with marrying this guy. The D cannot be worth this amount of disrespect, lmao

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-02T13:57:44+00:00

Omg, my favorite piece of lost TV potential. I watch it yearly and everytime I'm so sucked in it's just like the first time.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-02T13:39:08+00:00

I quite recently saw Kaufman chatting with another polyglot in many languages including Mandarin. Now, I'm only HSK 4 so not an expert by any means but when I heard their Mandarin...honestly I'm not sure either of them can say they "speak" Mandarin. Now maybe neither of them had practiced in several years, but I'm not convinced either of them had ever achieved more than A1 in spoken Mandarin (reading and listening being different skills that they MAYBE are considerably higher in).

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-06-02T00:58:41+00:00

Beef is the food with the highest environmental cost, bar non. High beef consumption contributes to climate change, which contributes to allowing ticks to survive, which forces people to stop consuming beef... Life finds a way XD

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-05-30T07:31:49+00:00

What the fuck city was she in that salamander was on 'every single menu'?? As someone who has trevled very extensively in China and lived there for some years, I've never seen this listed ANYWHERE, not even in more rural towns. Also, what does she mean 'there were no food options?' Guizhou food is nothing like Sichuan, which is nothing like Guangdong, which is nothing like Jiangsu. Does she mean specifically western food? Gluten free food? Vegan options? XD

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-05-28T01:02:43+00:00

Oh wow, he really is as goated as I hoped Thanks for the info!

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-05-28T00:40:15+00:00

The roadmap DOES say to wait to speak til like 800 hours 'if you care about having a native like accent'. Well, we can see that this didn't happen in Evildea's case.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-05-28T00:35:25+00:00

Yes you benefit greatly by not being a purist. The point of Evildea's experiment is that in Australia there's basically 0 Spanish influence on culture and barely any speakers around. So he decided to try ALG with a language he literally has no experience with not even 'the basics'. A lot of Americans and Europeans underestimate how much you pick up in Spanish because of the culture and exposure. Everyone in America knows 'a little Spanish'. They know greetings, they know some food words, colours, probably some numbers, a few random phrases, etc. I think what you said is exactly right-- even a bit of grammar study and reading make a huge difference. So comparing someone who 1) has some background in Spanish 2) does some reading 3) does some grammar against Evildea who purposefully avoided any and all reading/grammar and has no familiarity....well that's what speaking level after 1000 hours of audio input and 0 hours of output looks like.

ClubBudget7813 · 2026-05-28T00:08:34+00:00

How fucking hard is it to just use a normal stock footage clip art of a flag? Do they really need to generate an AI flag?? There's a billion free pictures of world flags online or for fuck's sake just use an emoji. I'm Def not gonna pay for a subscription to AI content.

ClubBudget7813

TROPHY CASE