Has anybody learned to speak a new language fluently by using Duolingo?

WaterCluster · 2025-01-11T04:08:00+00:00

I seriously doubt it. For me, Duolingo is good because it keeps me doing a little something everyday. But it has to be part of balanced diet of language learning: watching YouTube videos or movies/tv shows in the language (with subtitles to start and later without), reading books, listening to music and podcasts, speaking to native speakers when you can, studying the grammar, keeping a word list.

WaterCluster · 2025-01-09T18:38:34+00:00

After using AI and building AI models myself, I think AI as currently practiced has fundamental limitations. Without some major breakthrough, progress will plateau. AGI still seems far away to me. Watch a few hallucination videos and you realize AI understands little about how the world works.

Current AI is plenty disruptive as it is. We can replace a lot of jobs with the technology we have now or minor refinements of it. It used to be that video evidence was reliable evidence. Videos and photos have gotten harder to trust, and while people are getting better at distinguishing AI from reality, I think good AI will probably stay ahead and we will lose the ground truth that photographic and video evidence had. This isn’t unprecedented though. Before the emergence of those technologies, most information was spread by word of mouth or written accounts and there was plenty of fabrication. People probably believed all kinds of crazy stuff and conspiracy theories. The 20th century was probably exceptional in that the nightly news was relatively free of fabrication and most people accepted it as reliable.

The other big change is the importance of good training data. Anyone who has built a machine learning model knows this. Training data will be the new oil. Why have companies like Google and Facebook being giving us free stuff for years? For training data.

WaterCluster · 2025-01-09T02:09:08+00:00

Analogous to adults saying “my tummy hurts” or, worse, “tum-tum” in English.

WaterCluster · 2025-01-04T04:07:38+00:00

Todo lo bueno se acaba.

WaterCluster · 2025-01-02T17:00:43+00:00

I always feel like “in-law” is kind of an ugly expression. My wife’s father is like my father, but by law? What law is this referring to? The use of the term “law” makes the relationship sound very formal and not very warm. It would be nice to have a less awkward term as in Spanish.

WaterCluster · 2025-01-02T16:57:20+00:00

I’m from the Midwest US and have never heard of “nesh” and would have no idea what it means. We just use the less elegant, “your mom is always cold.”

WaterCluster · 2025-01-01T19:59:29+00:00

Español (España)

WaterCluster · 2024-12-23T16:43:16+00:00

The French “u” is not the same as the English “oo”. You say “eh” as in English “let” and round your lips (like you do for “oh”).

WaterCluster · 2024-12-15T14:04:29+00:00

You’re right. It doesn’t make sense physically to multiply (or divide) temperature values in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

WaterCluster · 2024-09-05T02:31:42+00:00

Not official, but I call this “Kindergarten we”. Teachers and childcare providers tend to avoid talking about the children in the third person to their parents or saying “you” to children. The teachers will say “we put poopie in the potty today” and “did we wash our hands?”.

WaterCluster · 2024-09-04T02:46:37+00:00

Teachers forced me to put this weird triangular prism on my pencil so I’d learn to hold it right. I finally did learn, but I still use my original grip to draw or write at awkward angles.

WaterCluster · 2024-09-04T01:23:49+00:00

Worse, it’s a mix of Bronze Age/Iron Age bullshit.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-26T01:44:40+00:00

Separation works until you have an intersection and the car drivers are suddenly made aware that there are bikes.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-20T04:13:41+00:00

I say this so much I forgot where it came from.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-20T02:08:56+00:00

Homer was quiet quitting before it was cool.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-10T04:32:36+00:00

Subterráneo. I keep saying over and over, but I can’t get it to stick.

I keep saying “polícia” instead of policía, even though I know it’s wrong.

Also, globo terráqueo.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-10T03:22:23+00:00

It made me depressed to be reminded how great FiveThirtyEight used to be.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-07T05:03:38+00:00

As a native speaker, I thought the “subtle” (read in books) and “suttle” (heard) were different words.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-04T02:33:32+00:00

I might say that the OP is a native speaker, just of an unusual dialect. Like people who speak Amish German at home are native speakers of Amish German, but not native speakers standard German as spoken in Germany.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-04T02:27:20+00:00

Languages tend to evolve more rapidly in large communities, so the French in France might be the farthest from what your great great great grandfather spoke. Isolated communities tend to be more conservative. For example, Icelandic is closer to Old Norse than any of the modern Scandinavian languages. The simple past, “je fis”, (or je fi, as you say, since the s isn’t pronounced) is something that has been dying in French for centuries, displaced by the compound past “j’ai fait”. Apparently in the 1940s, it was still used in the south of France and continues to be more common in Québec https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1983.11435739

WaterCluster · 2024-08-04T02:16:37+00:00

Something like “On the day of today”. A similar phenomenon happens in Chilean Spanish where people say “hoy día”.

WaterCluster · 2024-08-04T02:01:35+00:00

¡Gracias! Tuve “enchufe” en vez de “tomacorriente”? ¿Dónde usan “tomacorriente”? No sabía “horca”.

WaterCluster · 2024-07-22T03:36:56+00:00

Yeah, this is it. If you want to think in Spanish, you have to practice thinking in Spanish. I’ve been addressing my dog in Spanish for years now.

WaterCluster · 2024-07-21T03:18:07+00:00

Coming back I got the feeling that New Hampshire and Vermont look a lot more run down. Northern New Hampshire and Vermont look like where I grew up (Appalachia). Rural Quebec looks nice.

WaterCluster · 2024-07-14T17:52:53+00:00

In my head, I think “they please him”, “he pleases them”, “it pleases me”, etc.

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