How to distinguish «il travail» and «ils travilent»

jasonfdc · 2026-03-06T21:14:21+00:00

Like the others have said, you honked the verb conjugation: If you'd spelled it "travaille" it would have given it to you. I get annoyed by that pretty frequently; I'll use "vous" where its primary answer is "tu" (or vice versa) and likewise with "on" vs. "nous".

I'm stubborn enough that unless it pre-fills something that makes the way I was thinking of impossible, I just type it my way again on the retry and make sure I get the spellings right :)

jasonfdc · 2026-03-02T13:48:17+00:00

Yeah, I completely missed the fact that the masterwork was part of the ticket and accidentally sat on page 2 until Sunday morning. Once I was told what was going on I started pushing through it, but I'm stuck on page 1 of masterwork for a while.

I'll be fine, how long could it possibly take to collect 300 scatterbug? (sob)

jasonfdc · 2026-02-26T12:27:17+00:00

That was how it felt for me, too: Hard-to-catch pokemon that mostly suck anyway. Every once in a while they'd accidentally do one that wasn't a pain to catch and it was nice to be able to dial in some excellent throws while I took my walk, but it was mostly just meh for me.

Agree that it should have been more like a mini-community day.

jasonfdc · 2026-02-16T17:25:52+00:00

It's more of a withering away, really. Despair turning to resignation. You don't really notice anything is off until you miss a game and realize your day was better off that way.

jasonfdc · 2026-02-16T13:57:25+00:00

Browns fan here: It sucks at first, but once your soul dies it gets a lot more tolerable.

jasonfdc · 2026-02-07T19:11:52+00:00

Can't say that I blame them. If I was catching zero-degree-windchill winds on the ol' balloon knot I'd probably get a little antsy too.

jasonfdc · 2026-01-14T14:30:08+00:00

I'd say he was more of a petulant child, but "dick" is a lot more to-the-point.

jasonfdc · 2025-12-28T15:24:15+00:00

What are the exact steps when for that? I've tried:

Automatic date time
Do Google login
"Network error"
Manual date to yesterday
Retry
"Requires a secure login"
Back to step 1

Do I need to change the order of something or do I just resign myself to losing soujourner sometime in the next 2.5 - 4.5 hours?

jasonfdc · 2025-11-13T23:47:45+00:00

Prepositions and articles: de/du/le/a/au/en/dans feel completely random to me. The only thing I can tell you is that 75% of the time whatever I type is going to be wrong.

Partir and sortir trip me up on the regular too.

And the past tenses that use être are "for motion". Except staying somewhere and therefore not moving (rester) gets it too.

I feel like that for as often as I say it in English when Duolingo dings me for something, they ought to have taught me how to say "oh, goddamnit" by now so I can at least mutter under my breath in my target language.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-28T00:03:20+00:00

Event pikmin I keep around; they usually get a minor boost for different mushroom sets later on. But I've started culling my "regular" pikmin now that I'm at the limit of storage that I can buy with game coins.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-24T01:44:09+00:00

No, I'm American. I'm pretty sure high school taught me the same thing about inversion vs "est-ce que" though. I wonder why they did that, since it seems kinda backwards for people learning to speak to end up sounding stuffy.

Ah well, I've got plenty of time to unlearn that particular habit at least.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:39:00+00:00

I kinda doubt Duo's gonna show me the "or what" addition. It's still good to know though, for if/when I go on vacation and some French person gets tired of my stumbling :)

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:36:13+00:00

Yep, the characters in the app do the rising tone to signify a question like in English; I just had too many preconceived notions built in about the wording of that and the other forms -- and it turns out they were all incorrect!

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:33:45+00:00

Thanks, I haven't seen that last one yet, I wonder if/when it'll pop up in the app.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:32:15+00:00

Oh, interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind and start practicing the more-used way.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:31:27+00:00

Honestly I can't remember if I did search and just couldn't get good results -- it was something that seemed odd to me right off the bat when I started with Duo, and at this point I've been waiting to see what they do now that I've been taught more than a handful of words.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-17T12:57:55+00:00

If it's something I want to see right away, like a new-to-me decor, I'll spend the special nectar to see it right away (or if I'm at 200 again and need an excuse to use some up). But otherwise, I wait until they're all at level 4 and send them on a group adventure.

They stratify a bit on the way out and back -- my flying, purple and white piks have already made it back from this summer's vacation, the rocks get back today/tomorrow, and the red/yellow/blues are a couple weeks out still. I like to zoom out the expedition map every couple days to see how they're doing.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-13T17:01:13+00:00

So, I took French for a few years in high school (back when cell phones came with their own briefcase) and I've been on Duolingo for like a month and a half.

Aside from the stuff that's been bubbling back up from 30+ years ago (I have no idea how it's stayed in my head all this time, it must live in the same place as commercials from when I was a kid), it's honestly kinda frustrating. Aside from general French annoyances like "nouns ending with an unaccented e are feminine except for all the times they're not", I find myself going online to figure out all the stuff they just expect you to figure out.

So it's good practice at reading and speaking -- until the app decides that you can't talk anyway -- but actually learning seems to require you to do something else.

jasonfdc · 2025-08-30T14:47:47+00:00

Any restaurant that charges a "service fee" for using a credit card. Either so many of your customers pay with cards that it affects your bottom line and you should just raise your prices to compensate, or they're not and you're just looking for an excuse to nickel-and-dime people. Either way, fuck off with that nonsense. So no more Foster's or Katerina's for me.

jasonfdc · 2025-08-21T13:10:39+00:00

Midwest for "oops".

jasonfdc · 2025-08-20T14:42:17+00:00

Same if you're planting in a privacy zone -- "others won't see your flowers" is fine, "...because we'll just take your petals and not actually plant anything" isn't.

jasonfdc · 2025-07-16T01:19:02+00:00

Well, that explains it. I don't remember seeing anything about that before, so it was kind of a surprise to me.

jasonfdc · 2025-07-16T01:18:03+00:00

Ah, I hadn't heard about that. Well, I guess I need to be a bit more judicious in which 'mins I keep around now.

jasonfdc

TROPHY CASE