Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 83
Today was day 83 in my continuing effort to learn to read the German language by using the DuoLingo web and cell phone application. This post will describe my progress during the last three days.
Pixabay license, source
My progress on new lessons has definitely been slowing down recently. On day 80, I reported that I had completed the "People 1" category. Since then, I have only completed a single level in the next category, "Questions 2". As anticipated in my previous post, 3 or more categories per day have been decaying away from full, so I have spent most of my time refreshing the old categories that had been previously completed. Additionally, I have not been spending as much time at it because there is no more room to advance in leagues.
Anyway, I don't think I've written much about the "Questions 2" category so far, so here's a little bit from the "Tips" section.
The word, welch (which) is introduced here, along with the note that it is another "der word", changing its ending to match the gender of the noun that it accompanies.
i.e.
| German | English |
|---|---|
| welcher Mann | which man |
| welche Frau | which woman |
| welches Mädchen | which girl |
The tips then move on to describe three different forms of "where", wo (where), wohin (where to), and woher (where from), used as follows:
| German | English |
|---|---|
| wo ist das Essen? | Where is the meal? |
| wohin gehe ich? | Where am I going |
| woher kommen sie? | Where do they come from? |
But, since the German language must always be as confusing as possible, the Tips next point out that, wo can also be a prefix meaning "what". For example, womit (what with) and Worüber (about what):
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Womit läuft sie? | What does she run with? |
| Worüber lesen sie? | What are they reading about? |
A final note in the tips section is to notice the "r" at the end of Worüber. Apparently, even though words that end in "e" have a sort of an "r" sound in German, this "stealthy r" is added to make it easier to pronounce if followed by a word that begins with a vowel.
In addition to those tips, here are some other words and/or phrases from the "Questions 2" lessons and today's practice exercises:
| German | English |
|---|---|
| die Antwort | The answer |
| die Antworten | The answers |
| die Frage | The question |
| die Fragen | The questions |
| wie bitte | Excuse me |
| mach nichts | Never mind |
| wieso | Why (how come, remember 'cause it looks like phonetic for "why so") |
| wie viel | how much |
| wie viele | how many |
| wie | how / what |
I also noticed a pneumonic device so that I'll probably never forget the gender of "door". die Tür sounds like "detour".
And here are my current numbers in the application:
- Streak: 83 days
- Hearts: 5
- Crowns 132
- Crystals 961
- Lingots: 398
- XP today: 69
- Total XP: 14680
- League: Diamond
- XP in league: 367
- Place in league: 23
- Time left in league: 1d 21h 34m
- Followers: 4
- Words learned: 530 in app, 661 on web page
No new special characters in today's post, so the full table (so far) looks like this:
| Key press | character |
|---|---|
| ALT-0196 | Ä |
| ALT-0214 | Ö |
| ALT-0223 | ß |
| ALT-0228 | ä |
| ALT-0246 | ö |
| ALT-0252 | ü |
If you want to learn a foreign language (or Klingon or High Valyrian), my recommendation for DuoLingo continues to be "thumbs up". According to the app, you can also use DuoLingo to learn dead or endangered languages like Latin, Navajo or Hawaiian.
My guess is that no one is going to learn to speak a language perfectly through DuoLingo, but I think it can provide a solid foundation that can be used to build additional knowledge through other, immersive techniques.