[Better Life -> Learn With Steem] Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 171 - Imperative, Occupations 1, Prepositions, Materials, Numbers 3

For day 171 in my ongoing effort at learning German by using the DuoLingo application, I'll describe my recent progress through the application's language lessons. As noted in the title, the current categories that I'm working on include: Imperative, Occupations 1, Prepositions, Materials, and Numbers 3.

Introduction

Apparently, it has been 12 days since my most recent post about learning German. I had no idea it had been so long, but I guess life has been keeping me busy. Fortunately, even though I didn't find time to write about them, I have managed to continue my lessons.

Before I start on describing my own progress, I want to start with a post that DuoLingo put up on their Twitter feed today. The post, 2020 Duolingo Language Report: Global Overview, describes the company's research into language learning trends since 2011. Of particular note is that Spanish overtook French as the second most popular language. Here are the top-10:

Rank	Language
1	English
2	Spanish
3	French
4	German
5	Italian
6	Japanese
7	Korean
8	Portuguese
9	Russian
10	Chinese

Another highlight is that 30 million people started learning languages in the weeks after the global pandemic lockdowns began. It's an interesting article, so click through for their other observations.

Also, I recently received my own personalized report for 2020, which is summarized in the image to the right. Overall, I finished in the top 1% and spent just under 77 hours working on it. Not bad, I guess, since I just started 171 days ago.

And so, with that introduction out of the way, I'll move on to some discussion about my recent lessons in German. As noted before, I'm trying out a new pyramid strategy where I work on multiple categories at the same time. Additionally, I've been having about 1 category per day that decayed away from completion. It seems like maybe they slow down the decay if you open up more categories. (When I was focusing on one category at a time, I was losing 3 per day to decay...) or maybe it's just a fluke of timing...

Current Progress

Here are my currently opened categories and levels:

Category	Level	Lessons Complete
Imperative	4	1 of 2
Occupations 1	3	1 of 5
Prepositions	2	2 of 5
Materials	1	0 of 3
Numbers 3	1	0 of 2

Tips

Imperative

Here is the dust pneumonic that I mentioned so many lessons ago.

To write an imperative sentence, the Tips section suggests taking the du-st off. In other words, a normal sentence where you tell someone to do something takes the form: du <verb> [rest of sentence], and the verb normally ends with "st". When forming it as an imperative, the tips say that you get rid of the "du" and the "st" in the verb, and just use the remaining fragment of a sentence, which gives an implied subject of "du" (you). For example, they show how "du trinkst kein Bier" (You drink no beer) is replaced by "Trink kein Bier". As I noted in my previous post, it also says that verbs will sometimes be followed by an "e", but it gives no example.

On the other hand, if you're talking to a group of people, you leave the verb untouched but just drop the "ihr". An example for that construction is to switch from "ihr bleibt bei mir." (you all stay with me.) to "bleibt bei mir."

Examples

In this section, I'll give a few examples from each of the categories

Category	German	English
Imperative	Trink Saft	Drink juice
Imperative	Iss und Trink	Eat and drink
Imperative	Ruft sie an	Call her
Occupations 1	der Mitarbeiter	the coworker
Occupations 1	der Chef	the boss
Occupations 1	die Chefin	the boss (female)
Occupations 1	der Köche	the cook
Occupations 1	die Feuerwehr	the fire deparment
Prepositions	hinter	behind
Prepositions	zwischen	between
Prepositions	über	above/over
Prepositions	unter	under
Prepositions	auf	onto
Materials	Gold	Gold
Materials	die Mauer	the wall
Materials	die Mauern	the walls
Materials	die Wolle	the wool
Materials	die Baumwolle	the cotton
Materials	das Plastik	the plastic
Numbers 3	dritte	third
Numbers 3	fünfte	fifth
Numbers 3	siebte	seventh
Numbers 3	sechste	sixth
Numbers 3	der dritte Hund	the third dog

Conclusion

So far, the jury is out on whether I learn better by working on multiple categories at the same time or by focusing on one category at a time. I will keep trying this approach for a while and see how it goes.

The big problem I have at the moment seems to be that 12 days is too long to go between posts here on Steem. I think that reviewing my lessons in blog posts has been very helpful for me, but trying to recall 12 days worth of lessons is a daunting challenge. I feel like I'm forgetting more than I remember.

Postlogue

I noticed in my last post that Bing has trouble translating the number/year 1978, as shown here:

A couple days ago, I also noticed that Bing cannot translate 2020 either. If I type, "zweitausend zwanzig", Bing translates it correctly to "two thousand twenty",

but if I type "zweitausendzwanzig", Bing responds with either "two thousand twenty-two" or "two thousand twenty-five" depending upon which device I use.

I did confirm with some native-German speaking people I know that this truly is a mistake. weird... Someone should tell Microsoft.

Metrics

Finally, here are my current numbers, as reported by the application:

• Streak: 171
• Hearts: 2
• Crowns: 223
• Crystals: 880
• Lingots: 584
• XP today: 112
• Total XP: 23366
• League: Diamond
• Place in league: 10
• XP in league: 140
• Time left in league: 5d 0h 21m
• Followers: 4
• Words learned: 883 reported in app, 1112 reported in web site

Appendix

There were no new special characters in today's post, so the full table (so far) still 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.

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Steemit's Better Life initiative is described in the post: 1000 DAYS OF STEEM : A Better Life with Steem - new Content and Curation Project