Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 105

Today is day 105 in my continuing attempt to learn to read German by using the DuoLingo application and the Steem blockchain. This post will describe my progress from day 100 through today.

The other day, @cmp2020 asked for recommendations of German language music from one of his class-mates whose mother is a native-language German speaker. One recommendation was, Nena, whose videos I have already included in several of these posts. Another recommendation was Ein bisschen Frieden ( A bit of peace ) by Nicole. I have now listened to that video and some of Nicole's other videos a few times. I was able to recognize a small portion of the words. Here is a video:

Moving on to DuoLingo, the big surprise is that I stopped having three categories per day decaying away from completing. I have no idea why, but all of my completed categories have stayed at complete for the last few days, and I haven't had to refresh any of them.

I'm not going to do a day-by-day rundown of activities, but in the past five days I advanced from level 2 to level 5 in the "Dative Case" category, and surprisingly it wasn't as difficult as I had expected. (Although, it does still feel counter-intuitive to use the "r" form of "der words" in front of feminine nouns. Additionally, I advanced through levels 1 and 2 of the "Money" category). Also, since I didn't have any categories that decayed away from completion, I focused all of my practice activities on the "Conjunctions" categories. Although the difficulty of the two categories I've been working on was such that I have not needed to replenish my hearts very often, so I didn't really do very many practice exercises. Finally, I also read one or two stories.

Since "Money" is a new category, I'll include some notes from the "Tips" section.

An obvious need is to ask how much something costs, Was kostet das?. Also, there are some common phrases, or idioms such as: Alles hat seinen Preis. (Everything has its price.) Next, the tips list some common forms of money (geld). These include the Euro (euro) and the Schweizer Franken (Swiss Franc). Finally, it notes that the German-speaking world follows a custom of adding a Trinkgeld (tip) to the cost of a meal. The tip is typically lower than in the US, and is done by rounding the bill total up by a small amount.

Here are some words or phrases from recent lessons (remember, I'm learning, so mistakes may be likely):

German	English
Ich habe keine Euros	I don't have any euros
Hast du geld?	Do you have money?
Es ist reich.	He is rich.
Er kauft kein Pferd sondern ein Schwein.	He is not buying a horse but a pig.
Sie besitzen die Bäume	They own the trees.
Sie überweist geld vom Geldautomaten.	She transfers money from the ATM.
Die Kosten sind Hoch.	The cost is high.
Ich habe zehn Szweicher Franken.	I have ten Swiss Francs. (Plural and singular are the same)
Ich überweise achtzehn Dollar.	I transfer eighteen dollars.
Er gibt einer Frau fünfzehn Euro.	He gives fifteen euros to a woman. (combining "Money" and "Dative Case")
Du Zeigst dem Jungen einen Dollar.	You show a dollar to the boy.
Hat der Junge einen Dollar?	Does the boy have a dollar?

Lastly, here are my numbers as-of today:

• Streak: 105 days
• Hearts: 2
• Crowns: 159
• Crystals: 438
• Lingots: 445
• XP Today: 52
• Total XP: 17500
• League: Diamond
• XP in league: 563
• Place in league: 15
• Time left in league: 1d 4h 37m
• Followers: 4
• Words learned: 583 reported by app, 739 reported on web site

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.