Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 25
Pixabay license, source.
Here is an update from days 24 and 25 of my experiment trying to learn to read German from the DuoLingo application.
Yesterday, I completed more activities than I can count because I was trying to make my way to the top of the Sapphire league. Today, I completed 2 practice exercises and 2 lessons (so far.. I might do more later). The practice sessions were on the "Accusative case" which I still need to improve. The lessons were in the "Food 1" and "Animals 1" categories, and I have advanced from level 1 to level 2 in both.
Here are some words from the lessons:
Animals
| German | English |
|---|---|
| Schwein | pig |
| Insekt | insect |
| Ente | duck |
| Fliege | fly |
| fressen | To eat (animal eating, when a person eats, it's "essen") |
| süß | sweet |
| frisch | fresh |
| käfer | beetles |
| Spinne | spider |
| Biene | bee |
| Hund | dog |
Foods
| German | English |
|---|---|
| eine Kartoffel | a potato |
| Käse | cheese |
| das Fleisch | the meat |
| das Gemüse | the vegetables |
| der Wein | the wine |
| das Ei | the egg |
And I finally broke down and figured out how to type some special characters. Here are the key combinations for the three that showed up in this lesson.
| Key press | character |
|---|---|
| ALT-0228 | ä |
| ALT-0252 | ü |
| ALT-0223 | ß |
Here are my current numbers, as reported by the app:
- Streak - 25
- Crowns - 34
- Hearts - 2
- XP this week - 982
- XP today - 66
- Total XP - 2417
- League - sapphire
- Place - 1
- XP in league - 982
- Time remaining in league - 4d 2h 51m
- Followers - 2
As-of now, my recommendation for DuoLingo's free version continues to be "thumbs up". I definitely feel like I'm making a decent amount of progress.
I wonder if we could gamify language learning on Steem somehow...?
Thanks for the reply! I've also been thinking about that since I started making these posts. I definitely think so.
In a very basic form, in fact, you could argue it's already happening as a sort of "directed learning" with the achievement system that @cmp2020 and the other greeters developed in the Newcomer's Community. I think that program might be more "ground breaking" than has been recognized.
It wouldn't be difficult at all for anyone who has something that they want people to learn about to invest in a curation stake, create a community, and model something after that achievement system with an eye towards encouraging and rewarding people for learning about whatever it is. For example, the Tron Foundation could launch a Steem community and a directed learning program that accomplishes similar goals to coinbase's "Earn" program, but geared at teaching people about the components in the Tron ecosystem.
I've also thought that communities could be created for things like "book clubs" or to co-learn about any topic (like foreign languages ; -). With patronage from one or more curators, those communities could also evolve into a basic form of gamification.
On a more sophisticated level, partnerships could be established with almost any of the learning apps that are already gamified, and those apps could probably plug-in to the blockchain and add a rewards component to their already existing application. It's not something I've looked into much, but obviously DuoLingo is one possibility, and I'm pretty sure there are many many others. One of Steem's strengths is that developers can connect to the Steem blockchain without needing to learn any special coding skills for the blockchain or smart contracts. All they need is plain-old JSON, which most developers already know how to work with.
Last thought isn't really directly about learning, but it's sort of related. You could use a similar strategy to get people to contribute to the Steem code base (Tron, too, I suppose -- assuming that's open source?). Instead of "directed learning" call it "directed coding". Bitcoin apparently has a "good first issue" classification for new contributors. (See Twitter/@GoodFirstIssues) I'm thinking that Steem could do the same, but add rewards. A Steemit architect could start labeling "Good first issues" in github and a Steem community could be established to reward people who contribute solutions to those and post their documentation within the community.