Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 87
Today is day 87 in my initiative to learn to read the German language by using the DuoLingo web page and cell phone application. This post will describe my progress from the last two days.
die Straße entlang: pixabay license, source
As with the previous week, I waited until late yesterday to start my activities so that I would land in a less competitive league. Despite the fact that I had three categories decay away from completion, I was determined to complete the "Family 1" category yesterday, so I spent more time than usual at it, and I did manage to complete all five levels in the category, which was my last one to complete before "Milestone 3". As a result, I was in 2nd place of Diamond league at the end of the night. Today I dropped down to 5th place, and climbed back to 3rd when I completed some activities. I don't expect to finish the week in the top-3, however.
Today, amazingly, none of the categories had decayed, so I was able to immediately start on learning new material in the "accusative prepositions" section. I'm not looking forward to this category, because some of these words are like conjunctions, in that they cause words around them to get reordered (one such word is apparently "entlang" or "along"). So far today, I completed two lessons in "Accusative prepositions" and one practice exercise in "Conjunctions" when I needed to replenish hearts. I am still struggling with word ordering around conjunctions, so I expect that I'll continue doing those practice exercises as much as possible.
Ironically, as I was writing this post, I noticed that the "Nature 1" category has now decayed away from complete, so I suppose I'll have to do at least one more practice exercise later.
In the Tips section for accusative prepositions, the app reminds us that a preposition is a word that shows a relationship between two things, and it gives examples of ohne (without), für (for), and durch (through). This section focuses on accusative prepositoins, which means that the subsequent noun gets the accusative form of "der word" or "ein word". A final preposition in the Tips section is entlang, which comes at the end of the phrase, instead of the beginning - for example, die Straße entlang means "along the street".
Other accusative prepositions, not listed in the Tips section include:
| German | English |
|---|---|
| around | um |
| gegen | against |
And somehow, although it's not part of the category, I also learned "Lunch", Mitagessen, which - based on the "tag" in the middle and "essen" at the end - I suppose must literally mean something like "mid day meal".
Here are some other phrases or sentences from today's lessons:
| German | English |
|---|---|
| um die Ecke | around the corner |
| die Straße entlang | along the street |
| Kaffee ohne Zucker | coffee without sugar |
| Wir laufen durch den Park | We walk through the park |
Finally, here are my current scores. I am pleased to report that after being stalled for a while, I finally learned some new words!
- Streak: 87 days
- Hearts: 3
- Crowns: 139
- Crystals: 905
- Lingots: 410
- XP today: 52
- Total XP: 15401
- League: Diamond
- Place in league: 3
- XP in league: 396
- Time left in league: 5d 2h 37m
- Followers: 4
- Words learned: 537 in app, 671 on web site
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.