Food

[hayday]

And how's your French?

Ce n'est pas tres bien. I can read, pronounce, and say the words, but I can't converse. I know some phrases, but I can't carry on conversations. It just goes too quickly for me to translate on the fly. The six days I was in Paris this past summer went ok. "Je voudrais un cafe Ameicano. Merci." and "Ou est les toilettes?" I did alright with those things.

[Raza]

Ce n'est pas tres bien. I can read, pronounce, and say the words, but I can't converse. I know some phrases, but I can't carry on conversations. It just goes too quickly for me to translate on the fly. The six days I was in Paris this past summer went ok. "Je voudrais un cafe Ameicano. Merci." and "Ou est les toilettes?" I did alright with those things.

That’s a major problem with Duolingo’s format, I believe. I can type out just fine, because there’s an internal translation from brain to fingers and in that time I can also translate to French, but Duolingo’s format doesn’t really promote thinking in French. And they took away a lot of features that they reworked to lock behind Duolingo Max. Really annoying. I bought a lifetime Babbel subscription, I’ve been meaning to start to integrate that into my lessons as well.

[geoffbot]

That’s a major problem with Duolingo’s format, I believe. I can type out just fine, because there’s an internal translation from brain to fingers and in that time I can also translate to French, but Duolingo’s format doesn’t really promote thinking in French. And they took away a lot of features that they reworked to lock behind Duolingo Max. Really annoying. I bought a lifetime Babbel subscription, I’ve been meaning to start to integrate that into my lessons as well.

My girlfriend spent 2.5 years living in Spain and had a boyfriend who spoke no English. She took Spanish lessons every day for 2 hours. At the end she could 'just about' speak Spanish. Learning languages ain't easy, especially if you don't start young.

[Raza]

My girlfriend spent 2.5 years living in Spain and had a boyfriend who spoke no English. She took Spanish lessons every day for 2 hours. At the end she could 'just about' speak Spanish. Learning languages ain't easy, especially if you don't start young.

Look, you may not have a great vocabulary, but I wouldn’t say you “spoke no English”. You’ve come a long way, Geoff.

But immersion is definitely the way to go. In undergrad, I had to pass 3 years of Spanish, but if you took Spanish 3, it counted as all three years. So I took an intensive summer course of Spanish 3 and the classes were like 3 hours or something and after being immersed in Spanish for 3 hours, I found myself easily speaking in Spanish, even accidentally sometimes. To be fair, I did start taking some Spanish classes in middle school (around age 12-13), so I had a decent foundation to begin with, but I also took French at that time (though did not continue with French through high school, as I did with Spanish). But, knowing even the little Spanish that I do has made learning French easier, plus, grammatically, French is actually a bit easier to learn, I think, coming from English. At least that’s been my experience on Duolingo.