![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I feel like Duolingo has improved...
I tried it a few years ago, I think with Hindi and just for comparison's sake, French -- which I had damn well better still be close to fluent in. And it kind of sucked. The sentences were ridiculous.
I started again a couple of weeks ago -- I am doubling up on Hindi and Irish (which I tried to start years and years and years ago... like, in my 20s, but found the tapes and books "Teach Yourself Irish" completely impossible... Kneecap revived my interest!), and I feel like I somehow subconsciously made some sort of progress with Hindi despite not doing anything but listening to Bollywood music and watching Bollywood movies (and not as many of those as in the past...). It's very heartening not to have to mess around with identifying Devanagari characters, but to be able to sight-pronounce almost everything I see, even if I am kind of slow at unwinding the meaning of sentences I hear. I think their n + i model is much better now. Eventually I want to add in Arabic (probably ought to do it sooner than later, god...) and Farsi. I can fantasize about Korean, too. Anyway, I am enjoying the hell out of it, and despite doing both at once, it is not confusing me.
The spelling in Irish is insane; the accents and the ridiculous combinations of vowels, and the nonsensical pronunciation of some consonant combinations and clusters... a far cry from the different rationalities of, say, Spanish and Hindi. Spanish is a WYSIWYG language, I swear -- 26 letters and they all make one fucking sound each, damn it. (Especially the vowels... no batshit dipthongs, no seven-or-eight-ways-to-say-OUGH. The only confusion for native spellers seems to be h and j sometimes, and double ll, h, and y, sometimes.
And Hindi... Hindi has a lot of confusing Ds and Ts and Rs and Ns, but apart from that, it is the most conscious and designed transcription from oral to written language I've ever looked at: their abugida (not quite a straight alphabet, but a syllabary where an "ah" sound is built into each consonant when it is by itself... there's a lot more than that, but I am going on memory here) is transcribed IN THE ORDER IN WHICH EACH SOUND IS PRODUCED IN YOUR THROAT, MOUTH, and LIPS, from back to front. That's the alphabetical order in, say, a dictionary, too, except that all words with initial vowels (also in mouth order) are in a separate section of the dictionary from those words that begin with consonants.
God, I find linguistics fascinating. If Northwestern had had minors, I would have had a linguistics minor to go with my French Studies major.
I started again a couple of weeks ago -- I am doubling up on Hindi and Irish (which I tried to start years and years and years ago... like, in my 20s, but found the tapes and books "Teach Yourself Irish" completely impossible... Kneecap revived my interest!), and I feel like I somehow subconsciously made some sort of progress with Hindi despite not doing anything but listening to Bollywood music and watching Bollywood movies (and not as many of those as in the past...). It's very heartening not to have to mess around with identifying Devanagari characters, but to be able to sight-pronounce almost everything I see, even if I am kind of slow at unwinding the meaning of sentences I hear. I think their n + i model is much better now. Eventually I want to add in Arabic (probably ought to do it sooner than later, god...) and Farsi. I can fantasize about Korean, too. Anyway, I am enjoying the hell out of it, and despite doing both at once, it is not confusing me.
The spelling in Irish is insane; the accents and the ridiculous combinations of vowels, and the nonsensical pronunciation of some consonant combinations and clusters... a far cry from the different rationalities of, say, Spanish and Hindi. Spanish is a WYSIWYG language, I swear -- 26 letters and they all make one fucking sound each, damn it. (Especially the vowels... no batshit dipthongs, no seven-or-eight-ways-to-say-OUGH. The only confusion for native spellers seems to be h and j sometimes, and double ll, h, and y, sometimes.
And Hindi... Hindi has a lot of confusing Ds and Ts and Rs and Ns, but apart from that, it is the most conscious and designed transcription from oral to written language I've ever looked at: their abugida (not quite a straight alphabet, but a syllabary where an "ah" sound is built into each consonant when it is by itself... there's a lot more than that, but I am going on memory here) is transcribed IN THE ORDER IN WHICH EACH SOUND IS PRODUCED IN YOUR THROAT, MOUTH, and LIPS, from back to front. That's the alphabetical order in, say, a dictionary, too, except that all words with initial vowels (also in mouth order) are in a separate section of the dictionary from those words that begin with consonants.
God, I find linguistics fascinating. If Northwestern had had minors, I would have had a linguistics minor to go with my French Studies major.