Duolingo - You can have it your way

How can I best learn a new language?  Oh, if I only knew the answer to that seemingly innocuous question.  Lots of us want to learn another language, but few of us succeed.   My best advice is to give DuoLingo a try.  DuoLingo is a web-based language learning program available for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.  Two of the pluses of DuoLingo are that it has a perfectly acceptable free version and that you can tailor it to your own needs.  Is it the panacea for all language learning problems?  No, sorry.  But I have been using it for about six years and still look forward to using it on a daily basis. Here is the advice I would give a friend who wants to acquire another language using DuoLingo.

First, choose a language that is meaningful to your life. DuoLingo offers a wide variety of languages.You may be planning a trip to a foreign country, have friends who speak another language,, enjoy the music from a certain country, want to connect with your roots, or learn about a new culture.  I study Spanish and Portuguese because I have taught those subjects, French because I have French-speaking Canadian friends and enjoy traveling in Canada, Italian because a good friend has just bought a flat in Venice, and Irish and Welsh because I am intrigued by Celtic cultures.  And if you find that you chose the wrong one, you can quit it and start a new one.  I once began Catalan and  Romanian because they are Romance languages, but I quickly lost interest, probably because I didn't have a personal connection.

Next, set a daily goal ( a small one is fine) or let DuoLingo set one for you.  The program can be instructed to send you reminders if you don't meet your daily goal. I used them at first to develop the habit of doing some bit of language every day, but after a while, the reminders began to feel like a nag.  Now my strategy is to gain ten points every day, which is really easy.  I have a streak going of over 1800 days.  You may laugh, but I go to great lengths to maintain my DuoLingo streak.  However, in addition, my personal daily goal is to do one exercise in six different languages every day without making five errors.  Duolingo lets me know when I make an error by losing one of my five available hearts. So, my advice is to play around with your goal so that it fits your lifestyle.

Now to the content that DuoLingo offers.  You will choose topics to work on, some based on life experiences, like travel, and others based on grammar, like past progressive verbs.  Once again, you are in charge here.  The topics are arranged from easier to more advanced, but you don't have to necessarily work through them in a lock step fashion.  Remember, language learning can be a truly enjoyable experience. Language Acquisition experts talk about the important role of Language Input, that is, getting lots of language into your head in a comprehensible way. Duolingo offers an impressive amount of content.

Another piece of advice is to allow yourself to explore what DuoLingo offers.  There is no one right way to use it.  DuoLingo is constantly changing,  so you may log in one day and find new features.  I can compare it to learning how to use an iPhone or an Apple Watch.  You will discover capabilities you want to use and others of no interest.  On Duolingo, I have explored grammar explanations (pretty boring), jump ahead quizzes (great), vocabulary count (not useful), online discussions (pretty interesting if you have time), and adding friends to compete with (not so interesting anymore).  Just keep clicking around in the program until you find features that suit you.

Now back to the thorny question of how to learn a language.  I can only say that DuoLingo will help you along in your journey.  The program gives me an opportunity to maintain Spanish and Portuguese, helps me feel that I am not losing the French I learned in school, gives me hope that the next time I am in Italy I can use more Italian than the last time, and provides an intellectual challenge figuring out the workings of Irish and Welsh.   

My plea to Duolingo is: Please bring back the 'bots'.   The bots carried on a conversation with you to which you replied speaking or in writing.  Talking to the bots was very close to having a conversation with a real person, which means that you were creating language in your own head.  I loved talking to them.   But the bots unfortunately only made a brief appearance in the program.

Is DuoLingo the ultimate answer to the question, "How do I best learn a language?" No, but it is a flexible, motivating way to study language. And I look forward to a future where language learning is even more accessible. 

 If you are a DuoLingo user or want to be, I look forward to reading your comments and observations on language learning!

The Perils of Counting in Other Languages

"Can you count from one to ten in ______ (fill in the language)?"  Counting in another language is one proof for the world that we are acquiring another language.  But is expressing numbers in another language as simple as memorizing new vocabulary words for 1-10?  Of course not!  Few things having to do with language are simple!

Most beginning lessons of a foreign language course include the labels for numbers 1-10.  A few chapters later, the textbook writers think you are ready for the complexities of 11-100.  And here is where the fun begins.  It is interesting to note that Duolingo, my favorite on-line language learning program, does not include numbers as one of the first topics in their language tree.  And I agree that numbers, like all vocabulary, should be acquired gradually, and in context.

First, let's talk about what it takes to master foreign language numbers. Number concepts in a foreign language are notoriously hard to internalize.  It may be that we only truly learn to count once in our lives, and that is in our native language. I consider myself fairly fluent in Spanish, but I still have to take an extra second or two to translate a Spanish number, like sesenta y seis, into the concept of 66. I have often witnessed Spanish-English bilinguals speaking in English who make a temporary switch to Spanish when counting objects or people.

And do we really need to know numbers in a second language?  Yes, for activities such as counting, doing math, telling time, or giving phone numbers and addresses.  But how often do we have to write numbers rather than understand or speak them?  Not so often.  Check writing comes to mind, which is becoming somewhat archaic.  Formal wedding invitations, which may also be going by the wayside. Most of our use of numbers will be in communicating orally in a new language.

To further understand numbers in other languages, I made a comparison chart of 1-100 in my native language, English (Germanic family), Spanish, Portuguese, French (Latin family), Irish and Welsh (Celtic family).  Here is a sampling of what I discovered.

In all these languages, 1-10 are the building blocks of the numbering system, so, yes indeed, they will have to be learned. The teen numbers in English and the Latin-based languages must still be learned individually, although most contain a hint of their meaning (thirteen, trece, treze, and treize all remind us of the concept of three, for example).

To form the numbers from 20-100, basic arithmetic skills are required.  Since we are working on a decimal system, all these languages have a word for intervals of ten, but there are some differences to note.  English, Spanish and Portuguese have separate words (often easily recognizable) for 20, 30, etc., to which the numbers from 1-10 are added.  Examples are thirty-one in English and trinta e um in Portuguese.

French adds a bit of challenge by having separate numbers for 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 but then expressing 70 as 60 + 10 (soixante-dix),  80 as 4 x 20 (quatre-vingts), and 90 as 80 + 10 (quatre-vingt-dix).  The need for math skills continues as 71 becomes 60 + 11 (soixante-onze).  Whew! I may need a calculator on my next visit to Canada!

I thought the Celtic languages, Irish and Welsh, were going to have me as flummoxed as the sound systems of these languages, but I discovered a comforting regularity in the numbering systems. (I ignored for the time being that Irish has three numbering systems, used in different contexts, and that Welsh has masculine and feminine number forms.) 

Counting in Irish is a matter of learning 1-10 and adding déag/dhéag for the teens (13 is a tri déag). As in English, labels have to be learned for 20, 30, etc.  Then numbers 1-10 follow.  ( 20 + 1 is fiche a haon).

The key word for numbering in Welsh is deg (10)   20 is a logical 2 x 10 (dau ddeg), with the pattern holding for 30-90.  And 22 is a logical 2 x 10 + 1 (dau ddeg un).

The number 100 (one hundred) is very different in English only.  Here is how to say 100 in the other languages we are discussing.

Spanish - cien
Portuguese - cem
French - cent
Irish - céad
Welsh - cant

And the worst part of the matter is, even if I learned to sing the song, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," in any of the languages besides my native language, I would still have some complex thinking to do. Maybe I can start counting sheep in other languages on sleepless nights for a little extra number practice?


  

Where do I start with Welsh?

 "Where are we staying in Wales this summer?" asked my husband, wanting to make absolutely sure we chose the best possible accommodations with the best view, the best breakfast, at the best price.

"I researched a couple of towns on the North Coast, but I can't remember the names.  I can't even pronounce them!"  I complained.

That was the start of my desire to study the Welsh language.  I'm a language teacher.  I speak three languages and have studied a few more.  Surely, I told myself,  I could learn at least enough Welsh in the next year to be able to tell someone where we will be staying.  So I started devising a Welsh self-study  plan.  My goal was to teach myself, following the same philosophy I use in teaching Portuguese and Spanish in the college classroom.

Step One in acquiring a language is understanding the language.  Where could I hear and comprehend spoken Welsh?  I googled 'Welsh Language Study' and found quite a few sources.  It would have been great to enroll in an online course, but the perennial considerations, time and money, kept me from going that route. Did I really want to jump into Welsh grammar?  I almost fell into that trap.  Maybe I could order a nice grammar workbook where I could fill in the blanks with the correct form.   I teach linguistics courses and actually enjoy grammar.   But I knew that a heavy dose of grammar, though it might be intriguing to me personally, would not really be helpful until I had acquired enough Welsh language to apply it to.

What did appeal to me were websites that appeared to be more elementary.  Quick and dirty was what I wanted at this stage.  So I finally chose a site that described the Welsh alphabet.   Welsh has 28 letters, some of them double letters (dd, ff,ll), and some two letters combined (ch, ph, rh, th, ng), Also, the Welsh alphabet does not contain the following letters:  j, k, q, v, x, z.  Okay, interesting enough, but I still didn't know how to pronounce a word.  No wonder I don't teach the alphabet in foreign language courses, even though some students have complained that they would like to learn it.

Back I went to Google.  This time I found a site for Welsh pronunciation.  Oh, my, so many IPA symbols.  Some I knew from English phonetics, but did I really want to wade through the transcription of 14 diphthongs?  Certainly not.  When I read that three of the diphthongs have the same IPA pronunciation [eye], I decided just to fake the vowel combinations.  Vowels don't have that much sound compared to consonants, anyway.  This approach wasn't getting me very far.

Then I remembered an old Rosetta Stone CD forgotten in my desk drawer for many years. It was so old that it wouldn't work on my new laptop.  I found a former laptop stored up on an office shelf, dusted it off and booted it up.  It read the CD!   Yes, Welsh was on the list!  I was off on my language learning adventure!

Six months later, that same computer with the CD still inserted still sat by my reading chair.  I had not touched it since the day I set it up.  What had gotten in the way of my Welsh self-study plan?  Life.  And also wanting to do things too perfectly.  Obsessive-compulsive personalities do not make the best language acquirers.

The summer trip was looming in six months, and I still didn't know how to pronounce 'Llandudno' , the name of the Welsh coastal resort where we would be spending a few days before attending the London Summer Olympic Games.  I did some quick Internet research and found out that the double ll in Llandudno has a  sound that is difficult for English speakers.  The suggestion was to say the word 'whistle' with a lisp.  The sound in the second syllable of 'whistle' would approximate the ll sound.  So now my husband and I try to say 'Llandudno' correctly, looking pretty strange as we get our teeth and tongue in unusual positions to pronounce the beginning sound of the word.

At least I had made a start with the Welsh language.  Several weeks ago, I plugged earphones into the old laptop and listened to Level 1, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of Rosetta Stone.  I had used  Rosetta Stone  in the past to practice Portuguese and Spanish, but I had never used it to start a completely new language.  What were those people saying in Welsh, and why were they talking so fast?  What if I couldn't match the picture with the meaning of the word?  And it wasn't just words.  There were phrases as well.  What word in the phrase meant what?  I played the same lesson over quite a few times in different modalities, sometimes just listening to Welsh, other times listening and reading, sometimes just reading (the easiest!), and even doing some elementary writing.  I loved it when I got the smiley face and a pleasant chime sound for a correct answer, but I sometimes cursed under my breath when I received the X and an unpleasant sound for an incorrect answer.

Lesson 1 was now getting a bit boring.  I didn't know absolutely everything in it, but it was time to make myself move on to Lesson 2.  Now I'm up to Lesson 3.  The units follow a predictable sequence.  First I have to learn new material.  About 20 minutes of that is all that my brain can absorb.  For the next session, I review quickly and then practice with different types of exercises.  Each practice gets a bit easier, although sometimes my brain turns off completely or my attention wanders, and I miss the cue.  Maybe eventually I can learn a few choice words in Welsh to express my displeasure when I get the thumbs down signal.

I know that part of successful language acquisition is developing a 'tolerance for ambiguity'.   This was certainly true for Welsh.  For example, I was delighted to learn the word for 'cat' in Welsh, 'cath'.  Now I have a new name to call our pet Bitsy.  But wait, just when I had learned 'cath', I heard the speaker on the CD talk about the 'gath'.   I began to notice that other words were changing the beginning sound as well.  The phonological rule causing the sound change is still a mystery to me. Maybe I should reconsider ordering that Welsh grammar workbook.

The topic of Lesson 3 was the numbers 0-10.  Really now.  How hard is it to learn eleven numbers ?  I found out very soon just how hard it is.  Numbers are one of those concepts that a person learns once in their native language, I believe, and the numbers in subsequent acquired languages just never have the same deep meaning.  I still can't count from 0-10 in Welsh, but I can recognize the numbers when I hear them, which I suppose is the real use of numbers.  I don't get many requests to count aloud in any language.

After three lessons of Rosetta Stone study, I can now imagine myself on the boardwalk in Llandudno, holding fascinating conversations with Welsh speakers.  I can observe that the girls are walking, the horse is jumping, the airplane is flying, the boy is falling down, or, if we should see a fish, that the fish is swimming.  I can also indicate that I want not one but two scones at the takeaway coffee shop by the beach.  Who knows what friendships may be formed in Wales because I wanted to know how to pronounce 'Llandudno'?