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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3629 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can anyone recommend a good resource for learning Russian? I had been using Duolingo, but I didn’t feel like it was truly helping me become conversational in the language. I would take night classes, but I have a side job that requires me to keep most of my weeknights free. Something I could use while at work would be optimal, but I’m open to whatever recommendations people can provide.

You could start a Russian language culture war discussion thread. Duolingo has managed to create a system that provides a very strong illusion of progress: all these stages, ingots, stars and what not end up making you believe you're getting somewhere, but all they do is mask the lack of real progress.

I’ve never used it myself, but was shocked at how passable my coworker became at basic conversational French from scratch using Duolingo every day.

Uh, no offense, but do you yourself speak French or was this a case of impressing the non-francophone?

I speak better (not fluent) German, but passable French, and (very) amateur Russian and Spanish.

Well then I guess my question is ‘are we sure it was just Duolingo and he doesn’t have eg his old high school French textbook lying around that he uses as a reference’.

I believe her when she says it’s purely the app, she didn’t study languages and is otherwise English (they tend not to speak another language).

It seems likely to me that Duolingo works, gamification obviously works (Snapchat Streaks, Reddit Karma etc) and it pretty clearly drills you on vocab and sentence structure which are the most important things for beginners.

My problem with Duolingo, at least at the beginner levels of language instruction, is that it doesn’t do a very good job of actually explaining why a sentence is structured a particular way. I would suddenly be confronted with a sentence that looked very different from anything I had previously studied, with no context explaining the theory behind it, and I was expected to basically just figure it out using context clues, and then incorporate that new knowledge into future lessons without ever being told why I’m doing it in the first place. Which, to be fair, is probably a more accurate representation of how adults learn a new language than I would get by studying a textbook. For someone like me who is used to being careful and articulate with the way I use my native tongue, the thought of going to a new country and making a ton of flagrant grammatical mistakes because I don’t understand the formal structure of the language is something I find really icky.

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