1y ago

As a German visiting the US

Explanation: Germans ~~used to~~ (apparently only in my bubble) call cellphones "Handy" and many people still do that. My friends from america found that quite hilarious.

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In Lebanon, “Handy” means a cordless landline.
- In the US, it's apparently a handjob.
  
  Duolingo is insistent on calling it a handy. It does my head in.
  
  I already noticed that Duolingo isn't very good for learning languages after taking a glance at it's Japanese course. I need to take a look at the German one, as well.
  
  It's not that bad. The problem is that as you reach the later stages it often wants one particular (sometimes incorrect) answer, when multiple alternatives are correct or better.
  So, for example, I'm a dutch native speaker, and sailed through the duolingo course until the later stages. Then it gets pretty bad and I got bored of trying to complete it.
  Use duolingo for the basic stuff, but it's not the same as a language course.
  
  Oh that's interesting. Do you mind sharing why you scorn the Japanese course? It was my initial course and then I switched to German and have been doing it for a couple of years
  
  Duolingo in general isn't very good for learning a language. Their approach doesn't work because what explanation there is is sparse and not in depth enough. They expect the user to recognise patterns on their own but that frequently causes people to see patterns that aren't there and to misunderstand grammar points. It might be an okay-ish tool to practice what you already know.
  If you were successful with Duolingo, congrats, you were lucky.
  
  Duolingo leans very heavily into memory based learning. I would love to see us do away with this model, but it's what they do in schools.
  That said, I have basic reading and writing comprehension after two years, so it's not all bad. I still believe a toddler would best me though.
  
  The Japanese is just very unnatural and sometimes even wrong.
  
  It I pick it back up, maybe I'll opt for an alternative server then 😂

97 comments