Dan Piponi on Nostr: I thought I'd give Duolingo a go - and being the kind of person I am I thought I'd ...
I thought I'd give Duolingo a go - and being the kind of person I am I thought I'd try a language I wouldn't have to use with real people - Latin.
My primary thought so far is this: gamification of language learning is really great, someone ought to try taking this seriously as a way to learn language. Because Duolingo doesn't.
It has zero explanation of anything *at all*. I'd love to know how this looks to someone with no experience of non-trivial case systems. The spelling of Latin nouns must seem pretty arbitrary until you've seen enough exercises to infer the rules for yourself. You have to (1) infer that cases are inflected and (2) infer that there are different families of nouns with different inflections.
And it frequently asks you to translate things using words you haven't met earlier.
It's also quirky in that it teaches conversational Latin with sentences about New York and Boston and sacrificing parrots.
Still, it's a fun game and I'll keep going until it starts asking for money.
(Aside: I did Latin at high school - the notorious Cambridge Latin course with Caecilius spending all his time in the horto. But for our cohort our teachers decided to experiment with not explicitly teaching us grammar.)
My primary thought so far is this: gamification of language learning is really great, someone ought to try taking this seriously as a way to learn language. Because Duolingo doesn't.
It has zero explanation of anything *at all*. I'd love to know how this looks to someone with no experience of non-trivial case systems. The spelling of Latin nouns must seem pretty arbitrary until you've seen enough exercises to infer the rules for yourself. You have to (1) infer that cases are inflected and (2) infer that there are different families of nouns with different inflections.
And it frequently asks you to translate things using words you haven't met earlier.
It's also quirky in that it teaches conversational Latin with sentences about New York and Boston and sacrificing parrots.
Still, it's a fun game and I'll keep going until it starts asking for money.
(Aside: I did Latin at high school - the notorious Cambridge Latin course with Caecilius spending all his time in the horto. But for our cohort our teachers decided to experiment with not explicitly teaching us grammar.)