I love how tumblr is reverse chronological order so when your mutual starts having a blorbo breakdown overnight you get to start with the insane conclusion and work your way back to where they first went off the rails.
Here’s a list of what I do that really helps me learn the language using Duolingo; it’s extra work than the app gives you, but it helps me get my answers right most of the time and I feel like I know the language much better than I would have normally.
Completing the tree
The first thing you should do is complete the tree! Most people think they stop using Duolingo after that - this is absolutely not the stopping point! There’s a reason I listed this as step one.
To complete the tree, set a goal for yourself. One lesson per day, one unit per week, etc. Experiment a little and find one that works for you.
The XP feature on Duolingo helps me stay on track by measuring my frequency, not my learning. Use this to make you motivated to start each day, but don’t use it as a measure of how well you’re doing. It’s like a homework grade that gives points for completion but not accuracy. But, because of this, you can choose any goal you want. I’m on the “insane” goal (50pts per day) but I often go way past the limit. Trust me, if you’re following these steps, that won’t be a problem.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT RULE!!!! Before ever starting a new lesson, all of your previous lessons must be golden.
Duolingo builds off of previous skills in a fairly linear way. You’ll notice especially as you get farther in the tree that whenever you learn new nouns, they will always be practiced in the context of the most recent verb tense you’ve learned, and they will always mix up adjectives and phrases that you’ve also recently learned. Because of this, if you’re even a little shaky on a previous lesson, you’re screwing yourself over if you don’t review that first.
When you first open Duolingo, use “Practice Weak Skills” - this will give you a random lesson to run through and practice, and often it will mix multiple to allow you to strengthen multiple skills at once.
Keep using “Practice Weak Skills” until every lesson is golden. This takes about 3-4 times if you get most of the questions right, 5-6 if you’re getting most of them wrong - and it will get you past your XP goal. When you’re done, scroll through to check that every lesson is golden. Feels nice, don’t it?
Your lesson strength deteriorates quickly. It often feels like you’re taking one step forwards and two steps back. This is the case for a short while - the more you practice, the longer your skills will stick there. When you need to strengthen them again, all you have to do is prove that you know it from before. Instead of 15 questions on the same lesson, you’ll get about 3 - if you get all of them right, the skill goes straight back up to golden!
HOWEVER:
If you are having trouble with a certain lesson, maybe you find yourself constantly tripping up on it? Practice these lessons individually.
I constantly mess up on verbs, and now that I’ve finished the tree, whenever I review it mixes up to 4 tenses at once. What happens then? I get mixed up.
Personally, I rushed through the tree when I shouldn’t have. Whoops.
Because of this, I review each verb lesson on its own before using “Practice Weak Skills.”
When I feel confident enough, the next day I might test myself using “Practice Weak Skills” and see how it turns out. It’s your personal judgement call on when you should stop isolating lessons!
Grammar time!
So, if you’re anything like me, you love learning languages. If you’re even more like me, you have a preference for doing it, and it is not memorizing vocab (though this is necessary!). Duolingo is nice for vocab and grammar….practice. To practice, you have to learn it first, right? It teaches you the vocab well, but there’s one huge problem I found while finishing up my Spanish tree:
The farther you get, the less grammar lessons there are.
This is crucial! How am I supposed to know what’s going one with he/habia/habias when I don’t even know what the tense is?
So, I prepared a list of grammar resources/courses that I think do a good job of walking you through, step-by-step, the lessons in a similar order to Duolingo.
My recommendation for using these requires looking ahead. Look at your next Duolingo lesson and, before taking it, look at the corresponding lesson on one of these websites. Take notes on it! Go back to Duolingo and now that you actually know what you’re doing. (If you get things consistently wrong, you can then review the grammar lesson on whatever website - in case they’re out of order). These apply to any website or program other than Duolingo, especially self-teaching, since they’re all basic grammar lessons.
The ones I’ve listed are mainly Spanish and German; these are the languages I’m studying. I can’t speak on other websites and their ease/comprehensiveness if I’m not studying that language! Please feel free to edit this post and add your own websites/languages when you reblog.
Spanish
StudySpanish.com (This is my personal favourite! Separated into units that progress from basic to advanced.)
SpanishDict.com (good for referencing what you got wrong. Organizes by subject of lesson rather than easy-hard)
Bowdoin (Another one that goes through basic-advanced. Has lessons written in Spanish and exercises to practice! Also has more information than most of these other links, however this can be confusing and that’s why it’s not my favourite.)
German
German-Grammar.de (Has a TON of information and exercises; can be hard to navigate.)
Dartmouth Review (A little chart to separate very broad categories; once you pick a section, it goes on for a while.)
Deutsch Lingolia (Left column has a list; the top part is the important tenses, nouns, etc. grammar stuff.)
All Languages
ielanguages (Contains French, Spanish, ESL, Italian, German, Swedish, and Dutch, with a little information about various non-European languages.)
Rocket Languages (Another good reference. Ads pop up, but you don’t need to pay in order to read the free coursework. On each of these pages there should be a blue column on the right listing grammar lessons. Good luck!)
categories r growing + changing as i put more time into organizing these files and receive more stuff to add. also a lot of the new stuff i’ve received from other ppl i havent had time to look thru properly so i know i’ve miscategorised some stuff but w/e ill get to that in the summer.
if u have anything u’d like to add to this drive, please email me @ tevyefegeleh@gmail.com
A few days ago, my boyfriend introduced me to this amazing thing called edX courses. Probably you’ve already heard about this and if not, we can share the shame of ignoring its existence.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to take advantage of free online courses, such as edX, either for reforcing your studying, making it a habit or just for the pure joy of learning. My case is the third since I haven’t been able to find courses related to my field.
About edX (particularly)
Basically edX is an entity that contains tons of online free courses provided by amazing universities. About basically anything. (basically)
This a screenshot of the general topics that edX, in different languages:
The best of edX
So many topics to learn about. It doesn’t matter if your field is medicine, you can still go and learn some badass architecture.
Every course is free (hooray for all my poor fellas that understand me)
You can pay if you want to: Check the courses that are currently going on and you can pay either 25$ or 50$ depending on the course. The thing about this is that you get a certificate of the course you’ve taken and the university that provided the course. (you can happily show a Harvard course in your CV)
Even if a course has ended or closed, you can still pass it.
edX provides you the info of the course before taking it so you can organise yourself
There are guides. if you feel lost, you can ask people that are constantly participating for help or even the professor that made the course.
There are tests that help identify your comprehension or what still needs reinforcement
This all depends on you, this is pure passion
I mean look at this. These are just a few of the unis that provide courses to edX.
How do I take advantage of an awesome page I found with free online courses?
Choose wisely
Probably the hardest thing. I got so excited searching through all the courses that I found so many I had to take.
What do you need to priorise:
What subject do I need to reinforce ?
Do I suck at something ?
Do I love especially something ? Something that could potentially help me to find my passions ?
Once you’ve realised what you need, it’s time to organise.
Make a calendar: The simplest and first step for organisation.
Get to know your schedule well: be able to know how much time you can dedicate to this extra thing.
Identify the days in which you usually have more time to take advantage of instead of binge watching videos on Youtube on how snails have sex.
Identify the days that you feel way too tired or heavy days to not count on them. Because damn, we all need breaks.
Count the hours you can dedicate on it and compare it to the website. If it’s the same or similar, super. If it’s not there’s 2 options: 1) you ended up with extra time to indeed watch snails have sex or 2) you lack time which is something harder to handle but not impossible. My solution is, believe it or not, trying out the first plan. If it truly doesn’t work then you can decide how to dedicate extra time on it depending on itr priority.
This all generic, in all honesty, but the good thing about this website is that it does help you organise yourself because it tells you the amount of time you need per day to achieve the course in the ideal time. (I obviously suck at organising tips)
Example of a course I’m taking
Isn’t this beautiful ? Well it is.
We tend to forget that we study for passion. We’re not supposed to feel like all we do is mechanic and to please other people’s expectations (our parents, our friends, our teachers, everyone). Learning is great. Being forced to understand something that we don’t catch and get humilliated by a number that condens our understanding is the bastardisation of education.
Let’s all bloody avoid it.
That’s the moral or the story.
Lack of information is no excuse. Look in the endless possibilities that Internet gives you to expand your mind.
