I’ve used Duolingo for about seven years to learn German and wouldn’t really recommend it for achieving “rantability”, I’m just at the point where I’m able to understand 80% or so of Rammstein lyrics. That’s a fairly abysmal ROI for 7 years of study.
Yeah Duolingo is shit. I’m not an English speaker regularly, I was in Britain and the first time people spoke to me I freezed 🤣.
The best thing to do is to get a good base and go for it, hoping your interlocutor will not laugh at you (which in my experience: they don’t. They correct you and serve you a pint)
“Froze” 🍺
Thanks, mate
Speakn’t
Yeah, it’s rough for my fellow anxious people who tend to dwell on their mistakes too much, but it’s really something you just have to toss yourself into at some point. I’m sure there will be someone who had the absolute opposite experience to me, but there’s never really going to be a point where you’ve studied enough that you can suddenly understand everything people say in your target language, and find you can confidently express yourself as well as you do in your native language. You get to a point where you’re good enough to follow along most of the time and it starts to get weird being the only person who still needs to have your responses translated, and you just jump in and go for it. You will make mistakes, probably even some incredibly stupid ones. But the thing is, unless you’re making your first attempt at immersion double as your audition for an episode of Locked up Abroad, your mistakes are almost never going to have any real consequences. Like, don’t try and make your first foray into immersion buying a property without consulting with a lawyer who can explain what you’re agreeing to, but for talking with staff at restaurants and stuff, or shooting the shit with your coworkers, 99% of the time, you will remember your mistakes long after everyone else has totally forgotten them, if they hadn’t immediately done so.
Having had to do it a couple times now, I have seen both how low the stakes really are, as well as how much it will hold back your progress if you can’t conquer that initial fear of making a fool of yourself.
Stuff like Duolingo is good for building a foundation of vocabulary, but if you want to get ranting you have to immerse yourself. Movies, podcasts, audiobooks (reading along with the physical book so you can practice both reading and hearing at the same time is also great), whatever else you can think of where people are speaking fluently. You won’t be able to understand at first, but used in conjunction with those apps that teach you individual words, your brain will eventually start to catch up. Sometimes I even read aloud to myself to practice speaking. But vocab apps alone will never have you reaching fluency.
Watching kids shows in a foreign language is also very effective. They’re often literally designed around conveying messages to people with a tenuous grasp of the language :)
My friend improved her Spanish by watching Spanish soap operas. Apparently it’s was easier to pick up that they were saying because everything was so damned over the top.
Duolingo is (probably was since they hopped on the AI bandwagon) good for reinforcing languages you already have a decent grasp on. If you have. I experience with the language it’ll probably get you far enough to order food off a menu and similar situations.
Duolingo was always on the AI bandwagon, such as it is… the founder worked on Captcha and started reCaptcha.
Your 80% is higher than me (15% maybe) listening to music in my target language (Italian). Granted you have more time, but it’s not like I started last month. I’m currently on a little over 2000 day streak…
My plan was to complete the Duolingo course and move on to something else, but then they roughly doubled the size of my course recently.
So, is it “du hast mich”, or “du hasst mich”?
Both.
Du
Du hasst
Du hasst mich
Du hasst mich
Du hast mich gefragt
Du hast mich gefragt
Du hast mich gefragt und ich hab‘ nichts gesagt
I think it’s like “mein teil”, it’s intentionally written to work with morme than one meaning but when reading the entirety of the lyrics, I think it’s clearly “you hate me”
Was it worth it to understand Rammstein?
(Aside from the stated ROI, I’m not a Rammstein listener so I wouldn’t know too much in detail)
I think they intentionally write the lyrics to be at a childlike level of complexity. Maybe they do this for the multilingual fan base but whatever the reason, I think I could understand their lyrics long before I could order something I actually wanted at a restaurant or discuss the pros and cons of living next to a train station.
I’m still using the app daily, I think it just rubs and obsessive compulsive itch of mine. I long ago realized I wasn’t going to truly learn a language with the app.
Ja, kann sein dass Rammstein das für die internationalen Fans so macht. Ich dachte eher immer dass es einfach ihr Stil ist. Aber wie gesagt, ich kenne sie nur wenig.
Ich kann gerne die vor und Nachteile am Leben in der Nähe einer (S) Bahn Station erläutern. 😁 Zur Wiesn Zeit ist es kein Spaß da zuviele Besucher über die Gleise gehen und die Bahn das sehr lautstark kommentiert. Auch nachts um 3 Uhr.
Ja, ich kenne auch Leute die noch an Duolingo hängen, obwohl kaum noch nutzen vorhanden ist.
Sounds like a perfect scenario for Klingon.
yIqIm! jIHvaD nob qechmey Qav nejchugh vay’, vIghaj. DaHjaj ramvam naDev Frank Shirley, pInwI’ vIneH. QI’lop Quchvo’ Qong ghaH vIneH pa’ Melody Lane tlhejtaHvIS Hoch latlh mIpwI’pu’ je, ‘ej naDev ghaH qemlu’ vIneH! nachDaq tlhegh tIn tu’lu’! mInDu’Daj vIbej vIneH ‘ej ghaHvaD jIjatlh: qutlh, nep, ghobe’, non, toj, HeSwI’, roS Qa’, lam Sop, nur, ghoDlu’, jIv, ‘IwSuq, Ha’DIbaH chopmeH, valqu’be’, DIq’be’, tul’be’, tIq’be’, tlhagh, ghewmey mInDu’, letwI’, wuS tISuq, ghargh targhHom veDDaq noch! QAPLA’! JAY’! nuqDaq ‘oH tylenol’e’?
spoiler
That’s meant to be Clark’s rant in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, for those who didn’t recognize it.
(Also, this translation is probably completely terrible – it’s just Bing Translate plus me trying to naively fill in the words it gave up on. I don’t even know how to rearrange the word order to be correct.)
Sounds probable. Like the prayer said at the dinner table before I was eaten by a grue.
rant in vulcan.
Such an illogical move would imply that the madness of Pon Farr had taken hold, and that a fight to the death was about to ensue - causing everyone present to scatter for fear of their lives. Not sure that’s what OP is going for…
Make it ancient Sumerian. Make them want to call a priest.
I took my first French class in high school 18 years ago, got a French minor in college, wound up marrying a woman from Quebec whose parents are from France, spend a few weeks/month in the French-speaking world every year, but still don’t speak enough French to be able to truly tell my father-in-law off when he’s being a con and needs someone to tell him off, because he sure won’t listen to the women in his life. All that to say, good luck. It’s one thing to learn a language, but it’s a lot to get to where you can go off in it.
Probably want to start by going with the long form, “connard”, “con” is a bit more endearing, like if someone does something a bit silly you can be like “arrête, t’es con!” in a “stop being silly” kind of way. With “connard” there can be no confusion.
Isn’t Quebecoise different enough that it’s almost a new language entirely? I’ve heard they’re also super judgy when people use it wrong.
Seems like you gotta learn that specific dialect.
You’ll need to either memorize it or live in the country a couple years.
Toki Pona is well liked in language circles.
Esperanto should be one of the easiest languages to learn. Also the most useless.
I’d bet the easiest way is to just convert to Baptism and do the whole “speaking in tongues” thing at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Hint: It’s really easy to fake, you don’t need to commit.
Welsh would be a good choice.
Welsh is cool, I lived in Ceredigion for several years where it’s a lot of people’s mother tongue and really regret not learning it when I was there and could be immersed. Unfortunately I only acquired a few words and phrases by osmosis, a diolch here and a nos da there.
I’m working on learning the Swedish sign language alphabet for my deaf sister. For whatever reason I wasn’t taught growing up (there’s a 20+ age difference). Kinda want to blow her mind by just casually signing out the word we’re stuck on like my mother and my niece do (my sister lipreads extremely well but I mumble enough to give her trouble).
Extra points for picking something agglutinative.
