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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2BkmS7Q
in other news, i think i’ve gone as far as DuoLingo’s patented No Context Ever method can really get me in learning a language I don’t know (Russian). It’s been useful to get me to recognize Cyrillic characters, and I’ve learned a couple of useful constructions and memorized some basic words, but now it wants to teach me the “formal you” and I’m like, I didn’t even get the informal you out of anything, I only know those phrases by rote and not what the individual words mean.
And it’s trying to teach me plurals but again, I’m just memorizing phrases. I need actual context and maybe someone to explain how this works.
I’ll keep doing DuoLingo just for practice, but it’s not useful on its own, which is the same conclusion I reached with Spanish– a language I already had studied for years and was reviewing. It’s not a useless program, but. It’s got to be just one of several tools. I can’t really get anything out of it without a wider context.
The only phrase I can actually remember and use is “вот мой свитер”, “here is my sweater”, and actually in Google Translate just now (I don’t have cyrillic installed on my laptop keyboard so that’s the only way I can get cyrillic characters) is when I realized that’s saying “here is my sweater” instead of “that is my sweater” and that’s the difference between вот and есть and это. (”Here” and “there” and “that”.) I had no fucking idea what the difference was, just sometimes it wanted me to use one and sometimes the others.
So I need a textbook! Which, my dad has one, from the Cold War, that he’s promised to give me, and I can get that from him in a couple of weeks when I visit. But what do I do until then?
Hmmmm…
(Your picture was not posted)
in other news, i think i’ve gone as far as DuoLingo’s patented No Context Ever method can really get me in learning a language I don’t know (Russian). It’s been useful to get me to recognize Cyrillic characters, and I’ve learned a couple of useful constructions and memorized some basic words, but now it wants to teach me the “formal you” and I’m like, I didn’t even get the informal you out of anything, I only know those phrases by rote and not what the individual words mean.
And it’s trying to teach me plurals but again, I’m just memorizing phrases. I need actual context and maybe someone to explain how this works.
I’ll keep doing DuoLingo just for practice, but it’s not useful on its own, which is the same conclusion I reached with Spanish– a language I already had studied for years and was reviewing. It’s not a useless program, but. It’s got to be just one of several tools. I can’t really get anything out of it without a wider context.
The only phrase I can actually remember and use is “вот мой свитер”, “here is my sweater”, and actually in Google Translate just now (I don’t have cyrillic installed on my laptop keyboard so that’s the only way I can get cyrillic characters) is when I realized that’s saying “here is my sweater” instead of “that is my sweater” and that’s the difference between вот and есть and это. (”Here” and “there” and “that”.) I had no fucking idea what the difference was, just sometimes it wanted me to use one and sometimes the others.
So I need a textbook! Which, my dad has one, from the Cold War, that he’s promised to give me, and I can get that from him in a couple of weeks when I visit. But what do I do until then?
Hmmmm…
(Your picture was not posted)
