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lexiconofhope · 13 days
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Duolingo recently sacked most of their translators to replace them with AI, and kept on a few who now just check the AI content for errors.
I knew Duolingo was aiming to be the poster child of good apps turned to shit by greedy soulless stockholders but this takes the cake.
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lexiconofhope · 13 days
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A1-A2: man, there're so many words I need to know in order to say literally anything
B1-B2: wow, what I know is enough now
C1-C2: man, there're so many weirdly specific words I need to know in order to describe these weirdly specific things I've only seen once in my life. Also I forgot how to say ceiling.
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lexiconofhope · 2 months
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Best language learning tips & masterlists from other bloggers I’ve come across
(these posts are not my own!)
THE HOLY GRAIL of language learning (-> seriously tho, this is the BEST thing I’ve ever come across)
Tips:
Some language learning exercises and tips
20 Favorite Language Learning Tips
what should you be reading to maximize your language learning?
tips for learning a language (things i wish i knew before i started)
language learning and langblr tips
Tips on how to read in your target language for longer periods of time
Tips and inspiration from Fluent in 3 months by Benny Lewis
Tips for learning a sign language
Tips for relearning your second first language
How to:
how to self teach a new language
learning a language: how to
learning languages and how to make it fun
how to study languages
how to practice speaking in a foreign language
how to learn a language when you don’t know where to start
how to make a schedule for language learning
How to keep track of learning more than one language at the same time
Masterposts:
Language Study Master Post
Swedish Resources Masterpost
French Resouces Masterpost
Italian Resources Masterpost
Resource List for Learning German
Challenges:
Language-Sanctuary Langblr Challenge
language learning checkerboard challenge
Word lists:
2+ months of language learning prompts
list of words you need to know in your target language, in 3 levels
Other stuff:
bullet journal dedicated to language learning
over 400 language related youtube channels in 50+ languages
TED talks about language (learning)
Learning the Alien Languages of Star Trek
.
Feel free to reblog and add your own lists / masterlists!
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lexiconofhope · 2 months
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celtic languages mega drive folder
i've been meaning to share my folder of celtic language pdfs for a while now, especially since duolingo has gotten even worse. the folder has pdfs of language-learning material, as well as some stuff on literature, history, indentity, etc. this is very much a work-in-progress, as i will add to the folder as i find more resources.
my folder currently has: welsh, breton, cornish, irish, scottish gaelic, manx, béarlagair na saor, early modern irish and classical gaelic, old irish, middle welsh, old welsh, and proto-celtic (although not all of them have a lot of pdfs in their folders yet).
(also if you want online resources, fiction books, media, etc, then take a look at this website: https://www.celtic-languages.org/Main_Page - it has both free and paid resources for irish, scottish gaelic, manx, welsh, cornish, breton, old irish, and classical gaelic.)
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lexiconofhope · 2 months
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The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.
Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.
It is not in English.
Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.
...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.
So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.
I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.
Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.
And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.
I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.
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lexiconofhope · 2 months
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Can we talk about how two of the big name language learning sites (Duolingo and Memrise) have both simultaneously lost in quality and are trying to completely change their own thing so much that they're nearly unusable now
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lexiconofhope · 4 months
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This has just occurred to me -
How would you folks feel about a survey asking for terms which you'd like to see Welsh equivalents for if there aren't already?
Something like a Google Form where you can suggest terms you would like to see translated. E.g. as far as I'm aware there's not yet terminology for detransitioning or retransitioning, for example.
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lexiconofhope · 4 months
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when no one’s got my back, I know focloir.ie has got my back <3
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
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lexiconofhope · 4 months
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anyone else experience the language learning purgatory where all the easily available resources are below your level, but you're also not proficient enough for smooth conversation. so every time you hear a fluent speaker you encounter several dozen specific words you don't know, but every time you look up references they teach you nothing. so you're on your own and constantly confused
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lexiconofhope · 4 months
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my logic: do not start another duolingo course. you already have 10 of them going you only have 32 XP in arabic you should focus on one you already have progress on instead of starting a new one please please plea
me already loading up the vietnamese course: không :D
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lexiconofhope · 4 months
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i do not think i like the word cymblr it does not . sound . very good. /lighthearted
Ah but therein lies its appeal! Wumblr just wouldn't have the same ring to it. (also /lighthearted)
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lexiconofhope · 5 months
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hey what hell man, theyre "pausing" the welsh course on duolingo and it won't get any more updates. a lot of welsh people who don't have welsh as their first language really relied on duolingo. it was a struggle to get the North walian dialect on there, and they still haven't got regional dialects there. how disappointing.
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lexiconofhope · 5 months
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Duolingo is NOT what it used to be.
“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.
I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.
In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.
No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.
It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.
Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.
And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.
It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.
~End rant.
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lexiconofhope · 5 months
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i love it actually when nonnative speakers make mistakes that reveal how their native languages work.
lots of koreans online say they "eat" drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.
arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between "i think/i believe/my opinion is" which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.
swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.
i've heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it's hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.
how neat is that?! it add a charm to international english usage in particular and make our appreciation of both our native languages and our learnt ones stronger...!!
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lexiconofhope · 6 months
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Necesito encontrar unas artistas de YouTube que hablan español 🤔 puedo practicar hablando español y dibujando al mismo tiempo ^u^
Recomendaciones son muy apreciadas ✨
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lexiconofhope · 6 months
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you've probably been asked this a million times by now, but what IS the plural form for moose in Anishinaabemowin? i tried looking it up, but all i got was a bunch of white people nonsense.
mooz is the singular, moozoog is the plural! usually animals will have an -ag or -oog ending to make them plural, but obvs it varies. (also varies in terms of areas/dialects)
miigwech! :)
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lexiconofhope · 6 months
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Today, in “I’ll take any good news I can find”:
A production of Romeo and Juliet with Deaf actors signing their lines has been referred to as bilingual! Not just “accessible” or “diverse” but also BILINGUAL!
This makes me happy because the general idea of ASL (and other signed languages) is that they’re just a manual version of the spoken language. By that logic, Norwegian is just a higher-latitude version of German. Signed languages are languages of their own! With unique vocabulary, grammar, and dialects!
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