Learning French with DuoLingo, Day 1485

I haven’t done one of these updates since Day 600. Yikes!

Also, I now have a four-year streak going.

Yes, my streak is still alive. I still spend some amount of time on a daily basis learning French with DuoLingo. I’m still in the Diamond League, though I did fall off of it a couple of times along the way. Some weeks are busier than others, and some are a lot more competitive. When those two things collide in the wrong way, chaos ensues in the meaningless League chasing.

How and Why to Learn a Language, Part 1

I’ve also spent some time on YouTube in the last year exploring the Learning Languages corner of the site. There seem to be two camps there about the proper way to learn a new language.

The first uses DuoLingo and offers tips and tricks and guidance on how to best use the app.

The other side says DuoLingo is a waste of time and you’ll never learn anything good there.

The truth, naturally, is somewhere in the middle. I know I’m not going to be living some wild dream like speaking French fluently while living full-time in Paris. I also know that DuoLingo fits into my life in convenient places to allow me to continue my learning process, no matter how slowly.

I’m not trying to converse on the Parisian streets with the local baguette seller. I’m a bit of a weirdo. I’m not learning French so I can have some life-changing Eurotrip and absorb myself into the local culture.

I want to read comics in French. That’s it.

I’ve had times where I’ve used the DuoLingo features to help with pronunciations and trying to get the words to leave my mouth as readily as I tap on them on the screen, but I’ve never gone far with it. It’s nice to have, but not a necessity. It slows me down on the road to my true goal.

Paid Membership Still Just Out of Reach

Every 100 days or so, DuoLingo gives me a three-day preview of their paid membership. I try to maximize those days and go as far as I can as quickly as I can, racking up as many points as I can along the way.

I know I should subscribe to the app, but they have this annoying habit of only putting membership on sale once a year when my credit card is already maxed out from Christmas.

I do think the paid membership would help. It gets frustrating losing out on a lesson because you made too many mistakes and now you either have to wait a day for your hearts to replenish, or restore them by doing some earlier and easier lessons. It helps me to be able to work through the examples I got wrong as many times as needed until it’s drilled into me. But you can’t do that without the paid membership.

Instead, I take a screenshot and transcribe the answer from there the next time the sentence comes up.

I’m not proud of this, but sometimes it’s better to clear a level than to be frustrated and want to throw the phone away.

How and Why to Learn a Language, Part 2

The second method of learning is any variation of full immersion. It sounds scary, but it’s the classic way to learn a language. Drop yourself in another country and pick it up as you go. Don’t use your first language. Learn to think and speak in the other.

All or nothing.

I’m not doing that, either, but there is a variety of it that I can appreciate. That is, you should learn through examples and stories. Watch French television shows, listen to French podcasts, etc. You get the advantage there of seeing real-world usage, lots of context, and a large amount of examples in a short time. There are sites you can go to that focus on this specifically.

There are a lot of videos on this idea of increasing your input. The more you hear of the language, the more it will become familiar to you. It’s the same way babies learn — just by absorbing nothing but the language from hearing it constantly.

One of the more popular systems for this kind of learning is Olly Richards’ Story Learning. His theory is that learning just the rules of grammar and the textbook kinds of exercises isn’t going to help you. It’s dry and boring and likely to put you off. It also doesn’t give you any context or examples of real-world usage.

I got his French book for Christmas [yes, that’s an affiliate link] this year and have been slowly going through it. Having 1400 days of DuoLingo behind me is a great cheat code for it, but I’m still learning a lot. And, as he says, it’s interesting and more memorable to see these words in context.

The Importance of Words In Context

The deeper I get into learning the language, the more examples pop up where you can’t translate word-to-word. Phrases mean things that would be slightly different from a literal translation. Those tend to show up in stories more than in structured learning.

The quickest example I can think of with French is “vacances en famille.” Literally, that would be “vacation in family”, but it really means a “family vacation.” It’s a small example, but there are plenty of others.

Thankfully, Google Translate is pretty good at knowing this, too. It might not be perfect, but it’s far better than me.

The suggestion with the book is to read the story straight through first and not to worry about words you don’t understand. Just push through. Try to pick up their meanings as you go from their context. The second time you go through the story, you can note the words you missed and learn them afterward. By then the story will be fresh and well known in your mind and that third trip through will put everything together.

It’s been working for me like that so far, and I’ve picked up a couple of new vocabulary words along the way.

There are also some words that I get confused about or get mixed up with, so I’ve started doing some spaced repetition with the Anki app. This is the system where you practice with flashcards, but the app keeps track of which ones you got wrong and right. It tries to give you the wrong ones more often so you get more practice on the words you obviously need to practice. But it also doesn’t wear you out with drilling every word every time.

One of these days, I’ll drill enough to keep all these words straight: surtout, partout, puisque, jusqu’á,and autant. It’s all these little filler words that I can’t keep straight, but which I realize I use more often in English than I realize. Maybe they’re more important than I thought, after all?

Reading Comics (and Instagram)

Ultimately, it all boils down to being able to read comics. I can honestly say that it’s getting easier every month or so. The other day, I read Boulet’s latest webcomic in French from start to finish without having to consult Google Translate. It’s a small victory, but I’ll take it. (He’s since posted it in English, and I was relieved to see I understood it correctly.)

I’m reading parts of Spirou Journal every week. I try to purposefully sit down and read a single page of it word by word. I’ll run as much stuff through Google Translate as I have to. It’s not quite the Story Learning method, but it’s close enough for me.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from doing that is which words are more common than I would have first thought. Small conversational words like “ben” or “car” or “hâte” keep popping up. I’ve learned a bunch of words from first seeing them in a word balloon and then seeing them in other balloons in the following weeks. Those are the best small victories, and they add up over time.

Some of those words I also see from the French folks I follow on Instagram. Instagram Stories are great for this.

First, there’s a natural time pressure to get the gist of what they’ve written on the screen before the next story scrolls onto the screen.

Second, and more importantly, Instagram has a link at the top to translate any text on the screen that the user entered. Even better, they provide the French and English text at the bottom when you click on that link. That makes it so much easier to compare words directly. It also stops the scroll, so you can take a moment to read and learn.

This is as close to immersion as I’m going to get.

And that’s OK.

It might be slow learning, but it’s slow and steady progress.

Goals

I plan on doing more of the same, just more. Practice, practice, practice. That’s what this is going to take. I think reading more will help me, also.

It’s funny because I know a lot of words and phrases from reading comics news in French. I have a larger-than-average vocabulary for the jargon aimed specifically at the comic book industry, for obvious reasons.

DuoLingo is not going to teach me that “t1” is short for “tome 1” or “Book 1” in a series. It won’t teach me that “j -5” is a countdown for 5 days (jours). And even Google Translate gets lots of comics things confused. “Planches” are comics pages, for example, though it literally means board or plank. If you’re referring to the original art, then calling the art page a “board” is common enough. But that’s not what the article is always referring to.

I’ve learned more common phrases like “next week” (la semaine prochaine) from reading about upcoming releases. “La semaine derniére” is last week.

I’ve learned that “Actua”/”Actualité” means “News” and that “Telecharger” is “Download” from visiting BD sites and digital comics distributors.

Basically, I’m all about picking up little pieces of the language from anywhere I can find it. Every word counts.

If there’s one thing I’m learning from this process, it’s that the translator’s job is much harder than it seems. It’s a lifetime of work and experience to be a good translator. No, AI cannot replace their job. Doing a good job of it requires a lot more knowledge, finesse, and artistry than a neural network or a language model can handle.

The FTC Makes Me Say This

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