I'm on a Duolingo family plan, studying Ukrainian. It keeps throwing more and more difficult words without really building my knowledge and experience with the previous words.
I'm not sure if I can't hear the words correctly (it's possible, I'm partially deaf and it sounds like the voices it provides are low quality). I'm not sure if I'm not pronouncing them correctly (it often doesn't accept my pronunciations). Its feedback for improvement is extremely limited. For example, no matter how hard or slow or fast I pronounce it, it pretty much never accepts один ("oden" = "one") when I speak it.
When I was in 3rd through 6th grade of school, I learned English pronunciations using Spalding phonetics [0]. There are about 70 or so English phonemes if I recall. It would be handy to have that for other languages. It specifically taught how to put letters together to form sounds, and which combinations of letters are synonymous for sounds (but not for spelling, which was a separate class based much more on memorization of rules and exceptions). I excelled in both of these classes.
I've also sometimes asked ChatGPT for translations of words. It seems semi-OK. But it's much better to ask Ukrainian friends and colleagues. Friends and colleagues don't have a lot of time or patience to teach though. And they'd often throw additional meaning or context that was difficult to understand (for example, English has much less assignment of gender to words).
Not too much later in life (8th grade or so), I started writing software. I was homeschooled then, and had a lot of time on my hands. So I'd write software for most of the day every day for months at a time. There came a point where I stopped thinking in English and started thinking in objects and code relationships. I didn't realize it until my mother asked me what I was doing and I had to think to translate to English.
I've heard similar anecdotes: you start to become a native speaker when you can think in that language. I want that from Duolingo but haven't yet achieved it after 2.5 years. I imagine what's missing is just as @cat_multiverse said [1]: I don't really use the Ukrainian language in my daily life and should just start doing so even if it's just a journal. But without any feedback about correct pronunciation or grammar I worry that I would end up with my own mini language instead of truly a Ukrainian one.
It's available in Spanish, on Android, (which is the only duolingo permutation I have experience with) and seems to use google's speech recognition backend.
I'm on a Duolingo family plan, studying Ukrainian. It keeps throwing more and more difficult words without really building my knowledge and experience with the previous words.
I'm not sure if I can't hear the words correctly (it's possible, I'm partially deaf and it sounds like the voices it provides are low quality). I'm not sure if I'm not pronouncing them correctly (it often doesn't accept my pronunciations). Its feedback for improvement is extremely limited. For example, no matter how hard or slow or fast I pronounce it, it pretty much never accepts один ("oden" = "one") when I speak it.
When I was in 3rd through 6th grade of school, I learned English pronunciations using Spalding phonetics [0]. There are about 70 or so English phonemes if I recall. It would be handy to have that for other languages. It specifically taught how to put letters together to form sounds, and which combinations of letters are synonymous for sounds (but not for spelling, which was a separate class based much more on memorization of rules and exceptions). I excelled in both of these classes.
I've also sometimes asked ChatGPT for translations of words. It seems semi-OK. But it's much better to ask Ukrainian friends and colleagues. Friends and colleagues don't have a lot of time or patience to teach though. And they'd often throw additional meaning or context that was difficult to understand (for example, English has much less assignment of gender to words).
Not too much later in life (8th grade or so), I started writing software. I was homeschooled then, and had a lot of time on my hands. So I'd write software for most of the day every day for months at a time. There came a point where I stopped thinking in English and started thinking in objects and code relationships. I didn't realize it until my mother asked me what I was doing and I had to think to translate to English.
I've heard similar anecdotes: you start to become a native speaker when you can think in that language. I want that from Duolingo but haven't yet achieved it after 2.5 years. I imagine what's missing is just as @cat_multiverse said [1]: I don't really use the Ukrainian language in my daily life and should just start doing so even if it's just a journal. But without any feedback about correct pronunciation or grammar I worry that I would end up with my own mini language instead of truly a Ukrainian one.
[0]: https://spalding.org/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774032