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Feb. 23rd, 2018 10:22 pmSo in addition to duolingo, I have fallen in love with memrise -- it's another language learning thing, similar but different. It has an adorable space/alien theme (idek but it's cute) and uses real people as speakers and generally does a good job as far as I can tell in the two days I've been fooling with it.
The only quibble I have is that when it is in free type mode (instead of picking the correct option or refrigerator magnet style things, it has you spelling), the keyboard it has you use is tiny. Limited keys, but smaller than the native iOS keyboard, and when I'm in bed with my glasses off and my cpap mask half blocking my vision, it's hard to tell the difference between q and o and a, or between i and ยก and !, or whatever. And the line of keys is in random order, so I'm doing a lot of squinting.
But I like the other aspects of the interface, and I like that it starts with sentences like "what's up" or "hi" or "let's go" or "please", instead of the "the man eats an apple" that many of the duolingo courses start with. (Not welsh, though -- dw i draig!)
I dabbled briefly In Danish before deciding a) Danish pronunciation/spelling is wacky, and b) it was silly having memrise on one language and duo on another while also doing hiragana in a different app. So I decided that I'd do Japanese in all three. I have hiragana to the point where I can sound it out -- not really reading it yet, the way I can read Cyrillic, because it's very much "okay ใ is ka and ใ is n and ใ is shi... no, ji.., so ... oh, kanji", but at least I know the letters. I am a little :/ at the prospect of katakana also (whyyyy have two syllabaries) and more so at kanji, but ... eh. So far duo and mem are both just using/teaching in hiragana.
(The other app I'm using is "Learn Japanese!!" The first lesson is free, but you gave to pay for the rest -- $2 for the hiragana pack, $8 for the whole thing which includes katakana and some basic lessons, which isn't bad; same company has a kanji app, presumably similar model. I know I could have stuck with free tools, but this one is good about teaching you how to write, which is nice reinforcement rather than just staring at the characters.)
...I'm trying to convince myself that I shouldn't also do the Spanish unit on memrise. I'm not sure how successful I'll be in that regard.
The only quibble I have is that when it is in free type mode (instead of picking the correct option or refrigerator magnet style things, it has you spelling), the keyboard it has you use is tiny. Limited keys, but smaller than the native iOS keyboard, and when I'm in bed with my glasses off and my cpap mask half blocking my vision, it's hard to tell the difference between q and o and a, or between i and ยก and !, or whatever. And the line of keys is in random order, so I'm doing a lot of squinting.
But I like the other aspects of the interface, and I like that it starts with sentences like "what's up" or "hi" or "let's go" or "please", instead of the "the man eats an apple" that many of the duolingo courses start with. (Not welsh, though -- dw i draig!)
I dabbled briefly In Danish before deciding a) Danish pronunciation/spelling is wacky, and b) it was silly having memrise on one language and duo on another while also doing hiragana in a different app. So I decided that I'd do Japanese in all three. I have hiragana to the point where I can sound it out -- not really reading it yet, the way I can read Cyrillic, because it's very much "okay ใ is ka and ใ is n and ใ is shi... no, ji.., so ... oh, kanji", but at least I know the letters. I am a little :/ at the prospect of katakana also (whyyyy have two syllabaries) and more so at kanji, but ... eh. So far duo and mem are both just using/teaching in hiragana.
(The other app I'm using is "Learn Japanese!!" The first lesson is free, but you gave to pay for the rest -- $2 for the hiragana pack, $8 for the whole thing which includes katakana and some basic lessons, which isn't bad; same company has a kanji app, presumably similar model. I know I could have stuck with free tools, but this one is good about teaching you how to write, which is nice reinforcement rather than just staring at the characters.)
...I'm trying to convince myself that I shouldn't also do the Spanish unit on memrise. I'm not sure how successful I'll be in that regard.