Duolingo ditherment

[ysobel]

(Still, always, want to type that as Duolinguo. Gah.)

So I am at the point with Spanish where I have gone through all of the Duo lessons and am mainly doing "practice weak skills" over and over again. Which is not unwarranted -- there is a lot I'm shaky on still, even of what duo gives me, and I am nowhere near ready for real world applications.

But I sort of want to use Duo to brush up on my German. And I can't decide how to do it.

Option one is to do both German and Spanish, one right after the other. Which is easy enough to get in the habit of (the biggest hurdle is remembering to do it; two lessons instead of one is not a problem) but seems like it would be the most confusing to my brain.

Option two is to alternate days. Spanish one day, German the next, etc. Less immediate switching between languages, but still involves some.

Option three is to alternate weekends/weekdays (so do one Monday-Friday and the other Sat-Sun). Has the advantage of making it easy to remember which I'm supposed to be doing on a given day.

Option four is to alternate weeks.

Option five is to just use duo for German and find a more immersive source for keeping Spanish practice.

...I can't decide. Halp?

Poll #16370 Decide for me

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

View Respondents

Which option should I do?

View Answers

Both every day
0 (0.0%)

Alternate days
1 (11.1%)

Weekday/weekend split
2 (22.2%)

Alternate weeks
0 (0.0%)

German only, find something else for Spanish
6 (66.7%)

Spanish only until you're fluent, you slacker
0 (0.0%)

Ticky?

View Answers

Ticky!
5 (55.6%)

Tea!
2 (22.2%)

Tea and ticky
5 (55.6%)

Ticky needs to go to sleep
5 (55.6%)

Comments

[melissima]

I don't have an immediate idea for a more in-depth spanish resource, but I know I found some back when I found duolingo.

A lot of them are still online exercise/sentence level fill ins. Is that of interest, or would you prefer something more verbal? I have some podcasts I use in my own language studies - of course they aren't spanish - but I do find the format has made me much better at comprehending spoken words and tv/film.

Ooh speaking of film, I could recommend some Spanish movies you could watch with Spanish subtitles on - it's surprisingly helpful.

[ysobel]

Both are good but probably verbal is better -- movies would be awesome ♥

[asciident]

Duo's never going to take you to real fluency. You need more immersive resources for that. Now that you have a solid basis, try books, newspapers, tv, and movies. (Or talking to someone in Spanish, but I don't know if that's an actual possibility for you. I know some libraries do various language conversation meetings though.)

[ysobel]

There are places that do conversational language meetings, but I'm still too shaky even with comprehension, let alone generating understandable speech. (I also need to get a way better grasp on tenses, holy crap.)

Immersive sounds like a good plan though.