Duolingo, revisited
May. 31st, 2015 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutSince I have missed a couple Dutch lessons, and our August trip is approaching, I thought I'd go do some Duolingo Dutch by way of review. Of course, my daughter then got all obsessed with it (this is _my_ daughter, after all), but she wanted to do Spanish. We got her set up, but remember, this is an almost 7 year old, just finishing kindergarten and she's only been reading at all for less than a year. On the other hand, Dora the Explorer and a handful of bilingual board books that have been hanging around the house. On the third hand, her keyboard familiarity is limited, as is her spelling in _any_ language.
We're obviously providing a fair amount of support. But she is piecing together some things, more than I would have expected. Her spelling of English words is as uneven as I expected it to be. Her pronunciation of Spanish is, predictably, pretty awful. She's ignoring gendered stuff AND conjugation -- totes expected because (a) native language ungendered and (b) she's weak on conjugating in English. Still, it's clear that it's not so impossible that it has stopped being fun, and I don't mind that there's a bunch of English (making it not as immersive), given that she needs to work on that, too.
It's extremely difficult for me to tell when I'm making progress with a language (well, absent somebody producing grades on my work, which is not happening with my Dutch teacher because it's conversational only). Going back to redo stuff in Duolingo is kind of fun, in that it's fairly obvious that a bunch of things I used to have to think about are now very automatic. Of course, it is discouraging that I still forget the words for "empty" and "dry" (dry you would think would stick -- droog, drought, right? I won't forget it now, hopefully.).
We're obviously providing a fair amount of support. But she is piecing together some things, more than I would have expected. Her spelling of English words is as uneven as I expected it to be. Her pronunciation of Spanish is, predictably, pretty awful. She's ignoring gendered stuff AND conjugation -- totes expected because (a) native language ungendered and (b) she's weak on conjugating in English. Still, it's clear that it's not so impossible that it has stopped being fun, and I don't mind that there's a bunch of English (making it not as immersive), given that she needs to work on that, too.
It's extremely difficult for me to tell when I'm making progress with a language (well, absent somebody producing grades on my work, which is not happening with my Dutch teacher because it's conversational only). Going back to redo stuff in Duolingo is kind of fun, in that it's fairly obvious that a bunch of things I used to have to think about are now very automatic. Of course, it is discouraging that I still forget the words for "empty" and "dry" (dry you would think would stick -- droog, drought, right? I won't forget it now, hopefully.).