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Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over t
by ttfkam 3y ago
Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over three years aided your ability to jump start your conversational ability. Very few folks can start from scratch and watch shows in a new language without subtitles in just a few weeks.
Then there's the issue of accents. There isn't a single Spanish language despite what the Spanish Academy would like. Castilian Spanish (lispy) is a very different animal from Mexican (beat poet who's constantly out of breath), Venezuelan (all the sighs), Cuban (if Sean Connery spoke Spanish), Nicaraguan (I dunno. I still really struggle with this one.), Equatorial Guinean (like from Spain only clearly not), Chilean (Spanish is only a rough guideline, ¿Cachay?), Dominican (one word, and it's all the words), or Argentinian (spoken with an Italian accent).
If you're from the US and only learn from Duolingo, you might be able to get by a bit easier with folks from Colombia than with other accents (as long as you steer clear of Medellín).
- tremarley 3y agoThese descriptions of the different accents is accurate and hilarious
- ttfkam 3y agoI wish I could take credit. https://youtu.be/VlK-neOypDM?si=ZE3BJ0_E1pPEvDkp https://youtu.be/VlK-neOypDM?si=ZE3BJ0_E1pPEvDkp
- ghaff 3y agoI generally find my educated mostly urban Southern colleagues to have a pleasant slight drawl. But go into the deep rural South and urban Southerners struggle as I also will in places like northern England where my speech processing centers are forced into overdrive.
- AlgoRitmo 3y agoYou mean nobody can start duolingo and watch shows in a new language without subtitles shortly after
- ttfkam 3y agoI mean nobody can start to learn any foreign language in any modality (even immersion) and watch shows in that new language without subtitles a few weeks after with the possible exception of shows like Plaza Sésamo, but even that would be a hard sprint. The Defense Language Institute has Spanish at 36 weeks, Russian at 48 weeks, and Mandarin at 64 weeks. And those courses are NOT for the faint of heart. They are for folks who can get down and grind on language learning. Only prodigies could learn in substantially shorter time, like this guy. https://youtu.be/_GXjPEkDfek https://youtu.be/_GXjPEkDfek You and I are not that guy.