I have tried the Duolingo page on two different Macs (one a Macbook pro,. My microphone sensitivity is set at maximum, and it works fine for programs like. I hadn't tried it before upgrading, so I'm not sure if my results would have. The only browser that worked for me, to show the mic on the exercises was Chrome. How to fix microphone problem in Adobe Connect/Google Chrome.

This is such a well-timed review! I started using Duolingo earlier this week. Originally, I was going to brush up on my Spanish, but I got bored and headed over to French. It’s a language I’ve always wanted to learn to *pronounce*, at least. (The silent ‘s’ is the worst.) From what you’ve written here, I think I’ll probably end up stalling out when I get a few tenses in. But I do like being thrown right in with the present tense, instead of sticking to nouns and then being expected to tackle verbs all at once.

I’m using Duolingo and Fluent Forever on Ankidroid. FF cost $20 bucks I think, but I was impressed enough with their spiele about anchoring the most important conversational survival words and phrases – which you noted DL lacks – plus teaching you to understand the accent, that I thought it worthwhile. I studied German in high school 25 years ago, and now backpacking NZ where 80% of the other backpackers are Germans it inspired me to pick it up again. I haven’t been too diligent with my studies, but so far about 8 days of 10-15 mins a day in each app has brought back most of what I learnt and forgot, and has improved my understanding somewhat, but conversational skills will take more effort. For one thing I was super surprised when a cute German chick offered me a sandwich and I instinctively replied “Nein danke, Ich nicht esse brot” or some such phrase which she could understand as “No thanks, I don’t eat bread”.

Something I definitely couldn’t have done after a year of high school German. So in the end I think with the combination of these tools it’s entirely feasible to get to conversational level in a new language with less than an hour a day in under a couple months. Bootcamp for mac guide. I’ll do a longer post on it all when I eventually get thru them and can spachen die Deutsch.

“(It’ll also be even faster with a language like Spanish, where they actually pronounce the damn letters correctly, instead of French with that nonsensical silent s everywhere” LOL! Why can’t we just pronounce the words the way it is written?! I do not get it! Great write up and you’ve inspired me to go back to my Spanish Duolingo lessons. The problem with language though is that it’s a muscle the less you use it the less you can. The exception to that is the languages you learn in your childhood – I can still speak Malay and Chinese fluently, even though it’s been years since I really use them extensively. Youtube-dl for mac download. Moral of the story – get your kids to pick up as many languages as possible early on!

I’ve learned an incredible amount of Spanish from watching telenovelas. Yes, the vast majority of them are horrific, trite and melodramatic, or ridiculously corny (or let’s just say ‘culturally specific humor’). Sometimes they are all of those things at the same time. However, when you find the rare well-done one, it is engaging to the point of addiction.

You won’t want to miss an episode. As you get to know the characters and all the twists and turns of the plot, novelas provide a rich context, which helps comprehension. I am also an English major, and I have zero tolerance for junk lit or romance novels, which soap operas are in televised form, so I am surprised at myself at being able to watch them. I probably couldn’t stand to watch even the good telenovelas if they were in English or my Spanish skills were better. However, I have a true affection for the novelas and their quirks and foibles, and I recommend them highly for a fun way to learn Spanish.

You mentioned wishing that you could “mute” it, and you actually can through the settings. I’ve had the mic required functions muted since September since it’s really awkward to sit in class and randomly spout sentences about a monkey and a bear eating oranges.

You can also disable the speaker, voice auto-play, and sound effects and turn them back on at any time. I don’t have access to the app on a smartphone (mines a brick), but I think that if the settings are changeable on the computer, it should be possible on the app (don’t take my word). Additionally, a site that can supplement the lack of grammar lessons to build understand of what it is your learning (for spanish at least) is spanishdict.com. First and foremost it’s a dictionary, but most things like “past”, “imperfect”, “indicative”, and “subjective” have a question mark that leads to an explanation page as to how it works. I don’t know of any for other languages (I’m only doing spanish) but for both french and spanish, I believe that explanations work in telling how the words function since they are rather similar. My problem with Duolingo is what happens after you finish the skills tree. After the French lessons, I went on to translating a text.