Promiseland

[Fetian]

It's a three sodas sort of day

[Fetian]

Okay, do I want to work on video editing or language learning today

I've been hyperfocusing on Japanese the past couple of days but I think that might have broke this morning. I guess I can poke at it and see if I bounce off

[Fetian]

Okay, added a couple pages each to the Undertale and Zelda flashcard decks and did up to ten minutes in all of them (hiragana, katakana, Undertale, Zelda, and Pimsleur), and a duolingo lesson

I still have old duolingo on my phone, and the path on computers, and going back and forth on them I gotta say -- the path still kind of sucks! On the path I'm stranded in this katakana section of matching country names to their Japanese versions -- igirisu = england, eirurando = ireland, pari = paris, nouruwai = norway, etc etc etc. Like, I get that it's teaching me the country names and training me to be able to read katakana, but it's also extremely boring because 99% of the terms sound basically like saying the country name with a Japanese accent, for obvious reasons, and the exceptions are easy to memorise. On old duolingo I can skip forward to one of the Introductions lessons and alternate back and forth, to stop myself from completely losing interest. On the path, I guess I can do that with practice lessons or skip backwards and review something but, like, the entire point is that I get bored of lessons that I can breeze through and already know all the answers to. I want things that I don't know! I want to be challenged sometimes!

Supposedly the unit I'm on is supposed to be a combination of introductions and katakana but I swear to god it is at least 90% the katakana parts. Maybe I have to do more of it to get it to give me other things but that's just the same problem all over again

Anyway! I have been in here for like an hour and a half, so I'm well within my rights to go do something else. I'm going to continue to sit for a minute but then I think I'll get a bit of cleaning done

[Fetian]

It's also my opinion that the lessons are always like, just a little bit longer than they should be? I don't know how many questions they have exactly but I always feel like I just want them to be like, three shorter

[Fetian]

I don't wanna like -- 'oh I'm so good' or whatever, but this is getting back into the weeds of 'duolingo wants there to be a one-size-fits-all method for language learning' and there's just, not. There really should be some kind of behind-the-scenes adjustment being done for students that are whizzing past everything and students who are struggling, and of course for everyone in between. There should be something taking note that I'm getting 100% on these lessons and finishing them within a minute, and removing some of those units from my course and adding units that are a little more difficult. You know, if they want the lessons to be 100% dictated by their programming and 0% self-driven, which they clearly do

This is so obvious and it's frustrating that they refuse to accept that maybe! People learn! In different ways! And at different speeds!!

[Fetian]

Also - I'm gonna complain about something

So in the lessons that actually are, you know, teaching me Japanese, they're doing sentences about other people, 'shigeru is a student', 'tanaka is a teacher', 'sakura is japanese', etc. And it taught me early on that 'san' is an honorific that's roughly equivalent to Mr, Ms, Miss, Mrs, etc. So 'shigeru san wa gakusei desu' == 'Mr. Shigeru is a student', 'tanaka san wa sensei desu' == 'Ms. Tanaka is a teacher', 'sakura san wa nihonjin desu' == 'Mrs Sakura is Japanese', etc.

So as it's throwing 'san' at me, I'm adding honorifics to my translations, and there's no issue

Except! That out of the blue it throws something like 'shigeru san wa gakusei desu' and the options only have 'miss' for possible honorifics, so I use that and it's wrong! Because "shigeru" is usually a male name, a thing you'll only learn if you already know about Japanese naming conventions or if you hover over the "new" word (a thing I almost never do because for fuck's sake you're supposed to be learning these things from context, that's what duolingo pushes you to do, why this one time do I need to look up the gender of a fucking name to get the answer right?), and also if you ignore that Shigeru is in fact sometimes a family name that women can have

Anyway I have been spitefully refusing to add honorifics since except when duolingo explicitly demands them. It's such bullshit! And the discussion was full of 'well you should just know that shigeru is a male name', like my dude I am here to learn Japanese, I don't know the typical genders of all the Japanese names, and also it's 20-god-damn-23 I refuse to ""assume their gender""

You can't take any of this as anything but a trick question designed to trip people up for no reason

[Fetian]

You would think that this is what the 'tips and tricks'/'guidebook' section should be for, teaching you things you won't just pick up like 'hey keep in mind that Japanese names are usually more strictly gendered than English names', but of course there's nothing like that in there. They don't even cover the surname/first name thing, you have to just figure out that when it gives you a name in English you have to reverse it in Japanese

[Fetian]

I'm pretty sure they also don't cover that '-san' (and other honorifics) are used much more often and liberally than English honorifics, you just have to pick up that you're usually going to be using an honorific regardless of context (unless you're on a more casual basis with the person), which is one of the reasons many people were confused in the discussions -- we were taught that -san == Mr/Mrs, so when you see 'san' you should add Mr or Mrs, yes? But no

Have to go into the defunct read-only forums to find out what's going on, super great incidentally that they phased those out and will probably get rid of them entirely eventually

[knightofcups]

(This series of posts was incredibly fun to read, just in a "feeling the rant get rolling" way. Also, valid points.)

[Fetian]

The extremely human urge to keep something in a recreation of its environment