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Currently annoyed with Duolingo. I'm going through the Latin course for no real reasons other than I have always vaguely wanted to be the sort of person who learns Latin, plus I thought getting a few basics down* might give me some ideas for the, er, esoteric sciences (*coughmagiccough*) in Deadfall/Deadwater.
*Anyone who wants to tell me that you can't get fluent with Duolingo, I do already know that.
First, Latin is one of those languages that does away with a lot of fiddly small words and relies** on word endings to get meaning across, which I kind of like. However Duolingo is relying on you being able to figure out in which circumstances you use what endings from their brief sentences with no explanations. They don't use the words two different ways in a two-sentence construction, or present the words in sentences one after another so you (by which I mean I) stand the remotest of chances in remembering what the previous sentence was so as to compare it to this one.
**It's just taken me three tries to spell this word. Today is not a day for typing.
For example: New York. Novum Eboracum or Novi Eboraci. Two different use cases. One is the thing that is doing, one is the thing that is done to. You'll get:
Novum Eboracum est urbs. (New York is a city.) and then, several sentences later, Iuvenis Novi Eboraci habitat. (The young man lives in New York.) Had it presented those two sentences at the same time, it would have been easy to go "Oh! Novi Eboraci is 'in New York'," but no, I've got space and other words in between the two and I will absolutely not figure that out on my own because my short-term memory does not work that way.
And the second thing is less a problem with Duolingo and more a problem with forums. Duolingo has forums for each sentence/lesson bite that it presents you with so theoretically I could go to the forum after I've got "litteras Latinas/litteris Latinis" wrong yet again and see if anyone else has the same problem and what the answer is.
So I do. And the problem here is that the forums are made up of:
(1) people commenting on the sentence itself (ok, I also wonder why people are so concerned with where Marcus' daughters sleep, as "Marce, ubi filiae tuae dormiunt?" is a common sentence)
(2) people who are wrong complaining about the right answer being wrong
(3) people who are right complaining about Duolingo's un-nuanced choice of translations
(4) people complaining about "The man has a husband/The woman has a wife" (Vir maritus habet./Femina uxor habet or maybe maritum/uxorum I don't remember)
and finally...
(5) such an incredible imitation of Stack Exchange that it makes me want to throw my phone across the room.
If you are lucky enough not to be familiar with Stack Exchange, it's a set of tech (and other subjects, but mostly tech) forums that are notorious for stringent moderation leading to answers being completely opaque unless you already know enough about the subject to figure it out yourself. Or they shut down the thread for being repetitive and redirect it to another thread on the same subject that doesn't actually answer the question in the first thread, or do several other things that lead to quite a lot of answers being totally useless to anyone who is desperately Googling the error they've got, but alas it has such good SEO and such that its answers pop up at the top of every results list anyway.
Last night I was struggling with "Latin literature"--when to use litteris Latinis and when to use litteras Latinas. This has got to be a common question. I go to the forum for the lesson bit that I'd just gotten wrong. The top question is indeed when to use which one. The first answer says that litteris Latinis is accusative and the other is dative.
Like the punchline of the old Microsoft joke***, technically accurate, but completely useless, at least when you don't know what it means. Not helped by a Duolingo mod in the forum complaining that the question was answered already in the thread when people dared ask what that meant. The problem there is, I believe, that the app and the website forums show different comments because I found what I think is the same forum on the web version and there is an explanation of what accusative and dative means that does not exist on the app version.
edit: Oh, here's another question/answer that doesn't help me figure out when to use one version and when to use another:
In conclusion: ARGH.
*** "A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications qquipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, like their technical support, online help and product documentation, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless.""
*Anyone who wants to tell me that you can't get fluent with Duolingo, I do already know that.
First, Latin is one of those languages that does away with a lot of fiddly small words and relies** on word endings to get meaning across, which I kind of like. However Duolingo is relying on you being able to figure out in which circumstances you use what endings from their brief sentences with no explanations. They don't use the words two different ways in a two-sentence construction, or present the words in sentences one after another so you (by which I mean I) stand the remotest of chances in remembering what the previous sentence was so as to compare it to this one.
**It's just taken me three tries to spell this word. Today is not a day for typing.
For example: New York. Novum Eboracum or Novi Eboraci. Two different use cases. One is the thing that is doing, one is the thing that is done to. You'll get:
Novum Eboracum est urbs. (New York is a city.) and then, several sentences later, Iuvenis Novi Eboraci habitat. (The young man lives in New York.) Had it presented those two sentences at the same time, it would have been easy to go "Oh! Novi Eboraci is 'in New York'," but no, I've got space and other words in between the two and I will absolutely not figure that out on my own because my short-term memory does not work that way.
And the second thing is less a problem with Duolingo and more a problem with forums. Duolingo has forums for each sentence/lesson bite that it presents you with so theoretically I could go to the forum after I've got "litteras Latinas/litteris Latinis" wrong yet again and see if anyone else has the same problem and what the answer is.
So I do. And the problem here is that the forums are made up of:
(1) people commenting on the sentence itself (ok, I also wonder why people are so concerned with where Marcus' daughters sleep, as "Marce, ubi filiae tuae dormiunt?" is a common sentence)
(2) people who are wrong complaining about the right answer being wrong
(3) people who are right complaining about Duolingo's un-nuanced choice of translations
(4) people complaining about "The man has a husband/The woman has a wife" (Vir maritus habet./Femina uxor habet or maybe maritum/uxorum I don't remember)
and finally...
(5) such an incredible imitation of Stack Exchange that it makes me want to throw my phone across the room.
If you are lucky enough not to be familiar with Stack Exchange, it's a set of tech (and other subjects, but mostly tech) forums that are notorious for stringent moderation leading to answers being completely opaque unless you already know enough about the subject to figure it out yourself. Or they shut down the thread for being repetitive and redirect it to another thread on the same subject that doesn't actually answer the question in the first thread, or do several other things that lead to quite a lot of answers being totally useless to anyone who is desperately Googling the error they've got, but alas it has such good SEO and such that its answers pop up at the top of every results list anyway.
Last night I was struggling with "Latin literature"--when to use litteris Latinis and when to use litteras Latinas. This has got to be a common question. I go to the forum for the lesson bit that I'd just gotten wrong. The top question is indeed when to use which one. The first answer says that litteris Latinis is accusative and the other is dative.
Like the punchline of the old Microsoft joke***, technically accurate, but completely useless, at least when you don't know what it means. Not helped by a Duolingo mod in the forum complaining that the question was answered already in the thread when people dared ask what that meant. The problem there is, I believe, that the app and the website forums show different comments because I found what I think is the same forum on the web version and there is an explanation of what accusative and dative means that does not exist on the app version.
edit: Oh, here's another question/answer that doesn't help me figure out when to use one version and when to use another:
Q. What difference between lingua latina and Linguam Latinam? Why Linguam Latinam?And I've also got to figure out when to use the plural, as "lingae Latinae" has shown up a few times and I haven't figured out why it's plural in that spot ARGH.
It's the accusative. Verb + complement. Usually = accusative.
Notable exceptions we saw in the lessons so far (or that you'll meet soon):
"to be" doesn't take the accusative, as it's a particular case (called a "copula"), it takes the nominative.
Studere (to study) doesn't take the accusative, but the dative, that's an exception.
In conclusion: ARGH.
*** "A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications qquipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, like their technical support, online help and product documentation, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless.""
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Anyway, I can't imagine trying to pick up Latin or any moderately inflected language via those short bursts, so my hat's off to you regardless. :)
ETA Also happy to chat grammar sometime, if you'd like.
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Good luck. If you abandon Duolingo, I hope you find some other way to acquire Latin.
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