IRISH: Rebooting! Duolingo Review

     Around 2012/2013 I started to study Irish.  I started out with an online yahoo group then I continued on my own using books and online resources. After a while I kind of stopped studying it actively. From time to time though I go back and see how much I remember. Well, this month I decided to go back and actively study it again. I still have not decided which of my resources I am going to start studying with but at least one of them will be Progress in Irish, otherwise known as the little green book. However, I wanted to see how much I actually remember from Irish so I added it to my Duolingo line up. So far I have not met a word or verb that I didn't know. 

This brings me to the second half of this post and that is a review of Duolingo as a language learning app.

    I use it everyday but I don't use it as a source for serious grammar or structure study but rather as a way to learn vocabulary words. Duolingo has weird sentences that make no sense at all even though they are grammatically correct. For example, in Korean there are sentences like "A man is not food.",  "Animals are not things.", and "A man eats that in the bathroom." So far I have not encountered anything like that in Chinese but I remember from my previous tries with Irish that the further you go into the levels there will come a time when you will find strange sentences too.

    Another thing that Duolingo helps with is that if you don't have time to study for some reason at least you will be able to get five to ten minutes of vocabulary study each day. 

    So basically use Duolingo for vocabulary study and so that you at least do SOME sort of language study each day but don't think of it as the only source for studying any language you want to study.

 

CHINESE: Free resource online

HSK 1 Resource

YouTube: Free

A Course from Peking University

    One of the best ways for me to supplement my Chinese studies while mainly using my HSK books is to look online for resources that help me explain the concepts in the book and add some interesting facts to it. This is how I ended up finding this channel on YouTube. They have HSK 1-6 level courses. I am currently going through the HSK 1 videos.

    In the HSK 1 playlist there are 6 weeks worth of lessons and each week has 5 lessons. I just finished going through the first week of lessons. Each lesson is a mix of vocabulary words, dialogue, grammar and exercises to cement what you have learned in the lessons. 

    I don't take detailed notes, however I do note down things that I feel are important or that catch my interest. Here is an example these are my notes from all five lessons of week 1:

HSK 1: Week 1 all lessons.

    Two facts that I didn't know before I took these lessons and are not mentioned in the HSK books at least as far as I've gone so far are as follows: 

(1) When you say a phone number you don't use (yī) but instead you use (yāo). The reason is that (yī and qī) can sound the same when spoken and to keep things from getting confusing they use (yāo). For those who don't know (yī and yāo) are the number 1 and (qī) is the number 7. 

(2) When you are making plurals using (men), you can only use this method with people, never objects or animals. Examples are 我们 (We)， 他们 (They for mix of men and women or just men)， 她们 (They for women), 同学们 (Students) and so on. 

 This is my tip for a great resource today.

再见！