Nothing in particular

[krait]

I have many things to post about - Utena rewatch, Duolingo, Dragon Cave - and yet somehow haven't posted about any of them. Oops?

I did recently discover the nirvana_in_fire community, though, which seems to be pretty active, so if any of my NiF friends haven't seen it yet, stop in!

Comments

[adrianners]

How are you finding Duolingo? I tried a few lessons in Russian (for, uh, following skating news, I swear...) and got frustrated with it despite having learned Cyrillic in advance. It felt like the basic lessons had been pulled wholesale from another language with more English cognates. I can remember something like femina as a beginner, but you can't show me женщина once and expect me to type it correctly ten flashcards later!

[krait]

Argh, Russian Duolingo is hopeless!

I've stopped doing anything with it; I'm stuck in one lesson, because it requires me to type something in Cyrillic but doesn't provide any way for me to do that, and I'd just be typing by rote anyway because it never actually taught me the alphabet! Despite having an entire section labeled 'Alphabet' - it's an outright lie, and about three times more frustrating because I spent ages on the Japanese alphabet(s)!

It's infuriating enough that I just refuse to deal with it; if you can't manage a coherent lesson plan then it's not incumbent on me to somehow make it work by, what, copy-pasting out of Babelfish in another tab? Funny how my German and Japanese lessons do just fine, providing the necessary non-English letters in a menu bar for me to click on. And, as mentioned, Japanese taught me the alphabet almost obsessively, far beyond what I needed!

The Russian really does feel like it was hastily thrown together, and not debugged, in comparison.

[adrianners]

Glad it's not just me, then! Guess I'll go back to cobbling something together from other web sources. My school does offer undergrad Russian classes, but my advisor will order a hit on me if I register for anything but dissertation research hours.

I gave the Japanese lessons a shot for practice a couple days ago, and they're so impressive by comparison. Though yeah, it's slow as hell, probably to make you join Plus for the unlimited test-outs. I particularly loved that the questions let me use alternative word orders and more concise phrasing, like letting me drop "watashi no" when the "my" was already implied. Most of the sentences also felt pretty natural, not the stilted "Kore wa inu de wa arimasen. Kore wa neko desu" from my old textbooks.

A couple minor gripes: 1. My placement test put me right by the end of the course, but the lessons are still using polite grammar exclusively. It did not mark my answers correct if the buttons let me construct a phrase using familiar forms. 2. They ought to add an option for "write it from scratch" questions for users with Japanese-enabled keyboards. There's a big fluency gap between solving a sentence puzzle and being able to construct a sentence independently. Also I need way more practice with the JPN keyboard on my phone.