Cathy

They rearranged the lessons in the Chinese course. Argh. It annoys me so much when they do that, because I'm never sure whether they've given me credit for something I haven't learned, just because they moved it earlier.

I'm also a little frustrated with the Dutch lessons - I've finished the main course and am now on "daily review", but the daily review seems to draw from the same vocabulary of about 50 words, and those are not the 50 words I feel like I need to practice. Same with the lessons in the review center. I suppose there's nothing stopping me from going back and just doing some random practice?

Maybe it's time to move on from Duolingo - read random wikipedia articles in Dutch and Spanish for language practice, and find another app to learn Chinese with... except I've paid for Duolingo through December.

...I have added 给他毛巾 ("gei ta maojin" / "give him a towel!") to the list of phrases I do not need to have subtitled in Mandarin.

The odds that I will ever need this phrase are small? unless I want to yell at some drama about the obligatory "kneeling in the rain" scene? (would that need a 吧? some other modifier to convey tone? we've talked about how 'oh there's not much grammar in Chinese' is a filthy lie, right?) I suppose 请给我毛巾 ("qing gei wo maojin"/"please give me a towel") might be useful in the event that I am sitting in a restaurant and upend my drink?

...and it's probably still more useful than the belangrijke eend ("important duck") that Duolingo Dutch thinks I have and am concerned about. "De eend zorgt zich over de kleren van de neushoorn" ("the duck worries about the rhinoceros's clothes") is not anything I can imagine ever saying in any context. :)

For some reason Duolingo really thinks I need to talk about ducks. I apparently have an important one? and it eats sandwiches occasionally.

When they revised their curriculum from "individual words decay daily" to "we have five levels in each skill", I figured: the best way to work with this, for me, is to start at the beginning. Get to the first level in each skill before the first checkpoint. Go back to the beginning, get each skill before the first checkpoint to 2 and proceed to the next checkpoint. Repeat.

I've just hit a checkpoint and gone back to the beginning. If I kept with my study plan, I'd be advancing the skills before the first checkpoint from 4 to 5. I planned to do that, individually, at my usual pace of 3 lessons per day, even with the option to test out of skills. And I did that for two days, and then I did the math. I would be spending a week on variations of "I am a boy. You are a woman." Then another week on variations of "We are eating an apple." It would take me a couple months to get back to my important duck.

There are a few things I could probably stand to be drilled on for a week, even from the earlyish lessons. Those things are not them. Bring on the tests...

(meanwhile I went back to Spanish for a little bit and found myself trying to speak Dutch... and I've essentially stopped the Potawatomi I was doing on Memrise because it wasn't leading towards fluency/understanding of grammar in any way and having a memorized list of phrases wasn't what I wanted. Might have to look at a different course.)