Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 153 - Travel

Today is day 153 in my attempt to learn to read the German language by using the DuoLingo cell phone application and web site. Because of holiday activities and other time conflicts, going has been slow during the last few days, so I still find myself in the Travel category. I have completed 3 of 6 lessons in level 4.

Tips

Vacation / Holiday

Last time, I discussed Tips from the Shopping section, so this time I'll discuss the Tips section in Travel.

First, we note that there are two words for vacation: der Urlaub and die Ferien, and we don't "take a vacation", but rather we "make" or "do" a vacation, as can be seen in the example: Die Familie macht Urlaub. (The family is on vacation is literally, "The family makes a vacation.")

The distinction, it turns out, between Der Urlaub and Die Ferien is that Urlaub describes when you physically go somewhere, but Ferien means a time period when school or work is on break.

Driving

This lesson includes a number of words that are anchored to fahren (to drive). Examples include the following:

German	English
das Fahrrad	The bicycle
die Fährrader	The bicycles
das Motorrad	The motor cycle
die Motorräder	The motor cycles
das Fahrzeug	The automobile/vehicle
die Fahrzeuge	The automobiles/vehicles
der Fahrer	The driver
die Fahrer	The drivers
die Fähre	The ferry
die Fähren	The ferries

Public transportation

The lesson also includes words that invoke modes of public transportation including der Zug (train), die Zuge (trains), der Bus (bus), and die Busse (busses). Although not included in Tips, the lesson also has alternative forms for "train" and "trains", which are der Bahn and die Bahne. These last two might be better translated as railway/railways, and I recognize "Bahn" from a previous lesson where it was part of "Bahnoff" (train station).

Musical Interlude

Since Thanksgiving (yesterday) marked the unofficial beginning of the Christmas season in America, I also thought it would be fun to practice German with a YouTube video of a Christmas Carol. Fortunately, I was able to find O Tannenbaum sung in German with captions in English and German.

Lessons and Practice

In addition to new lessons in the Travel category, I have also practiced previously completed categories in order to refresh them after they expired out of completion status or to collect hearts when I was running low.

A small surprise this week was when I came across this Tweet.

Many of you have recently noticed the addition of Hearts to the Duolingo app. These are a way of balancing practice and new material.

Understandably, we've gotten lots of questions and want to offer insight and resources to help you learn more.

I have had hearts in my app since I started doing this in June, so I had no idea that it was a new feature, and even less idea that it could prove to be controversial. Apparently, though, hearts were just rolled out to long-time users of the application, and it met with some amount of dissatisfaction.

I haven't explained it before, but the way it works is that you get 5 hearts each day, and you lose one whenever you make a mistake in the new lessons. If you run out of hearts you cannot complete any new lessons until you get more. This can be done by using crystals to buy new ones or you can earn more by practicing the previously-completed lessons. It's also possible to purchase the premium "Plus" service for unlimited hearts, and if you do the new lessons in the web site, it doesn't keep track of hearts.

Personally, I definitely understand the frustration when you run out of hearts in the middle of a lesson, but I think that hearts are probably a helpful addition for most learners.

Anyway, on to the subject matter. Here are a handful of examples from the Travel category... from memory, so mistakes are possible.

German	English
Ich habe den Pass	I have the passport (I always forget dativ case here)
Wo ist der Zoll	Where is customs?
Ich habe ein Visum und sie haben Visa.	I have a visa and they have visas.
Das Fahrzeuge sind mit der Fähre.	The vehicles are with the ferry.
Der Flug geht nach Österreich.	The flight is to Austria.
Wo ist der Stadtplan?	Where is the city map?

Wrap-up

Finally, here are my current numbers in the application:

• Streak: 153 days
• Crowns: 200
• Hearts: 3
• Crystals: 646
• Lingots: 538
• Total XP: 21,666
• XP today: 71
• League: Diamond
• XP in league: 163
• Place in league: 41
• Time left in league: 2d 5h 1m
• Followers: 4
• Words learned: 729 reported in app, 941 reported on web site

There were no new special characters in today's post, so the full table (so far) still looks like this:

Key press	character
ALT-0196	Ä
ALT-0214	Ö
ALT-0223	ß
ALT-0228	ä
ALT-0246	ö
ALT-0252	ü

If you want to learn a foreign language (or Klingon or High Valyrian), my recommendation for DuoLingo continues to be "thumbs up". According to the app, you can also use DuoLingo to learn dead or endangered languages like Latin, Navajo or Hawaiian.

My guess is that no one is going to learn to speak a language perfectly through DuoLingo, but I think it can provide a solid foundation that can be used to build additional knowledge through other, immersive techniques.