Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 31

Today is day 31 in my effort at learning to read the German language by using the DuoLingo application. Here's an overview of some of my progress during the last couple days.

On day 30, I completed the challenge at Milestone 1 that unlocked some of the categories leading up to Milestone 2. The first two to be unlocked are "Plurals" and "Adjectives". On day 30, after unlocking those categories, I completed level 1 in the "Plurals" category, a number of practice exercises and two more stories.

On day 31 (today), I completed level 2 and level 3 of "Plurals", read another story, and also completed 8 practice exercises covering all of the categories from "Milestone 1".

I also received some sort of prize for completing a 30 day streak and another award for finishing the Sapphire league in first place. In addition to the prize, finishing in the top-10 also advanced me to the Ruby league.

Meanwhile, @cmp2020 has also started using DuoLingo to learn German and he has already passed me in pretty-much every possible metric. Now on to the content of the lessons...

According to the "Tips" section in the "Plurals" category, there are a number of different ways to transform a word from singular to plural. These include the following:

Rule	Example
Add "e"	das Schwein -> die Schweine
Add "er"	das Ei -> die Eier
Add "en"	die Frau -> die Frauen
Add umlaut	der Vogel -> die Vögel

The tips don't mention it, but I also noticed another variation for die Spinne (the spider) which maps to die Spinnen (the spiders).

Overall, I'm continuing to struggle with memorizing the masculine/feminine/neuter mappings of nouns, so I'm nervous about moving into the plurals, since that's going to require the same type of memorization. I feel like I'm getting better at remembering to at least notice the gender, so maybe it'll eventually start to "click" into place.

Here are some words/phrases that I remember from the lesson. As before, I'm looking up the correct gender as a learning aid for myself. Otherwise I'm going from memory, though, so there may be errors.

German	English
Die Enten fressen das Brot	The ducks are eating the bread
Der Hunde sind Tiere	The dogs are animals
Die Katzen fressen die Mäuse	The cats eat the mice
Die Mäuse frisst Käse	The mice eat cheese
Der Pferde fressen der Zucker	The horse eats the sugar
Die Bienen sind Insekten	The bees are insects
Die Bienen sind Tiere	The bees are animals
Die Bären Heißen BJ und Smokey	The bears are called BJ and Smokey
Die Menschen lesen die Zeitungen	The humans read the newspapers

Here's a new special character from today's recap:

Key press	Character
ALT-0246	ö

Which makes the full table up to now:

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

Finally, here are my overall numbers, as reported by the app:

• Streak: 31
• Hearts: 5
• Crowns 44
• Total XP: 4101
• XP this week: 1750
• XP today: 337
• XP in Ruby League: 478
• Place in Ruby League: 3
• Time remaining in Ruby League: 5d 2h 18m
• Words learned: 181

Overall, my recommendation for DuoLingo continues to be "thumbs up".