Conquered French Skill Tree... Again

This morning I conquered the French skill tree on Duolingo for the second time.

I originally completed it something like four or five years ago (it was the second Duolingo skill tree I completed, after German), but recently (in the last year or so) they'd added new skills, so I had to work through all of those before I regained my trophy.

Scottish Gaelic

Duolingo announced to-day that the Scottish Gaelic course is available, so...

Foreign language #24

Conquered Latin Skill Tree

I conquered the Latin skill tree on Duolingo this morning:

I had a year of Latin in college, and for the last few years, I've been working my way through two different Latin books (intentionally going a bit slowly), so going through the Duolingo course was more review than learning.  It doesn't go very far either; I didn't even get beyond present tense verbs.

Conquered Navajo Skill Tree

I conquered the Navajo skill tree on Duolingo this morning:

I must admit though that hardly any of the content has stuck in my brain.  Maybe with some more practice...

Latin on Duolingo

Recently, Duolingo announced a Latin course.  I'd thought it was supposed to launch in mid-September, but it's live now, so I started it.  (And now I'm doing twenty-three languages on Duolingo.)

Latin is my fourth language (third foreign language).  I had two semesters in college (fall 2011 to spring 2012), and over the last four years, I've been going through my textbook again (much more slowly than I did in the class, in an effort to stick the material more firmly into my brain), so for the first time, when presented with the "Choose your path!" screen, I chose the placement test option.

Unfortunately, I didn't test out of any skills, so I had to start from the beginning anyway.

I'm extremely pleased that the Duolingo course is using the right pronunciation.  Here's a description from the introductory lesson's notes (which I usually never read):

Hebrew Transcription

Way back in May 2017, in one of the Daily Dose of Greek videos, Dr. Plummer gave some suggestions for a "Summer Greek Challenge."  One of them was to copy out the week-daily verses by hand.  I've been doing this since 15 May 2017, and I'm pretty sure it has helpt in my comprehension.

So when I heard that the Daily Dose of Hebrew was going to start a new book, I decided to do the same thing with Hebrew that I've been doing with Greek.  Here's my laboriously copied Deuteronomy 1:1:

Even just in copying out this one verse from Deuteronomy, I found that I was more engaged with the text.  My letters are awkward and stilted, but I'm sure that the longer I continue copying out verses, the better I'll get at it.  That was my experience with Greek.  Here are the first few verses I copied:

And here are some verses I copied out last month:

Hawaiian

I started the Hawaiian course on Duolingo to-day:

I'd intended to start it back in March but never got around to it.  Recently, I'd been thinking about not doing Hawaiian at all.  But here I am... doing it.

This is the twenty-third language I've started learning, and it's the first language I've started this year.  The last language I started was Hungarian last October.

No More Duolingo Levels

I think it happened a few days or even a few weeks ago, but I noticed to-day that Duolingo seems to have done away with the levels for each language.  All I see on my profile now are my XP totals:

When they introduced the crowns system, I was a bit suspicious that they would get rid of the levels eventually, and now here we are.

The primary purpose of this blog was to keep track of when I levelled up in languages on Duolingo.  Now that that's gone, posts here will probably be few and far between.

Et cetera et cetera

A few times in the last two months, I heard or read "et cetera et cetera."  "Et cetera" is Latin for "and others," but I think people are starting to use it with the intended meaning of "and so on."  If the actual meaning of the Latin is held to, however, "et cetera et cetera" doesn't even make sense (or - at the very least - it's redundant).  As I've written about before, "et... et..." in Latin is the correlative "both... and...," so "et cetera et cetera" isn't "and others and others" (or - as people try to use it - "and so on and so on").  Rather, it means "both others and others."

Duolingo Levels Update

I was looking through my Duolingo levels and comparing them to what I've posted here, and I discovered that I'd unknowingly levelled up in three languages:

Level 20 Norwegian
Level 5 Navajo

Level 5 Hungarian

Level 18 Russian

Level 18 Russian!

Level 14 Danish

Level 14 Danish!

Level 12 Welsh

Level 12 Welsh!

Level 11 Portuguese

Level 11 Portuguese!

Level 4 Hungarian

Level 4 Hungarian!

Level 17 Hebrew

Level 17 Hebrew!

Level 4 Navajo

Level 4 Navajo!

Level 11 Swedish

Level 11 Swedish!

Level 16 Greek

Level 16 Greek!