Sixth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

"The thing about illegally breeding fire-breathing possums is that you gotta keep a bucket of water handy."

*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*

(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)

Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: How's Life?

[(Anonymous)]

Have noticed there's nowhere where it lists all the vocab so far. Forces you to remember it, I guess, but annoying when you *haven't* memorised it and it isn't written down anywhere so you can.

Re: How's Life?

[(Anonymous)]

Notes so far:

The way you hold your mouth for the accent is kind of similar to french but less pouty. I find it easier to get my head around than accents that are held further back in the mouth.

3 doubles sounds. 2 seems to make a glottal stop

aa has an "air" sound, a seems like a schwa, a3 is more like "a". But seems to vary a bit depending on the word and there's no obvious rule to why

An arabic "f" seems somewhere between a "f" and a "th", more like an s-with-lisp. Hard to tell what's the accent and what's this specific speaker

every letter is written "j" or "a swirl" istg.

I assume this makes arabic much faster to write than english, once you're good at it. It looks like a very efficient way to write. And apparently in "real" arabic people don't write the short vowels, so that'll save some more time.

I've never heard anybody say "hello" like this in my life. Duolingo also use a different word for "absolutely" than the one I've heard around. (salam alaykum and baraklaoufic are the ones I'm familiar with for "hello" and "exactly" respectively, and yeah I cba to check the spelling; I always heard it as baraklahovic and only searched it for the standard english spelling recently and have already forgotten.) So far the only word I already know on this course is shukran. Then the remaining familiar words are bayt, kabir, karim, janeel, though I didn't actually know what they meant, just heard them around. So pretty much learning from scratch.

The accent also doesn't sound like accents I've heard irl

I'm a lot better at it than I thought I would be, but suspect I won't retain much

Re: How's Life?

[(Anonymous)]

It does annoy me. And when I know which words I can tell I need to practice, but instead it keeps making me say “good afternoon”.

Also, I find French Duolingo difficult to use since they started trialing making the characters mouths randomly move while the voiceover speaks. Thankfully this behaviour has yet to spread into any of the other courses I use. It is bizarre and distracting.

I think Duolingo expects me to care a lot more about their cartoon characters than I do.

Re: How's Life?

[(Anonymous)]

> I think Duolingo expects me to care a lot more about their cartoon characters than I do.

I felt like this but then I got into the cartoon characters. I like the bear because he is a bear. And the woman who's always grumpy.