Fluent? - Duolingo Forum (2024)

Hopefully I find the mentioned two threads again. Was a good read.

@PtolemysXX

I had a 11 years goal in mind for Brazilian Portuguese (not for the Duolingo courses alone, but I don't have a full L5 golden + L6 Legendary tree here either and the Cefr EN<-PT reverse tree is huge if it would be still usable like it was in 2019-2021 with activated base PT audio) when I saw someone with a physics Phd degree telling his YT viewers that he learned Spanish/Romance basics for good 11 years in school (high school, university,..) BEFORE he started intensively with studying Portuguese and practicing speaking it on his YouTube recordings,..
Well, 6.5 years have already passed by for me... time was quickly flying by

ACTIVE speaking could take me longer to get the hang on.
Podcasts, Tv films, reading books, mastering Memrise vocabulary,...

I am back to the French basics in my new DE->FR Duolingo course in section #2 (old tree design) and I need to be careful to slowly pick new content up and to practice the more difficult stuff (unknown verbs and conjugations, prepositions, conjugations,..).
My mind says just unlock checkpoint #2 to keep going forward but that means my CP test score won't be great as I have not mastered all shown difficult material, not yet.
So I'll focus on the other crowns a bit more to re-strengthen previously learned stuff and to do skill level ups.

To be honest: Didn't think that spending 1.0-1.5 years learning French on Busuu A1 and first 38 A2 lessons would give me such a difficult Duolingo time with this quite basic French stuff....but no big surprise...Busuu is quick-paced; a lot of stuff comes later which only gets mentioned in some sentence examples or phrases in dialogues very quick in the A1 section or where EN translations were initially left out so remembering and fully understanding everything was and is the main issue there for me...if I don't write everything down (which I don't do).
With Portuguese I had a better learning 2016-2018+ while using the Memrise Web portal (full userscript and typing support).

Not sure how much slower I would be on my new Duolingo French course (not the Cefr one from English) without my previous Romance-/Portuguese knowledge and already studied Busuu formal grammar tips and doing the quizzes.

But for French it will take me longer than Portuguese to learn ALL the complicated basics (@// those question forms are a nightmare).
My personal factor (PF) comparing classroom lessons to self study won't only be 2.5-3.0x, not with French.
Will take some time to develop a feeling with all the ' vocal abbreviations and how to correctly construct French sentences.
Duolingo will be some good drill...even the old Android mobile app versions.

So yeah, I'm
miles away from being fully "conversational".
My impression after 1.5 years: I focused (especially on Busuu, now also on Duolingo with the Android app) on the reading out aloud aspect or speech to text dictation way more than I did with Brazilian Portuguese when I got started.

I guess setting too high goals too soon will make you quit much earlier. I'm glad I'm still around.
Saw this happening to many of Duolingo learners who barely passed XP levels 10-14 when they got started.

Busuu Spanish is huge too.
There's even some C1 content like with English C1 Advanced.

Seems to be difficult for learning providers to balance the difficulty and quick pacing vs too slow learning out (with stuff you're not interested in, you have to learn stuff which doesn't directly help for the first speaking goal) evenly.

Glad that the DE->FR challenging volunteer course is still around.
EN->FR tree3 was already gone after 1.0-1.5 years when I caught it in 2018 (A/b test).

I think the Spanish tree benefitted from the introduced written mobile tips (written by staff) but is quite long because of CEFR and I expect more difficult grammar stuff and multiple verb tenses plus Subjunctive get only introduced much later, not to overwhelm a true beginner?!??

Hard for me to find good Portuguese learning material (there is a free podcast site which I haven't deeply looked into).
Well, I exactly knew this was going to happen in 2017, compared to Spanish.

Duolingo lacks a bit the full immersion experience but Busuu wants you to best have a headstart of 1.5-3.0+ years from somewhere else so you don't have to start there from scratch and get lost thaz quickly

Unbelievable how many lessons I have literally flown over in the last couple of weeks in my new French course on Duolingo topping all my crown earnings and XP scores from the past.

Spanish has to wait a bit more.
Need to restart from scratch with it and I hadn't continued with my 1000 Spanish words from the Lingvist challenge (end of 2017).

Anything you learn with those resources is not so easy to bring into your personal life and make immediate use of it for speaking, without being in the country or meeting people yourself locally.
But honestly, I'm glad I can learn those languages (the basics) in my own pacing with no outside force which I would surely feel when living in those countries as a starter and having a hard time to keep up (same for expensive classroom courses).

So hopefully I can stick to some more realistic learning numbers and not these mentioned 17+ years when I will "finish" PT or FR to hopefully start with ES one day
The path is even worse with its forced L3 crowns waterfall approach.

Well, after 28+ years of English learning and some practice here and there (not counting in early school days) incl. writing about complicated technical stuff in the IT business or Rc heli hobby sector I just know I'm not finished with it yet; speaking comes too short, as always.
Busuu, EF Hello, BritishCouncil, Xeropan, Berlitz & Co. would definitely help me when I could make room for 2-3 more thorough serious daily lessons or to take out my Cambridge vocabulary and learning learning books.

Glad that I didn't have a goal in mind to be fluent as soon as possible.
Wouldn't have helped me to push through...

Hope Busuu will extend the B1 and B2 Portuguese content a bit more in the future, when I take a quick look at the Spanish course and available lessons.
Business Portuguese wouldn't hurt either once I pushed through the earlier limited B1/B2 content.
Won't start Business French anytime soon....