Duolingo finally listened to (half of) my pleas and added a Latin course! I’m not currently tutoring any students in Latin, but enough schools in NYC require it of their 7th and 8th graders that I hope the chance will arise again. So far I’ve only worked through a few of the most basic lessons, so I can’t say how effective or comprehensive the course is.
(I can say that I can tell it’s new/in beta because, as compared to the uniform and polished voices and high production quality of the audio in the Mandarin and Spanish and Russian courses, the spoken components of the Latin often sound like a guy shouting from his bath.)
((This doesn’t really require double parentheses – in fact is strongly does not require them – but it feels more like a pps than a separate parenthetical. Cough. Anyway, when I was choosing a language in sixth grade, I was totally baffled by people telling me “You can’t speak Latin out loud” because I took that very literally, as if there was something about the language that inherently limited it to written form, when really they were speaking somewhat colloquially and meant “People DON’T speak Latin out loud in the world unless they are the pope or are the seventh graders who were chosen to visit all of the sixth grade classrooms and put on a short Latin skit))
When I took the Duolingo Latin placement test, I found that I was often accidentally mixing in verb endings from Spanish, or getting confused by which language something happened “nunc(a)” in – in Spanish, never; in Latin, now. When I first moved to Thailand and didn’t know any Thai/had just started to grasp a few key phrases, my brain’s response was to try to tell my taxi driver to stop “aqui” instead of “jod ti ni.” And as I learned Thai, I found my Spanish lapsing, though that’s more likely because I wasn’t studying it any more.
I don’t know if, by doing the Duolingo courses in Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Latin (they still don’t have a Thai course, hence why they’ve only answered half of my please – they do have Vietnamese, and I’ve heard rumors of Thai soon, but who knows), I’m allocating limited resources to each language that could more effectively be concentrated on one or even two, or if that’s a misunderstanding of how the brain processes language. It certainly feels at times that there’s only one slot for a new language and the others have to be pushed to the edges. Sometimes I try to correct for this by doing a Duolingo lesson in one language and testing to see if I can come up with all of the requested words and phrases in one of the other languages I’m learning. It’s mixed. But I think the “too many languages” explanation is more of a red herring, and the real issue is that I’m listening, reading, matching vocabulary, and even repeating in these languages when I use Duolingo, but I’m not generating them. I’m not trying to write a story or even speak to someone conversationally, and as such I’m not requiring myself to pull forth sentences or even words. To really speak any of them with any measure of facility is going to require immersion.
(The ability to read with fairly strong accuracy in all of them is pretty useful, though.)
