Er mer gerd

[fuzzyred]

flameandsong was right; the people in the Diamond League are absolutely crazy. We are only 16 hours into the week, and the leader already has over 1700XP. How am I ever going to get the achievement for being first in the Diamond League? I have to *work*, people. :,,,( XD

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

The things I've noticed about people in the top spots in Diamond League is they are almost always polyglots (as in, they have a lot of different courses on their profile) and almost always one of their courses is Spanish, which I've heard has stories you can do for extra XP. I don't know how efficient that is time-wise. At some point I need to brush up on my Spanish (I started taking it in a gifted-and-talented program in elementary school, and continued studying it for the rest of my school career, but I've been out of practice for awhile so I'm rusty), but I'll probably do that when I have my Italian or Portuguese golden owls so I'm not confusing myself too much.

Not that I'm even going to try to get the #1 in Diamond League achievement, though, I've written that off as basically impossible. I'd have to do nothing but Duolingo for a full week, no writing fic, and probably stay awake over 24 hours at least once. I have a friend who got the achievement but that's what he did, and he almost didn't get it because the person he was competing with gave him a really hard fight.

[fuzzyred]

That makes sense. The first skills are usually easier, so if you have a lot of those, you can rack up points quickly. French also has stories, and you may have just given me an edge, thank you! :D The stories are 14XP each, only take about 3 minutes, and you can redo them for XP (in case the later ones take longer. I don't know cause I'm not there yet.) And basically all you need to do is click the next button and answer a few simple questions. Probably not as helpful as a lesson language-wise, but much easier on the brain if you need XP and are low on spoons.

Ya... If it gets that nuts, I'll just give up. I don't need the achievement bad enough to lose sleep over it.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Yeah the languages I'm taking at the moment seem to not have stories, which is unfortunate as that's a good way to rack up XP, 14 XP for 3 minutes and can be redone.

[fuzzyred]

Ya, they might not be quite that quick, but if they are longer than 5 minutes I'd be surprised, and they are definitely faster/easier than testing out of skills (which is what I usually do in French.) I think French, Spanish, and German all have stories, though unfortunately I don't think you are doing any of those right now.

[ex_flameandsong751]

No, I'm not doing any of those at the moment. I have Norwegian, Dutch, Navajo, Finnish, Latin, Greek, Swahili, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Italian and Portuguese in my language list. I'm not working on them all at once, but as I gain golden owls I'll go back and work on some of the others. As far as I can tell none of them have stories.

Eventually I'll be adding Spanish, French and German to the list, but not for awhile, and probably also Swedish and Danish.

The answer to "are you out of your mind?" is "yes."

[fuzzyred]

That... is a lot. I'm jealous XD I'm focusing on my French mostly, with some Hawaiian and Polish thrown in. I'm doing a tiny bit of German but that will probably wait until later, and I picked up Irish too, but that is harder than I thought and also going to wait.

Good luck with all your languages! It sounds very interesting.

[ex_flameandsong751]

I thought about Irish but if I take it at all it won't be for awhile because it looks hard.

I'm also hesitant to take anything with a non-Western alphabet - as it is Greek is breaking my brain and I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the Greek alphabet. I tried Korean and I couldn't get past the alphabet because my brain kept screwing it up, so I dropped the course. As much as I would love to take Russian for fic reasons, I'll probably have to settle for Google Translate if I write more MCU fic and Nat is having A Moment.

(I'm OK with additional letters in a Western alphabet, like Norwegian has some letters English doesn't have, but I'm not having to memorize new symbols. The irony is that I can communicate in Norse runes and Tengwar, and I don't know why TF my brain can parse *that* and not something like the Korean alphabet or Cyrillic. ARGH.)

[fuzzyred]

From a first glance, it does seem hard, so even though it is on my list, it is probably going to just sit for awhile.

I haven't tried non-Western alphabets yet, though I am familiar with lots of accented letters. I would love to learn something like Russian or Arabic or Greek, but I'm not sure how well my brain will do. Something to see at a later date.

Interesting that you can handle runes but not foreign aplhabets. Maybe you picked up the runes earlier enough for them to make sense? Brains can be sooo weird (but also cool.)

On a somewhat related tangent: I looked at the top five people in my Diamond League (I'm currently 6th), and there are 4 monoglots (3 Spanish, 1 Chinese), and the leader who is essentially a monoglot (over 50,000XP in English, less than 50XP in Korean and Italian). And there I am with 8 languages, 3 of which I'm actively working on.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Yeah, actually, I learned runes and Tengwar back in the 1990s, my brain was a lot more plastic back then. While I didn't mean for this to get dark, PTSD sort of short-circuited my brain and I suspect that's why it's harder for me to learn new alphabets now, I have some other cognitive difficulties that didn't start until my PTSD got really bad so I think that probably went along with them.

That's interesting that the top 5 in your Diamond League is mostly monoglots. I wonder why I keep running into extreme polyglots in my Diamond League...

[fuzzyred]

That could be it then. I'm sorry you've had to deal with something that difficult.

Hmm... Luck of the draw maybe? It does make sense that people with more XP/more invested would have a tendency to pick up more languages. You'd probably also end up with some hyper-focused ones. Funny that they split that way though.

On another side note, I just started the English course for French speakers for shits and giggles, and the audio sounds so robotic. I wonder if other languages speakers thing the same about their native audio.