I've not used the little green bird, but quoting the French Together website: [1]
> Your French learning journey starts by listening to a fun and realistic conversation between Jérome, Elodie, Stéphane and the other professional voice actors who worked on this French. course.
> They speak fast, don’t they? That’s how all French people speak (especially Parisians, they are the worst!) Don’t worry though, French Together comes with audio recorded at both slow and normal speed.
> Listening to the slow audio helps you train your ears to recognize French sounds while listening to the normal audio prepares you for real life French.
> Do this for a few weeks and you could dramatically improve your understanding of spoken French. Oh and the course also includes audio from a variety of speakers so you get used to different accents and intonations and don’t end up having to ask locals to repeat when you go to France.
Watching the Yankees in Spanish all season has really improved my ability to listen to Spanish. Combined with Anki spaced repetition flashcards (conjugation and vocabulary), Duo Lingo for some general practice, and Pimsleur for speaking and listening I suspect I'll be pretty decent by the end of the year!
It's definitely a whole skill to be able to listen and disambiguate words spoken at a native speaker's pace in a second (or nth) language.
I’m doing something similar for Spanish: listening to News in Slow Spanish podcast, Pimsleur, Memrise and then also paying for a tutor through Italki which has really been helping.
Check out Dreaming Spanish, hours and hours and hours of free comprehensible input content, and then some premium content on top of that when you run out. It's been great for my listening comprehension.
Try Language Transfer, it's really incredible. I realize now I've more or less wasted the last year learning Spanish on Duolingo. Now I have to go and unlearn stuff so I can relearn it properly.
Actually, what I found was that in Duolingo I was learning random, specific versions of verbs such as Quiero (I want), Quiere (she/he wants), Quieres (you want). But I should have been learning the verb starting with the "to form", e.g. Querer (To want). From that you then learn how to conjugate the different variations based on the use-case, which isn't just I, she/he, you, they, we but also is different in the various tenses. But having blindly learned words in Duolingo without explanation is hampering me, I kept reaching for say Quiero and not Querer as I should and then the rules for breaking down the verb and adding the right ending don't work right.
I wished I'd started with LT, learned the rules, then maybe Duolingo would have been ok for practice (although the gamification sort of annoys me). My Super Duolingo sub is up this summer, I think I might not renew and stick with LT and Dreaming Spanish.
Regarding Latin American Spanish vs European -- in the LT lessons, they cover the differences in pronunciation when applicable and also differences in word usage (Carro vs El Auto) and even later on talks about "Spanish Idiolects" (e.g. the ways individuals speak Spanish).
Do you have any recommendations for folks learning Swedish outside of Sweden? So far I’ve been bouncing between Duolingo and 8sidor for reading comprehension.
No lol. It was such an embarrassing situation. I was dunking on my wife before landing in Sweden - "hey do you see how good my Swedish is? guess i'll have to do all the talking". And once we reached there, to have to speak English at every situation made me turn red and she looked on with a smirk.
Duolingo is a bit like Notion. It makes you think you are achieving things but the direction is completely incorrect.
I wouldn't say it's useless. Won't make you fluent, but I've found the short phrases I can use (just a little over a year of Duolingo, plus HS Spanish classes in the late 90s) useful in a few situations. (I'm in the Houston area, so it's pretty common to encounter Hispanics who do not speak English well)
Of course, we live in a world where the translations apps on ours phones are approaching a "universal translator" level.
My wife has like a 230 day streak in Duolingo and every time I speak any Spanish to her (I'm like early intermediate level maybe) she doesn't understand. She's just hooked on making number go up.
Duolingo is kind of garbage.
As a native french, for fun, I tried to quickly finish the whole french course. I quit well before halfway. Duolingo would refuse perfectly fine sentences. The accepted answers aren't flexible enough.
I didn't try english though.
Esperanto is super easy if you speak both french and english. But man there is less content on the internet than klingon...
My experience: Essentially all consumer language learning apps are only useful for learning up to maybe CEFR A2 or B1. That makes sense, because that's all the typical consumer has patience for. Going beyond this basically requires hiring a tutor, because so few people ever progress to that point.
