Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
It’s kind of a both and situation. It is important to know some stock phrases, just like it’s important to know addition and multiplication tables in mathematics. That’s simply to get you to the point of being able to use those facts to “use” mathematics. Or in the case of language, to be able to hold a very basic conversation in the target language. This as I said, works until it doesn’t. That’s my issue here. Once you start getting into more complex things, the method fails. You cannot memorize your way to understanding, and without understanding the grammar, you’re lost when dealing in conversations that use vocabulary you don’t know yet, or more complex sentences, you lack the tools to figure out how to get at understanding what they’re trying to say, or to say something complex yourself. The method is a mile wide and an inch deep.
I tend to find, at least from the people who claim to have learned via Duolingo alone, that they’ve either already learned the language in another setting, or speak a similar one prior to starting. If I already know Spanish, I have decent exposure to the structure of Romance languages and can then use that to bootstrap myself to understanding the structure of a different Romance language. If I already know Spanish, learning Italian is simply figuring out how Spanish and Italian handle conjugation and the vocabulary. This is quite different than an English speaker trying to sus out Korean — an unrelated language with far fewer common features and only a few loan words in common.
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