And That's Half The Trouble, Because Irish Is At Least Remotely Similar To English. English Is Not My

And that's half the trouble, because Irish is at least remotely similar to English. English is not my first language, but I'm getting by. But trying to learn Japanese in Duolingo, for example, is a disaster. I studied Japanese for a year at the institute with a teacher and it's only because of that knowledge that I can see that learning Japanese through English is bloody hell because their grammars are too different. Learn Japanese through Russian, it's easier XD

Duolingo will have you thinking you totally speak Italian but then you listen to any random podcast or look at a book and you recognize like 1 out of every 15 words it’s humbling.

this website is horrible and everyone is mean as fuck. with that being said reblog and compliment the previous person in the tags ✨

The duality of man is thinking “children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public” and also “damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/“

Duolingo is really shitty tool for learning languages tbh.

Thirty-five days ago (yes, Duo, thank you, you can count) I started learning Irish out of sheer curiosity. *squinting at my hyperfixation on Cillian Murphy*

And, well... *inhale*

I have never had anything explained, not a single reason for a certain word order in a grammatical construction or why a simple ‘thank you’ would be ‘go raibh maith agat’ and ‘please’ would be ‘le do thoil’. I only know that ‘le’ is ‘with’ and ‘do’ is ‘your’. And that's only because I've seen them in other exercises.

I have to look at the suggested word forms on the choices myself and conclude that, for example, ‘mother’ would be ‘mathair’ and ‘my mother’ would be ‘mo mhathair’. And by analogy, this ‘h’ appears in all the family members when indicating affiliation (and with for some fuckin' reason it's the second letter). At the same time, the indication ‘my’ from ‘mo’ turns into ‘m'’ if the word following it starts with a vowel. For example, ‘my daughter’ is ‘m'iníon’.

Also, I was not given any instruction on how to read the three-storey combinations of vowels and consonants, of which there are a shitload. Purely by experience through sound exercises, I can guess that ‘ch’ will sound like ‘h’ and ‘bh’ will sound like some kind of half-swallowed ‘v’ that doesn't sound like ‘v’. And with vowels it's a nightmare, one sounds like one, but all three are written, just in case, but God forbid you mix up the order.

And then suddenly there are letters with accents. And I can't understand whether they really write it that way or whether they put it there for me for stupid. The answer counts as correct, even if I do not put these accents, but they write ‘pay attention to accents’. Okay? Thank you?

Long story short, I got to the middle of the first section on listening, translating and repeating words and sentences in a similar fashion. No explanation.

Duolingo will have you thinking you totally speak Italian but then you listen to any random podcast or look at a book and you recognize like 1 out of every 15 words it’s humbling.

why does viva la vida by coldplay always go so hard. i hear those opening strings and instantly im a cynical and mournful king walking through his overthrown kingdom like oh shit I totally did used to rule the world!!! I used to roll the dice and feel the fear in my enemies’ eyes but now im literally sweeping the streets I used to own!!!! idk what it is about this song but for some reason i can’t explain

Cillian Murphy for Dazed & Confused 17 (December 2011)