Some things make a post

[kaberett]

1. I am now on Duolingo, sort of, half-arsedly, for at least the next few weeks. I am not sure I understand the social side of things at ALL but if you want to either explain it to me or friend me I'm the obvious human over there.

2. Relatedly, the Turkish accusative is preposterous. "Ben paynir yerim" but also "ben payniri yerim", the former being "I eat cheese" and the latter "I eat the cheese"? FUCK OFF.

3. I have a problem, and it is that the people who make the rugged phones I have a pretty hard (but not impossible) time destroying have started making fully waterproof smartphones with excellent battery life.

4. Pleasant late morning/early afternoon hanging out with baby brother, cooking and eating and discussing body mods and work and dating and casual nudity.

Comments

[khronos_keeper]

Related to #2, if Turkish has any linguistic similarities to Arabic, then the most likely culprit for that particular grammatical hiccup is because of the article that sounds like its tacked on to the end of the verb ("ee" might be "el"), but actually elides with some sounds of the noun in precedes.

(Although tbh if "paynir" is "to eat", then the "ee" at the end is probably the reflexive, which probably only some verbs take.)

Sorry sorry idk I'm just familiar with Arabic, and that sounds like very typical language features of the region.

[birke]

In this sentence "peynir" is actually "cheese." The verb comes at the end.

[davidgillon]

fully waterproof smartphones with excellent battery life.

The warranty against even accidental damage is impressive (as a dyspraxic klutz surprisingly I've yet to trash a mobile, but I have history around other similarly-sized tech).

But is it HF proof? Inquiring minds demand to know :)

[hilarita]

3 sounds like a reason for me to buy a new phone soon...

[hilarita]

Also, Jesus Christ their website is fucked in Chrome.

[kaberett]

So's the ui on the homegrown OS they have on the brick phones. Nice hardware, terrible software. The smartphones run Android :p

[ex_we935]

Which languages are you doing there? Just turkish, or others?

~K.

[kaberett]

Turkish, German in order to get a feel for how things work in-app, maybe French but I probably don't care quite that much?

[mustela_nivalis]

The Turkish thing is differential object marking, certain direct objects take different overt case marking for semantic reasons (in this case, marking definiteness). Also there are a few Indo-European languages (like Swedish) that have decided articles are stupid and instead have definiteness suffixes. Otoh yeah this is pretty weird coming from a Western Eurolanguage setting.

[steorra]

"certain direct objects take different overt case marking for semantic reasons (in this case, marking definiteness)."

This reminds me of the Hebrew "et" prefix/particle/whatever marking definite direct objects, though I don't think that's usually classed as case.

[tim]

Duolingo is a maybe-useful, definitely-fun tool if you want to try learning a language with not much barrier to entry, which happens to have some distracting, useless "social" features tacked on as a gimmick.

[fyreharper]

Re: DuoLingo - I am finding that I get along somewhat better with Memrise, for reasons including that it got to useful sentences earlier (this may vary by course! am not doing Turkish :p Sisterling's recommendation was to look for the course that had the most people in it, once narrowed down to topic) and when I get thing wrong/can't remember it tells me what the word is again *and then afterward gives me that word/phrase again sooner* rather than just marking three failures in the area and then making sadNOPEface at me. Am still using both concurrently though... And Memrise doesn't make one talk, which could be a plus or minus, depending.