two questions quickly

[kaberett]

(1) Given that Swype has had end-of-life announced, anyone fancy recommending me an Android keyboard? Swype features I particularly like include "bilingual predictive text" and "rapid language-switching". (My most-used keyboards are currently enUK-de bilingual, French, Turkish.)

(2) New Duolingo. Crown levels. Assume I'm the kind of completionist who tried to keep everything gold before moving on to learning a new skill. WHAT IS THE EQUIVALENT HERE. How! Do I completionism! and feel like I've actually completed a thing! thank and goodbye.

Comments

[flippac]

GBoard (the modern-day default Google one) will do rapid switching, I don't know if it does bi/multilingual predictive text though.

[shortcipher]

It seems to, for me. I have English and German enabled; the spacebar is labelled "EN • DE" and I can swipe words in either language.

[kaberett]

okay fab!

[cjwatson]

I use GBoard too. It seems OK; I have English/Irish bilingual by default, allowing swiping words in either, and occasionally switch to Hebrew. I'm not sure exactly what kaberett means by "rapid", but switching to Hebrew for me is a long press on the space bar followed by a tap.

[mathemagicalschema]

I'm using swiftkey. I liked it better before microsoft acquired it but it hasn't annoyed me enough to make me switch yet. I can switch between English and Chinese by swiping on the spacebar. a changelog seems to suggest that bilingual predictions are a thing that it does? And one of the things I majorly like about it compared to Gboard is that it can be very easy to access special characters - backslashes, but also stuff like diacritics. sometimes when I'm typing a word like "that" or "the" I hover a few milliseconds too long on the "t" key and decide to use thorn instead of "th" for pure amusement :P

as a different kind of completionist I really like the duolingo change! Gaining levels is a happier thing for me than a thing I completed not being complete anymore. I am also appreciating the more focused drilling of parts of a lesson; lots of characters do not enter my brain properly in the first place when I'm only encountering them a few times per lesson or review. I sort of progress through the lesson tree at both ends - new lesson, then the next-earliest review at my lowest lesson level, etc. So right now, that would be "Sports 1" (not yet learned,) and then Greeting 4, currently at level 1.

[flippac]

There's definitely a right size screen at which the "PC" layouts on Gboard would help for special characters. My preferred phone size isn't it though - I'm still holding on to trying to fit the things in my pocket.

[steorra]

I'm also trying to figure out what to do with the Duolingo change. Your approach might just work for me!

[kaberett]

chinhands

Does Swiftkey do the thing of letting you insert an initial capital by swiping up after it?

also hmmmmmmmm re your completionism. (The gradual degradation worked for me because it seemed pretty well calibrated to how I actually forget things!)

[wildeabandon]

I use SwiftKey in French and English and its mostly fine. It gets he and je confused sometimes, but I think that's hard to avoid because they're both so often the first word in a sentence.

[sebenikela]

+1 for Swiftkey, I have used it in English/French/Spanish and while I occasionally get french spellings inserted into English sentences it usually works well.

[emperor]

I use Swiftkey, and it's BALGE for English/Finnish.

[feanelwa]

Duolingo: I haven't found a way yet. I thought of looking at the numbers to keep them all above a certain level but that means reading them all one by one. I think I am going to switch to a pattern of doing two practices each language each day and add a new lesson on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and not look at the numbers at all.

[cesy]

I have started at the beginning to try and turn everything complete in Duolingo. It's not going particularly well so far.

[kaberett]

... wait, there is a thing that constitutes "complete" in this brave new world?

[cesy]

I assumed the crowns would not be infinite, but I haven't found the end of Basics 1 yet.

[kaberett]

so one of my nonsense "bonus" skills has maxed out -- the central circle has gone golden -- at level 1, so I'm slightly dread-fully wondering whether you max it out at your current level -- have you anything to report on this supposition?

As a competitionist...

[threewalls]

I am using https://duolingo.eu/XXXX/progress where XXXX is your Duolingo username.

This gives me a list of what's golden and what isn't, and I take note of the top few 'non-golden' lessons and go back to normal Duolingo to work on them.

Re: As a competitionist...

[kaberett]

Oooh, excellent suggestion -- thank you!

Re: As a competitionist...

[threewalls]

Glad to help.

[umadoshi]

Swype has had end-of-life announced

I hadn't heard--eep!--and I have no recs, so I'm watching the comments on this post with great interest.