After about 11 months or so of poking at Duolingo, a few weeks ago, I finally finished their Finnish course. So now I blog, as is my tradition.

I originally started in anticipation of a trip to Helsinki last year, and then I continued on my return because frankly, I was having fun stretching my brain in a new direction. Something that I have learned about myself is that I enjoy challenging myself. I do it with guitar, reading classics, and more, but languages have really not been an area of stretch in a long time -- I basically gave up learning languages after a pair of semesters of German in highschool. Every time I do spend the time to push myself on something I am always gently surprised at the out-sized reward for it.

Finnish

As I said, selecting Finnish was rooted in travel, but continuing was because I found it fascinating. There are so many pieces that are wildly different than English, and yet, here and there little bits of sharing.

Here’s a few things that really stood out while I learned Finnish:

No articles: no ‘the’, ‘a’, etc. “pöyta” rather than “a table”
No implied gender in their “she/he” word: “Hän on onellinen” is “she is happy”... or “he is happy”; not determined by “hän”.
A very straightforward spelling to sound mapping (phonology?) -- for them most part, so long as you hear the word correctly you can spell it, even if you have no idea what it means, and similarly with practice, you can pronounce words even if you don’t know what they mean. This doesn’t mean everything is easy, but compare to the nightmare that is English (row, row, roe, tear, tear, shower, tower) and it’s a breath of fresh air.
At least for the verbs I learned, conjugation was super simple and reliable. For example “me” means “we”, and most things conjugated for the “we” form in turn end in “-mme”, like “olemme” or “juoksemme”

For more interesting reading, this seems neat, and I wish I’d found it a heck of a lot earlier!

Duolingo

I have weird complicated feelings about Duolingo. On the one hand, the gamification and social pressure really does help someone come back day after day after day. As a real believer that skill acquisition is driven by putting in the time, this is a good thing for making someone actually successful in trying to acquire a language. However...

Where Duolingo falls down is that it fails to teach in places that teaching would be profoundly effective. Duolingo prefers to show example after example, hoping that after time you gather enough context to form a rule in your head. This to my mind horribly slows down your ability to succeed. Sometimes a one paragraph explanation is a super power.

Since I have finished their Finnish course, I’ve been trying out the maintenance track... and I have to say, I’m generally underwhelmed. I can feel the skill atrophying a bit already, about 3 weeks in.

ChatGPT

Work got the whole AI-all-the-things bug, and so last year they encouraged us to get ChatGPT enterprise licences. So I signed up. These days I’m starting to figure out there are places it’s helpful, but it was a long fallow period.

Where I did find it helpful was explaining and -naming- bits of Finnish grammar. While everyone is mad at AI for hallucinations and errors, what’s incredibly helpful is it’s ability to provide a name for a pattern. A pattern I got into was getting a question wrong in Duolingo, then conversing with ChatGPT about why what I said was wrong. It was both helpful and motivating.

A side note on Temporal

Despite reviewing a huge number of patches for Temporal, writing this was the first time I’ve used it. It’s pretty nice :)

trip = Temporal.PlainDate.from("2024-06-11") 
recollected_duration = Temporal.Duration.from({days: 77}) // also approx
estimated_original_start = trip.subtract(recollected_duration).toString(); // "2024-03-26"