through the fingers into the brain
Jan. 14th, 2020 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwI am still doing Duolingo Spanish, for at least a few minutes every day. There are all kinds of motivational things built in, such as gemstone levels and fake currency and graphs and boards where you can compare yourself to others, but the only thing that actually motivates me (besides the vague feeling that I should learn some Spanish) is my streak. I am at 72 days now.
I do it on the iPad.* What I am really learning to do is read and write Spanish, not speak it. There is a lot of typing. I don't like typing on the pad, and I make a lot of mistakes. For some questions, one can tap on words in a word list instead of typing them. That is better in some ways, but after about a week of doing it that way, I am convinced that while my reading knowledge is progressing, my writing competence is not. I don't remember the new words as well, especially spelling and accent marks. I am aware that there are people who claim that only handwriting (not typing) helps learning in this way. I am also aware of lots of disabled people who find those attitudes (and classroom policies) discriminatory. For me, at least, it seems that as long as my fingers are doing the work one way or another, it's good enough. My plan had been to just use the duolingo page, without looking things up or doing any other kind of homework, but starting today I am going to do a notebook page with new words, so that I am writing them down (while tapping on the device).
Also considering adding Swahili. I did a couple of lessons of that a while back. It was hard, and I'm lazy. But I discovered yesterday that I know a native speaker (although she mostly speaks English), so maybe that will get me to try it again.
* still considering buying a Thunderbolt adapter for the pad so that I can connect a real keyboard.
I do it on the iPad.* What I am really learning to do is read and write Spanish, not speak it. There is a lot of typing. I don't like typing on the pad, and I make a lot of mistakes. For some questions, one can tap on words in a word list instead of typing them. That is better in some ways, but after about a week of doing it that way, I am convinced that while my reading knowledge is progressing, my writing competence is not. I don't remember the new words as well, especially spelling and accent marks. I am aware that there are people who claim that only handwriting (not typing) helps learning in this way. I am also aware of lots of disabled people who find those attitudes (and classroom policies) discriminatory. For me, at least, it seems that as long as my fingers are doing the work one way or another, it's good enough. My plan had been to just use the duolingo page, without looking things up or doing any other kind of homework, but starting today I am going to do a notebook page with new words, so that I am writing them down (while tapping on the device).
Also considering adding Swahili. I did a couple of lessons of that a while back. It was hard, and I'm lazy. But I discovered yesterday that I know a native speaker (although she mostly speaks English), so maybe that will get me to try it again.
* still considering buying a Thunderbolt adapter for the pad so that I can connect a real keyboard.
