Language Levels

What do you say when someone asks you "how well do you speak French?" (Or whatever language you have studied.) Or if they ask "are you fluent?" Sometimes you will hear people give very precise answers, such as "I'm a C1 reader but only a B2 speaker" or "Spanish is my L1" or even "I'm a heritage Spanish speaker." This post aims to give a straightforward explanation of all of these terms so you can figure out where you stand and describe it to others.

The language-level system most people know about is called the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The CEFR is a very well-thought-out system for rating how well someone speaks a foreign language, but the published explanations are awfully complex and can be hard to get your head around. This post aims to simplify the explanations to make it easier for people to understand what language levels are all about. Like any simplification, it will leave some things out, but I think it will make a good starting point--better than starting by leafing through dozens of pages of dense rules, at least.

Native and Foreign Speakers

L1 Speakers (Native Speakers)

A child is able to learn a language without actually trying to do so. Plop them into a new environment where most people speak a different language, and in a few months they'll be chatting like natives. An L1 language is one that was acquired in this fashion. The ability to do this starts to diminish at around age 10 or 12 and seems to be completely gone by age 18 or 20. This is called the "critical period." A "native speaker" is an L1 speaker.

Children who are immersed in a language during the critical period will essentially all rocket up to native proficiency, given time. As a result, there is no rating system for L1 speakers. For the purposes of foreign-language learning, all L1 speakers are the same (but see the section on heritage speakers below).

L2 Speakers (Foreign Speakers)

An adult (anyone past the critical period) cannot learn a language "by osmosis," the way a child can. Adults need some organized study plan. A person who learns a language this way is say to be an L2 speaker of that language. (People who study multilingualism will talk about L3, L4, etc. but everyone else uses L2 for any language acquired through deliberate study.) An L2 speaker is a "foreign speaker."

L2 speakers make slow, steady progress, and many stop after a point, so it is very worthwhile to have a system to rate a given person's ability with a foreign language. In particular, businesses and universities need to be able to set requirements for language proficiency, and having a standard rating system helps them do that. Europe needs this more than most, and their CEFR is hugely influential.

L2 speakers never (or almost never) become good enough to regularly fool L1 speakers. No matter how long they live in complete immersion (decades even), and no matter how much study they put into it, they never become perfect L1 speakers. There is some debate as to whether this is truly impossible or merely very rare. Without getting into the argument, suffice it to say that if it is possible at all, it is so rare that people write papers debating the point. But even if perfection is impossible, excellence is not. Also, although only a child can learn an L1, age doesn't seem to matter much for learning an L2.

For an excellent discussion on the difference between how children and adults learn foreign languages, read Chapter 2, "Is There a Best Age For Learning a Second Language," from Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition (Cook and Singleton, Multilingual Matters, 2014).

What To Measure

Learning a language actually requires mastering four different skills

1. Reading.
2. Writing.
3. Conversation.
4. Passive listening.

To see how different these are, note that it's possible to be an excellent reader who is almost unable to hold a conversation or to be great at conversation but functionally illiterate. The formal tests that people take to measure language competence generally rate these four abilities separately, even when they give a final, composite grade. In my chart below, I'm going to mix them together to some extent, but keep in mind that you do need to develop them separately. That said, it is also true that improvement in one ability generally benefits the others to some degree.

Levels of Speakers

Summary

The chart below summarizes what I just described plus it includes all the CEFR levels. Again, a reasonably complete description of the CEFR can be found on Wikipedia.

Zero		No knowledge of the language at all.
L2	A0	Smattering of the language. Knows a few words and phrases. Can recognize the written form and identify what language it is.
	A1	Phrasebook speaker. Uses a few templates to create sentences. Can read some signs. Understands responses if they're what he/she was expecting.
	A2	Creates original sentences, but doesn't know the whole grammar yet. Can express a lot, but often frustrated by concepts he/she has no way how to express.
	B1	Knows essentially the whole grammar (excluding some of the fine points) but has to think hard to use it. Able to eventually say just about anything, but the process can be painful. Can read almost anything, given enough time, a good reference grammar, and unlimited use of a dictionary. Movies are hopeless without subtitles.
	B2	Fluent, but with errors and omissions. Can hold real conversations with non-English speakers but often struggles to get around gaps in vocabulary. Often corrects own errors. Reads newspapers with ease. Still depends heavily on dictionary to read novels. Can understand most of a movie in standard dialect.
	C1	Fluent, fully conversational, but very obviously not native. Grammar errors don't impede conversation, but minor ones still turn up with some frequency. Reads anything short of literature with minimal dictionary use. Can watch movies without too much difficulty.
	C2	Fluent to the point where the residual errors in accent and grammar don't matter. The person does not fool native speakers, due to the nature of the occasional errors, but they are no worse than the errors some native speakers make. Reads/watches anything.
L1	Heritage	Exposed to the language as a child, but acquired a different L1. Has strong listening ability, but speaking ability ranges from zero to limited (See more below.)
	Native	Learned as a child and uses it regularly now.

A-Levels: Basic User

The A-levels are about beginning to learn the language but not knowing all the grammar. An A-level speaker typically doesn't know all the verb tenses, or the declensions of adjectives, or other key bits of grammar.

You can think of the A-levels as being useful to tourists. With A2 ability, you can impress the heck out of your zero-level companions.

A0 isn't an official level in the CEFR, but it is very commonly used by people to indicate that they have either begun to study a language (so they're not really at zero) or that they have forgotten so much of it that they don't believe they could even pass the A1 exam anymore.

B-Levels: Independent User

The B-levels are about knowing the whole of the grammar but having limited ability to use it. The B1 speaker has to think to apply the rules, and as a result, speaks in a halting fashion. The B2 speaker can apply the rules without thinking, but is limited by vocabulary.

As far as conversation goes, a few weeks of immersion is probably the only way to move from B1 to B2. It's as though the pressure of having to apply all those rules forces the brain to learn them so deeply that you don't have to think about them anymore. Immersion has some benefits for any student, but the biggest bang for the buck, by far, is for the B1 student who comes back a B2.

There's a rule of thumb that says you should not try to live or work abroad on your own if you are less than B1.

B2 is sometimes called the threshold of fluency. Zero-level speakers listening to a B2-level speaker will usually describe that person as "fluent" because they hear smooth, continuous speech.

C-Levels: Proficient User

The C-levels are about mastery. Speakers at those levels differ from B2 speakers primarily in vocabulary. A B2 speaker can hold a great conversation and abruptly run into a wall when he/she simply doesn't have the words to describe something. That should never happen to a C-level speaker. B-level speakers know essentially the entire grammar, but C-level speakers have mastered the fine points too.

European universities generally won't admit you if you can't pass the C1 test for their language. (Otherwise you won't be able to follow lectures.) Companies don't want to hire anyone under B2, or at least B1.

Study moves you from A0 to B1. Immersion moves you from B1 to B2. Only time moves you from B2 to C2. It takes many years of daily use of the language to reach C2, and there are no short cuts.

Heritage Speakers

When a child grows up in an environment where his/her parents speak an L1 that is different from the L1 of the community, the child usually grows up speaking both languages. However, the child normally speaks the local language natively but speaks the L1 of the parents in a more limited way. These are called heritage speakers.

To illustrate the idea of a heritage language speaker, consider the example of a person whose parents spoke Japanese but who grew up in California. This person will almost always grow up to be a standard L1 speaker of English, but he/she will usually acquire some level of Japanese. We would say the person speaks "heritage" Japanese. This usually covers three rather different levels of ability:

1. The child understands Japanese, but never attempts to speak it. This is typical when the child was born in the US and the parents never spoke Japanese to him/her. (The child learned it simply from listening to the parents talk to each other.)
2. The child uses Japanese words but English syntax to make sentences. This seems to happen when the child was born in the US, and the parents didn't arrange any sort of training in Japanese, although they did use Japanese with the child.
3. The child speaks Japanese with simplified syntax. That is, they speak but don't use the entire grammar. This is more likely when the child was born in Japan and grew up speaking Japanese before moving to the US at a young age and then continued to use Japanese at home, while acquiring L1 English at school.

Of course, if the person was already too old to learn L1 English, then he/she will be an L2 English speaker and an L1 Japanese speaker. This may end up being a strange dialect of Japanese if no effort is made to study it formally.

It is very, very rare for anyone to be a perfect L1 speaker of two different languages. One loophole is that for two closely-related languages (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese) it may be possible for even an adult learner to acquire essentially L1 proficiency. Unfortunately, there is no significant language that close to English.

It is presently unknown whether a heritage speaker can, in general, improve his/her language ability to meet the expectations of a standard L1 speaker.

To learn more about heritage speakers, read Heritage languages: In the 'wild' and in the classroom by Polinsky, Maria, and Olga Kagan. 2007. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 368-395.

What is Fluency?

A lot of people seem to think that fluency means you are an L1 speaker of the language. Since that's (essentially) impossible to achieve if you didn't grow up speaking that language, that's way too strict to be useful.

In general, fluent means that the language flows. That is, the speaker doesn't constantly have to stop to think about how to construct each sentence. A fluent speaker may make lots of grammar errors, may have to use a lot of hand gestures, and may have an awful accent, but when he/she speaks, the words flow, and the listeners understand. The person is able to start a sentence without having to think out how the sentence is going to end; for the fluent speaker, speech is something that just happens--like walking.

By that definition, B2 is the threshold of fluency. One might argue that B2 speakers have "intervals of fluency" whereas C-level speakers are fluent all the time. Regardless, if you reach level B2 and call yourself fluent, not too many will argue with you about it.

Rating Yourself

You ought to be able to look at the chart above and get a fair idea of where you are. If in doubt, pick the lower estimate. If you want to be more precise, look through the Council of Europe's self-assessment test.

If you actually have a real need to get a formal language rating, you should look online for any of the commercial sites that do formal testing in your target language. Those can be expensive, though, so before you do that, make sure that the certificate you're paying for is actually accepted by whatever organization you plan to submit it to!

Finally, people are notorious for overestimating their language ability. When someone says that he/she is a C1 speaker, odds are good that B2 would be more accurate. If you have a real need to hire someone with specific language ability, insist that they provide a test result from a respectable organization.

Italian Verb Patterns

It's a chore memorizing how to conjugate all 45 forms of  Italian verbs--even the regular ones, and when you factor in the irregular ones, it looks hopeless. However, there are patterns, and following those patterns makes the whole thing easier to deal with.

The most important tip is don't try to learn everything at once!

In the tables below, I will offer rules capable of generating all the forms of all Italian verbs, but you really don't want to try to memorize all of this. Not at once, anyway. Instead, look over it and pick the bits that matter to you at the moment. When you find a new verb, look at how it fits into the pattern. Use that to help you memorize it.

Just as you don't try to learn 5,000 new words all at once, try to absorb these rules a little bit at a time. Otherwise it really will be too overwhelming.

Regular Verbs

Non-Finite Verbs

There are three Italian verb forms that don't have a tense: the infinitive, the past participle, and the gerund. A traditional way to represent this would be to use example verbs, one for each of the three conjugation families:

	Speak	Fear	Sleep
Infinitive	parlare	temere	dormire
Past Participle	parlato	temuto	dormito
Gerund	parlando	temendo	dormendo

But this obscures much of what is common between them. In the table, I have made the "theme vowels" bold to illustrate that the endings (the part to the right of the theme vowel) are the same for all three conjugations, even though the stems (the part to the left of the theme vowel) are different.

A much better (and far more compact) way to represent the same information is to omit the stems, collect the theme vowels together, and thus make the endings stand out.

IT Verb Endings	Non-Finite
Infinitive	[aei]re
Past Part.	[aui]to
Gerund	[aee]ndo

The three letters in brackets show the theme vowel needed by each of the three conjugations. Make sure you see how this little table represents the information in the larger one above it before we move on to apply the same idea to finite verbs. (Verbs that do have a tense.)

Finite Verbs

Italian has seven "simple" (as opposed to compound) verb tenses: the present indicative, the present subjunctive, the imperfect indicative, the imperfect subjunctive, the future, the conditional, and the passato remoto. Verb tables in books go on for many pages. Using the notation we used for the non-finite verbs, we can make the most compact table of Italian verb conjugations you will ever see:

I T		Present		Imperfect		Fut/Cond		P. Remoto
		Ind	Subj	Ind	Subj	Fut	Cond	Reg	Irr
Sg	1	-o	[iaa]	[aei]vo	[aei]ssi	[eei-]rò	[eei-]rei	[aei]i	-i
	2	-i	[iaa]	[aei]vi	[aei]ssi	[eei-]rai	[eei-]resti	[aei]sti
	3	[aee]	[iaa]	[aei]va	[aei]sse	[eei-]rà	[eei-]rebbe	[òéì]	-e
Pl	1	-iamo	-iamo	[aei]vamo	[aei]ssimo	[eei-]remo	[eei-]remmo	[aei]mmo
	2	[aei]te	-iate	[aei]vate	[aei]ste	[eei-]rete	[eei-]reste	[aei]ste
	3	[aoo]no	[iaa]no	[aei]vano	[aei]ssero	[eei-]ranno	[eei-]rebbero	[aei]rono	-ero

A dash in place of square brackets means that there is no theme vowel. A dash in the fourth position reflects the fact that irregular verbs in the future and conditional tenses omit the vowel entirely. More about that below when we discuss irregular verbs.

The three odd forms marked "Irr" under the Passato Remoto are an artifact of the fact that Vulgar Latin had four conjugation families, not just three, but two of them were folded together into today's -ere verbs. As a result, a large number of -ere verbs have different endings in the first person-singular, the third-person singular, and the third-person plural of the passato remoto. Again, we'll discuss this more when we talk about irregular verbs.

Play with this table for a bit and make sure you know how to generate verb forms with it. Compare it with the verb conjugators in WordReference or Cactus 2000 if you need to. In this very compact form, all sorts of patterns are now clearly visible. Patterns make memorization easier, of course. I'll point out a few, but you should study it yourself and find the ones that help you learn.

• All first-person plural forms end with -mo
• All second-person plural forms end with -te
• All third-person plural forms end with -no or -ro
• Theme vowels are the same for all imperfect forms
• Theme vowels are the same across all future and conditional forms
• Despite the  name, the Imperfect tenses are the most perfect ones.

Omitted Forms

You might think that's enough verb forms already, but the astute observer will note that I've omitted a few categories:

• The so-called "present participle" Verbs that are turned into adjectives e.g. parlante. You form it by changing the gerund ending from -do to -te. Trouble is, it doesn't function as a verb, not all verbs have them, and the meanings are often wildly different. (E.g. dirigente means "manager"). These are probably best learned as separate vocabulary items as you come to them.
• The imperative forms. The command forms in Italian are just existing present-tense or infinitive forms used for a slightly different purpose. 
• All of the compound forms. E.g. Lui ha parlato. I have already written about the Italian Perfect Tenses. They're important to get right, of course, but as with the imperatives, the issue isn't with learning how to construct the forms--it's with learning what to do with them after that.

Summary

You can think of these tables as little machines that take a verb stem and create all the forms of that verb. These same tables with work for all but the most irregular verbs, as I'll explain in the next section.

Irregular Verbs

Verbs with multiple stems

With the regular verbs, we spoke of the verb stem. The tables above let you generate endings for verb stems. With irregular verbs, we're going to speak of multiple stems. For a regular verb, you only have to learn one stem, but for an irregular verb, you need to know more than that. The more stems you need to learn, the more irregular the verb is. For irregular verbs, then, we need a table to generate stems. Since these still use the same endings as regular verbs, between the two sets of tables we can conjugate everything except the super-irregular verbs.

To see how this works, take a verb like rimanere (to remain). I have made the irregular stems bold.

	Remain
Infinitive	rimanere
Past Part.	rimasto
Pres. Part.	rimanendo

		Present		Imperfect		Fut/Cond		P. Remoto
		Ind	Subj	Ind	Subj	Fut	Cond	Reg	Irr
Sg	1	rimango	rimanga	R E G U L A R		rimarrò	rimarrei		rimasi
	2	rimani	rimanga			rimarrai	rimarresti	rimanesti
	3	rimane	rimanga			rimarrà	rimarrebbe		rimase
Pl	1	rimaniamo	rimaniamo			rimarremo	rimarremmo	rimanemmo
	2	rimaniate	rimaniate			rimarrete	rimarreste	rimaneste
	3	rimangono	rimangano			rimarranno	rimarrebbero		rimasero

Notice how the present tenses all share the same irregular stem? And the future and conditional tenses share a single (albeit different) irregular stem? And the passato remoto seems to be derived from the past participle?

To conjugate rimanere, then, you need to know the infinitive, the past participle, the first-person present indicative, and the future/conditional tense. That's just four forms to generate 45--not a bad deal.

In the worst case, you'll need to know eight stems (again, not counting super-irregular verbs), but in many cases two or three will do.

Distribution of stems

These charts show how irregular stems tend to be distributed:

IT Verb Stems	Non-Finite
Infinitive	INF
Past Part.	PP
Pres. Part.	IMP

Italian Verb Stems		Present		Imperfect		Fut/Cond		P. Remoto
		Ind	Subj	Ind	Subj	Fut	Cond	Reg	Irr
Singular	1		1SG	IMP		FUT			REM
	2	3SG						IMP
	3								REM
Plural	1		1PL					IMP
	2	IMP
	3	1SG							REM

Here's what the abbreviations mean:

INF

Infinitive stem

PP

Past Participle stem

1SG

First-person singular stem

3SG

Third-person singular stem

1PL

First-person plural stem

IMP

Imperfect stem

FUT

Future/Conditional stem

REM

Passato Remoto stem

Now look back at rimanere. See how the 1SG stem rimang- gets used six times in the present tense and the FUT stem rimar- gets used twelve times in the future/conditional? This is a pattern you'll see over and over.

These eight stems are all heavily used forms. Half of the stems come from the present indicative. A single stem covers both imperfect tenses. A single stem covers the future and the conditional.

Even the passato remoto forms are heavily used by narrators in novels. A third-person narrator uses the two third-person forms, while a first-person narrator uses those as well as the first-person singular. (I suppose a first-person narrator could also use the first-person plural, but that's actually rather rare in most books.)

And you don't usually need to learn all eight anyway.

Relations between stems

For a perfectly regular verb, the other seven stems are the same as the infinitive stem, of course. Even for an irregular verb there are often connections between the stems that let you avoid learning all eight of them in most cases.

The imperfect stem is extremely important because when it differs from the infinitive stem, it drags several others along with it. All of the present-tense stems usually follow the imperfect over the infinitive.

The three irregular forms of the passato remoto tend to follow the past participle, although it would be more accurate to say they're "inspired" by it. A common transformation is for the letter 't' to become 's'. For example, the past participle of leggere (to read)  is letto and the passato remoto for "I read" is lessi.

Here's a summary of how the different stems influence each other:

INF: IMP, FUT, PP
IMP: 1SG, 3SG, 1PL
PP: REM

Irregular infinitives

It seems very strange to think that an infinitive could ever be irregular, but that's the best way to think of verbs like trarre, which seems to be missing an e from the stem, and bere, which has a different stem from all of it's inflected forms.

For the verbs with missing vowels, we'll select the stems as if the vowels were there all along. So we'll treat trarre as if it were trarere. It has an infinitive stem of trar- and an imperfect stem of tra-. It generates the future tenses with a null theme vowel and all the rest with a theme of e.

In the case of bere, the infinitive stem isn't used for anything but the infinitive itself. The imperfect stem, bev-, is used everywhere else except the future/conditional (berr-) and the passato remoto (bevv-).

What is not a stem

Sometimes a stem changes spelling in order to preserve the sound. So mangiare drops the i whenever it doesn't need it to get a soft 'g' sound. e.g. "I will eat" is io mangerò not *io mangiero. This sort of orthographic change I don't count as creating a different stem, since the pronunciation is regular.

Super-Irregular Verbs

There are only ten super-irregular verbs: andare, avere, dare, dovere, essere, fare, potere, sapere, stare, and volere. What makes them super-irregular is that they break the rule that the 1SG form gets used for the third-person plural. E.g. andare has io vado but loro vanno (not *loro vadano). These same verbs often break the rule that the second and third-person singular have the same stem. So lui va but tu vai (not *tu vi).

They follow some patterns of their own, and they're probably best learned all at once. Most of them are not irregular outside the present tense and the past participle. But there are exceptions.

Present Tense, Subjunctive

Four verbs generate the entire present subjunctive from the first-person plural, largely because they have super-short first-person singular forms. These are avere, dare, sapere, and stare. 

Imperfect

For almost all verbs, the imperfect indicative and the imperfect subjunctive share the same stem. The only exceptions are dare, essere, and stare.  Essere even uses a different set of endings in the imperfect indicative. Except for essere, the regular half of the passato remoto follows the imperfect subjunctive while the present tenses follow the imperfect indicative.

Gerund

This always uses the imperfect indicative stem, with the sole exception of essere, which is essendo. Essere is the ultimate super-irregular verb.

Families of Verbs

According to A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, Second Edition (Maiden and Robustelli, 2007, pp. 240-242 Table 14A), if you learn how to conjugate every verb in a particular list of forty, that's enough to conjugate every verb in Italian. The reason for that is that sets of verbs that end the same way are conjugated the same way. For example, if you can conjugate correre then you can conjugate occorrere, concorrere, and soccorrere.

I've asked the publisher for permission to reproduce that table--if only to show how finite the problem really is. Even so, rather than try to memorize such a table, it's probably better just to try to get a feel for it over time. Verbs that "sound the same" get conjugated the same way too. After all, despite all the rules you might learn, you eventually need to get to the point where you do this by instinct.

So, yes, there is a lot to learn, but if you do it gradually, there are all sort of patterns that will help you out. Like much of the rest of the language, over time it will become second nature.

How to Memorize German Cases

German presents a bewildering combination of attributes: masculine, feminine, neuter, plural, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, which combine in complicated ways across nouns, pronouns, determiners, and adjectives. Remembering how they all go together seems almost impossible. To make this easier, I've taken a shot at identifying the underlying patterns to make it easier to memorize all of this.

To speak well, you must reach the point where you generate the correct forms without thinking about it, but it helps a lot to have some rules to follow in the meantime. A useful tip is don't try to learn all the rules at once. Instead, as you find things that confuse you, refer back to the tables and memorize a bit more of them. For example, if you already know about masculine, feminine, and neuter, and you have just discovered that there is an accusative case in addition to the nominative one, then look at the tables below but ignore the dative and genitive rows for now.

What Do All These Things Even Mean?

Obviously if you don't even know what "nominative" or "accusative" mean in the first place, these explanations will do you very little good. I'll give a quick explanation in terms of English. I'm only going to explain the main uses of case, so don't be surprised when you learn there are others.

I'm going to assume that you already know the difference between singular and plural, and that you have already figured out that German has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.

In English, only personal pronouns (I, me, you, he, him, etc.) have case. Case is what makes "he" different from "him" and "she" different from "her." You would never say "*Him called she," and that's because the subject of the sentence has to be in the nominative case and the direct object has to be in the accusative case.  The subject is whatever performed the action of the verb. If the verb is "called" then "he" did the calling, so he is in the nominative case. The direct object is the thing directly affected by the verb. "She" is nominative case, so we need the accusative form, her. "He called her" is the grammar English requires, so if you speak English, you already know a little bit about case--you just didn't realize it.

Indirect objects in English also get the accusative case. You say "He gave her the letter" not "*He gave she the letter." The letter is the thing that got given, so it's the direct object. The woman is only indirectly affected, so "her" is the indirect object.

The other place you can get case is from a preposition. If you're talking about a horse, you could say "the saddle is on him" but not "*the saddle is on he". English prepositions always take the accusative case--just like direct and indirect objects do.

From this, it's kind of obvious that English only has two cases: Nominative and accusative. It's also obvious that they only apply to pronouns. In German, not only do the personal pronouns have case, so do the adjectives and (to a limited extent) the nouns as well. Also, in addition to the nominative and accusative cases, German also has a dative case for indirect objects and a genitive case to indicate possession. Finally, different prepositions require different cases.

That's all stuff you learn as part of learning German. There's a nice, lengthy description of what German case is all about on the About.com site, if you want more details.

Beyond this point, I'm going to assume you know all about what this stuff is for and that your main goal is how to memorize all of it.

The Basic Pattern

The Der Words

People talk a lot about the "der words," which are the words like der, dieser, jeder, welcher etc. They are what linguists call determiners, which you can think of as a special kind of adjective that comes at the start of a noun phrase. (The determiner comes first, then all the adjectives, and the noun comes last--just like in English.) You usually hit them right off the bat because "the" is such an important word.

They all follow this pattern:

Der Words	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-er	-es	-e	-e
Accusative	-en
Dative	-em		-er	-en
Genitive	-es			-er

Almost everything else in the world of German case will follow some variation on this pattern. In a very real sense, this table is 90% of what you need to memorize, so learn it and learn it well. My strategy was to try to write this chart from memory every morning before starting my German lessons. It only takes a few seconds, and it's well worth it.

Ironically, der itself  is slightly irregular. Neuter Nominative/Accusative is das not des, and Feminine/Plural is die not de. Since these are some of the most common words in the language, memorizing them isn't a big deal. Most of the other der words follow the table above perfectly, but you'll need to learn exceptions as you come to them.

Here are some simple observations on the table above that may make it easier to memorize:

• There are no genders in the plural--only in the singular.
• The accusative only exists as a separate case for the masculine singular.
• There are effectively only two cases for the feminine.
• In the dative and genitive, there are effectively only two genders.

The nominative and accusative of the feminine are the same as for the plural, but I don't suggest making a big deal out of that because it fails when we get to weak forms of adjectives.

The Ein words

These are also determiners. Ein, kein, mein, dein, etc. are all ein words. They follow almost exactly the same pattern as the der words except that two of the masculine and neuter forms lose their endings entirely.

Ein Words	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-	-	-e	-e
Accusative	-en
Dative	-em		-er	-en
Genitive	-es			-er

Pay attention to those two empty slots: we're going to say that those are places where the determiner is "weak." That is, we'll say that einen, einem, eines, eine, and einer are "strong" but ein is "weak." This will matter when we talk about adjectives later.

Personal Pronouns

These are the words like he, she, it, me, etc. I'm going to do two very unorthodox things here: first, I'm going to treat the third-person personal pronouns separately from the rest. Second, I'm going to replace the genitive with the possessive. I'm a linguist, and I know that's wrong in linguistic terms, but for the purpose of memorization, I think it helps a lot. You'll see why.

Third-person personal pronouns

I think one place a lot of textbooks go wrong is that they try to treat all the personal pronouns at once. This is a big mistake because it crams the different kinds of third-person pronouns into two cells and completely obscures the fact that they follow almost the same pattern as the der words.

Personal Pronouns	3rd Person Singular			3rd Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	er	es	sie	sie
Accusative	ihn
Dative	ihm		ihr	ihnen
Possessive	sein			ihr

I have replaced the genitive case with the possessive here because the real genitive personal pronouns are almost obsolete.  This is another chart worth producing from memory every morning for a while.

The words on the possessives row mean "his," "her," and "their." Unlike the other words in the table, they get further modified based on the gender, number, and case of the thing being possessed, and they follow the pattern of the ein words above. So "his cat" (in the nominative) is seine Katze; the possessor (masculine) determines which pronoun and the object (feminine) determines the ending.

If you really do need the genitive pronouns for some reason, just add -er to the words on the bottom row. That gives you seiner and ihrer.

First and Second-Person Personal Pronouns

The first and second-person pronouns follow a completely different pattern. They have to. 

Personal Pronouns	Singular		Plural
	1st Person	2nd Person	1st Person	2nd Person
Nominative	ich	du	wir	ihr
Accusative	mich	dich	uns	euch
Dative	mir	dir
Possessive	mein	dein	unser	euer

They don't fit the pattern, of course, because they have no gender. You learn them quite early when you study German, and the fact that they follow such a different pattern from everything else doubtless causes lots of confusion. It helps to know they're their own thing.

As with the third-person pronouns, each of the words on the possessive row generates a whole set of ein words. This is another chart worth trying to write from memory every morning.

Again, if you really need the genitive personal pronouns for some reason, add -er to the words that don't already end in -er. That gives you meiner, deiner, unser, and euer. 

Adjectives

Strong  forms of adjectives

An adjective is "strong" when it has a weak ein word in front of it or when it doesn't have any determiner at all. For example, "I like red apples." (Remember that a weak ein word is one that doesn't have any ending on it.)

Strong Form Adjectives	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-er	-es	-e	-e
Accusative	-en
Dative	-em		-er	-en
Genitive	-en			-er

Notice that these are exactly like the der words except for the Masculine/Neuter Genitive (in bold). I'm told that even native Germans sometimes make the mistake of using -es instead of -en for these.

The way to think of this is that the information in the der-word table has to be conveyed somehow, and if the determiner is weak or absent, then the adjective has to do it. (As long as the leader is strong, everyone else can be weak.)

Weak forms of adjectives

When an adjective has a der word or a strong ein word in front of it, it takes a much simpler set of endings.

Weak Form Adjectives	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-e	-e		-en
Accusative	-en
Dative	-en
Genitive

If it weren't for the masculine accusative, this would be really simple. This is the last chart worth trying to write from memory every morning.

Some books talk about a "mixed" form, and they have a separate table to show what happens to adjectives when they follow one of the ein words. That saves remembering that some ein words are weak (but you have to learn that anyway) at the expense of having to memorize yet another table. (I took this idea from Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, Chapter 6.2 "The Use of the Strong and Weak Declensions.") There are other weak determiners, with their own patterns. (For example etwas takes no endings at all.) Hammer's rule of "use the strong adjective ending when the determiner has no ending and use the weak ending when the determiner has a der-word ending" works very well for those too.

So what happens if you have two or more adjectives in a row? They all take their form from the determiner, not from each other.

Summary

Everything keys off the der words. Learn those well. They aren't a perfect guide, but they're awfully good. Learn the exceptions as you come to them.

Good luck!

How to Make a Gold Duolingo Tree

Finishing Duolingo isn't enough; you want all the skills to be "gold," and you want them to stay gold. In this post, I'll talk about how to "regild" a completed tree, what to do about weak skills if you're half-way through a tree, and how to keep a tree gold from the very start. I'll also discuss how to do this in a way that actually teaches you something--it shouldn't be an exercise in aesthetics!

Those who are impatient can just skip straight to the end and read what I recommend as the best practice. For everyone else, I'll explain what it is we're talking about and how I reached the conclusions I did.

The Decaying Tree

When you first finish a skill, Duolingo turns its icon gold, and five "strength bars" (like on your phone) appear beside it. If you don't do regular "strengthening" exercises, though, the strength bars will gradually weaken from five to one, and at anything less than five, the skill appears in its original color--not gold. This is what we mean by "strong skills" and "weak skills." "Regilding the tree" means doing enough exercises to turn the whole tree gold again.

People who do new lessons but never do review lessons get used to the way a wave of color chases them down their tree. Those who took the placement test and skipped over a large part of the tree are often stunned when a huge slab abruptly turns color all at once. In both cases, Duolingo is sending a message that those are skills that ought to be reviewed. This post is for those who want to do something about weak skills and who want to enhance their language learning at the same time.

Why Bother?

As Duolingo warns, if you don't review what you learned, you'll start to forget it. Lots of people eventually abandon Duolingo because they get about a third of the way down the tree and then they have terrible trouble finishing new lessons, due to the fact that they've forgotten too much of the earlier material. Doing regular review lessons spares you from this.

Duolingo has a decent algorithm that tries to target the things you most need to review. Done right, the review lessons really shouldn't end up being a waste of time--they should help you solidify your understanding of the language. And they often contain material you didn't see when you did the skill for the first time.

Two Kind of Strengthening Exercises

To reverse this decay process, you can either do a skill-specific strengthening exercise or a general strengthening exercise. To do a skill-specific one, you pick a weakened skill and click on its icon. On the right, you'll see a colored box showing the strength of the skill, and inside that box is a button to strengthen the skill. Press that button and Duolingo gives you a review lesson targeting the skill as a whole. That is, it doesn't just repeat one of the lessons--it asks you questions drawn from all of them.

Because it only takes 17 correct answers to complete a lesson, and because Duolingo usually has far more than 17 possible questions per lesson, when you do a review lesson you will frequently see sentences you never saw when you did the skill in the first place. Usually not entirely new words, but you'll definitely see new ways to use the old words.

Depending on how weak the skill is and how big it is (i.e. how many words it covers), a single strengthening exercise may not be enough to make it gold again. Repetition may be necessary. On the other hand, occasionally you'll strengthen some entirely different skill that just happens to share a few words with the one you were trying to strengthen.

To do a general strengthening exercise, you go back to the main menu and click the blue "Strengthen Skills" button on the far right of the screen." This brings up a review lesson that has a random mix of things you have already studied but that Duolingo thinks are weakest.

Because the benefits of the general exercise are spread across the entire tree, it usually strengthens anywhere from zero to three skills--some people have reported as many as 13.

In short, your tree weakens over time, and you have to do strengthening exercises if you want it to stay (or become) gold. The question is how often to do them and what kind to do. To answer that, we'll start with a look at Duolingo's algorithm--what's known of it, anyway.

How it Works

Duolingo does not publish much about the algorithms they use for weakening and strengthening, but they did make at least one posting with hints about it. Further, a Duolingo user with the handle pinkodoug has made an extensive study of the Duolingo JavaScript and he has some plausible ideas about their algorithms for strengthening and weakening.

Drawing from those sources plus my own experiments, here's my best guess as to what they do. (N.B. these are my conclusions, so if they're wrong blame me--not the sources above.)

To Duolingo, strength is about words, not skills. Strong words have a score of 100%, and they decay over time until they reach zero. All words are decaying all the time, but some words decay faster than others.

You can actually see this if you click on the "Words" tab at the top of the home screen.

This shows all the words that Duolingo thinks you've studied so far. It tells you how long ago you practiced each one, and it gives each word's current strength using a bar system that goes from 1-4 (not 1-5 the way skills do). If you sort by "Last Practiced," you'll see that the older words tend to be weak while the latest words are almost all 4-bars strong. This is because all words weaken over time, but, as I said before, some words decay faster than others. We'll get back to this last point in a minute.

Every skill is associated with a set of words--probably the same words that you see in the individual lesson descriptions. Whenever those words have an average strength of 2.5 bars or more, the skill is gold. Otherwise, it shows the original color, and the skill-strength declines based on some function of the average word strength.

Whenever you do a review lesson, it targets some number of your weakest words for review. A skill-specific review only picks words from that one skill. A general review picks words from every lesson you've completed so far. Otherwise they're the same--with one important exception: in the tips that Duolingo offered, they said that skill-specific strengthening turns your tree gold faster than general strengthening does.

As long as you complete the review lesson, the targeted words all get set back to four bars whether you get them right or not. The catch is that getting them right makes them decay slower in the future. Getting them wrong or using the hints makes them decay faster. This is why some people report making tremendous efforts to strengthen every single skill only to watch them start decaying again a few days later.

The fact that some people seem to keep their trees gold without much effort suggests that there actually is an optimal way to do this. To determine what that might be, I did a few experiments--with help from a friend.

Experiments

Greg's French Tree

For the past twelve months, I have been slowly going through Duolingo's French tree, following a rule of doing two review lessons per day followed by one new lesson. In that time, I have completed most of the tree, and it has never weakened. That is, although an individual skill has weakened two or three times, I simply strengthened it specifically and thus ended the day with a solid-gold tree. During that time, I had three different week-long vacations during which I couldn't do lessons. Even so, when I got back, the tree was still gold. Others have reported similar experiences.

This suggested to me that it is possible to have a durable gold tree without a whole lot of work. That is, it seemed that as few at two general strengthening exercises per day might be enough, if done daily for a long enough time.

Naomi's Italian Trees

My friend Naomi in New Zealand was interested in exploring this, and she agreed to help do a few experiments. She had finished her English-to-Italian tree (aka the "forward tree") in just a few months and wanted to gild it. She had also just completed the Italian-to-English tree (aka the "reverse tree") in a single day and wanted to keep it gold.

The experiment was very simple: On her forward tree, she did two general strengthens per day. On the reverse tree, she did three general strengthens per day. Back when Duolingo allowed you to fail, she would persist until she completed that number, although, as it happens, she rarely failed an exercise.

Here's what happened.

With three general strengthens per day, the reverse tree got worse for about 40 days, leveled off for about a month, and then started improving in an irregular sort of way.

The forward tree decayed steadily, reaching 57 weak skills on day 91. At that point, we changed our strategy.

Starting on day 92, Naomi began doing three skill-specific exercises instead of two or three general ones. She selected the skills to strengthen by picking the weak skills highest in her tree. She applied the same algorithm to both trees.

We only have 13 days of data with the new method, but the results speak for themselves.

This graph shows how many weak skills were left each day after Naomi did her strengthening exercises. This shows that the reverse tree was 100% regilded on day 99 and that it has remained so for six days now. On the present trend, the forward tree will be regilded in two more weeks.

Obviously this strongly suggests doing the per-skill exercises rather than the general ones--just as Duolingo had advised people. In fact, the per-skill exercises appear to be more than three-times as effective at regilding. It also suggests that two exercises per day was not enough.

We adopted one additional rule: substitute general exercises for specific ones if there are no weak skills left, but never do more than two general exercises on the same day. That is, if the tree has any weak skills, then Naomi still does three strengthening exercises--padding them out with general ones as needed, but if the tree was solid gold to begin with, then she only does two generals, not three. The idea is that, like with my French tree, a durable gold tree should eventually need only two per day to maintain it.

Note: Throughout the process, Naomi reported that the algorithm seemed to have a knack for finding exactly the things she was weakest on. She felt the exercise improved her Italian enormously, even if she did spend 91 days making no visible progress on regilding her trees.

Greg's Spanish and Italian Trees

During this time, I let my own Spanish and Italian trees decay. (Both had been gold on day zero of Naomi's experiment.) Over the next month or two I'll try to reproduce the results from Naomi's trees, but I wanted to share one key result that I got on the first day:

For the best learning experience, you should strengthen from bottom-up instead of top-down.

The reason to prefer bottom up is that it drills you in the skills you most-recently learned--the skills you are most likely to need help in. You'll discover that Duolingo has a lot more material for those skills that you never saw when you did them the first time. Most people have a weak grip on the last skills in a tree, so it makes a great deal of sense to prioritize strengthening them first. In contrast, the stuff at the top of the tree is far easier to do, but it's also far less valuable to review.

The exception would be for someone trying to resurrect a long-unused tree or for someone who has become overwhelmed and is considering quitting. Those folks should strengthen from the top down because it's equivalent to starting over, in a way, without losing everything you learned the first time. (In my view, no one should ever delete their Duolingo tree and start over.)

Other Issues

I always advise people to avoid timed practices and not to use the mouse-over hints unless absolutely necessary. I'll explain my reasoning for both suggestions.

Timed Practices

You buy the ability to do timed practices at the lingot store. It's a one-time purchase, but it's still a bad deal. The way it works is that when do a review Duolingo offers you the option to do timed practice instead of the normal kind. In fact, it becomes the default.

In timed practice, you only have a few seconds before the clock runs out and you lose the round. Every correct answer puts more time on the clock, so you need to go like lightening to keep ahead. In theory, this helps you develop the skills to handle conversation in real time.

Many of the people I've talked to who reported doing lots and lots of review lessons with little progress on regilding their trees told me they were doing timed practices. I think this strengthens the tree slowly because time pressure encourages people to skip long sentences. The earlier post from Duolingo said that every word counts, so it would make sense that skipping the long sentences would really hurt you.

Given that Duolingo's new UI is much more forgiving of mistakes, it probably makes more sense to try to get the same effect by simply going through the exercises as fast as you can, accepting the fact that you'll make more errors. As a bonus, when you do make an error, you can stop and study what you did wrong. Anyway, if you want to regild your tree, you should probably stay away from timed practice.

Hints

The other thing that seems to be strongly associated with lack of success is using hints. Using a hint means doing a lesson and mousing over a word to get Duolingo to show you the definition.

Unfortunately Duolingo takes this as a hint that you don't know that word at all, and it makes that word decay faster. Do use the hints if you really don't know the word. (We want to help Duolingo figure out what you really need to study, after all.) But don't use them just because you want to be 100% sure of a word before you press return.

Summary

Plan to do three exercises per day. If you can't invest that much effort, you probably can't do this in a reasonable time. With that, here is the system I recommend for making durable gold trees with Duolingo:

• Always do a skill-specific strengthening exercise if there are any weak skills in your tree at all. Only do a general strengthening exercise if there are no more weak skills to do.
• If there are multiple weak skills to choose from, always pick the one that is furthest down the tree. (That is, prefer skills you learned later over ones you learned earlier.) But, if you are effectively starting over (e.g. after a long absence or because you're overwhelmed) then pick the highest (that is easiest) weak skills first.
• For an incomplete tree, do two strengthening exercises and then do one new exercise every day. If you're not ready for a new exercise, do a third strengthening exercise instead.
• For a complete tree that isn't all gold, do three strengthening exercises every day, using general strengthening exercises if you run out of skill-specific ones.
• For a complete, solid-gold tree, only do two strengthening exercises per day--both of which have to be general ones, of course.

Never do a timed practice. Never use hints.

Finally, take your time. Don't try to regild your tree in a day or two of inhumanly focused effort--followed by a month of neglect. A steady effort over a long period of time is the best way to do this. You'll learn the most that way, and it won't burn you out.

If you follow this plan, assuming that you are doing your best on the exercises, your tree will eventually be "durable gold," meaning it will stay gold with minimal effort on your part, even if you go on vacation for a week or so. How long it will take to get there depends on a lot of things, but a month or two seems typical. (It depends on how well you do the exercises and on how deeply decayed your tree was in the first place.) Have at it, and best of luck!

I would love to hear from anyone who gives this a try. Leave a comment and let me know how it went.

Using Anki Flashcards for Vocabulary Drill

To read effectively, you need to learn thousands of words, mostly by rote. Flashcards are the tool par excellence for rote memorization, but, unfortunately, they become unwieldy beyond a few hundred cards. Anki is a free computer program that lets you comfortably manage the thousands of cards you'll need if you want to comfortably read books in foreign languages. This posting discusses how I use Anki, and shows you how to set up decks the same way I do.

What are Flashcards?

In its simplest form, a flashcard is a 3×5 index card with an English word or phrase (e.g. "to walk") written on one side and the corresponding foreign word (e.g. marcher) on the reverse. Make cards for the vocabulary you want to learn, shuffle the deck, and voila: instant random vocabulary quiz. Deal the cards one at a time and try to guess what's on the other side. Ones you get right go into a discard pile. Wrong ones you stick back into the middle of the deck. When you have discarded all the cards, reshuffle the deck and repeat until you can make a pass without any mistakes.

The astonishing thing about flashcards is how fast you learn. On the first pass, you typically get up to half the words because the simple act of creating the cards has taught you that much. On the second pass, that jumps to 90% or more. On the third or fourth pass, you get all or all but one or two, and by that point you're zipping through the cards just as fast as you can deal them.

Drilling with flashcards is fast, effective, and immensely satisfying. It's hard to imagine mastering a language without them. But you really don't want to do this with paper cards.

What's the Problem with Paper Flashcards?

If you just keep adding new words to the same deck, you run into a number of problems

• Beyond one or two hundred cards the deck becomes impossible to shuffle.
• No matter how fast as you are, a quiz with hundreds of cards takes a long time.
• The deck fills up with words you know really well, and you start to feel you're wasting time reviewing them over and over.

You can avoid this by making multiple decks. That works to some degree for a language class, where you make a new deck for each new lesson and you don't review the old ones until exam time, when you dump them all together for a few marathon study sessions. If you do it that way, you'll find you retain some words pretty well, even after weeks, while you forget others almost at once. That may be okay for passing quizzes, but it's not what you need if your objective is to actually use the language. What you really want is a system that separates the "easy" cards from the hard ones.

In other words, you want the computer to organize it for you.

How does Anki work?

The Anki program lets you create decks on your computer and it handles running and scoring the drills. He's an example card from my English/French deck:

It's showing me the English side of the card and prompting me to type the French translation of "to walk" in the box. The phrase "move on feet" is a hint which I put there to remind me that this does not mean "walk the dog," which would require a different verb in French.

When I type marcher and press enter, Anki shows me the answer:

The green highlight on the word I typed means that my answer completely agreed with the expected answer. Below it is the content of the French side of the card plus the pronunciation of the word.

I can press any of the three buttons below that to indicate whether I got the word wrong ("Again") or got it right ("Good") or thought it was really easy ("Easy"). The numbers above the buttons indicate how long Anki will wait before showing me this card again. Cards that you get right over and over are rescheduled further and further into the future so you don't waste time going over them again and again.

Unlike a physical flashcard deck, Anki treats the French-to-English cards as being separate from the English-to-French ones. That makes sense because, for example, it is much easier to guess that extrême means "extreme" but much harder to remember that the French word needs a circumflex on the second 'e'. Whenever you do a drill, Anki mixes both kinds together. That is, some cards will show you English and expect French while others will show you French and expect English.

Anki is smart enough not to give you the same word in both directions on the same day, but here's what the French side of the card above looks like:

In this case the hint, "French," is there because otherwise I couldn't tell if this was the French verb "to walk" or the English noun for "a person who marches." I'll answer with just "walk" and not "to walk." Here's the result:

Anki shows me how my answer differs from the desired answer, but it still leaves it up to me to decide if my answer was good enough or not. In this case, I'd clearly mark it "Good" or even "Easy." Obviously that means I could just skip typing the words entirely, but I find that typing them keeps me honest. (I use the US International Keyboard layout to input characters that don't exist in English, by the way.)

Notice a couple of things about these cards: First, I only have to type the words, not the hints. Second, the pronunciation never appears with the question--only with the answer. That's very helpful because if it appeared with the English question, it would give the word away, but if it appeared with the French question, then I couldn't use it to help practice pronouncing the word. Always having it on the answer side means I can pronounce the French word out loud before I flip the card and then check myself. As always, it's up to me whether I count a pronunciation error as a serious enough error to call the card wrong.

Every day, Anki decides which cards you need to review (again, counting French-to-English as separate cards from English-to-French) and sets up a drill for you. It limits the drill to 100 cards (even if you skip a day), and you can stop in the middle of a drill and resume later (or not) if you need to. When you're done with the drill, every card will have a new review date, and Anki can show you some cool statistics to help you track how well you're doing.

For complete information, as always, read the manual. Anki has lots and lots of features.

How Do You Set it Up?

Download the app

The first thing you need to do is go to the Anki Website and download the program. Yes, this is a program, not a web application, so you actually have to install it on your PC. Don't worry--it's worth it.

Once it's installed, start the program. It should look something like this:

Yours won't say "Test Profile," most likely. There's no reason to name the profile until you want to have more than one, so don't worry about that for now. I didn't need a second profile until I wrote this article.

Creating a Deck

Downloading the Sample

The Anki User manual gives you lots of options for configuring a deck, but none of the defaults was quite what I wanted, and I went through a good bit of trial and error before I had something I was happy with. To make this easier for others, I have created a trivial sample deck. You can download it from here. The file called Sample.apkg is the one you want. If you've already installed Anki, simply download Sample.apkg and open it. That should cause Anki to import the Sample deck. Or you can just copy the file to your PC and import it manually. To do a manual import after you've downloaded Sample.apkg, run Anki, click on the File menu and select Import.

Either way, once you've imported the Sample deck, Anki should look something like this:

We've only downloaded the Sample deck so we can use the card type "Vocabulary," which is inside it. As soon as you have created a deck of your own, you can delete "Sample."

Creating your own deck

Click on the "Create Deck" button at the bottom of the dialogue box. Give your deck a reasonable name like "French Vocabulary."

You should see this on your screen now:

Click on your new, completely empty deck.

This is Anki's way of saying that you have no more cards scheduled to review today. Not a surprise, since you don't have any cards at all yet. Up at the top in the middle, find the "Add" menu and click on that. It should pop up this dialogue box:

You may need to resize it to get it all to show. Be sure it says "Vocabulary" in the upper left-hand corner (after the word "Type"). If not, click on whatever type is does say and select "Vocabulary" from the list. The whole point of downloading my Sample deck was to get you the Vocabulary type because it describes the layout of the cards and defines the fields.

So let's create a card. As you can see, we have five fields to fill in. Let's take them one by one.

Front: This is where you put the English word. I follow the rule that I always put "the" with nouns and "to" with infinitives, which helps me distinguish "to walk" from "the walk". Use a word from the language you're actually studying. This time I'll use "the leaf."

Back: This is where you put the word in the language you're studying. In this case, I'll put la feuille.

The next three fields are all optional, but when you need them, they're very useful.

Comment: This field that always shows with the answer but never with the question. I'll put the pronunciation here, but you can put anything you want there. I get the pronunciations from WordReference. In fact, to be safe, I like to copy the text from the Back field and paste it into WordReference just to be sure I didn't mistype it. That also tells me if the word has multiple meanings. Then I can click on the English word (still in WordReference) and see if that has multiple meanings. When there's ambiguity, I use the next two fields to clear it up.

FrontHint: This is shown with the English word, but it isn't part of the answer when you're drilling from French to English. I use this for three purposes: first, as in the "to walk" example, to clarify which meaning of the English word I want. "move on two feet" clarifies that I don't mean "e.g. walk your dog." For "leaf" I can say "e.g. on a tree."

The second reason I use a hint is when the target language has synonyms and I want to be clear which one I want. For example, cependant and pourtant in French both mean "yet" or "however". The difference is that cependant augments the first clause while poutrant contradicts it, but this is way too complicated to express in the hint. Instead, I just put "not pourtant" or "not cependant". The long explanation can go into the Comment field.

The third reason is when an English word and a French word have the same spelling and I need to specify that this is English. If the word and the translation are identical, I usually won't bother to create a card at all, so this doesn't happen very often. (E.g. "intelligent" in English is intelligent in French, so I don't bother to create a card unless I'm concerned about the pronunciation.)

BackHint: This field works just like the FrontHint, except that you see it with the French word. It's very important not to give too much away in this field. I want to memorize the French words--not my hints. I in this case, I feel safe saying "not sheet," and I add a bit more explanation to the Comment field.

Here's what it looks like all filled out. Again, don't bother with the three optional fields unless you need them; there's no reason to make extra work for yourself.

Now click the "Add" button. This actually adds two cards: an English-to-French one and a French-to-English one. In Anki terms we have created a single "note" which comprises two "cards." You create and edit notes but you drill on cards. If you realize you have made a mistake, you can click on the "History" button and it will let you edit the earlier notes (and this will fix both cards). If you look back at my examples of what a quiz looks like, you'll notice there is an "Edit" button in the lower left corner. That lets you edit notes in the same way even in the middle of a quiz.

Enter ten or so of your own vocabulary words and click the "Close" button when you're done. You should see a screen like this one:

Press the "Study Now" button and see how you do!

In a future post, I'll offer some tips and tricks to get the most out of Anki.

Duolingo: Language Learning as a Game

What is Duolingo? (Updated December 30, 2014)

Duolingo is an award-winning free, web-based program for learning foreign languages. Duolingo manages to make language learning fun by turning it into a video game, but, more important, it also manages to be very effective. It presently offers English speakers a choice of five languages (plus four in beta and seven under development), and has lots of options for non-English speakers as well.

I have been using Duolingo since January 2014 (351 days as of December 30, 2014). I have completed the Spanish and Italian courses, I expect to finish the French one in April 2015, and I have just started the German one. I'm very impressed with Duolingo, and I strongly encourage anyone who wants to learn a language to give it a try. For a free service, the quality is astonishing.

And it's not just me. In a December 2014 article, PC Magazine said, "Duolingo is the best free online language-learning service." So it's worth taking a look at it.

In this posting, I'll describe the basics of how to use Duolingo, I'll talk a bit about how it works, and I'll finish up with suggestions on how to get the most out of it. I won't talk about the mobile version (even though I know it's very popular) simply because I haven't tried it myself. Nor will I talk about the "Immersion" feature, in which advanced students collaborate to translate documents.

How Do You Use Duolingo?

Skill Tree

Like any system for learning a language, Duolingo has a set of "skills" that you need to learn, divided between vocabulary (e.g. "Household," "Places," "Directions," etc.) and grammar (e.g. "Irregular Plurals," "Verbs: Past Imperfect," "Determiners," etc.) Unlike a textbook, which might have twenty chapters, Duolingo has a "tree" comprising 60 to 70 skills. Here's the top portion of my new German tree:

The gold skill, "Basics 1" is the only one I've completed so far (after three days). The two colorful ones under it represent skills that I'm allowed to attempt now. The gray ones below are skills I'm not allowed to try yet. When you complete the tree, you have "beaten the game." Note the similarity to a computer game where you complete quests that set you up to do more quests until you reach the final goal.

The upper right corner shows "experience points" (XP) which are earned by answering questions correctly. You earn XP by completing lessons, which advances you in the language (and opens more of the tree). XP lets you compare your progress with friends and family.

In the upper left corner, you can see that I'm currently at level 2 in German. Level is a function of the number of experience points (roughly the cube root, so each level requires more and more points). Again, note the similarity to a video game.

When you have finished all the skills, you have learned the language. If you did nothing but Duolingo, you would probably reach a CEFR level of A2. That's enough to "get by" if you travel somewhere. It's not enough to do much reading or hold serious conversations, but it'll sure impress your friends.

If you supplement Duolingo with other resources (as I'll describe later) you should easily reach B1 and possibly B2, at which point you can read newspapers and attempt novels. But even A2 is nothing to sneeze at. It sure is a lot more than you get out of most video games! It's quite a lot to get from a free one.

Lessons: Inside a skill

If you look closely at the tree above, you'll see that the "Basics 2" skill looks like a pie chart. That skill comprises five "lessons," and so far I have done two of them. If I click on Basics 2, I can see the whole list.

Each lesson is described in terms of which words it teaches. Lessons must be done in a particular order. If I click on "Lesson 3," it begins the quiz for that lesson.

Some lessons (especially the earlier ones) include grammar tips. It is almost always best to read these after attempting the lessons. Otherwise your eyes will glaze over--much as they might have in your high-school language classes. The best time to read a grammar rule is at the point where you're wondering "why do I have to say it like that?" Anyway, the tips are generally good--just don't think you have to read and understand them before doing a lesson.

Quizzes: How you complete lessons

Quizzes currently have seventeen questions, of which there are seven types:

1. Foreign to English Translation. These show you a sentence in the language you are trying to learn and ask you to translate it into English.
2. English to Foreign Translation. You see a sentence in English and must translate it into the foreign language.
3. Listening. You hear a sentence in the foreign language and must type what you hear. (Not a translation.)
4. Multiple choice. You are given a sentence in English and shown three sentences in the foreign language. You must pick the ones that correctly translate the English sentence. This works best if you try to do the translation before you look at the multiple choices.
5. Match the picture. You are shown a word in English and three pictures, each labeled with a foreign word. You pick the picture that matches the word. Most (not all) new vocabulary is introduced this way.
6. Translate one word. Sometimes it gives you a single word in English and asks you to type it in the target language.
7. Speak into the microphone. This one is supposed to test your pronunciation by having you read something, but I was unable to make it work at all. Reports from those who've tried it suggest that at this writing the feature doesn't work all that well at the best of times, so I didn't try too hard to fix the microphone problems. Disabling the mic in the settings menu makes these questions go away, and I think that's what most people do.

Most of the question types give you lots of opportunities to hear the foreign language spoken. You can repeat what you hear, but other than the speak-into-the-microphone question type, there's no feedback from the program.

Obviously the translation exercises have the problem that there are often hundreds or thousands of ways to translate a given sentence. The Spanish ¿Es su libro? Could mean "Is it your book" or "Is it his book" or "Is it her book" for example. Duolingo generally has all the reasonable translations, and it benefits from a mechanism for users to report missing ones, so it gets better over time.

In the year I've been on Duolingo, I have seen them adopt at least 100 of my suggestions, so they do listen to their users.

Questions

Here's an example of a German-to-English translation question with a correct answer.

The red bar across the top shows how much of the lesson I've done. The word in gold, sind, is new vocabulary in this lesson. the number 2 on the right is the total number of questions I've answered so far--right or wrong. Whenever I get an answer wrong, the bar moves one to the left. That means each wrong answer cancels out one correct answer. You never "die" (like in many video games), but it can take a long time to win. The only way to lose is to click that Quit button in the upper right.

Other types of questions have slightly different formats, but the basic idea is the same: answer questions to complete lessons. Complete lessons to master skills. Master all the skills to learn the language. That's the whole thing in a nutshell.

Review

If you look back at the skill tree, you'll see a long blue button on the right titled "Strengthen Skills." This creates a custom quiz based on the words or phrases you either seem to be having trouble with or which just haven't come up in a while. Doing review lessons doesn't advance you down the tree, but it does keep it from "weakening." If you don't do any review lessons, after a while the earlier skills will turn from gold back into some other color. They'll even have strength bars (like a wi-fi signal) that will gradually drop. It's Duolingo's way of saying that it thinks you haven't really learned this material. Weakened skills don't affect you finishing the tree, but most people want to keep their tree all gold. That's a good thing. I have written at length about the best strategy to keep a Duolingo tree gold.

The optimal mix seems to be to do two review lessons for every new lesson you attempt. You don't need to do a new lesson every day, but it's a good idea to do at least two review lessons each day. Three lessons a day takes about 30 minutes. (Longer if you do outside study.) If you can't commit 30 minutes a day to it, you probably shouldn't be trying to learn a new language in the first place.

If you really can do one new lesson every day, it takes about one year to finish a language. Since you'll have days when you don't want to do a new lesson, figure anywhere from 18 months to two years.

How does it work?

We don't need no grammar lessons

Despite the extensive grammar tips for the lesson above, Duolingo expects you to learn the language by trial and error--not by learning rules.

In a Redit Discussion in 2014, Luis Ahn, the founder of Duolingo said, "I, personally, don't like vocabulary, grammar or verb conjugation. My dream in life is to be able to teach you a language without you needing to read textbooks about indirect objects. In fact, I consider the use of grammar to be discriminatory against those who unfortunately didn't have a very good education in their own native language (which is the majority of the world's population). I think slapping 30 pages of grammar before every lesson is the easy way out -- instead we should strive for something that everybody can consume."

The person who approaches Duolingo purely as a video game will miss questions over and over until he/she has memorized the words and phrases needed to finish each lesson. Keeping the tree gold requires remembering all those words and phrases. The whole concept is that the brain will deduce the patterns so it can reduce the memorization effort and that after a while, correct expressions will start to "just feel right." To some degree, this really does happen.

The makers of Rosetta Stone have a similar philosophy: they too believe that through repeated exposure to sentences in the foreign language, your brain will naturally deduce the grammar rules, and you'll speak the language without ever having studied the grammar at all. After all, children learn their native languages without studying grammar at all.

Or do we?

Things aren't really this simple. Linguists don't believe that adults can learn languages the way children do, so one would expect a few problems. And there are.

Almost no one ever actually finishes Rosetta Stone. A University of Maryland Study showed that out of 150 people who had free access to it, all but one gave up during a twenty-week period. One wonders how they stay in business. My personal suspicion is that most people who paid $500 for the product a) blame themselves for not working hard enough and b) convince themselves that they're not really quitting--they're just putting it aside until "later."

Duolingo doesn't publish statistics, but it's clear from the discussion forums that only a fraction of those who start it ever finish their trees. City University of New York did a study that asked 88 people to use Duolingo for 30 hours over an eight-week period, or about half an hour per day.  One quarter of the people managed to do this. That sounds better than the Rosetta Stone numbers, but we don't know what the 20-week results would be like--never mind the 65-weeks it would take to finish the tree.

So it's not actually clear that Duolingo has a better success rate than Rosetta Stone, but it does have one very big advantage (other than being free): it has a strong online community.

Discussion as Study Group

If you look back at the last picture (of the failed French translation question), down at the bottom there's a button labeled "discuss sentence." If you click on that, it takes you to a forum where the users discuss the challenges of this specific sentence. These discussions are almost entirely about grammar.

Studying a language with Duolingo is like taking a college class from a professor who never bothers to show up to class, but somehow the TAs are regularly giving quizzes anyway, and they're harsh graders who can't be argued with. The discussion sessions are a study group where you and other students get together to try to teach yourselves the subject. Different people attempt to explain the rules, offering links to free outside material. Native speakers pop in to offer advice. And somehow it works. For those who stick with it, anyway.

Duolingo does listen. A year ago almost none of the lessons had any grammar tips whatsoever. In response to endless user complaints, they have gradually been adding more and more tips in more and more languages--and from what I can tell, those are largely based on the sort of questions users ask in the forums.

Supplemental Materials

I said above that if you do nothing but Duolingo, you'll reach A2 competence in the language in a bit over a year. But what if you want more?

Grammar Books

As with a video game, Duolingo has the equivalent of walk-throughs and game guides. These correspond to free online grammar sites and professionally-produced thousand-page grammar texts, respectively. For example, the French About.com Grammar site is extremely popular with Duolingo users. For the first few skill levels, that may be all you want, but as you move through the language you're likely to want something more solid eventually.

For French, I bought Schaum's Outline of French Grammar: Sixth Edition, and it's quite good. Serious students will want a "Reference Grammar," which is more like an encyclopedia of the language and dives deep into difficult areas. I use Advanced French Grammar (L'Huillier, 1999), but most language students probably won't want anything that heavy-duty.

Either way, whenever you see something you don't understand, you thumb through the grammar book until you've figured it out. This is something you'd probably spend thirty minutes on once or twice a week.

Dictionary

For French, Spanish, and Italian, nothing beats WordReference. This free online dictionary gives you definitions, pronunciations, conjugations for words and phrases, and it automatically searches forums that have ten years worth of answers to questions about the meanings of words.

Flash Cards

Duolingo does a great job of drilling you on grammar (even though it purports not to teach grammar), but it's a little weak on vocabulary drill. If you supplement it with a few minutes a day of flashcard drill, it will make a big difference.

Duolingo has a very simple built-in flashcard program, but it drills word forms (e.g. mangeais "I was eating") as opposed to headwords (e.g. manger "to eat") and it only drills from the language you're learning to English--not the other way around. There are no "glosses"(hints that let you distinguish otherwise-equivalent words) so, for example, when it prompts with tiens you don't know if it means "I keep" or "hey there". Finally, it doesn't drill phrases, which doesn't help if you want to learn that it's commencer à not de. Duolingo's flashcard program is very new (as of this writing), so it will probably get better over time.

Instead, I use the Anki flashcard program, which is a free download. I create the cards myself based on what I get wrong or need to look up on Duolingo each day. Then I do a daily drill of up to 100 words per language (bidirectionally, so, for example, when I drill French, I see a mix of English-French and French-English cards), which takes from ten to fifteen minutes. I have a posting about using Anki flashcards for vocabulary drill.

The Duolingo Wiki

Finally, serious, long-time Duolingo users have created a Wiki for Duolingo which gives countless tips on how to make the best use of the software. Again, any serious videogame has a fan-maintained Wiki that gives you all the details; if you use Duolingo, you should bookmark the Wiki.

Speaking and Writing

Duolingo doesn't do a lot to directly develop your skills at conversation or composition, but it definitely puts you in a good position to do this yourself. I use the Lang-8 site to practice writing, and I have used Meetup to find local conversation groups for Spanish, Italian, and French. These are things that make more sense to try when you are almost finished with your Duolingo tree.

Reading

I have written at length about the importance of reading novels to help learn foreign languages. I still think this is the best way to advance, once you have reached an intermediate level. When you have learned the past tense in a language, I think it's time to start trying to read newspapers. Most of the worlds major foreign-language newspapers make at least some articles available for free. For French, I was delighted to learn that Le Monde has lots of free online content. Try to read just a paragraph or two a day to exercise what you learned from Duolingo. Use Wordreference for anything you couldn't figure out.

Once you get to the point where you can read entire newspaper articles, try books. I have some suggestions for how to pick a foreign novel to read. If you do this, you'll be pleasantly surprised to discover that Duolingo has done a good job of selecting vocabulary; especially if you like action-adventure and/or crime novels.

Alternatively, use Duolingo's own "Immersion" feature, which lets you practice translation in a collaborative environment with other learners. (Think of it as the co-op version of the game.)

Whichever route you take, read. As soon as you are able to do it, read. Unlike speaking or writing, you can do it every single day, and it has the potential to lift your abilities in all the other skills simply because it boosts your vocabulary so much.

Conclusion

Duolingo is a remarkably effective free service for learning a foreign language. By making it into a game, the Duolingo people have managed to make learning fun. This may be the most effective way ever designed to learn a foreign language, short of studying abroad.