Duolingo really is speedrunning dystopia rn.

  • teft
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    4 days ago

    1200 days of language learning? Different languages or the same one? If it’s the same one you probably don’t need an app anymore. Try talking to natives in your chosen second language. You might be surprised how much you know. I used duo for about a year when i moved to a different language country. After that year i found it was holding me back more than helping.

    • @Balaquina@lemmy.ca
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      254 days ago

      The same language, but I only did about 15 minutes a day. I am more the “pick away at it a little bit” than an “immerse your entire life in it” kind of learner. I learned a lot, and can have basic conversations at this point, but I still have a long way to go and will continue using some kind of language app going forward. I watch media too which helps. Apps are just one tool of many.

    • queermunist she/her
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      4 days ago

      Do you just force yourself into their day and start talking at them? And you don’t feel guilty for forcing them to talk to you?

      Extroverts are wild lol

      • teft
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        I live in colombia so it’d be pretty difficult to find someone who doesn’t speak spanish. Why would i feel guilty for talking to someone? I don’t force anyone to talk i just talk to them normally. I find a lot of times if they know a little english they like to practice that as much as i like to practice spanish.

        • queermunist she/her
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          I don’t force anyone to talk i just talk to them normally.

          That’s the same thing - you interrupt their day and insert yourself into it by barging in to talk at them, forcing them to have an interaction with you.

          Why would i feel guilty for talking to someone?

          The fact that you’re asking this is amazing to me. You can’t even imagine it!

            • queermunist she/her
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              34 days ago

              To, what? Convince me that being talked at by a stranger when I have my own stuff going on isn’t rude and annoying? I certainly don’t like it when people do that to me!

              There are some spaces where being talked to by strangers is acceptable, but just doing it to everyone wherever in another country is alien behavior to me. I honestly don’t get it.

              Like, do they just sit next to strangers on the bus and talk at them? I think I’d die!

                • queermunist she/her
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                  14 days ago

                  Just confused. Where does someone in another country go to just talk to people without being annoying or rude? I can’t imagine it.

                  • I’m genuinely confused as to what you think they’re doing. Like, do you assume that they’re just barging into situations where they aren’t welcome? Are you assuming that they’re not using the same tact and discretion that one would use to engage in polite conversation anywhere else? What does it being in another country or language change?

                    I get the feeling that you don’t do much socializing outside of the internet, so I’ll let you know that yes, it is entirely normal for people to have polite and unexpected conversation in public or wherever. People can choose to disengage if they feel like it. Nobody is being held verbally hostage here. Just because you have difficulty interacting with others and find it annoying when people talk to you doesn’t mean that others feel the same way.

          • teft
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            4 days ago

            Dude you got issues if you can’t talk to people. How do you accomplish any task without interacting with people? And why learn a second language if you arent going to talk to others in said language?

              • @Sarcasmo220@lemmy.ml
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                64 days ago

                Everyone has different comfort levels when interacting with people. Try and find situations where you feel it would be less of a bother. For example, if Spanish is a language you are learning, you can go to a Spanish or Latin American restaurant, and mention you want to practice. It is worth asking if the server speaks the language, so as not to assume.

                  • Yes but it’s not fair to assume that everyone else is as averse to interaction as you are. Many people enjoy polite conversation as a distraction from the drudgery of their job.

      • @newfie@lemmy.ml
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        64 days ago

        Posts like this are a psy op to keep English language speakers (especially in North America) lonely and atomized. There are numerous state and nonstate actors who benefit from this

        If you are in public, you should expect to be spoken to. Conversations between strangers are an inherent part of existing in public in human society. Doing away with this causes loneliness on the level of a public health crisis

        • queermunist she/her
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          24 days ago

          You’re getting base and superstructure reversed.

          This feeling of the rudeness of interrupting other people in public spaces arises from our material conditions. There are limited hours in a day and we have to give up at least eight (or more) of those hours for wages/commuting. Then the other eight (or fewer) hours cram in as many chores, hobbies, chores, entertainment, and chores as we can before we have to sleep and go back to work.

          This produces hyper-alienated hyper-individuals that don’t talk to anyone and only work. It’s unhealthy and lonely.

          But you aren’t going to fix this by just forcing your way into other people’s lives and making them talk to you! That doesn’t change the material base. You’re just wasting whatever limited time they have between shifts and probably just ruining their day.

          Doing away with this requires restructuring society and production, not brute forcing the issue by talking at people.

          • @newfie@lemmy.ml
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            14 days ago
            1. Base and superstructure are not being reversed.

            To say that trying to talk to someone in public is “just superstructural” and therefore pointless misunderstands Marx’s dialectical method. The superstructure—culture, ideas, social practices—does indeed arise from the base, but it also plays an active role in reproducing the base. Marx writes in The German Ideology that the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class—but this doesn’t mean culture is irrelevant. It means that challenging the dominant cultural norms (such as social atomization or emotional withdrawal) can be part of building class consciousness.

            Casual human interaction and social warmth—even in public—are not distractions from revolution; they are preconditions for solidarity.

            1. Alienation is a problem to be fought in daily life, not just after the revolution.

            Yes, workers are alienated—precisely why we should reject behaviors that normalize atomization. Waiting for material conditions to change before trying to relate to one another humanely is mechanistic and non-dialectical. Marxists don’t just observe alienation—we oppose it.

            You complain that people are “hyper-alienated hyper-individuals that don’t talk to anyone and only work”—but then say we must preserve that isolation in the name of respecting their time. That’s a perfect example of how ideology defends the status quo: by making alienation feel like politeness.

            1. Human beings are social animals—sociality is part of our species-being.

            Marx understood that our species-being is realized through conscious, cooperative activity—work, communication, creativity, and mutual recognition. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he describes how under capitalism, “man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions… and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.”

            Avoiding spontaneous social interaction is not “neutral”—it is part of the internalization of capitalist discipline. Public silence is not a natural baseline—it is a social norm formed under capitalism’s conditions of isolation, commodification of time, and mistrust between individuals.

            1. We don’t need to “brute force” anything—but we do need to resist social death.

            This isn’t about “forcing” conversations. It’s about reclaiming public life from capital. Small acts of human engagement push back against the logic of commodified time and estranged relationships. They are not revolutionary in themselves, but they are practices of de-alienation that matter for prefigurative politics: living as if the world were already more humane.

            Just as Marxists support mutual aid, workers’ discussion groups, and community gardens—not because they overthrow capitalism directly, but because they prefigure new forms of life—so too should we support small acts of human connection.


            Rejecting all unsolicited conversation in public on the grounds that capitalism has left us too tired to be human is the kind of defeatist logic Marx called “crude communism”—a desire to equalize misery rather than abolish it.

            Instead of bowing to alienation, we should treat every opportunity for warmth, connection, and solidarity as a small but real blow against the isolating logic of capitalist society.

            If we want a world where people can be free, we should practice being free—even in line at the grocery store.