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This afternoon I noticed that Duolingo claimed I had learned 748 new words of French, which seemed unlikely even allowing for the software not knowing which of the French words covered so far are things I already knew.
I looked at its list of words: it gets that high number by counting each form of a verb separately, so "manger" isn't counted as one word, but six (we've only done the present tense so far). This would be annoying if I was taking that count seriously; as it is, I'm glad there aren't really 748 new (or "new," it has no way of knowing that I already knew quite a few nouns and a few polite phrasings like "de rien"), because that would imply I'd already forgotten a lot of what's been covered.
One odd bit is that I sometimes look at a translation question that asks for the French for something, think of a word, and hesitate because I think it's Spanish--even though I know there are a lot of cognates between the two.
I looked at its list of words: it gets that high number by counting each form of a verb separately, so "manger" isn't counted as one word, but six (we've only done the present tense so far). This would be annoying if I was taking that count seriously; as it is, I'm glad there aren't really 748 new (or "new," it has no way of knowing that I already knew quite a few nouns and a few polite phrasings like "de rien"), because that would imply I'd already forgotten a lot of what's been covered.
One odd bit is that I sometimes look at a translation question that asks for the French for something, think of a word, and hesitate because I think it's Spanish--even though I know there are a lot of cognates between the two.
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