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edit: Cleaned up version of this thread: https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-ill
in the context of the discussion above, someone asked me how they could best teach their friend some English, when the friend doesn't have the time or opportunity to be immersed in it all the time. this was my answer:
Since you're also trying to learn their language, and as you've noticed, Duolingo has gotten you nowhere (and yeah, it's not just you, that's how it is)—you should look into tandem methods. This is when you sit with someone to try each other's languages for a set period—say 25 minutes English, 25 minutes Spanish. Here’s a couple quick links to learn more about it:
- https://www.sprachenzentrum.fu-berlin.de/en/slz/tandem/tipps/index.html
- https://tandem.net/pages/ultimate-guide-language-exchange
Starting from zero, you should rely heavily on body language, context, mimicry, pointing, facial expressions, intonation, props like drawings and physical objects etc. With these non-linguistic means, is quite doable to communicate with someone even if you don't have a single word in common, and from there build up linguistic knowledge starting from pointing at things and asking how they're called (linguistic anthropologists do this all the time in fieldwork).
Never correct your language partner directly, unless they ask for feedback explicitly. You want to keep sessions fluid and enjoyable like friendly conversations; you don't want the heavy feel of a "language lesson". You can try to work the correct form naturally into the conversation (they: “The my mother is María”, You: “Oh, your mother’s name is María? [smiling with a thumbs up:] That’s a pretty name! My mother’s name is Elizabeth…”) But you can also just gloss over it; errors will iron out naturally over time.
Tandem methods have many good features that aren't immediately obvious, based on building rapport with one another and expectations of what the other person will say, of your mental model of them and of the context you share together. One of the many hidden advantages is confidence: The other person gets to be the instructor, the expert, for half of every session. They’re not just "studying", they’re offering you a precious treasure that you're after (=their own native-level fluency, something exceptionally hard for you to do). This helps them feel like they’re contributing something; they’re not just reliving school trauma and trying to pass a test before an authority, they’re wanted in the sessions.
I have had good experiences with iTalki coaches, who are like, actual human beings you can interact with on live video, and whose hourly rates for trial periods can be very affordable. You might try talking with a couple experienced language coaches to get a few for how the pros do it.
English is a language with a relatively simple grammar, but it has tricky phonetics for foreigners, and the convoluted orthography doesn’t help. While normally I advocate acquiring language intuitively through use, this is one of those exceptions where I think it pays off to study the details explicitly, for a while at least. Geoff Lindsey on Youtube has some excellent videos about this which will help you understand the parts of English phonetics that are fully unconscious for you, but hard for foreigners to reproduce: https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/playlists
Pay special attention to vowels; schwa; weak forms; contractions; aspiration; deaccenting. Once your language partner has at least a little bit of English, as soon as they can more or less make sense of videos like these, you can recommend them to check out the channel by themselves, too.
@elilla So Tandem Language Learning is basically mutual aid language learning? Fuck yeah, that's awesome!
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@Mair that's the single major reason why English is such an easy language for everyone else to learn, and why it's hard to learn other languages once you know English. it comes with the territory of being a lingua franca, natürlich. you have to kinda trick yourself and engineer a situation where you're engaging with the other languages anyway; this is often easier said than done.
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edit: Cleaned up version of this thread: https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-ill
in the context of the discussion above, someone asked me how they could best teach their friend some English, when the friend doesn't have the time or opportunity to be immersed in it all the time. this was my answer:
Since you're also trying to learn their language, and as you've noticed, Duolingo has gotten you nowhere (and yeah, it's not just you, that's how it is)—you should look into tandem methods. This is when you sit with someone to try each other's languages for a set period—say 25 minutes English, 25 minutes Spanish. Here’s a couple quick links to learn more about it:
- https://www.sprachenzentrum.fu-berlin.de/en/slz/tandem/tipps/index.html
- https://tandem.net/pages/ultimate-guide-language-exchange
Starting from zero, you should rely heavily on body language, context, mimicry, pointing, facial expressions, intonation, props like drawings and physical objects etc. With these non-linguistic means, is quite doable to communicate with someone even if you don't have a single word in common, and from there build up linguistic knowledge starting from pointing at things and asking how they're called (linguistic anthropologists do this all the time in fieldwork).
Never correct your language partner directly, unless they ask for feedback explicitly. You want to keep sessions fluid and enjoyable like friendly conversations; you don't want the heavy feel of a "language lesson". You can try to work the correct form naturally into the conversation (they: “The my mother is María”, You: “Oh, your mother’s name is María? [smiling with a thumbs up:] That’s a pretty name! My mother’s name is Elizabeth…”) But you can also just gloss over it; errors will iron out naturally over time.
Tandem methods have many good features that aren't immediately obvious, based on building rapport with one another and expectations of what the other person will say, of your mental model of them and of the context you share together. One of the many hidden advantages is confidence: The other person gets to be the instructor, the expert, for half of every session. They’re not just "studying", they’re offering you a precious treasure that you're after (=their own native-level fluency, something exceptionally hard for you to do). This helps them feel like they’re contributing something; they’re not just reliving school trauma and trying to pass a test before an authority, they’re wanted in the sessions.
I have had good experiences with iTalki coaches, who are like, actual human beings you can interact with on live video, and whose hourly rates for trial periods can be very affordable. You might try talking with a couple experienced language coaches to get a few for how the pros do it.
English is a language with a relatively simple grammar, but it has tricky phonetics for foreigners, and the convoluted orthography doesn’t help. While normally I advocate acquiring language intuitively through use, this is one of those exceptions where I think it pays off to study the details explicitly, for a while at least. Geoff Lindsey on Youtube has some excellent videos about this which will help you understand the parts of English phonetics that are fully unconscious for you, but hard for foreigners to reproduce: https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/playlists
Pay special attention to vowels; schwa; weak forms; contractions; aspiration; deaccenting. Once your language partner has at least a little bit of English, as soon as they can more or less make sense of videos like these, you can recommend them to check out the channel by themselves, too.
@elilla thank you ! With these messages you explained to me better than I could've think why my attempts to get back to learning Chinese all failed.
I've had courses during high school about it, and the teacher was so passionating I still now think fondly of the language.
However to get back at learning it has joined the "side-projects I've failed each time I try to do it" box. Your advices gave me food for thought for the next time I light up the spark of motivation needed to try Chinese again. Thanks ! -
@elexia @Mair I can't say whether that works for you and if it does, great; but I can share that in my particular case, I found that retreading books, series or games that I already knew didn't really hit that compulsive addictiveness that I get from fresh new stories where I Have To Know What Happens. with stores I already know, the added friction of a language I'm partial in leads me to just drop it over time.
so for example I get more out of a simple children's novel that happens to be interesting to me, than out of an adult novel that I'm more interested in but I already read in another language, even if the previous knowledge of the plot roughly evens out the linguistic difficulty of both.
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@elilla thank you ! With these messages you explained to me better than I could've think why my attempts to get back to learning Chinese all failed.
I've had courses during high school about it, and the teacher was so passionating I still now think fondly of the language.
However to get back at learning it has joined the "side-projects I've failed each time I try to do it" box. Your advices gave me food for thought for the next time I light up the spark of motivation needed to try Chinese again. Thanks !@Gurwinner specifically for Chinese my biggest pieces of advice would be:
1. spoken language before hànzì;
2. try to do tones by mirroring and imitation, not by analysis of sandhi; don't fuss over the details, focus on understanding them / being understood;
3.pīnyīn is your friend.(sources for this: De Francis; Victor Mair; extrapolating from my acquisition of Japanese and my own research on kanji.)
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@elexia @Mair I can't say whether that works for you and if it does, great; but I can share that in my particular case, I found that retreading books, series or games that I already knew didn't really hit that compulsive addictiveness that I get from fresh new stories where I Have To Know What Happens. with stores I already know, the added friction of a language I'm partial in leads me to just drop it over time.
so for example I get more out of a simple children's novel that happens to be interesting to me, than out of an adult novel that I'm more interested in but I already read in another language, even if the previous knowledge of the plot roughly evens out the linguistic difficulty of both.
@elilla @Mair makes sense! I think maybe it makes more sense for the one we haven't finished yet where we can maybe rewatch a bit to remind ourselves of the plot so far and then jump into new stuff once we're a bit more comfy with it. we'd definitely need something that's gonna be easier first though and we need to get motivated to just start learning at all again so we can get through the basics.
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@ein_wesen @enby_of_the_apocalypse yeah totally, that's one of the signs that it's working :)
some signs that your Language Acquisition Device is fully engaged:
- you're spontaneously making up sentences in the target syntax (the "babbling" you mentioned).
- binge behaviour. you feel annoyed at having to stop your book (or TV series, visual novel, flirting with your crush etc.), you resent having to go make food, you want to go back and see what happens.
- short exclamations, complex verb conjugations and other spontaneous pieces of vocabulary pop on your tongue faster than you can second-guess them, so afterwards you feel like, "wait, does this word *really* mean this thing?" you have no idea where did you learn this grammar from, or whether it actually can be used in this context like this. (it totally can, btw. your subconscious knows it better than you.)
- you don't even notice the vocabulary you don't know anymore, you're too focused to stress over details. to paraphrase polyglot Kató Lomb, when the detective hides behind a hawthorn bush you don't care about what the fuck is a hawthorn, you want to watch what happens when she jumps on the suspect.
- you're so interested in your series that at some point you realise you've forgotten it was in another language. you started it as language practice, but that has became a secondary consideration.
- you find yourself with a certain crave for the language itself, for more input, kinda the way one craves a particular type of cooking.@elilla @ein_wesen @enby_of_the_apocalypse ironically we now wanted to know what hawthorn is. I guess because we didn't have a story that made us care more about the detective :3
we heard the name before of course but couldn't really connect it to a specific plant we know. -
@enby_of_the_apocalypse @elilla I'm pretty sure Hawthorne is Hagedorn (= Hagebutte?)
@ein_wesen @enby_of_the_apocalypse @elilla Weißdorn (just looked it up myself). a plant we definitely were vaguely familiar with growing up.
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is dying, apparently:
DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.
Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla muito bom, obrigada!!!
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla thank you for the articles!
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
saving this for later
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla I enjoyed reading this aloud so much to my formerly-warrior-cats-addicted, and currently duolingo'ing 13yo.
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla great summary and advice, thanks for writing that up!
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla Can vouch for these methods, they work like a charm!
Language courses make a lot of sense for me as I want to start off with a good feel for grammar and become a decent writer.
These have provided me with a functional understanding of the language and allowed me to judge whether my sentences are correct on not. They also jumpstart good pronounciation.Then I try to find uses for the language like you describe. My most basic Warrior Cats is a silly blender ad dubbed into a bunch of languages where they talk about vegetables and count to ten. Setting all my video games to the target language is fun as well. From there I try to find anything that interests me and wasn't translated, as a treat.
This has been great for building my vocabulary and listening skills, especially when it comes to regional accents / dialects.Texting or talking to native speakers has helped me build sentences FAST and has really grown my confidence. Plus I get to request stuff like: "Let's find synonyms for this boring word!"
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Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla This definitely works. I learned three languages in school, but I only got proficient by watching series and reading books I didn't quite understand yet. Over time it expanded my vocabulary *immensely* and strengthened the feel for the sound and rhythm of the language.
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is dying, apparently:
DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.
@elilla
i wish more people would learn #tokipona. it took me a month to feel confident reading, writing and talking, because it's only 120 words. a simple tool for international communication.esun Tuliniko la mani ona li weka tan ilo ko ona pi sona toki li jaki. a a a.
( duolingo is losing their money because their language learning app is trash, lol ) -
Whenever I discuss how much Duolingo sucks and doesn't work and is in fact counterproductive, and all that was already the case *before* it got rebuilt from slop, people ask the very reasonable question: "If not Duolingo, then what"?
My answer is that literally any other method is better than Duolingo lol
But I've collected some of my more detailed answers about two methods I strongly recommend—comprehensive input and tandem exchange—in these two blog posts:
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
* https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-illThis is cleaned up and edited from the threads of today, so if you want to #like and #share this #content with your friends, please use the links above. Thanks everyone who participated in the comments
@elilla @tadbithuman Do you know of any other online English proficiency tests that are accepted by higher education institutions in the West?
I’ve personally paid for a few Duolingo tests so folks in Gaza can apply for placement and scholarships in the West and I’d rather not give them money if possible.
💕
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@elilla @tadbithuman Do you know of any other online English proficiency tests that are accepted by higher education institutions in the West?
I’ve personally paid for a few Duolingo tests so folks in Gaza can apply for placement and scholarships in the West and I’d rather not give them money if possible.
💕
@aral TOEFL is probably the most famous, but where I live most universities will recognise any reasonably reputed English proficiency test. This list is typical:
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Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Numeri che pensano (ebook)
@libri - L'IA e le storie della matematica che le stanno dietro
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@evan oh that's awful - I'm so sorry.
It's so important to have the soles of your shoes out on the pavement of your streets. You live among neighbours that way. And should never lose one of your community THIS way. 😩
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Almost a third of 2026 Oscar-nominated films acknowledge climate change
To pass the ‘climate reality check,’ a movie must depict climate change in some way, and a character in the story must recognize it
#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #UpheavalClimate #ClimateInstability #MassAtrocity #pollution #ecology #environment #climate
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@staringatclouds @lowqualityfacts Geese don’t actually honk. Rather they are being constantly censored.
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@david (Back in these days)
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@cmconseils
This is so much funnier than it deserves to be. 😂
