Late Stage Capitalism
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What are some good alternatives?
i’d guess… textbooks. like actually though. some are really well written, nicely ordered and prioritize stuff which is actually useful.
also you get a distraction free environment as a plus which, i think, is more helpful than one might think.
Unironically love this answer
How do I get this distraction free environment with the textbooks? I got a bunch for college and everywhere was still stuffed to the gills with distractions!
I think maybe my own brain is made of distractions...
When's the last time you went to your local library?
Like a week ago! But it's usually busy.
At least for me it feels like that when I sit down to read a book I somehow trick my brain to go into "learn" mode like it actually tries then to remember stuff and to be attentive. Its harder to do that being on the phone i think. Maybe environment wasn't the right word.
Rosetta stone maybe?
Anki
Depending what you want out of it.
Anki Memrise Wlingua
Check if your local library has any resources. Mine let me claim a free rocket languages premium account, which supports Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Arabic, Hindi, Korean, ASL, Portuguese, and Russian up to (I think, don't remember) CEFR level B2
I have found that Language Transfer is the best language learning system I have used.
French, German, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, Spanish and Italian all taught by the same guy. Each course is a set of audio files you can listen to on Soundcloud, YouTube, download, or use the minimalist but very functional phone app.
Completely free, supported by donations.
I've been using Busuu
Pimsleur. Scientifically developed method. Lessons are a little longer than we would normally do today but it works.
Pimsleur! Easily found online
Duolingo classrooms
Using an LLM is actually a great use case. But you'll have to fact check it periodically.
how are you supposed to fact check it if you don’t know the language?
Well, you can look up conjugation tables or a dictionary. But for romance languages, they're pretty damn good.
Cope harder
NLP is one of the few tasks they're actually good for?
Mmhmm, because what I really want is a program that teaches me to say "orange bacon sandwhich" when I ask it to tell me "where is the bathroom?"
Hopefully if you're at the point of knowing basic verbs and conjugations you'd recognize a string of nouns?