Pronoun Trouble

Lesson exercises for DuoLingo on my phone: Make sound by default, with many different performers of varying quality, may or may not involve phone typing, and after Section One always have at least seventeen exercises per set.

Lesson exercises for DuoLingo on my laptop: No sounds (so no hearing what things sound like), frequently or always involve typing (which I'm faster at, aside from letters that don't appear on my keyboard), include actual readable lessons, only ten exercises per set???

Granted, I've only done the one exercise set on my computer since before DuoLingo completely revamped the Esperanto course (a very brief time after I managed to finish the pre-vamped course), but this is, uh. Hmm. I'm going to go with "perplexing" for now, I think.

Guess who finished the entire Esperanto course on DuoLingo today?

That's right, it's me!

I am indeed rather pleased with myself, though I definitely don't feel as fluid as I could be. I got double crowns on most of the first half of the course when I was going through it (and three or four on a few of the lessons) before I decided to just do once-and-done, so I think I'll be going through and re-doing the old lessons until I at least get two levels in each one. I might go all the way to four crowns in each, but considering that the fifth level of the first lesson has some fifteen micro-levels, I might not go farther than four on each.

I've also added the app Drops to my daily practice routine. It's a visual-focused vocabulary building and drilling app, and I gotta say, it's working pretty well for me as a supplement. Vocab building wasn't my strongest point in DuoLingo, and matching pictures of concepts with the vocab words rather than with their direct English translations is really helping reinforce the words for me. I went ahead and bought a year's subscription on the day after I downloaded it since it offered me a sale, and it's cheaper than a year of DuoLingo, even on Duo's New Year's sale. That means I don't know a lot of the limitations of the free version, aside from how it only gives you five minutes of practice every ten hours or so (though you can earn extra by completing streaks and a few other ways). I'm really enjoying it, and a lot of the vocab art is super cute.

Oof, I really need to make myself an Esperanto icon.

I have reached the "Politics" section of Duolingo and it is difficult for reasons entirely unrelated to linguistics.

So Duolingo* is pretty good at drilling and introducing new vocabulary, but absolute crap at explaining stuff? As in, they just plain don't. I had some limited prior knowledge of Esperanto from trying a couple of different courses previously, and that's helped a bit? Like, I'm pretty okay with marking plurals and direct objects and stuff.

But Esperanto also has two forms of the word "of", and Duolingo has so far been absolutely zero assistance in helping me figure out which one to use when.

Just a few sentences on theory or grammar to accompany lessons, that's all I ask! And you can even skip those if all you're introducing is new nouns!


Edit: Mnemonic created! The "a" in "da" refers to amount. The "e" in "de" is for, uh, "everything else" 9_9 Well, if it works...

* The app. I am now checking out the website version, though!

Started the Esperanto course on Duolingo. I am cautiously optimistic about how far I'll get in it.

So far my biggest problem is the word "fartas", which asks about condition (e.g., how are you doing, I am doing well, etc). I'm pretty sure it's got a cognate in "fare", which will help me remember it, but still. As an English speaker, it is ...slightly distressing to me.