Just came across it and it’s more relevant today than when it was posted

Exactly this worked best for me back in the day

Not just you, your brain is wired to pick up language, how did you learn your first one?

I’m German and while we have some mandatory English classes, they’re …well … not good.

I can attest that English classes here aren’t great either (although most people here do speak English as a second or third language)

and at least the teacher I had first also had a VERY thick German accent

This is a known side effect of premature output (writing/speaking before you feel comfortable doing so), you don’t just listen to what’s around you, you primarily listen to yourself and pronunciation differs between languages, this premature output becomes toxic input for your brain which then uses that from then on (you can try and get rid of it; but it is really hard to do)

once I was halfway through the game my brain kinda switched to “English mode” and I actually learned words and grammar in a natural way instead of trying to force myself to understand what the hell a “singular past tense adverb” is.

Yup, that’s natural understanding for you. When you speak a language you don’t care about the rules; you should instinctively know them.

As for my issue with Duolingo: it ignores the amount of time it takes to properly acquire a language, if I were to split up all the time I spent watching english youtube into 5 minute chunks it’d take me well over 15 years (and that’s just accounting for the initial 4 month span; I’ve learned more things after as I naturally used the language). Combine that with the fact it throws established research on this topic to the wayside to push the school-based one which we know goes against the natural way in which we learn. I found a great blog post online about this, while it mostly revolves around learning Japanese; the core principles apply to learning pretty much any language. The beginning of the post does sum the entire thing up pretty well though:

We do not recommend “language learning” apps like Duolingo, Lingodeer, Babbel, and others due to the fact that their methodology conflicts with AJATT’s principles of immersion learning. Such apps do not actually help you with anything. There are no success stories. On the other hand, AJATTers typically reach fluency in just 18 months. The apps prevent you from reading interesting content in your target language, such as manga. And they make you more miserable in the end.

There are some really good parts in that blog that apply to any language; but a lot of it is geared towards Japanese specifically.

The best course of action is to consume as much content in the target language as possible, tv shows, music, YouTube videos… Your brain will eventually pick up on certain parts of the language naturally. Also the best thing you can do is to not force yourself to speak or write in that language until you are comfortable doing so (this is one of the biggest things doulingo does wrong).

I can attest to this method working as I went from barely knowing a couple of English words to speaking it in about 4 months (you could probably do less if you stick to what I outlined above). To back up this method I suggest you look at antimoon which is written by people who have used this to learn English as well.

I’ve been using Vendetta with a custom stylesheet for mobile which does the AMOLED theme much better than discord, haven’t used the new app yet and I’m honestly contemplating whether I should get the old android native app running again.

Looks very interesting, love to see how well it works (and interoperates between different fediverse platforms)

Tbh, I would not mind a proper chat standard built on activitypub, it’s obvious that this protocol works, now if only somebody built a secure messaging platform with it.

It’s because they rewrote the app from the ground up. They had a lot of issues getting the AMOLED theme to work because the base of the entire thing was written with the idea that there will only ever be 2 themes.

Yup, still mad about that one. Some day nobody will remember that the mobile app was somewhat responsive. I do know that there are projects that still allow you to use the old app; but I don’t know how long the API for it will still be supported by discord.

Knowing how their desktop app works on Linux (or more specifically doesn’t and requires you to mingle with it if you want any degree of Wayland awareness) it doesn’t surprise me their app remake (because it’s not just a redesign) is total garbage. I hope they get around to fixing the performance and bugs; but as things are right now I’m staying on Vendetta and refuse to update.

Length might have mattered in the 80s and 90s when IDEs were crap but we got autocomplete in pretty much all our text editors (even TUI ones like vim).

As for readability there is an argument to be had in specific contexts, but 9 out of 10 times it makes more sense to use a proper word.

Example:

let list = [1, 2, 3];
for i in list {
    println!("{}", i);
}

In this case using item in the place of i would be more fitting.