So real quickly - how does this app differ from the little green bird?
> Your French learning journey starts by listening to a fun and realistic conversation between Jérome, Elodie, Stéphane and the other professional voice actors who worked on this French. course.
> They speak fast, don’t they? That’s how all French people speak (especially Parisians, they are the worst!) Don’t worry though, French Together comes with audio recorded at both slow and normal speed.
> Listening to the slow audio helps you train your ears to recognize French sounds while listening to the normal audio prepares you for real life French.
> Do this for a few weeks and you could dramatically improve your understanding of spoken French. Oh and the course also includes audio from a variety of speakers so you get used to different accents and intonations and don’t end up having to ask locals to repeat when you go to France.
It's definitely a whole skill to be able to listen and disambiguate words spoken at a native speaker's pace in a second (or nth) language.
And yes, DL teaches South American Spanish which has a fair few differences to European so that might be the source of the differences.
I wished I'd started with LT, learned the rules, then maybe Duolingo would have been ok for practice (although the gamification sort of annoys me). My Super Duolingo sub is up this summer, I think I might not renew and stick with LT and Dreaming Spanish.
Regarding Latin American Spanish vs European -- in the LT lessons, they cover the differences in pronunciation when applicable and also differences in word usage (Carro vs El Auto) and even later on talks about "Spanish Idiolects" (e.g. the ways individuals speak Spanish).
I didn't try english though.
Esperanto is super easy if you speak both french and english. But man there is less content on the internet than klingon...
Duolingo is a bit like Notion. It makes you think you are achieving things but the direction is completely incorrect.
By "environment" I mean of course apps + devices (combined with real-world sources, perhaps).
Of course, we live in a world where the translations apps on ours phones are approaching a "universal translator" level.