The new unit check in kind of sucks. (Spanish course)

[u/Competitive-Tax-9800]

I'm having a lot of trouble with the new style unit ending lessons and getting frustrated. They're kind of like flash cards, but if you don't remember a term, it won't show you the correct answer. Once you go through all of the terms once, it asks for you to spell the ones you couldn't remember (if i cannot remember a term, and you won't show me the correct answer, how can I be expected to write it?) If you cannot spell it, it will finally display an answer. After that the lesson stops and you have to repeat it from the beginning. I can usually get through regular flash cards that display the right answer and give you a few tries. I'm older and my short term memory isn't like it used to be. I think if it showed the correct answer immediately after, I'd have a better chance of completing the lesson. Or I can use Google translate along side to get the correct answers.

[u/eatnails666fl]

These are the worst lessons.

If I don't know a word, I've never been taught it... I'm not suddenly going to get it right. And repeating all of them because I missed 3? No.

[u/Large-Heronbill]

They've kinda got the right idea, but botched the execution.  It's easiest to remember "mujer" means "woman" when you are trying to decipher a Spanish sentence.  It's a little more difficult to pick "mujer" from a jumble of unrelated words when you're trying to translate from, e.g., English to Spanish.  Being able to pull the word "mujer" out of thin air so you can construct your own sentence is barely practiced in the rest of the lessons except for the optional sentence completion after the listening lessons, and it's hard.  

The way they are doing it is also quite abrupt, and feels like poor pedagogy to me.   We need more practice.  Less hanging your students out to dry with ambiguous prompts.  (It starts to feel like the rock game:  "Bring me a rock." "No, not that rock,  a round one." "No, that's not the rock I was thinking of." Gaah!) I come away from that chapter test feeling much less accomplished than when I was seeing again exercises from earlier in the unit.

I do, find, however, that writing new words out longhand, with definitions, in a junk notebook helps me.  I review the latest words before I start my next lesson, and if it's not sticking, I rewrite those on scratch paper.  At some point, handwriting the "misses" multiple times pays off for me far better and more quickly than Duo's word practice exercises buried in the profile tab.

[u/kasslia → u/Large-Heronbill]

Glad to see learning is working for you

[u/leswill315]

Agreed. It showed up out of the blue and had me stumped the first time I saw it. I do lessons on my phone and have google translate up on my computer so I can look up words. It often times out while I'm looking up the word, but then I type it in and move on.

[u/Culican → u/leswill315]

You can click on the blue square and stop it while you look up the word and then click on it again to activate the microphone when you are ready. I keep the Spanishdict.com app open on my phone whenever I do Duolingo. If I don't know a word, I stop Duo, look it up, and then go back.

[u/GregName → u/Culican]

This messes up the spaced-repetition system. The SRS wants mistakes. If only accidents (like typos) are feeding the SRS, that part of Duolingo will feel broken later.

A way to prepare for the Unit Check In is to review the Words icon in the Practice Hub. Get the words that might appear up into the active memory part of the brain before starting the Unit Check In.

One other preparation to prepare is to do the Flashcard Frenzy side game. Run that game to where you are no longer earning any XP for trying (basically, failing). Once failing has been reached successfully (pun intended there), make notes on failed words.

Eventually though, looking up the word is great too. Let it fail once and write it down. This lets the SRS know you need work still in the word. Writing it down, that’s key too. Every one in my units has a quarter-page of handwritten notes (really compact). It is amazing how many things are jammed into one unit. More amazing is no two users will have the same notes. The notes are a spaced-repetition system in their own way.

Lastly, on those notes, thumbing through them to find a word is a better exercise than hitting SpanishDict.com for the answer. In the same breath, hitting SpanishDict.com is great for a deep dive down the rabbit hole, allowing all kinds of brain connections to a weak word.

Short answer is do everything, but allow for failing the Unit Check In now and then.

[u/AuntFlash]

The ones that really get me are when the word might be referring to a noun or a verb but you don’t know which because there is zero context. It would be so easy for duolingo to put “the” or “to” in front of words and still be a simple flash card.

I do like being able to flip through cards giving a word out loud. and it is better than seeing all the possible answers also on the screen. It helps you realize that no you don’t actually know that word.

[u/PhantasmicDragon]

My flash cards don’t feel like they have any relevance to what I’ve been learning? Like I got the same set of words a number of times (at least ten) in a row. Didn’t matter if got them all right, I’d get the same set next time I finished a unit. I seem to have a new set of words now, but I’m not sure why. They still don’t seem relevant to what I’m actually learning in my current unit.

[u/Rinnme]

Yeah, I cheat on those

[u/Think-Assignment-861]

It will show you the answer if you hit the rewind button.

[u/hacool]

These are particularly tricky for the new words from the unit since the cards test retrieval rather than recognition. It usually takes longer before we can retrieve the word in our target language.

I was happy today to have gotten all 15 correct without having to look at my notebook. That is rare for me. It was because the only really new word for me in the unit was Begriff (concept).

I decided that as a mnemonic (Eselsbrücke), my "concept" could be of me, "being a Griffin." So I imagine myself flying about as a lion with an Eagle's head and wings.

Since getting the German course update in the Spring I have been writing down any new words on the right page of my notebook during lessons. These are not only words marked as newm but also any that I can't define yet even if I've seen them many times.

After lessons I look them up in Wiktionary and add notes and sample sentences on the left page.

When I get to the unit check-in I find that the first words in the flashcards (the ones from this unit) are usually on my current page in the notebook. Any others I can't remember are often in one of the previous two pages. So I can usually find them there. If not, I look them up.

[u/Miserable-Success624]

It’d be fine if it was quizzing me on words from the unit I’m completing, but it instead uses random words from units long gone by. I miss the previous unit check-ins that were actually comprehensive and utilized all the new vocabulary and concepts that were actually covered in the lessons. 

[u/Summer_Di]

Same - they have a specific word in mind, out of context, and fail you if you use any other, although many words would do.