Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
I have a memrise lifetime thing that I bought some years ago and occasionally use, but I’ve never done a comparative test so I can’t tell you how much better/worse it is than anything else. they did try integrating some chatgpt-backed “have a conversation” junk a while back but it’s optional (and when I asked support about it, as well as which data is used for training, the answer said it was optional. I have no measure to tell how true this was/is)
you don’t say which you want to learn (except mentioning spanish) but best other addition I have is that languagejones (youtube channel) recently did a review of every language on duolingo, including some comparisons with how those languages were treated on other platforms. might be worth a look
bonus round: the most recent agma schwa cursed conlang circus featured some absolutely amazing entries (I watched part 3 last weekend while recuperating on the couch). some of the ones from it include goptjaam and seraphim and I promise you they may be the most cursed thing you see all day
ah yep, this is for Spanish! I’ll give memrise and that languagejones video a look
I think what excited me about Readlang is that I could use real text (which gives my ADHD brain something other than language learning to be excited for) and it’s like a semi-automated version of the process I’ve seen Spanish speakers use to learn English with a translation dictionary and handwritten flash cards. I might just have to try a variety of apps (for as much as these free trials will let me — a lot of these companies are terrified I’ll learn something of value without paying them a fuckload of money) until I find one that tickles the same part of my brain