Debit cards have CVCs. For obvious reasons I’m not going to ask what yours looks like, but it’d be really weird if it didn’t have your CVC number listed anywhere because it’s required to make most debit payments. https://help.gopay.com/en/knowledge...v-cvc-code-and-where-can-i-find-it-on-my-card To mortgage a house you need a credit score. Mortgage lenders will perform a credit check on you and see your credit history, score, and all payments you’ve made and missed on credit. A good credit score shows the lender you can make your payments on time, whereas a bad credit score - or no credit score at all - tells lenders that you’re financially irresponsible and/or unreliable. You can build a credit score by taking out loans and repaying them on time, by using catalogue services to buy items and split the cost into instalments and pay those on time, or even by getting an overdraft on your debit card and using it responsibly. Using a credit card to buy things just happens to be the easiest way to build one.
I originally started using Duolingo to learn German. I thought it might be useful/interesting since we have many Amish people in the area who I speak with in English often at the business where I work. I have heard that they do not typically speak English in private and have noticed that one will often explain things to another when we are discussing products or some other business. I was aware that they speak a unique dialect but thought I would try it anyway. After comparing vocabulary with one of them one day I realized it was unlikely to be as useful as I had originally hoped since there seemed to be so many differences in saying even simple things. I dropped German and started the Spanish course which my wife has started also. I think it has been more enjoyable having someone to practice with. Sometimes all the repetition seems boring but I keep pushing since I think that that will help in the long term. I suspect that eventually I will want to use other resources or move on to something else if I want to become very good in the language. I've found a lot of entertainment in picking up pieces of conversation in the shows I have watched that have a lot of German or Spanish dialog and comparing what I understand with the closed captioning and voice overs. Sometimes it seems quite silly.
Well, not in the Netherlands! Ah, thanks for explaining that! When I was talking with someone about it before, it sounded like credit scores were solely determined by credit cards. By the way, do you know this because of your knowledge of the USA, or does the UK have a similar system?
They probably said that because the easiest way to build credit in the U.S. is with a credit card. Instead of paying $450 a month for a $30,000 car, it’s easier to pay $100 a month to pay off a credit card balance. The issue with credit cards is that people get multiple, which increases their overall limit, and then they spend more, accumulate credit card debt, and then pay outrageous interest rates. …But a first-time car buyer with no credit will — most of the time — need a co-signer to purchase a used car. So, it’s also easier to buy a new, expensive car to build credit… but that discussion is off-topic. There may be a way to use your debit card to pay for Duolingo Plus using a service that gets you a virtual card in the format they want… but (opinion) it might be more difficult to learn using Duolingo when you have “infinite health” and whatever. And you don’t use it year-round, anyway.
Yeah, I'm not going to get it. If I would get it, it would just be to get rid of the nagging about getting it. -.- That's quite bad at the moment. Currently I got 3 days for free (I think I had to), but they're still nagging me about it! I've always had infinite health, by the way, and I think that is the only way to learn. Adding lives makes no sense to me. Maybe I should get a credit card at some point anyway, apparently it costs less than €20 a year. Almost everything supports PayPal, though, which is free...
I've found that the repetition gets more welcome as the lessons get more challenging. I could read German a little bit, probably because it's so similar to Dutch. I've also had two years of German in secondary education, but I had three years of French, and I cannot read French. Over the past year however, my German vocabulary increased quite a bit, because I read a book in parallel German - Dutch. This seems like a very good way to improve in a language, to me, as you can immerse yourself in real language, but when you don't know something you can very easily look it up—just check the facing page. However, it's probably pretty hard to find such parallel editions of books. More recently, I also bought a Luther Bible, so I can read the Bible in German. This is also a good way to learn because I know the context well, and if I don't understand something I can just check in another of my Bibles. Subtitles are weird! Often they are translated separately from the dub, which is to me really distracting, because what you read will usually be slightly different than what you hear.
One thing I've always found strange is that you can suddenly be transported to a different course/tree/path. In the past, at least I could check the forum to find consolation in others with the same fate, but now that that's gone I have no idea when this update was done to the Danish path. But all of a sudden I am back from unit 12 to unit 4. And sure enough, there are plenty of words there that I haven't seen before, as apparently the order got changed around a lot. The sentences are really simple for me now, though, it will be a while until I'm learning new grammar again. And yet, I am learning bits of this language, for free... let me know if you know a better method, but otherwise I might just accept the annoyance and get what I can out of it.
The system I described is UK-specific, but I would imagine the US works exactly the same. The knowledge about how credit works comes from me learning how to build my score back up after my financially abusive mother committed thousands of pounds worth of fraud in my name using credit between 2019-2022 💀 Mortgage knowledge is from me and my girlfriend preparing to take one out to buy a house together in a few years time. If you’ve got any questions about it I’d be happy to discuss in DMs but I feel like it’s all off topic for a Duolingo thread
I have never and will never use an app to learn a language. I speak 4 languages, 3 of them fluently. I have seen friends using it, I don't think it's a good idea. I'd rather travel where I want to live and learn the language there.
Why not? By the way, one day after posting my post above, I did decide to stop using Duolingo. I got inspired by my post above that, where I said that I had been practising German by reading the Bible in German. I started reading the Bible in Danish, which of course I couldn't do very fluently. But I'd look up all the words I didn't know in a Danish dictionary (ordnet.dk), and if necessary use other tools, and also compare to two Dutch translations. Doing this, I was able to understand almost every word and part of grammar that I came across, and I was learning grammar a lot faster than on Duolingo. I also wanted to be able to practise vocabulary, so for each chapter I wrote down some Dutch words and their Danish equivalent in a notebook, that I then rehearsed. It was quite fun, and worked pretty well, I think. One downside compared to Duolingo is that it focuses on passive knowledge; I can read a lot of Danish grammar now, but I'm not sure if I could reproduce it.
I have replaced a large chunk of my idle time (endless scrolling) with Duolingo. I’m 22 days into the French course, spending 1-3 hours on it every day. I’m planning to use the app in conjunction with other material (YouTube videos, books, movies, music, etc.) to have a better understanding of the language. I plan to learn other languages with the app, as well. I’m using Duolingo Plus — it’s $89/year — and I would say it’s definitely worth it with my experience so far. It’s a lot of value for the equivalent of about $7.42/month.
I like it a lot! I thought the way they had it before was all over the place. The path being more linear seems to streamline everything.
