Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for language learners. Catch up on past installments here.Hi there, learners! This week, Dear Duolingo is a team effort—which is appropriate given this week's question! We're Dr. Kristina Schoen, who you might remember from posts on grammatical gender and possessive pronouns in German, and Dr. Rich Forest, Duolingo Learning and Curriculum Manager. This is Rich's first Dear Duolingo post! Before joining Duolingo, he was an associate professor of English and taught English as a second language in the U.S., Japan, and Hong Kong.Our teaching experiences involve different languages, but that's not what we're writing about today—instead, this week, we're answering a question about another one of our passions! Let's...
Parents, use your Noggin to get your kiddos excited about learning! For a limited time, hurry on over to the Noggin website where they are offering a FREE 30-day trial plus 50% off a Nick Jr. Noggin subscription! The Noggin app is designed for kids ages 2 & up and is an easy way to encourage early learning. It’s also a great way for preschool-aged kiddos to get extra support with the basics they’re learning in school. Nick Jr.’s Noggin was developed by early childhood educators using personalized and interactive learning that’s tailored to younger children. Not only are they engaged by their favorite characters, but they’ll build skills while playing along. This includes social & emotional skills, math basics,...
I haven’t had the best relationship with love- quite in fact, I’d argue that for the majority of my life I’ve romanticized, idealized, and sexualized love. Pretty much all of my relationships have been unhealthy. During this past winter I began to deeply question my instincts and emotions surrounding both relationships and intimacy. I had ended yet another relationship that had devolved into repetitive intimacy. The last time I saw him, I hurriedly kissed his cheek, “You’re really nice.” I ran to my house and found myself alone. Unsure of what to do next, I considered an impromptu haircut or even a tattoo as some momentary dissonance from my despair. I was cornered. Having no real guidance, I turned...
I opted to take on Tiny Beautiful Things because I adore Kathryn Hahn, especially when she dives into a dramatic role. What I didn’t know was where the Disney+ series came from. Chery Strayed did the original book, and she put together a series of letters and responses from an advice column called Dear Sugar—the same column we hear so much about in the series. Instead of a series of columns, Tiny Beautiful Things follows Clare (Kathryn Hahn, Bad Moms, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, WandaVision), a writer, as she takes on life in a big way. During her every day, the story ebbs and flows between reality and fantasy, taking us wherever Clare’s mind wanders, be that daydreams,...
agsandrew/ShutterstockRecent public interest in tools like ChatGPT has raised an old question in the artificial intelligence community: is artificial general intelligence (in this case, AI that performs at human level) achievable? An online preprint this week has added to the hype, suggesting the latest advanced large language model, GPT-4, is at the early stages of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as it’s exhibiting “sparks of intelligence”. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has unabashedly declared its pursuit of AGI. Meanwhile, a large number of researchers and public intellectuals have called for an immediate halt to the development of these models, citing “profound risks to society and humanity”. These calls to pause AI research are theatrical and unlikely to succeed – the allure...
