Now I'm feeling nostalgic, I was only there for a few weeks, but with the parks, teahouses, and food, it was my favorite city in China.

When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.

Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.

For example, I used to use the perapera-kun plugin and I guess yomichan does a similar thing, but that sort of tool—but say, for closed captions—could help listeners get more comprehensible input from movies. Like, here's one I have to try. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-learning-...

Or just apps or social networks that help connect speakers in other languages. I know of a Discord server, that lets me practice a target language; the group just meets at an inconvenient time for me.

You have to keep in mind what a tool is trying to accomplish relative to the personal development it takes to grow into another human language. Different levels of learners require different kinds of instruction. Bilingual instruction is quickest if a person has zero knowledge of the language whatever. Absolute beginners need direct instruction in phonology. An Anki deck is to build basic vocabulary or literacy for a person who has some. Duolingo is there to get you comfortable with basic grammar or phrases, to get you interacting with native speakers in the first place once you stumble off the plane. A more advanced speaker might need accent reduction work.

Anki is fantastic at flashcards. Duolingo is fantastic at translation exercises, way better than what we had a few decades ago. Definitely the author in the OP should be using Anki rather than postcards on her bed.

"Mastery"-level linguistic tasks include things like writing creative poetry in the language that another person finds moving, describing the movements of a complex machine, or composing an essay in a specific literary style—things that native speakers may find difficult without formal training. There's just no way Duolingo can do that.

I took a survey recently that clarified a lot of this for me. The questions were all things like: What percentage of your time do you spend listening to music in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend watching moveis in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend reading books in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend thinking and interacting with other people and thinking in the target language (and your native language)? If I spend 1% of my time or less in the target language and 99% in my native language, it's no wonder that I have plateaued in it.

Moving away is a different kind of preparation; it's certainly not doing nothing. Moving is a lot more extreme than keeping some spare food & water in your basement.

But usually what you typically have is a person who enjoys guns and is trying to think about a situation where it might possibly be useful to own an AR-15. It's a terrible self-defense weapon in an urbanized area (compared to a shotgun or handgun), and they're illegal to hunt with in lots of areas. Owning such a gun requires a major investment of money and time (for practice and training), and encourages this kind of paranoid outlook. So you have interest in guns driving interest in disaster preparedness, rather than interest in disaster preparedness driving interest in guns.

A user could be able to specify "I want 50% of my newsfeed to be from immediate family, 35% from close friends, 15% from acqaintances." Use a pie chart slider bar to make it clear. Then let the algorithm figure out how to interpret that chart.

Japanese numerals are quite easy, but when it comes to actually counting things, it is quite complex. There are two series of numeral words that are used in different contexts, as well as dozens of counter words that pair with a variety of semantic categories. Many combinations or number + noun have quite irregular combinations, like "hatachi" (20 years of age) or "hatsuka" (20th day of the month).