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qaStaHvIS wa’SaD cha’vatlh jaj tlhIngan Hol vIHaDtaH = I have studied the Klingon language for 1200 days.

In my post 1111 Days of Klingon, I said it might be my last post on Klingon. Obviously, it wasn’t.

In a “what the heck” mood, I decided to try the first lesson of “Section 4” in the Duolingo course. In that lesson, I was prompted with a new phrase: pe’vIl tlhIngan SuvwI’ HIv yIH yoH = The brave tribble forcefully attacked the Klingon warrior.

That tickled me. I decided to stick with it. Since then, while there’s been a lot of repetition, I’ve encountered new phrases that taught me some more tidbits of the Klingon language. It’s been enough to keep me motivated.

When I mentioned this on the Klingon-language Discord, a course developer named janSIy replied:

When we entered a new vocabulary item we would create a variety of sentences using that new word. Some of them were very simple and some of them were very complex. Their own AI would try to judge how “difficult” the sentences were. At the very least it would rank them by length. In addition, as users attempted the sentence, the AI would track success and failure rates to tweak the ranking. Each time you encounter a particular Skill (all the Nodes that have the same Descriptor and same vocabulary list) it gives you some new sentences that rank as a little more “difficult” than last time. It saves the most “difficult” sentences for those extra Nodes at the end. So you may be encountering some of those sentences for the first time, but there is no new vocabulary and the course has not actually been expanded in any way. You’re just seeing some of the old sentences for the first time. So, I agree that it’s worth continuing to try to see more new sentences.

So here we are. We’ll see where we’re at on Saturday, June 22, 2024.