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I enjoyed duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com https://www.duolingo.com) for learning Swedish. I liked the game mechanics, honestly. Here's why: * Positive rei
by gargarplex 10y ago
I enjoyed duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com https://www.duolingo.com) for learning Swedish. I liked the game mechanics, honestly. Here's why:
* Positive reinforcement: cheerful noises and visual progress once I completed a section.
* Negative reinforcement: if I didn't practice at all that day, I would get a notification at 11pm. If I ignored for a while, they were super passive aggressive, saying things like "These don't seem to be working. We'll stop sending them". I felt guilty and would start agin.
* I wanted to keep my daily streak going. It made me feel like Jerry Seinfeld with his "write a joke a day; put an X on the calendar" technique.
* I liked the concepts of experience (exp) and levels; it let me feel like I was making concrete progress, even if I was totally incompetent. I indulged my gamer side while still being productive!
* duolingo works just as well on browser as mobile
* Training sessions were short enough that if I only had a few minutes of downtime, as long as I had my phone on me, I could actually be productive. This made subway rides that much better.
* duoolingo offers a practice mode where I could work specifically on my speed if I had longer chunks of time and wanted to dive deeper.
And today, I can totally speak intelligible Swedish [1]. It worked.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxoXe5FDIkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxoXe5FDIkA – some phrases are off (I should've said "hur man sköter marknadsföring själv") and pronunciation is off.
- nothrabannosir 10y agoIt's personal, but Duolingo has gone a bit south for me. They are (understandably) focusing on getting users to pay. It just hit me in an unfortunate way: Duolingo is all about "streaks". After a fifteen day streak, I was greeted with "You broke your streak! Buy it back for $3.50." I hadn't broken it, I remembered the exact lesson I did, 100%. Sent them an e-mail; no reply. A week later, I'm talking to my sister, exact same thing happened to her 180 day streak... Another e-mail, again no reply. All in all, a petty detail, of course. It was the lack of response to support e-mail that got me, not so much the situation itself. Used to be a fan, but that wasn't a great moment. :(
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lacampbell 10y agoWeird how they went down the path of charging money for the 'game' parts, as opposed to the actual materials parts. I'd gladly fork over $50-100 for a mandarin duolingo course with an option for traditional characters. I wonder if these volunteers making courses realise that they can make actual money off of high quality recordings of HSK vocab.
- aaron987 10y agoI've been using Duolingo to learn Italian. It was awesome up until about 40% fluency, then it lost its effectiveness. It was a great way to learn basic vocabulary and sentence structure, but after that I learned more by just reading my news in Italian.
- whenwillitstop 10y agoYeah I had the same problem. I actually found this online course at ylanguage.com it was really effective.
- Graziano_M 10y agoThe italian lessons in particular are, unfortunately, utter garbage. Peek at the French for an example of good lessons.
- adgulacti 10y agoduolingo is much better in browser than mobile. there it has course summaries, tables, etc. meanwhile, i think it focuses too much on vocabulary. instead it should be daily dialogue driven.