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has anyone had success with any of these language-learning apps, even as supplemental material to a more traditional education? I've tried to use Duolingo for

has anyone had success with any of these language-learning apps, even as supplemental material to a more traditional education? I've tried to use Duolingo for Japanese, with very little success on its own. Paired with my own studying, it was only a bit more helpful, but not more helpful than flashcards. Another app, LingoDeer, was better, because it had a curriculum and more unified lessons, and I could swap between Kanji/Katakana/Hiragana at will to learn one at a time. (Whereas DuoLingo will bring you to 15% understanding of Hiragana before dumping you into Katakana).

tdumitrescu 8y ago
Not apps, but I've had good results with the old Teach Yourself... book+audio series as well as the Pimsleur audio series. Tried Duolingo for a while and it felt more like a vocabulary course than a language course. Not useless, but it didn't improve my language skills.
symmitchry 8y ago
Absolutely. I did Duolingo Spanish (although I a) was fluent-ish in French, and b) had taken a Spanish course at University.) I can say without a doubt that I learned a ton (via Duolingo) and a trip to Cuba made it very obvious. I am far from fluent, but I could get by in nearly all situations. I'm learning Swedish now, and it's getting to the point where new languages are easier and easier to pick up. My partner is further than me, and knows a shocking amount of Swedish just from the Duolingo app.
SwellJoe 8y ago
I find it fun (enough) and quick enough to use daily to keep my mind thinking in Spanish now and then, but I agree it isn't very effective at allowing me to speak it. I draw a blank whenever trying to converse in Spanish. But, I do find I can read quite a bit more Spanish after a year or so of using Duolingo mostly daily. I only use it for about 10 minutes a day, so I don't expect miracles. I find the "you are 53% fluent in Spanish" notifications laughable, though. I'm maybe 10% fluent, on a good day, when listening, and about 20% when reading. Though assigning a percentage to fluency is a bit weird anyway. So...yeah, I think you kinda get out what you put into learning a language, and Duolingo is way closer to putting in "nothing" than it is to putting in "something". One shouldn't expect to get much out, if you're just doing little memory quizzes a couple times a day. But, I can do it without needing a lot of free time, and maybe it'll help some day when I am able to spend a few months in Mexico, so I can immerse myself in the language, to really learn it.
- olliej 8y ago
  I am also 40% or so fluent in Swedish >50% in Spanish, and similar for Portuguese and Korean. I have come to the conclusion that people in those countries are either very dumb and have little to talk about, or these numbers aren’t really correct. I’m not sure which it is yet ;)
  - Ma8ee 8y ago
    They have removed the fluency rating, for good reasons.
kaycebasques 8y ago
I've recently vacationed in Mexico and Colombia. Duolingo Spanish was my main resource for brushing up on the language before each trip. I wasn't fluent, but I impressed myself over how much I was able to successfully communicate. I practiced for about a month before each trip. My daily goal was 50XP. That said, I've cumulatively taken about 6 years of Spanish throughout middle school, high school, and community college. As this article points out, they are adding an impressive amount of new content. The new "Stories" feature is cool (I think it's still under the "Labs" section). So is their podcast, which is an NPR-style story that alternates 1 paragraph in Spanish, then the next paragraph in English.
barsonme 8y ago
I used it for French. It was great to get a footing with the language, but ultimately it doesn’t allow you to learn more than superficially.
titanix2 8y ago
A few years ago, as a graduate in Japanese studies, I was curious about what Duolingo offered to learn the language. My verdict: nothing usable at all. Recently I needed to learn Czech, and give it another try. Again, not something that can be used to learn the language: it just throws quizz of things I never learnt in the first place. Years ago, I had a project for an app that proposes collaborative language learning quizzes. Sometimes, I think I shouldn't have abandoned it because existing software still doesn't exactly provide what I want.
macspoofing 8y ago
I did French with Duolingo. I found it was a great companion. It's not enough on its own.
dmihal 8y ago
I casually used Duolingo to start learning Russian for a few years. I had a trip to Kiev a bit ago, and decided to take some lessons while there. I hated it. I couldn't keep up with the class, felt like I was learning nothing and wasting money. Different learning styles work best for different people.
lambda 8y ago
I had taken some Japanese in high school, and French in college, and later done some Duolingo to try to brush up my French, but then abandoned it. I recently picked it back up again (couple of months ago), and tried doing both Japanese and French. I find the French one much more helpful. The Japanese module is still in beta, and it shows; tapping on one word to look them up if you don't remember them doesn't work well in Japanese but it works fine in French. And yeah, I found the Japanese curriculum pretty lacking, and the kanji really hard to learn in this format. I did find an interesting way to practice my hiragana and katakana, though. I created a slide deck using Tinycards (Duolingo's flash-card app, I found it a lot easier to set up and use than Anki even if it's less powerful) in which I would have to write the kana using the handwriting input method for Japanese. I found that actually trying to write out the characters was way more helpful for remembering them then just clicking on the right one out of a list. However, I couldn't figure out a good way to get Duolingo to give me a list of the kanji I was supposed to have learned by now to use that with kanji, and figured it would be too much of a pain to go back through all of the lessons, write all of that down and then create the flash cards manually from that. I've quit with the Duolingo Japanese lessons by now, I think I want to wait until they're a little more fully baked, and even then I'll probably need some other outside resources to study along with. I think Duolingo in its current form is a good way to stay practiced with a language and learn some vocabulary and grammar, but only for some of the languages. However, even for those languages, you will need some other resources to really develop fluency.
- GuiA 8y ago
  I’ve found WaniKani to be amazing for SRS for kanji. If you are diligent about it you can go through the jouyou set in 18 months or so.
  - lambda 8y ago
    Looks interesting. I think I'd have to be a lot more dedicated to that, and need some other resource for learning grammar, vocabulary, and testing complete sentences. The nice thing about Duolingo for, say, French is that I can kind of mindlessly do it every day to keep my skills up and improve my vocabulary, and then do smaller bouts of studying using other methods to improve actual fluency. But with Japanese, Duolingo just doesn't work very well, and just learning kanji with WaniKani would miss all of the rest of the context, so I'd need something to pair with that for learning the rest of the language. Any recommendations on good resources for learning the actual spoken language to go along with WaniKai?
zubi 8y ago
I successfully learned Esperanto, extensively studying solely on duolingo for 3 weeks, then jumping on to other material. It was one of best things that I did for myself. I particularly recommend Esperanto to HN readers as the language itself is "hackable".
- sudosteph 8y ago
  ĉu vi povas rekomendas la aliaj materialojn ke vi utilis? Mi jam forgesis plej de miaj studisoj...
  - zubi 8y ago
    Mi forte rekomandas ke vi legu Gerda Malaperis ĉe lernu.net. Fakte, mi trovis ĉiu materialo sur lernu.net tre utila. Kaj tiam vi povas provi legi rakontojn de Fratoj Grimm, denove sur lernu.net. Alie, vi povas vidi videojn de Evildea sur Jutubo kaj aŭskulti podkastojn ĉe kern.punkto.info. Ne forgesu aniĝi al Duolingo Esperanto Learners ĉe Fejsbuko, se vi havas konton tie. Bonŝanson :)
ben_w 8y ago
Yes, German. Taught myself to GCSE grade B (self assessed with a past paper, for non UK that exam is the standard for 16 year olds and is merely OK not amazing or terrible). Also learning Esperanto (I don’t think it’s teaching me enough) and Greek (no idea, only half way through the course, but I can now touch type Greek on an English keyboard).
abecedarius 8y ago
I've used Duolingo French mostly daily since last August, along with reading children's books of gradually increasing difficulty. (I'm into the first Harry Potter book at this point.) I think I could've learned substantially more efficiently than with Duolingo, if I could've focused on it as a top goal, but it worked well enough as a way of turning time when feeling tired with no initiative into learning time. You just fire up the app and do what it asks you to, for some delimited time per day, and gradually do get good enough at French to read real books. I wish it were better still -- some other responses have pointed out criticisms I agree with -- but by the standards of when I grew up, in the 80s, it offers something that afaik just didn't exist then. I took several years of Spanish in school but probably could not read it as well as I read French now. (I'll have to grab a Spanish Harry Potter and check.) Conversations out loud might be a different story.
- sweezyjeezy 8y ago
  > Conversations out loud might be a different story. This is the biggest limitation of duolingo. In most languages, reading is the easiest in the reading/ writing/ listening/ speaking hierarchy[1] - a good way to learn vocab, but learning to cope with the sound of the language at full speed is generally where the biggest challenge lies. I would seriously recommend listening to language learning podcasts over duolingo once you get past a beginner level. Source : am also an intermediate French learner. French people talk fast. [1] ... but writing correctly in French is freaking hard as European languages go, because of the spelling rules...
Patient0 8y ago
I am currently using Duolingo to learn French and finding it tremendously useful as a way to practise. It's only been for the last 3 weeks or so but I feel that it is working much better for me than if I was trying to learn from videos or books. I should say however that I am also taking weekly face to face French lessons (it was my teacher who recommended Duolingo)
justherefortart 8y ago
I use the Living Language series in conjunction with college courses when I want to learn a new language. Then try to read online newspapers and comments to get a more well rounded vocabulary. Then I try TV/Movies once I've roughed my way through the language listening stuff I've got. I tried Dulingo for a bit but found it mostly annoying as I prefer the structured way I've been taught and learned in the past. Maybe it's just how I enjoy learning though.
theresistor 8y ago
I used it to learn basic Spanish before a trip to Spain, and do feel that it helped. However, I'm coming from a specific position in that I already speak French and studied Latin for a long time. It was absolutely sufficient for me to pick up a basic vocabulary, with my general knowledge of Latin-derived grammars helping me fill in for its weaknesses on that front.
adrianN 8y ago
I've learned Japanese to a level where I can read the children's news mostly without using a dictionary mainly by grinding vocabulary in Anki and reading with Yomichan. Depending on the topic I can follow spoken language decently as well.
stordoff 8y ago
I've been having success with WaniKani. It's mainly for vocabulary learning, but just that lets me be able to read enough to be able to start picking up the grammar from context, and (more importantly) being able to apply that grammar in more situations which makes it much easier to learn. It also forces you to rapidly become fluent in hiragana (IIRC romaji isn't used anywhere). I feel like it's working because I'm frequently understanding the terms in real Japanese content, and it's giving me the ability to understand terms that haven't been explicitly taught (e.g. I was reading something the other day and read 心理学校 and 火の用心 as "psychology school" and "beware of fire" [with the correct pronunciations/readings] without any thought, despite never coming across the phrases before). > DuoLingo will bring you to 15% understanding of Hiragana before dumping you into Katakana Personally that's how I prefer to learn -- I got to being able to read about 50% of the hiragana without too much effort then went straight to WaniKani, and found I was making much more rapid, reliable (i.e I feel like I'm actually _reading_ them, not just being able to remember the meaning/having to think about it) on the remaining 50%, and I've mostly learn the katakana through context/use -- but of course YMMV.

tdumitrescu 8y ago

Not apps, but I've had good results with the old Teach Yourself... book+audio series as well as the Pimsleur audio series. Tried Duolingo for a while and it felt more like a vocabulary course than a language course. Not useless, but it didn't improve my language skills.

symmitchry 8y ago

Absolutely. I did Duolingo Spanish (although I a) was fluent-ish in French, and b) had taken a Spanish course at University.) I can say without a doubt that I learned a ton (via Duolingo) and a trip to Cuba made it very obvious. I am far from fluent, but I could get by in nearly all situations. I'm learning Swedish now, and it's getting to the point where new languages are easier and easier to pick up. My partner is further than me, and knows a shocking amount of Swedish just from the Duolingo app.

SwellJoe 8y ago

I find it fun (enough) and quick enough to use daily to keep my mind thinking in Spanish now and then, but I agree it isn't very effective at allowing me to speak it. I draw a blank whenever trying to converse in Spanish. But, I do find I can read quite a bit more Spanish after a year or so of using Duolingo mostly daily. I only use it for about 10 minutes a day, so I don't expect miracles. I find the "you are 53% fluent in Spanish" notifications laughable, though. I'm maybe 10% fluent, on a good day, when listening, and about 20% when reading. Though assigning a percentage to fluency is a bit weird anyway. So...yeah, I think you kinda get out what you put into learning a language, and Duolingo is way closer to putting in "nothing" than it is to putting in "something". One shouldn't expect to get much out, if you're just doing little memory quizzes a couple times a day. But, I can do it without needing a lot of free time, and maybe it'll help some day when I am able to spend a few months in Mexico, so I can immerse myself in the language, to really learn it.

olliej 8y ago
I am also 40% or so fluent in Swedish >50% in Spanish, and similar for Portuguese and Korean. I have come to the conclusion that people in those countries are either very dumb and have little to talk about, or these numbers aren’t really correct. I’m not sure which it is yet ;)
- Ma8ee 8y ago
  They have removed the fluency rating, for good reasons.

kaycebasques 8y ago

I've recently vacationed in Mexico and Colombia. Duolingo Spanish was my main resource for brushing up on the language before each trip. I wasn't fluent, but I impressed myself over how much I was able to successfully communicate. I practiced for about a month before each trip. My daily goal was 50XP. That said, I've cumulatively taken about 6 years of Spanish throughout middle school, high school, and community college. As this article points out, they are adding an impressive amount of new content. The new "Stories" feature is cool (I think it's still under the "Labs" section). So is their podcast, which is an NPR-style story that alternates 1 paragraph in Spanish, then the next paragraph in English.

barsonme 8y ago

I used it for French. It was great to get a footing with the language, but ultimately it doesn’t allow you to learn more than superficially.

titanix2 8y ago

A few years ago, as a graduate in Japanese studies, I was curious about what Duolingo offered to learn the language. My verdict: nothing usable at all. Recently I needed to learn Czech, and give it another try. Again, not something that can be used to learn the language: it just throws quizz of things I never learnt in the first place. Years ago, I had a project for an app that proposes collaborative language learning quizzes. Sometimes, I think I shouldn't have abandoned it because existing software still doesn't exactly provide what I want.

macspoofing 8y ago

I did French with Duolingo. I found it was a great companion. It's not enough on its own.

dmihal 8y ago

I casually used Duolingo to start learning Russian for a few years. I had a trip to Kiev a bit ago, and decided to take some lessons while there. I hated it. I couldn't keep up with the class, felt like I was learning nothing and wasting money. Different learning styles work best for different people.

lambda 8y ago

I had taken some Japanese in high school, and French in college, and later done some Duolingo to try to brush up my French, but then abandoned it. I recently picked it back up again (couple of months ago), and tried doing both Japanese and French. I find the French one much more helpful. The Japanese module is still in beta, and it shows; tapping on one word to look them up if you don't remember them doesn't work well in Japanese but it works fine in French. And yeah, I found the Japanese curriculum pretty lacking, and the kanji really hard to learn in this format. I did find an interesting way to practice my hiragana and katakana, though. I created a slide deck using Tinycards (Duolingo's flash-card app, I found it a lot easier to set up and use than Anki even if it's less powerful) in which I would have to write the kana using the handwriting input method for Japanese. I found that actually trying to write out the characters was way more helpful for remembering them then just clicking on the right one out of a list. However, I couldn't figure out a good way to get Duolingo to give me a list of the kanji I was supposed to have learned by now to use that with kanji, and figured it would be too much of a pain to go back through all of the lessons, write all of that down and then create the flash cards manually from that. I've quit with the Duolingo Japanese lessons by now, I think I want to wait until they're a little more fully baked, and even then I'll probably need some other outside resources to study along with. I think Duolingo in its current form is a good way to stay practiced with a language and learn some vocabulary and grammar, but only for some of the languages. However, even for those languages, you will need some other resources to really develop fluency.

GuiA 8y ago
I’ve found WaniKani to be amazing for SRS for kanji. If you are diligent about it you can go through the jouyou set in 18 months or so.
- lambda 8y ago
  Looks interesting. I think I'd have to be a lot more dedicated to that, and need some other resource for learning grammar, vocabulary, and testing complete sentences. The nice thing about Duolingo for, say, French is that I can kind of mindlessly do it every day to keep my skills up and improve my vocabulary, and then do smaller bouts of studying using other methods to improve actual fluency. But with Japanese, Duolingo just doesn't work very well, and just learning kanji with WaniKani would miss all of the rest of the context, so I'd need something to pair with that for learning the rest of the language. Any recommendations on good resources for learning the actual spoken language to go along with WaniKai?

zubi 8y ago

I successfully learned Esperanto, extensively studying solely on duolingo for 3 weeks, then jumping on to other material. It was one of best things that I did for myself. I particularly recommend Esperanto to HN readers as the language itself is "hackable".

sudosteph 8y ago
ĉu vi povas rekomendas la aliaj materialojn ke vi utilis? Mi jam forgesis plej de miaj studisoj...
- zubi 8y ago
  Mi forte rekomandas ke vi legu Gerda Malaperis ĉe lernu.net. Fakte, mi trovis ĉiu materialo sur lernu.net tre utila. Kaj tiam vi povas provi legi rakontojn de Fratoj Grimm, denove sur lernu.net. Alie, vi povas vidi videojn de Evildea sur Jutubo kaj aŭskulti podkastojn ĉe kern.punkto.info. Ne forgesu aniĝi al Duolingo Esperanto Learners ĉe Fejsbuko, se vi havas konton tie. Bonŝanson :)

ben_w 8y ago

Yes, German. Taught myself to GCSE grade B (self assessed with a past paper, for non UK that exam is the standard for 16 year olds and is merely OK not amazing or terrible). Also learning Esperanto (I don’t think it’s teaching me enough) and Greek (no idea, only half way through the course, but I can now touch type Greek on an English keyboard).

abecedarius 8y ago

I've used Duolingo French mostly daily since last August, along with reading children's books of gradually increasing difficulty. (I'm into the first Harry Potter book at this point.) I think I could've learned substantially more efficiently than with Duolingo, if I could've focused on it as a top goal, but it worked well enough as a way of turning time when feeling tired with no initiative into learning time. You just fire up the app and do what it asks you to, for some delimited time per day, and gradually do get good enough at French to read real books. I wish it were better still -- some other responses have pointed out criticisms I agree with -- but by the standards of when I grew up, in the 80s, it offers something that afaik just didn't exist then. I took several years of Spanish in school but probably could not read it as well as I read French now. (I'll have to grab a Spanish Harry Potter and check.) Conversations out loud might be a different story.

sweezyjeezy 8y ago
> Conversations out loud might be a different story. This is the biggest limitation of duolingo. In most languages, reading is the easiest in the reading/ writing/ listening/ speaking hierarchy[1] - a good way to learn vocab, but learning to cope with the sound of the language at full speed is generally where the biggest challenge lies. I would seriously recommend listening to language learning podcasts over duolingo once you get past a beginner level. Source : am also an intermediate French learner. French people talk fast. [1] ... but writing correctly in French is freaking hard as European languages go, because of the spelling rules...

Patient0 8y ago

I am currently using Duolingo to learn French and finding it tremendously useful as a way to practise. It's only been for the last 3 weeks or so but I feel that it is working much better for me than if I was trying to learn from videos or books. I should say however that I am also taking weekly face to face French lessons (it was my teacher who recommended Duolingo)

justherefortart 8y ago

I use the Living Language series in conjunction with college courses when I want to learn a new language. Then try to read online newspapers and comments to get a more well rounded vocabulary. Then I try TV/Movies once I've roughed my way through the language listening stuff I've got. I tried Dulingo for a bit but found it mostly annoying as I prefer the structured way I've been taught and learned in the past. Maybe it's just how I enjoy learning though.

theresistor 8y ago

I used it to learn basic Spanish before a trip to Spain, and do feel that it helped. However, I'm coming from a specific position in that I already speak French and studied Latin for a long time. It was absolutely sufficient for me to pick up a basic vocabulary, with my general knowledge of Latin-derived grammars helping me fill in for its weaknesses on that front.

adrianN 8y ago

I've learned Japanese to a level where I can read the children's news mostly without using a dictionary mainly by grinding vocabulary in Anki and reading with Yomichan. Depending on the topic I can follow spoken language decently as well.

stordoff 8y ago

I've been having success with WaniKani. It's mainly for vocabulary learning, but just that lets me be able to read enough to be able to start picking up the grammar from context, and (more importantly) being able to apply that grammar in more situations which makes it much easier to learn. It also forces you to rapidly become fluent in hiragana (IIRC romaji isn't used anywhere). I feel like it's working because I'm frequently understanding the terms in real Japanese content, and it's giving me the ability to understand terms that haven't been explicitly taught (e.g. I was reading something the other day and read 心理学校 and 火の用心 as "psychology school" and "beware of fire" [with the correct pronunciations/readings] without any thought, despite never coming across the phrases before). > DuoLingo will bring you to 15% understanding of Hiragana before dumping you into Katakana Personally that's how I prefer to learn -- I got to being able to read about 50% of the hiragana without too much effort then went straight to WaniKani, and found I was making much more rapid, reliable (i.e I feel like I'm actually _reading_ them, not just being able to remember the meaning/having to think about it) on the remaining 50%, and I've mostly learn the katakana through context/use -- but of course YMMV.