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I did Duolingo seriously for more than 370 days in a row. Spanish: I speak french and English so Spanish is relatively easy to complete. After completing the c

I did Duolingo seriously for more than 370 days in a row. Spanish: I speak french and English so Spanish is relatively easy to complete. After completing the course, I tried having conversations with people (with friends but mostly uber drivers) and I was surprised how many times i learned it all wrong. I had to read a lot or children book to remedy that. French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta course just to see. It was very awkward. The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. Japanese: This is very different from the languages I speak. But after completing the entire suite, I still can't look at a japanese text and read it. I can't form a sentence on my own because it never teaches you how. I can't count to ten because it only gives you numbers randomly. I know a few colors. I know words, but those words make no sense on their own. I also had to follow youtube lessons to make any sense of what I learned. Duolingo is cool at making it look fun to learn. I don't think you'll learn to speak any languages with it.

KeitIG 9y ago
Exactly my problem with Duolingo. It is great for Vocabulary, but in the end it's just knowing it by heart, and I was suprised there are no real courses explaining you the synthax of a phrase or some other advanced rules.
- simias 9y ago
  I don't find it great for vocab either, Anki or Memrise are massively better IMO since they only do that and they do it well. Of course it Duolingo you get the words in some context which could be better but since half the time the context makes no sense anyway why bother? I just did a Duolingo review about "household items" right now and it repeated twice the word "stairs" and thrice the word "kitchen", words I have no real trouble with. How about giving me some vocabulary I actually need to practice instead? And at least on Anki or Memrise you can select decks that match what you want to learn, such as getting the basics to order at a restaurant or ask for directions. On Duolingo I think I've learned how to say "the bishop sends a pineapple to the queen" before I learned how to say "bathroom".
rando444 9y ago
I've been on duolingo since the beginning and am sure that I've spent more time with the site and app than 95% of the userbase. I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language. There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses. #1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking. This is just the basics of a language.. enough to understand basic expressions. You're never going to learn a language without further practice and tools. Spending time in books, trying to form your own thoughts. Duolingo is a great start, but if you never progress beyond it, of course you're not going to learn a language. #2: and most important. When you complete a course you're not done. I see this all of the time, people just get to the last exercise and stop. You're not going to learn a language this way because most people can't retain a 2000+ word vocabulary by only seeing a word a couple of times. There's a reason why your "strength" in categories decreases as time passes.. because it's unlikely that you've actually remembered every single word you were taught. I've participated in a large number of duolingo related discussion over the years and one thing stands out is that there is a strong correlation between people that think you can't use it to learn a language and people that go straight through the course, reach the end, and stop. Anyway, it has its flaws, and is far from perfect, but I can't imagine having a better product that does not come with a fee.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  No way will Duo Lingo get you anywhere close to A2 for writing or speaking. MAYBE A1 if you try hard at it for a long long time in a language it well supports. To get to A2 you need a real tutor and real communication experience. I used Verbling to find a tutor and I traveled to Eastern Europe over the summer to practice and only after hundreds of hours of practice was I able to communicate in Russian to any degree even approaching A1.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - rando444 9y ago
    This largely depends on the language. More complex languages, yes, but for languages like swedish/norwegian/danish where there is very little grammar, I find it's much easier to progress within the limits of their program.
crazygringo 9y ago
Agreed. I speak Portuguese fluently as a second language, and wanted to see what the Duolingo material was like. First warning sign: I couldn't pass the test to study intermediate content, because a significant proportion of the multiple-choice answers were just wrong. Then, looking at the beginner content, a shocking number of answers were wrong as well. It was kind of funny, since each piece of material had user comments associated, you'd see 70+ comments from people all complaining about wrong answers. That immediately destroyed any trust with them. When you put out educational material, it has to be correct. That has to be the foundation.
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  Did you check if other language learning apps were wrong as well?
  - gnulinux 9y ago
    Why would this matter, at all?
    - strken 9y ago
      It would matter to those of us trying to learn a language, because if another app was better, we could use it instead of duolingo. At the moment I'm supplementing duolingo by nattering away to my father in French and asking the half-French guy at work how to say various things, but if the app is teaching me things that are plain wrong, I'll have to either find another app or start taking real life classes, which is why it would be useful to know what else is broken.
      - rayxi271828 9y ago
        I've been trying a few of these lately. I passed French DELF A2 late last year and going for B1 in a week. My chronological progression of picking up French via apps/courses (lots of trial-and-error): 1. Duolingo 2. Michel Thomas audio course - this has its critics but it gave me a much more solid, if limited, foundation on grammar. 3. Lingvist - I was lucky to find this early. Added around 2000 words to my vocabulary (yes they claimed ~5000 - that was inaccurate; conjugations and plurals are counted separately). Today you need to pay $23 / month to get the same number of words. 4. Clozemaster - it offers a lot more words, so I got a paid subscription. Got disappointed really fast though because its automated method to offer mass sentences really shows its flaws quickly: there are many errors and nonsensical cloze placement. I got tired of flagging. 5. Assimil - seems good, but without any gamification or anything I can play on my phone while waiting, commuting, etc., this soon dropped off the radar. 6. Speechling - this one should not have the problem of Clozemaster or Duolingo, because they have a human teacher correcting your speech. I imagine their sentences are more carefully curated as well. I started the trial, but dropped after a while because I found I just couldn't allocate the time to sit in a quiet place and record myself for an extended amount of time. Yes, it's a genuine "it's not you, it's me" thing. I really like their recent features and will probably try this again during a less hectic life period. Hongyu (the CEO) is super responsive too, which is great. 7. Glossika - this is what I'm currently on. It's not perfect; their main thing is you hear someone saying X in English and a moment later the equivalent in French. They offer mass repetitions as well, with the same class of problems: occasional inaccurate translations. The reason I picked this one instead of Speechling is not quality: it allows me to listen to mass sentences while doing mindless boring stuff that I have to do anyway (e.g.: doing the dishes, walking to/from the subway station, etc.). This allows me to get French exposure every day, even if not perfect, which ends up meaning more exposure than what Speechling can give me. 8. I'm a subscriber of one more app, I can't believe I forgot to add this one the first time: Kwiziq. They have a very specific target: teach you grammar from A0 (i.e.: the level below A1) to C1. My main problem is that they don't have an "aging" feature. Something I learned fully in A1 9 months ago will be forever marked as "mastered", despite my having forgotten it completely. Nevertheless I continue to be a happy subscriber. It's fun to finish a quick grammar quiz here and there as you're waiting for food, queueing for stuff, etc.
smsm42 9y ago
> But after completing the entire suite, I still can't look at a japanese text and read it. Well, if you're coming from a European language background, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to benchmark on. I mean, there's three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji) for starters! And then unlike European languages, it's not alphabetical and kanji is not even really syllabic - which means, the background you need to get to be able to read texts is huge. E.g., for Spanish, I can read the newspaper (not understand yet, but just reproduce, look for words I recognize, etc.) without even touching a language course. And if I get the basics, I can see grammatical structure, and given common Romance background, get about 20% of vocabulary for free just from knowing another European language (well, not true for all European ones, but for many it is).
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  It's true that Japanese is harder to learn. However, the Duolingo course is particularly awful. Even with some prior knowledge I was completely lost with much of the stuff they randomly throw at you without any explanation.
  - aninhumer 9y ago
    Also a lot of it is essentially wrong, since they expect you to transliterate parts of the sentence that would probably not be included in context, e.g. saying "watashi wa" for any sentence starting "I".
    - viraptor 9y ago
      While there may be some specific cases where it's done, I'm halfway through the course and watashi was shown on its own, (quite early) but I don't think it was used in even one sentence so far. (Most of them starting with I)
      - cuddlybacon 9y ago
        I've made it through the full course. It will generally let you add "watashi wa" on, but rarely mandates it. Most of the time the suggested answer won't include it either.
adrianN 9y ago
It takes a couple of years before you can look at a Japanese text for normal adults and read it without problems.
ljm 9y ago
I had a similar experience and almost straight away I felt like I wouldn't learn much besides random vocabulary. Learning 'la tortuga es verde' and 'el hombre y el niño' and similar isn't particularly useful in the grand scheme of things and it's not going to help you get to 'la cuenta por favor', 'donde esta el baño', and so on. In fact you might run into certain situations where your vocab tells you one thing but the response is something else entirely. e.g. You might believe that 'estoy caliente' means that you're feeling really hot, because you learned that 'estoy' means 'I am' and 'caliente' means hot, but you would be confused when the room bursts into laughter and won't tell you what's so funny about it. I spent a while using Busuu instead, which presents something more like a curriculum and lets you formulate your own answers to questions which are then reviewed by native speakers (in return for you reviewing the submissions of others). I found that incredibly effective because I wasn't stuck with putting strange sentences in the right order, I could get creative about how I described a red flag or a holiday I went on. More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion, and generally refactor the sentences until my gut said I had something that flowed reasonably well. Very intense and deliberate but it didn't take long to start posting to Facebook in Spanish. The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking.
- vram22 9y ago
  >More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion, Ha, I do that too sometimes (GT), and when it doesn't work, I do this: https://translate.google.com/#en/en/Blame%20Google%20Translate https://translate.google.com/#en/en/Blame%20Google%20Transla... and share it with the person I am talking or writing to. Just first change the language of the right side text box inf GT to the target language you want, or in the URL above, change the second language code from en (English) to de or es (German or Spanish), for example. Also, it's interesting that if you toggle the translation from lang A -> lang B to lang B -> lang A, the result is sometimes not the same as the original you first typed in lang A. e.g. try the above phrase I used (Blame Google Translate) with DE (German) as the target lang. All that said, GT is still a useful and fun tool. I play around with the audio outputs of the languages sometimes.
kzrdude 9y ago
Well, Duolingo can't make you learn a language. You have to do that yourself. You can use Duolingo along the way..
chrischen 9y ago
I’m trying to learn Japanese and 99% of the apps out there focus on memorizing phrases out of context that could be applied to any topic, and market itself as a language learning system. I’ve yet to find a single app that beat out a one-time read through of a Japanese grammar guide. That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that.
- travv0 9y ago
  > That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that. What about Anki?
  - chrischen 9y ago
    I’m using StickyStudy, which is built just for JLPT official vocab sets.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I've been using Anki as called it by a sibling. I'm not super excited about it because everything about it is just a mess. But the are great pre-made decks and it's easy to find help because so many people use it. There is also memrise which seems to be gaining in popularity. If you are using Genki the publisher provides their own mobile apps.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Skip the apps and hit the books. Apps aside from Anki are useless. https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html
simias 9y ago
I'm in the exact same boat? I'm French and I've been learning Portuguese for about a year now, including on Duolingo. I currently have a 203 day streak and I had a ~100 day streak before that. I've been using the "Portuguese for English speakers" tree because the French counterpart was so filled with typos in the basic lessons that I didn't trust it. I thought that the more popular English version might have been better reviewed. I mean if they can't even proofread the text of the "Basic 1" lesson the rest probably isn't better. The streak is actually the only thing I really like about it, I want to keep it going because it shows me how long I've been working on it. For everything else I completely agree with you, Duolingo is borderline worthless for actually learning a language IMO. I can make a random list of complaints in no particular order: - The spaced repetition aspect is ridiculously poorly calibrated, at least for me. Basic words decay way too fast which means that if I actually try to keep the skills "golden" (in the pre-crown era) I keep drilling the same basic skills again and again. Anki or Memrize manage that tremedously better. It's not even that complicated to implement correctly, I wonder why it's so crap. Maybe to keep you coming back and stretch the existing content? Now with the crown system they got rid of skill decay altogether, instead having you drill the same sentences an ungodly amount of time to reach a higher skill level. Also no matter how much I've drilled any lesson the majority of the exercises are asking you to translate foreign-to-native instead of the other way around, which would be more interesting as you improve. - The actual "lessons" for each skills are so bare bones that they're basically useless. I think they know that since I don't think they're accessible at all in the android app. I know that grammar isn't sexy for most but if you want to learn a language you'll have to bite the bullet at some point, an english speaker will have some trouble learning the nuances of the perfect and imperfect past in romance languages by examples alone. - Meanwhile, on top of not actually teaching you proper grammar they like to mix concepts in the same lessons, because otherwise it wouldn't be confusing enough. For instance the Portuguese subjunctive course contains examples that are actually imperative but "by chance" happen to have the same form as the subjunctive. Because obviously the subjunctive is so trivial that you have to spice things up by adding a completely different tense in there. - The actual vocabulary they teach you is absurd. You can do the entire tree and not know how to say basic stuff, but you'll be able to say "the painter opens the power outlet" or "my tiger ate my pillow". Those are real examples. - Worse than weird vocabulary you also have very confusing sentences. For instance take a look at this: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2121481$from_email=comment&comment_id=26493280 https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2121481$from_email=comment&... "Se nós nos encontrássemos mais vezes?" which is translated by "If we met more often?". What does that even mean? It's not even a full sentence. And that's for the past subjunctive lesson, you know, that trivial thing that definitely requires trash sentences like those. And it's been there for 4 years judging by the comments, so the authors of the course stand by it. - These types of weird sentences are super common and they keep you wondering if you're not getting an idiom of the language or if it's just a super weird sentence. 90% of the time it's the latter. I don't understand why Duolingo is so popular, IMO Memrise is massively better. It's a lot more focused, it only pretends to teach you words and simple phrases, but at least it does the job. If you want to learn a language buy a good grammar book, a dictionary and drill vocab on Anki or Memrise. Use something like lang-8 to practice your writing. Forget Duolingo. I do enjoy their "Duolingo Stories" service though, but there's not enough content there to keep you busy for very long and there's no "replay" value.
poisonarena 9y ago
Disagree, I went from no spanish knowledge to being able to basically text/whatsapp. Some of the phrases were retarded but I was still learning new words and a bit of grammar. 4 years later and I am fluent and still credit duolingo for giving me a boost and making it fun/gamifing the very basics. I also disagree about Japanese, I used to it learn the kanas and I am continuing to learn with it. I don't understand why there are people that hate on this free language tool so much.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I agree that the kana were pretty good. Everything after that was just incoherent and I'd rather sit down and read through Genki instead, memorise what I learned with a Anki deck and maybe even spend some money for a teacher in iTalki. I've also had good success listening to Michel Thomas recordings while commuting. While none of this except most versions of Anki is free, neither is my time and learning a language especially Japanese is a massive time investment to begin with. I'm happy to throw money at the problem, especially if we talk $50 for a text book or $15-$20/hour with a native teacher.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Measuring Duolingo’s quality by kana learning is not a good idea. Kana are so simple you can learn them in a week using any method ever. What Duolingo fails at is the important part of learning Japanese (aside from kanji) - grammar and sentence structuring. You’re much better off reading an actual textbook. I personally don’t hate on Duolingo because it’s free but it tends to waste people’s times and gives them false impressions about language learning.
edpichler 9y ago
Did it, at least, improved your vocabulary?
ubernostrum 9y ago
French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta course just to see. It was very awkward. The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. This is interesting. I took six years of French in high school + college, and did immersion in Québec. I had not spoken French since then, so a couple years ago when I was planning a trip to France I got Duolinguo and worked through the French course to refresh. I didn't notice anything odd about it. And in France I was able to communicate with people, though one person asked if I was Canadian -- apparently I have an accent. Did I perhaps learn French incorrectly?
- umanwizard 9y ago
  I read/write fluent French (not native, but close enough for Duolingo purposes). I just went through the course to see what I could find. It's quite common for correct answers not to be accepted. In particular, often some technically correct literal translation is accepted but the almost certainly correct colloquial translation is not. For example: "Tu manges ça" Literally this means "you eat that" or "you are eating that". However, since it's hard to imagine someone saying "you are eating that" in real life (why would you ever say that?) I interpret this as a question ("are you eating that?") or as a command to a child ("Eat that!" or a bit more literally, "you shall eat that!") However, the accepted answer was indeed "You are eating that.". By the way, this isn't even taking into account the fact that "ça" should quite commonly be translated as "this", not "that" -- the distinction between "this" and "that" isn't the same in French as it is in English, and it's totally wrong to assume that "ça" should always be translated as "that" and "ceci" as "this". In fact, I think "are you eating this?" is orders of magnitude more likely to be the correct translation of "tu manges ça" than "you are eating that.". I've only shared one, but there are a million examples like this on DuoLingo. There are also some translations that are just objectively wrong: "He reads the menu" should be "il lit la carte", but on DuoLingo it's "il lit le menu". Nobody says "le menu" for "menu" in France. (They do say that in Québec, but nowhere was it indicated that I should be answering in nonstandard Québec dialect. "il lit la carte" was marked wrong here even though it's what you would say in France, the primary French-speaking country in the world.) Similar to the "ça" == "this" fallacy, DuoLingo seems to believe that any phrase in which "le" or "la" appears has to involve "the" in the English translation. "You help kids" is apparently wrong for "Tu aides les enfants". The expected translation was "you're helping the children". Yes, that's one possible meaning, but "les enfants" isn't necessarily definite here: "tu aides les enfants" can certainly mean that "you help children" (or "kids", see the paragraph below), in general, whereas "you're helping the kids" implies some fixed, well-defined set of kids. Let alone French: there are even cases in which DuoLingo's writers don't seem to understand English. For example, any sentence with "les enfants" has to be translated with the overly formal "children": "kids" isn't accepted, even though I, a native English speaker, would say "kids" something like 99.9% of the time.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. // It can't be expensive to get this right, not considering what Duolingo must be doing in revenue, so why is it that way?
davidcbc 9y ago
Having completed the Duolingo Spanish tree a couple of times, I found that it gave me enough of the basics to work my way through books and follow some basic plot of TV shows with closed captioning. It hasn't done a whole lot for my listening or speaking skills, but to be fair I often disable the listening and speaking exercises since I tend to do the exercises at work while I'm waiting for something to compile. Duolingo will not make you fluent in a language, but it can give you the basics to build upon.
- prawn 9y ago
  I like Duolingo and worked through a bit of their Spanish tree but one thing that I found baffling is how late they introduce numbers. I got to Spain knowing how to tell someone that my large uncle was a milk-drinking crab in the army, but without covering 1-10.
Fins 9y ago
For Russian, initial test wasn't terribly bad, but it would flag word order as wrong when it would make no difference in Russian (and really is a bit more natural). Some of the "correct" answers also obviously required more background information than the phrase they wanted me to translate provided. Looks like fun, but not a tool that would teach you to speak a language correctly.
rangibaby 9y ago
TBF Japanese kids spend 10 years learning how to read their own language, so it’s important to have realistic expectations of what you can accomplish
liberte82 9y ago
I also don't like that it's mostly reading and listening comprehension, with little writing and as far as I know no spoken.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
I've found that Duolingo is very good for learning how to read another language (or at least read enough to get an idea of what a text is saying). It's mediocre at teaching you how to write, bad at teaching you to listen, and useless at teaching you how to speak. I've found that if you just grind through lessons without actually reading the supporting material, you don't learn much at all. If you actually read the supporting material you'll learn a lot more. Duolingo is best used as a tool in a toolbox of language learning tools. It's good for reinforcement learning, but not great for actually developing an understanding. As an analogy, you could learn algebra by looking at a lot of examples and working through worksheets of algebra problems, but you're not going to actually understand what you're doing, or learn very well.
foobiekr 9y ago
I can't speak to the others, but I did the Japanese course for a bit as a refresher since I'm 20+ years from my 4Y of japanese. I found the content pretty terrible, some of it is also obviously wrong or very misleading.
draggnar 9y ago
To me Duolingo is a fun side activity while learning a language, good to reinforce vocabulary, but I wish the exercises had just a bit of context. So much of language is with full expressions. When we learn words, we don't learn them individually but rather how they are used in a context or phrase.
DarqWebster 9y ago
I've used three apps to slowly teach myself a little Japanese. Human Japanese, Memrise, and Duolingo. And they all offer distinct advantages and disadvantages, and that's frustrating because a combined app would be far superior. Human Japanese is great for gentle explanations of grammar, but its flashcards are horrible, so one can't get the spaced repetition needed to remember everything it throws at you. Memrise is fantastic for vocabulary with its spaced repetition, but I couldn't string a sentence together, as Memrise (at least the course I did) mostly ignores grammar. Duolingo is great for practicing reading and writing sentences, checking the comments for sanity if the sentence looks fishy. But it doesn't try and teach anything, just get it wrong until you get it right. Does sentence order matter? Why do we use "wa" here and "ga" there? Duolingo doesn't say. An app that combines actual lessons with spaced practice sessions would make the whole process a lot smoother.
cuddlybacon 9y ago
I reached the end of Japanese course about a month ago and have continued to practice daily. Here are my thoughts: * Many of the English translations don't seem like idiomatic English. Sometimes I think it is even grammatically incorrect. This has made me worried about some of the Japanese not being super great as well. With other people chiming in about how languages they already knew having this problem, it doesn't look great. * I agree with numbers. They way Duolingo handles numbers, days, months, etc is to me worse than the traditional way. It took a long time to get decent at numbers, and I screw them up a bit. I don't know any of the days of the week, but I know what day of the week words look like. They only ever include one day of the week word it the word bank, so you never actually have to learn. * On the subject of the word bank, I think if the incorrect words where more plausible. For many lessons, you don't need the Japanese input. The word bank only provides one plausible English sentence. * It needs more sentence variety. For example, if a less has "The tea is hot." and "The ramen is cool.", why not also add "The tea is cool." and "The ramen is hot."? I find if Duo selects the same lesson a few days in a row, I start to memorize the answers and can punch them in without needing the input. * I can form original sentences. I'm not very fast at it, but I think that is to be expected. I don't think I'll get better until I start trying to actually speak to people. * The bigger problem I have is a lack of vocabulary. Duolingo seems to like to jump around a lot, never getting good enough at any one thing. Even in a situation where you are able to get by if you stick to a script, eg at a restaurant, there are still gaps that would prevent me from doing everything in Japanese. Looking at Memerise, it seems to focus on giving you more depth. For example, Duolingo taught me how to say "How are you?" and respond "I'm fine.". Later I've been able to add "I'm tired." and "I'm scared." Memerise teaches you "I'm fine.", "I'm tired.", "I'm happy.", "I'm angry.", "I'm hungry.", and "I'm sick.". That feels more useful. * The audio quality is crappy. Sometimes it sounds like the syllables are clipping into each other or something. Sometimes it seems like their text to speech engine got confused about where word boundaries are. I took a brief look at Memerise's Japanese course, and the audio quality is much better. * About 50% of the time when I try to tap the button to replay the audio clip, it seems to think I want to quit the lesson. * It would be nice if there was something you could tap to temporarily see Japanese sentences with spaces between words. * While I expect Duolingo would never do it, I think a few lessons on innuendos would be useful. It would save some embarrassing situations.

KeitIG 9y ago

Exactly my problem with Duolingo. It is great for Vocabulary, but in the end it's just knowing it by heart, and I was suprised there are no real courses explaining you the synthax of a phrase or some other advanced rules.

simias 9y ago
I don't find it great for vocab either, Anki or Memrise are massively better IMO since they only do that and they do it well. Of course it Duolingo you get the words in some context which could be better but since half the time the context makes no sense anyway why bother? I just did a Duolingo review about "household items" right now and it repeated twice the word "stairs" and thrice the word "kitchen", words I have no real trouble with. How about giving me some vocabulary I actually need to practice instead? And at least on Anki or Memrise you can select decks that match what you want to learn, such as getting the basics to order at a restaurant or ask for directions. On Duolingo I think I've learned how to say "the bishop sends a pineapple to the queen" before I learned how to say "bathroom".

rando444 9y ago

I've been on duolingo since the beginning and am sure that I've spent more time with the site and app than 95% of the userbase. I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language. There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses. #1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking. This is just the basics of a language.. enough to understand basic expressions. You're never going to learn a language without further practice and tools. Spending time in books, trying to form your own thoughts. Duolingo is a great start, but if you never progress beyond it, of course you're not going to learn a language. #2: and most important. When you complete a course you're not done. I see this all of the time, people just get to the last exercise and stop. You're not going to learn a language this way because most people can't retain a 2000+ word vocabulary by only seeing a word a couple of times. There's a reason why your "strength" in categories decreases as time passes.. because it's unlikely that you've actually remembered every single word you were taught. I've participated in a large number of duolingo related discussion over the years and one thing stands out is that there is a strong correlation between people that think you can't use it to learn a language and people that go straight through the course, reach the end, and stop. Anyway, it has its flaws, and is far from perfect, but I can't imagine having a better product that does not come with a fee.

3pt14159 9y ago
No way will Duo Lingo get you anywhere close to A2 for writing or speaking. MAYBE A1 if you try hard at it for a long long time in a language it well supports. To get to A2 you need a real tutor and real communication experience. I used Verbling to find a tutor and I traveled to Eastern Europe over the summer to practice and only after hundreds of hours of practice was I able to communicate in Russian to any degree even approaching A1.
- deleted 9y ago
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- rando444 9y ago
  This largely depends on the language. More complex languages, yes, but for languages like swedish/norwegian/danish where there is very little grammar, I find it's much easier to progress within the limits of their program.

crazygringo 9y ago

Agreed. I speak Portuguese fluently as a second language, and wanted to see what the Duolingo material was like. First warning sign: I couldn't pass the test to study intermediate content, because a significant proportion of the multiple-choice answers were just wrong. Then, looking at the beginner content, a shocking number of answers were wrong as well. It was kind of funny, since each piece of material had user comments associated, you'd see 70+ comments from people all complaining about wrong answers. That immediately destroyed any trust with them. When you put out educational material, it has to be correct. That has to be the foundation.

dna_polymerase 9y ago
Did you check if other language learning apps were wrong as well?
- gnulinux 9y ago
  Why would this matter, at all?
  - strken 9y ago
    It would matter to those of us trying to learn a language, because if another app was better, we could use it instead of duolingo. At the moment I'm supplementing duolingo by nattering away to my father in French and asking the half-French guy at work how to say various things, but if the app is teaching me things that are plain wrong, I'll have to either find another app or start taking real life classes, which is why it would be useful to know what else is broken.
    - rayxi271828 9y ago
      I've been trying a few of these lately. I passed French DELF A2 late last year and going for B1 in a week. My chronological progression of picking up French via apps/courses (lots of trial-and-error): 1. Duolingo 2. Michel Thomas audio course - this has its critics but it gave me a much more solid, if limited, foundation on grammar. 3. Lingvist - I was lucky to find this early. Added around 2000 words to my vocabulary (yes they claimed ~5000 - that was inaccurate; conjugations and plurals are counted separately). Today you need to pay $23 / month to get the same number of words. 4. Clozemaster - it offers a lot more words, so I got a paid subscription. Got disappointed really fast though because its automated method to offer mass sentences really shows its flaws quickly: there are many errors and nonsensical cloze placement. I got tired of flagging. 5. Assimil - seems good, but without any gamification or anything I can play on my phone while waiting, commuting, etc., this soon dropped off the radar. 6. Speechling - this one should not have the problem of Clozemaster or Duolingo, because they have a human teacher correcting your speech. I imagine their sentences are more carefully curated as well. I started the trial, but dropped after a while because I found I just couldn't allocate the time to sit in a quiet place and record myself for an extended amount of time. Yes, it's a genuine "it's not you, it's me" thing. I really like their recent features and will probably try this again during a less hectic life period. Hongyu (the CEO) is super responsive too, which is great. 7. Glossika - this is what I'm currently on. It's not perfect; their main thing is you hear someone saying X in English and a moment later the equivalent in French. They offer mass repetitions as well, with the same class of problems: occasional inaccurate translations. The reason I picked this one instead of Speechling is not quality: it allows me to listen to mass sentences while doing mindless boring stuff that I have to do anyway (e.g.: doing the dishes, walking to/from the subway station, etc.). This allows me to get French exposure every day, even if not perfect, which ends up meaning more exposure than what Speechling can give me. 8. I'm a subscriber of one more app, I can't believe I forgot to add this one the first time: Kwiziq. They have a very specific target: teach you grammar from A0 (i.e.: the level below A1) to C1. My main problem is that they don't have an "aging" feature. Something I learned fully in A1 9 months ago will be forever marked as "mastered", despite my having forgotten it completely. Nevertheless I continue to be a happy subscriber. It's fun to finish a quick grammar quiz here and there as you're waiting for food, queueing for stuff, etc.

smsm42 9y ago

> But after completing the entire suite, I still can't look at a japanese text and read it. Well, if you're coming from a European language background, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to benchmark on. I mean, there's three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji) for starters! And then unlike European languages, it's not alphabetical and kanji is not even really syllabic - which means, the background you need to get to be able to read texts is huge. E.g., for Spanish, I can read the newspaper (not understand yet, but just reproduce, look for words I recognize, etc.) without even touching a language course. And if I get the basics, I can see grammatical structure, and given common Romance background, get about 20% of vocabulary for free just from knowing another European language (well, not true for all European ones, but for many it is).

ajmurmann 9y ago
It's true that Japanese is harder to learn. However, the Duolingo course is particularly awful. Even with some prior knowledge I was completely lost with much of the stuff they randomly throw at you without any explanation.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  Also a lot of it is essentially wrong, since they expect you to transliterate parts of the sentence that would probably not be included in context, e.g. saying "watashi wa" for any sentence starting "I".
  - viraptor 9y ago
    While there may be some specific cases where it's done, I'm halfway through the course and watashi was shown on its own, (quite early) but I don't think it was used in even one sentence so far. (Most of them starting with I)
    - cuddlybacon 9y ago
      I've made it through the full course. It will generally let you add "watashi wa" on, but rarely mandates it. Most of the time the suggested answer won't include it either.

adrianN 9y ago

It takes a couple of years before you can look at a Japanese text for normal adults and read it without problems.

ljm 9y ago

I had a similar experience and almost straight away I felt like I wouldn't learn much besides random vocabulary. Learning 'la tortuga es verde' and 'el hombre y el niño' and similar isn't particularly useful in the grand scheme of things and it's not going to help you get to 'la cuenta por favor', 'donde esta el baño', and so on. In fact you might run into certain situations where your vocab tells you one thing but the response is something else entirely. e.g. You might believe that 'estoy caliente' means that you're feeling really hot, because you learned that 'estoy' means 'I am' and 'caliente' means hot, but you would be confused when the room bursts into laughter and won't tell you what's so funny about it. I spent a while using Busuu instead, which presents something more like a curriculum and lets you formulate your own answers to questions which are then reviewed by native speakers (in return for you reviewing the submissions of others). I found that incredibly effective because I wasn't stuck with putting strange sentences in the right order, I could get creative about how I described a red flag or a holiday I went on. More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion, and generally refactor the sentences until my gut said I had something that flowed reasonably well. Very intense and deliberate but it didn't take long to start posting to Facebook in Spanish. The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking.

vram22 9y ago
>More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion, Ha, I do that too sometimes (GT), and when it doesn't work, I do this: https://translate.google.com/#en/en/Blame%20Google%20Translate https://translate.google.com/#en/en/Blame%20Google%20Transla... and share it with the person I am talking or writing to. Just first change the language of the right side text box inf GT to the target language you want, or in the URL above, change the second language code from en (English) to de or es (German or Spanish), for example. Also, it's interesting that if you toggle the translation from lang A -> lang B to lang B -> lang A, the result is sometimes not the same as the original you first typed in lang A. e.g. try the above phrase I used (Blame Google Translate) with DE (German) as the target lang. All that said, GT is still a useful and fun tool. I play around with the audio outputs of the languages sometimes.

kzrdude 9y ago

Well, Duolingo can't make you learn a language. You have to do that yourself. You can use Duolingo along the way..

chrischen 9y ago

I’m trying to learn Japanese and 99% of the apps out there focus on memorizing phrases out of context that could be applied to any topic, and market itself as a language learning system. I’ve yet to find a single app that beat out a one-time read through of a Japanese grammar guide. That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that.

travv0 9y ago
> That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that. What about Anki?
- chrischen 9y ago
  I’m using StickyStudy, which is built just for JLPT official vocab sets.
ajmurmann 9y ago
I've been using Anki as called it by a sibling. I'm not super excited about it because everything about it is just a mess. But the are great pre-made decks and it's easy to find help because so many people use it. There is also memrise which seems to be gaining in popularity. If you are using Genki the publisher provides their own mobile apps.
sotojuan 9y ago
Skip the apps and hit the books. Apps aside from Anki are useless. https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html

simias 9y ago

I'm in the exact same boat? I'm French and I've been learning Portuguese for about a year now, including on Duolingo. I currently have a 203 day streak and I had a ~100 day streak before that. I've been using the "Portuguese for English speakers" tree because the French counterpart was so filled with typos in the basic lessons that I didn't trust it. I thought that the more popular English version might have been better reviewed. I mean if they can't even proofread the text of the "Basic 1" lesson the rest probably isn't better. The streak is actually the only thing I really like about it, I want to keep it going because it shows me how long I've been working on it. For everything else I completely agree with you, Duolingo is borderline worthless for actually learning a language IMO. I can make a random list of complaints in no particular order: - The spaced repetition aspect is ridiculously poorly calibrated, at least for me. Basic words decay way too fast which means that if I actually try to keep the skills "golden" (in the pre-crown era) I keep drilling the same basic skills again and again. Anki or Memrize manage that tremedously better. It's not even that complicated to implement correctly, I wonder why it's so crap. Maybe to keep you coming back and stretch the existing content? Now with the crown system they got rid of skill decay altogether, instead having you drill the same sentences an ungodly amount of time to reach a higher skill level. Also no matter how much I've drilled any lesson the majority of the exercises are asking you to translate foreign-to-native instead of the other way around, which would be more interesting as you improve. - The actual "lessons" for each skills are so bare bones that they're basically useless. I think they know that since I don't think they're accessible at all in the android app. I know that grammar isn't sexy for most but if you want to learn a language you'll have to bite the bullet at some point, an english speaker will have some trouble learning the nuances of the perfect and imperfect past in romance languages by examples alone. - Meanwhile, on top of not actually teaching you proper grammar they like to mix concepts in the same lessons, because otherwise it wouldn't be confusing enough. For instance the Portuguese subjunctive course contains examples that are actually imperative but "by chance" happen to have the same form as the subjunctive. Because obviously the subjunctive is so trivial that you have to spice things up by adding a completely different tense in there. - The actual vocabulary they teach you is absurd. You can do the entire tree and not know how to say basic stuff, but you'll be able to say "the painter opens the power outlet" or "my tiger ate my pillow". Those are real examples. - Worse than weird vocabulary you also have very confusing sentences. For instance take a look at this: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2121481$from_email=comment&comment_id=26493280 https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2121481$from_email=comment&... "Se nós nos encontrássemos mais vezes?" which is translated by "If we met more often?". What does that even mean? It's not even a full sentence. And that's for the past subjunctive lesson, you know, that trivial thing that definitely requires trash sentences like those. And it's been there for 4 years judging by the comments, so the authors of the course stand by it. - These types of weird sentences are super common and they keep you wondering if you're not getting an idiom of the language or if it's just a super weird sentence. 90% of the time it's the latter. I don't understand why Duolingo is so popular, IMO Memrise is massively better. It's a lot more focused, it only pretends to teach you words and simple phrases, but at least it does the job. If you want to learn a language buy a good grammar book, a dictionary and drill vocab on Anki or Memrise. Use something like lang-8 to practice your writing. Forget Duolingo. I do enjoy their "Duolingo Stories" service though, but there's not enough content there to keep you busy for very long and there's no "replay" value.

poisonarena 9y ago

Disagree, I went from no spanish knowledge to being able to basically text/whatsapp. Some of the phrases were retarded but I was still learning new words and a bit of grammar. 4 years later and I am fluent and still credit duolingo for giving me a boost and making it fun/gamifing the very basics. I also disagree about Japanese, I used to it learn the kanas and I am continuing to learn with it. I don't understand why there are people that hate on this free language tool so much.

ajmurmann 9y ago
I agree that the kana were pretty good. Everything after that was just incoherent and I'd rather sit down and read through Genki instead, memorise what I learned with a Anki deck and maybe even spend some money for a teacher in iTalki. I've also had good success listening to Michel Thomas recordings while commuting. While none of this except most versions of Anki is free, neither is my time and learning a language especially Japanese is a massive time investment to begin with. I'm happy to throw money at the problem, especially if we talk $50 for a text book or $15-$20/hour with a native teacher.
sotojuan 9y ago
Measuring Duolingo’s quality by kana learning is not a good idea. Kana are so simple you can learn them in a week using any method ever. What Duolingo fails at is the important part of learning Japanese (aside from kanji) - grammar and sentence structuring. You’re much better off reading an actual textbook. I personally don’t hate on Duolingo because it’s free but it tends to waste people’s times and gives them false impressions about language learning.

edpichler 9y ago

Did it, at least, improved your vocabulary?

ubernostrum 9y ago

French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta course just to see. It was very awkward. The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. This is interesting. I took six years of French in high school + college, and did immersion in Québec. I had not spoken French since then, so a couple years ago when I was planning a trip to France I got Duolinguo and worked through the French course to refresh. I didn't notice anything odd about it. And in France I was able to communicate with people, though one person asked if I was Canadian -- apparently I have an accent. Did I perhaps learn French incorrectly?

umanwizard 9y ago
I read/write fluent French (not native, but close enough for Duolingo purposes). I just went through the course to see what I could find. It's quite common for correct answers not to be accepted. In particular, often some technically correct literal translation is accepted but the almost certainly correct colloquial translation is not. For example: "Tu manges ça" Literally this means "you eat that" or "you are eating that". However, since it's hard to imagine someone saying "you are eating that" in real life (why would you ever say that?) I interpret this as a question ("are you eating that?") or as a command to a child ("Eat that!" or a bit more literally, "you shall eat that!") However, the accepted answer was indeed "You are eating that.". By the way, this isn't even taking into account the fact that "ça" should quite commonly be translated as "this", not "that" -- the distinction between "this" and "that" isn't the same in French as it is in English, and it's totally wrong to assume that "ça" should always be translated as "that" and "ceci" as "this". In fact, I think "are you eating this?" is orders of magnitude more likely to be the correct translation of "tu manges ça" than "you are eating that.". I've only shared one, but there are a million examples like this on DuoLingo. There are also some translations that are just objectively wrong: "He reads the menu" should be "il lit la carte", but on DuoLingo it's "il lit le menu". Nobody says "le menu" for "menu" in France. (They do say that in Québec, but nowhere was it indicated that I should be answering in nonstandard Québec dialect. "il lit la carte" was marked wrong here even though it's what you would say in France, the primary French-speaking country in the world.) Similar to the "ça" == "this" fallacy, DuoLingo seems to believe that any phrase in which "le" or "la" appears has to involve "the" in the English translation. "You help kids" is apparently wrong for "Tu aides les enfants". The expected translation was "you're helping the children". Yes, that's one possible meaning, but "les enfants" isn't necessarily definite here: "tu aides les enfants" can certainly mean that "you help children" (or "kids", see the paragraph below), in general, whereas "you're helping the kids" implies some fixed, well-defined set of kids. Let alone French: there are even cases in which DuoLingo's writers don't seem to understand English. For example, any sentence with "les enfants" has to be translated with the overly formal "children": "kids" isn't accepted, even though I, a native English speaker, would say "kids" something like 99.9% of the time.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

>The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. // It can't be expensive to get this right, not considering what Duolingo must be doing in revenue, so why is it that way?

davidcbc 9y ago

Having completed the Duolingo Spanish tree a couple of times, I found that it gave me enough of the basics to work my way through books and follow some basic plot of TV shows with closed captioning. It hasn't done a whole lot for my listening or speaking skills, but to be fair I often disable the listening and speaking exercises since I tend to do the exercises at work while I'm waiting for something to compile. Duolingo will not make you fluent in a language, but it can give you the basics to build upon.

prawn 9y ago
I like Duolingo and worked through a bit of their Spanish tree but one thing that I found baffling is how late they introduce numbers. I got to Spain knowing how to tell someone that my large uncle was a milk-drinking crab in the army, but without covering 1-10.

Fins 9y ago

For Russian, initial test wasn't terribly bad, but it would flag word order as wrong when it would make no difference in Russian (and really is a bit more natural). Some of the "correct" answers also obviously required more background information than the phrase they wanted me to translate provided. Looks like fun, but not a tool that would teach you to speak a language correctly.

rangibaby 9y ago

TBF Japanese kids spend 10 years learning how to read their own language, so it’s important to have realistic expectations of what you can accomplish

liberte82 9y ago

I also don't like that it's mostly reading and listening comprehension, with little writing and as far as I know no spoken.

toomanybeersies 9y ago

I've found that Duolingo is very good for learning how to read another language (or at least read enough to get an idea of what a text is saying). It's mediocre at teaching you how to write, bad at teaching you to listen, and useless at teaching you how to speak. I've found that if you just grind through lessons without actually reading the supporting material, you don't learn much at all. If you actually read the supporting material you'll learn a lot more. Duolingo is best used as a tool in a toolbox of language learning tools. It's good for reinforcement learning, but not great for actually developing an understanding. As an analogy, you could learn algebra by looking at a lot of examples and working through worksheets of algebra problems, but you're not going to actually understand what you're doing, or learn very well.

foobiekr 9y ago

I can't speak to the others, but I did the Japanese course for a bit as a refresher since I'm 20+ years from my 4Y of japanese. I found the content pretty terrible, some of it is also obviously wrong or very misleading.

draggnar 9y ago

To me Duolingo is a fun side activity while learning a language, good to reinforce vocabulary, but I wish the exercises had just a bit of context. So much of language is with full expressions. When we learn words, we don't learn them individually but rather how they are used in a context or phrase.

DarqWebster 9y ago

I've used three apps to slowly teach myself a little Japanese. Human Japanese, Memrise, and Duolingo. And they all offer distinct advantages and disadvantages, and that's frustrating because a combined app would be far superior. Human Japanese is great for gentle explanations of grammar, but its flashcards are horrible, so one can't get the spaced repetition needed to remember everything it throws at you. Memrise is fantastic for vocabulary with its spaced repetition, but I couldn't string a sentence together, as Memrise (at least the course I did) mostly ignores grammar. Duolingo is great for practicing reading and writing sentences, checking the comments for sanity if the sentence looks fishy. But it doesn't try and teach anything, just get it wrong until you get it right. Does sentence order matter? Why do we use "wa" here and "ga" there? Duolingo doesn't say. An app that combines actual lessons with spaced practice sessions would make the whole process a lot smoother.

cuddlybacon 9y ago

I reached the end of Japanese course about a month ago and have continued to practice daily. Here are my thoughts: * Many of the English translations don't seem like idiomatic English. Sometimes I think it is even grammatically incorrect. This has made me worried about some of the Japanese not being super great as well. With other people chiming in about how languages they already knew having this problem, it doesn't look great. * I agree with numbers. They way Duolingo handles numbers, days, months, etc is to me worse than the traditional way. It took a long time to get decent at numbers, and I screw them up a bit. I don't know any of the days of the week, but I know what day of the week words look like. They only ever include one day of the week word it the word bank, so you never actually have to learn. * On the subject of the word bank, I think if the incorrect words where more plausible. For many lessons, you don't need the Japanese input. The word bank only provides one plausible English sentence. * It needs more sentence variety. For example, if a less has "The tea is hot." and "The ramen is cool.", why not also add "The tea is cool." and "The ramen is hot."? I find if Duo selects the same lesson a few days in a row, I start to memorize the answers and can punch them in without needing the input. * I can form original sentences. I'm not very fast at it, but I think that is to be expected. I don't think I'll get better until I start trying to actually speak to people. * The bigger problem I have is a lack of vocabulary. Duolingo seems to like to jump around a lot, never getting good enough at any one thing. Even in a situation where you are able to get by if you stick to a script, eg at a restaurant, there are still gaps that would prevent me from doing everything in Japanese. Looking at Memerise, it seems to focus on giving you more depth. For example, Duolingo taught me how to say "How are you?" and respond "I'm fine.". Later I've been able to add "I'm tired." and "I'm scared." Memerise teaches you "I'm fine.", "I'm tired.", "I'm happy.", "I'm angry.", "I'm hungry.", and "I'm sick.". That feels more useful. * The audio quality is crappy. Sometimes it sounds like the syllables are clipping into each other or something. Sometimes it seems like their text to speech engine got confused about where word boundaries are. I took a brief look at Memerise's Japanese course, and the audio quality is much better. * About 50% of the time when I try to tap the button to replay the audio clip, it seems to think I want to quit the lesson. * It would be nice if there was something you could tap to temporarily see Japanese sentences with spaces between words. * While I expect Duolingo would never do it, I think a few lessons on innuendos would be useful. It would save some embarrassing situations.