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This mirrors my experiences with Duolingo. I tried it out, and realized that it went against my ideas about learning languages: translation, no person involved,
by 0x38B 8y ago
This mirrors my experiences with Duolingo. I tried it out, and realized that it went against my ideas about learning languages: translation, no person involved, no real communication. Maybe they'll remedy some of these, as the article notes, but I feel very strongly that translation like this is nearly useless busy-work, and further, harmful.
When I learn a language, I use translation to look words up, but strive to expose myself to rich language. By this I mean large amounts of language, some of it near my level (textbook dialogues), some of it way above (an audiobook of favorite book), as interest dictates.
In addition I write people in the language and make friends on sites like italki, or in apps like HelloTalk and Tandem.
I don't worry about learning words, nearly ever. I just expose myself to them and look them up when I 'notice' them (my brain: oh, this word is interesting, we've heard it before... What does it mean?).
I hate translation when learning with a passion, and listen a lot to get away from it.
Results (N=1, YMMV) have been fantastic with Russian. It's strong enough now that it messes with my English and I can make the same mistakes a Russian/Ukrainian would in English if I've been using Russian a lot.
Learning languages is cool, and it opens so many doors and connects you with all sorts of people. If Duolingo works for someone, great. From working as a tutor and getting to know lots of students, you'd be better off doing what I talk about above, but something is better than nothing, and perfect is the enemy of good here.
- twotwotwo 8y agoStrongly second "expose yourself to a lot of the language" from my own experience with Spanish. Lot easier to get that exposure now than a decade or two ago, too.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- virmundi 8y agoWatch out for aging. My mom spoke French and Spanish aside from English. As she aged, she reads both and doesn’t understand why we can’t read too. My wife has a patient that speaks five languages. Her husband speaks 3 of them. As the patient’s illness progresses, she starts talking in a random language. Sometimes she gets lucky and it’s one of 3 her husband speaks.
- jacobush 8y agoIn Sweden there is very large minority of finns - many of the older ones forget Swedish and can only speak Finnish. (Or in some areas, actually never learned Swedish to begin with.) Hence the prevalence of nursing homes with the requirement to know Finnish to work there.
- telesilla 8y agoI think language learning is a growth area for intelligent machine interactions: a machine can understand pretty well if you are saying the right thing, like Duo Lingo tries to do. If it could add in some actual conversation flow, it would start to emulate a teacher or a conversation class. I'd certainly try it out - Eliza in Spanish?