7 ms·

At least for Duolingo there is an easy fix: don’t use it. I’m currently reading a researcher paper written by an employee and while the paper is interested the

At least for Duolingo there is an easy fix: don’t use it. I’m currently reading a researcher paper written by an employee and while the paper is interested the app itself is abysmally bad. I just tried the app again today just to be sure my opinion wasn’t a mistake but it reinforced it instead. That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer. The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc. I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular.

SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
I've been learning Japanese with it for the past 2 years. Although I haven't tried other apps (so I don't have a baseline for comparison), their methodology has proven quite effective for me.
- trophycase 8y ago
  Japanese conforms extremely poorly to the duolingo format. As someone who is also learning Japanese, I'm very surprised you've stuck with Duolingo this long. My experience was that it explained nothing. No explanation of particles, the different between hiragana and katakana, no other grammar explanations, etc.
  - MegaLeon 8y ago
    Bit off-topic, what what did you find is working well for you?
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    How useful is explicitly learning about the difference in use of hiragana and katakana, really? As far as I’m aware the research on language learning is pretty clear on teaching grammar; teaching it explicitly is no more effective than teaching implicitly. This example is right, that one isn’t is how we learn to speak our native tongues and we faultlessly follow rules we can’t teach all the time, e.g. adjective order in English is opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/about-adjectives-and-adverbs/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/abo...
    - titanix2 8y ago
      Do you have a link to a paper or two supporting that claim? Sure as children we learned our natives language by hearing it for years but the point is you can't magically have ten years of everyday language input when learning a foreign language. So then as adult it is way more efficient to learn the underlying rules. If there really was a more efficient method universities would have ditched their curricula for it. But from my experiences they don't and they don't recommend Duolingo either.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  How are you measuring effectiveness?
  - SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
    Two years ago I had zero knowledge of the language, today I know all hiragana syllables, half of the katakana and a few kanji. I also know some basic vocabulary. Yeah, maybe "quite effective" is overstating it.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      I think if after two years of study you still have no ability to actually communicate in Japanese, then it has actually been shockingly ineffective.
    - titanix2 8y ago
      Ok, it's interesting because I also learned Japanese (MA graduate). In comparison, it took me a few days for learning hiragana/katakana plus few weeks more to read them a reasonable speed. Two years before that I've learned about 70 kanji with kunyomi in three weeks during high school. That part was done also with Wikipedia-sensei. Then I actually started learning the language at university. So, if after two years of using Duolingo you cannot read all the katakana and cannot make a sentence more complex then xxx ha yyy desu it just totally prove how bad the application is. And what's even more damageable is that user think they are making progress and then do not focus on real, useful material.
- peruvian 8y ago
  I find that super hard to believe... can you read an article from https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ with ease, aside from vocab? I quit Duolingo for Japanese because it was super slow and boring. I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites and started reading native material/talking to natives. Currently going through KKLC so focusing on kanji/vocab... I passed the JLPT N5 (admittedly so easy it's useless as a certificaiton) with six months of studying from scratch, and I approximately N4 level now (~1 year in). I know everyone has different goals and timelines, but 2 years of Duolingo feels like it covers what you can learn in <4 months by yourself.
  - SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
    > can you read an article from https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ with ease, aside from vocab? Nope. Perhaps you are right. > I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites Would you mind telling which ones you went through?
    - peruvian 8y ago
      Sure. And sorry if I sounded rough in my comment... if you're happy with Duolingo it's fine. I put in an hour every day towards Japanese (with a full time job + life on top) so I know I'm in a privileged position when it comes to language learning. I used the following: - Genki I, II The classic Japanese textbooks. They're pretty good and have tons of exercises. Do the exercises! - Tae Kim's Guide http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar Alternative guide written by one guy. Very good as reference or quick learning. Used it to review Genki material. - Japanese: The Manga Way I thought this would be stupid but in some ways I liked it more than the other resources. Every chapter goes through grammar/expressions and it uses real manga examples. Vocab is translated for you. Not necessary with the other two resources but if you like manga or want something different, it's fun. - Japanese Ammo with Misa https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSyd8tXJoEJKIXfrwkPdbA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSyd8tXJoEJKIXfrwkPdbA Long (20+ mins) lectures on grammar with a lot of examples. Goes on tangents often and some videos are too long but a great source of vocab, native expressions, etc. - Anki https://www.ankiapp.com/ https://www.ankiapp.com/ You've probably heard of this. I currently use it for kanji but you can use it for whatever I prefer making my own flashcards but there's pre-made decks for vocab from Genki, Tae Kim, grammar etc. I'd link to some but they also include links to pirated PDFs so don't want to get the mods mad at me. -- With all of that said, the most helpful thing for me has been reading native content in Chrome with this extension -> https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ if you don't read, write, etc. you will not retain stuff. You will start out not understanding anything but slowly you will start reading without even translating to English. You will hit a wall with vocab without kanji study but you should be good to go for some time with this.
izzydata 8y ago
It's probably popular because it makes it into a game and it is also easy. You get to feel good about "learning" without actually putting in the effort to really learn on a deeper level.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  and it is free
ipsi 8y ago
The phone app is a bit useless on its own. However, they do provide more explanations of grammatical points on their website, plus you can set it so you can type in answers rather than using the "word bank" on the desktop, which makes it a lot harder to guess answers! It's definitely not as good as having a tutor or structured lessons, but for getting the basics down, when complemented with other study, it seems perfectly fine to me.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  I took a couple of semesters of Spanish in school, but not enough to be able to do much with it. I've found Duolingo to be very effective for helping build up vocabulary, and even for learning grammar rules. A couple of things I've found to be very helpful: - Each lesson has a guide that shows what's new. This is a bit hard to find on the website (click on the lightbulb above the "Practice" button for any lesson), and (last I checked) isn't available at all on mobile. - There's a discussion board associated with each sentence. This can be immensely helpful for getting tips from more experienced speakers regarding various tricky aspects of the language. Is it enough to build fluency by itself? Doubtful. But I find it very helpful for building vocab with a ~20-minute daily investment.
nix0n 8y ago
Can you recommend something better?
- titanix2 8y ago
  Yes: grammar books, Wikipedia & websites to grasp the phonology of the language, a native to work on pronunciation, series/movies for more oral input, standardized test word list for vocabulary, MOOCs (quality varies a lot) for introduction & overview, registration to university (remote degree) for anything more advanced. This list is mean to be read with comma meaning 'and' although you can safely skip a few items.
barry-cotter 8y ago
> That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer. The design of the app isn’t an accident. They want you to start trying immediately. The testing effect works even for vocabulary. If you guess which of four words is the Spanish for milk you’re more likely to remember the answer than if you’re just told it. When you put effort into learning something you’re more likely to remember it, even when the effort is as trivial as a multiple choice test. > The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc. None of this is wrong to be honest. I wouldn’t use any Duolingo course that hadn’t been out of beta for more than a year because there are often plentiful mistakes. > I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular. It’s actually pretty good at getting you from nothing to novice for European languages as far as reading goes. And it’s free and gamified, which helps a lot with motivation. You might be mistaking the feeling of learning with actually learning too. Almost everyone does. That’s why most people do massed practice (cramming) instead of distributed (multiple reviews) and interleaved (practice different skills together, not one at a time, even though massed works worse. You feel like you’re learning more with massed.
matwood 8y ago
I agree that using Duolingo alone is probably not the most effective way to learn a language, but I find its quick drills work well in tandem with other methods. I'm currently using Babbel (free 3 month trial) with Duolingo and the combo seems to work well. Is there some other app that you would recommend?
reaperducer 8y ago
That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer. Sounds like machine learning just met machine teaching.
- howard941 8y ago
  Reminiscent of programmed learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning
baby 8y ago
I agree. I'm an avid language learner and I've always got nowhere trying to use duolingo. If you want much better results, memrise and flash card apps are WAY better. Learn as much vocab, grammar, irregular verbs, etc. there. You need to complete that with dialogues. On youtube you can often find these, either teaching videos which are great, or tv shows/movies with subs.

SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago

I've been learning Japanese with it for the past 2 years. Although I haven't tried other apps (so I don't have a baseline for comparison), their methodology has proven quite effective for me.

trophycase 8y ago
Japanese conforms extremely poorly to the duolingo format. As someone who is also learning Japanese, I'm very surprised you've stuck with Duolingo this long. My experience was that it explained nothing. No explanation of particles, the different between hiragana and katakana, no other grammar explanations, etc.
- MegaLeon 8y ago
  Bit off-topic, what what did you find is working well for you?
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  How useful is explicitly learning about the difference in use of hiragana and katakana, really? As far as I’m aware the research on language learning is pretty clear on teaching grammar; teaching it explicitly is no more effective than teaching implicitly. This example is right, that one isn’t is how we learn to speak our native tongues and we faultlessly follow rules we can’t teach all the time, e.g. adjective order in English is opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/about-adjectives-and-adverbs/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/abo...
  - titanix2 8y ago
    Do you have a link to a paper or two supporting that claim? Sure as children we learned our natives language by hearing it for years but the point is you can't magically have ten years of everyday language input when learning a foreign language. So then as adult it is way more efficient to learn the underlying rules. If there really was a more efficient method universities would have ditched their curricula for it. But from my experiences they don't and they don't recommend Duolingo either.
umanwizard 8y ago
How are you measuring effectiveness?
- SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
  Two years ago I had zero knowledge of the language, today I know all hiragana syllables, half of the katakana and a few kanji. I also know some basic vocabulary. Yeah, maybe "quite effective" is overstating it.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    I think if after two years of study you still have no ability to actually communicate in Japanese, then it has actually been shockingly ineffective.
  - titanix2 8y ago
    Ok, it's interesting because I also learned Japanese (MA graduate). In comparison, it took me a few days for learning hiragana/katakana plus few weeks more to read them a reasonable speed. Two years before that I've learned about 70 kanji with kunyomi in three weeks during high school. That part was done also with Wikipedia-sensei. Then I actually started learning the language at university. So, if after two years of using Duolingo you cannot read all the katakana and cannot make a sentence more complex then xxx ha yyy desu it just totally prove how bad the application is. And what's even more damageable is that user think they are making progress and then do not focus on real, useful material.
peruvian 8y ago
I find that super hard to believe... can you read an article from https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ with ease, aside from vocab? I quit Duolingo for Japanese because it was super slow and boring. I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites and started reading native material/talking to natives. Currently going through KKLC so focusing on kanji/vocab... I passed the JLPT N5 (admittedly so easy it's useless as a certificaiton) with six months of studying from scratch, and I approximately N4 level now (~1 year in). I know everyone has different goals and timelines, but 2 years of Duolingo feels like it covers what you can learn in <4 months by yourself.
- SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
  > can you read an article from https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ with ease, aside from vocab? Nope. Perhaps you are right. > I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites Would you mind telling which ones you went through?
  - peruvian 8y ago
    Sure. And sorry if I sounded rough in my comment... if you're happy with Duolingo it's fine. I put in an hour every day towards Japanese (with a full time job + life on top) so I know I'm in a privileged position when it comes to language learning. I used the following: - Genki I, II The classic Japanese textbooks. They're pretty good and have tons of exercises. Do the exercises! - Tae Kim's Guide http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar Alternative guide written by one guy. Very good as reference or quick learning. Used it to review Genki material. - Japanese: The Manga Way I thought this would be stupid but in some ways I liked it more than the other resources. Every chapter goes through grammar/expressions and it uses real manga examples. Vocab is translated for you. Not necessary with the other two resources but if you like manga or want something different, it's fun. - Japanese Ammo with Misa https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSyd8tXJoEJKIXfrwkPdbA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSyd8tXJoEJKIXfrwkPdbA Long (20+ mins) lectures on grammar with a lot of examples. Goes on tangents often and some videos are too long but a great source of vocab, native expressions, etc. - Anki https://www.ankiapp.com/ https://www.ankiapp.com/ You've probably heard of this. I currently use it for kanji but you can use it for whatever I prefer making my own flashcards but there's pre-made decks for vocab from Genki, Tae Kim, grammar etc. I'd link to some but they also include links to pirated PDFs so don't want to get the mods mad at me. -- With all of that said, the most helpful thing for me has been reading native content in Chrome with this extension -> https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ if you don't read, write, etc. you will not retain stuff. You will start out not understanding anything but slowly you will start reading without even translating to English. You will hit a wall with vocab without kanji study but you should be good to go for some time with this.

izzydata 8y ago

It's probably popular because it makes it into a game and it is also easy. You get to feel good about "learning" without actually putting in the effort to really learn on a deeper level.

dwighttk 8y ago
and it is free

ipsi 8y ago

The phone app is a bit useless on its own. However, they do provide more explanations of grammatical points on their website, plus you can set it so you can type in answers rather than using the "word bank" on the desktop, which makes it a lot harder to guess answers! It's definitely not as good as having a tutor or structured lessons, but for getting the basics down, when complemented with other study, it seems perfectly fine to me.

organsnyder 8y ago
I took a couple of semesters of Spanish in school, but not enough to be able to do much with it. I've found Duolingo to be very effective for helping build up vocabulary, and even for learning grammar rules. A couple of things I've found to be very helpful: - Each lesson has a guide that shows what's new. This is a bit hard to find on the website (click on the lightbulb above the "Practice" button for any lesson), and (last I checked) isn't available at all on mobile. - There's a discussion board associated with each sentence. This can be immensely helpful for getting tips from more experienced speakers regarding various tricky aspects of the language. Is it enough to build fluency by itself? Doubtful. But I find it very helpful for building vocab with a ~20-minute daily investment.

nix0n 8y ago

Can you recommend something better?

titanix2 8y ago
Yes: grammar books, Wikipedia & websites to grasp the phonology of the language, a native to work on pronunciation, series/movies for more oral input, standardized test word list for vocabulary, MOOCs (quality varies a lot) for introduction & overview, registration to university (remote degree) for anything more advanced. This list is mean to be read with comma meaning 'and' although you can safely skip a few items.

barry-cotter 8y ago

> That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer. The design of the app isn’t an accident. They want you to start trying immediately. The testing effect works even for vocabulary. If you guess which of four words is the Spanish for milk you’re more likely to remember the answer than if you’re just told it. When you put effort into learning something you’re more likely to remember it, even when the effort is as trivial as a multiple choice test. > The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc. None of this is wrong to be honest. I wouldn’t use any Duolingo course that hadn’t been out of beta for more than a year because there are often plentiful mistakes. > I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular. It’s actually pretty good at getting you from nothing to novice for European languages as far as reading goes. And it’s free and gamified, which helps a lot with motivation. You might be mistaking the feeling of learning with actually learning too. Almost everyone does. That’s why most people do massed practice (cramming) instead of distributed (multiple reviews) and interleaved (practice different skills together, not one at a time, even though massed works worse. You feel like you’re learning more with massed.

matwood 8y ago

I agree that using Duolingo alone is probably not the most effective way to learn a language, but I find its quick drills work well in tandem with other methods. I'm currently using Babbel (free 3 month trial) with Duolingo and the combo seems to work well. Is there some other app that you would recommend?

reaperducer 8y ago

That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer. Sounds like machine learning just met machine teaching.

howard941 8y ago
Reminiscent of programmed learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning

baby 8y ago

I agree. I'm an avid language learner and I've always got nowhere trying to use duolingo. If you want much better results, memrise and flash card apps are WAY better. Learn as much vocab, grammar, irregular verbs, etc. there. You need to complete that with dialogues. On youtube you can often find these, either teaching videos which are great, or tv shows/movies with subs.