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It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and

It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame. Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools. It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. It should be simple to choose a rate of exposure to material from trickle to firehose. It should be possible to see an estimate of time remaining to achieve functional fluency at the current rate of progress, no different from the progress bar you see when downloading files. Instead, each individual is forced to cadge together learning materials, of varying quality, in dribs and drabs; and guess at ones progress. There are plenty of full-time University foreign language teaching staff around the world, they should be able to collaborate in production of content for online learning tools. Yet neither the sophistication nor the efficiency of foreign language learning seems to have improved much in my lifetime.

edgarvaldes 8y ago
>It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. This is the key. I would love to digitally immerse myself in a given language. Nowadays what I do is tune the korean news in Youtube while getting prep for work, listen to some podcast in the commute, attempt to read some korean newspaper in the afternoon. But my whole job as a programmer is in front of a computer, I'm sure the immersion could be more gradual, more fine tuned to be there but not enough to block my productivity, etc. Any tips are welcome.
adrianN 8y ago
Anki+Yomichan integration is awesome for Japanese. Adding a new word with the surrounding context to your deck as you encounter it is as simple as clicking a button.
dsjoerg 8y ago
What are Duolingo/Babel not doing that they should?
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  They're shit for teaching grammar, verb conjugations and the vocabulary is quite limited, in some cases not even close to what native speakers use.
  - spockz 8y ago
    I learned Italian from my mother and grandmother and other family so I can do okay in general conversation. However, conversing with young people is a different thing altogether. They speak faster and less articulated, and use a completely different vocabulary/slang. So it is not just about which technology tools you use but also who you talk with.
  - rando444 8y ago
    I agree that they're bad at teaching grammar. That said, I believe it's also the user's fault if they're only using one tool to learn a language. That's quite a high bar that just simply hasn't been achieved yet, and at the moment I would consider it an unreasonable expectation.
  - dazc 8y ago
    I have found Duolingo great for revising basic vocabulary (Spanish) but, yeah, for grammar not at all. I have also found that anything I have really learned (in a sense that I don't need to revise, I just know it) has not come from the comfort of an app but from the real struggle of trying to converse with someone in their native language.
ta1234567890 8y ago
Also, what does it mean to "learn" a language? Is it to be able to read it? At what level? Is it to be able to understand the spoken language? Of a kid, an adult, for work, in social situations? Is it to be able to speak it? For what purpose, how often, how well? None of the tools for "learning" a language really address this. They are all kind of linear and very vague about what skills you are training. Most of the popular ones feel like just memorizing words and phrases. In my experience, the only way to "fully learn" a language, is to be fully immersed, i.e. for months, pretty much exclusively, read/listen/speak the language - watch movies, read news, talk to as many people as possible, all in that language. Unfortunately, pretty much the only way to do that is to move to a country that natively uses the language and ideally have a native significant other that you interact with a lot. Also, usually the biggest barrier is being ashamed of making mistakes, most people stay quite because they are afraid of sounding stupid in another language, so they miss out on most of the best potential learning experiences.
panglott 8y ago
The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signals of other human beings, and there's no way to automate that. With the Web, YouTube and internet radio, the actual amount of target-language material that a person can expose themselves to is hugely, hugely more available than it was 20-30 years ago. You have to keep in mind what a tool is trying to accomplish relative to the personal development it takes to grow into another human language. Different levels of learners require different kinds of instruction. Bilingual instruction is quickest if a person has zero knowledge of the language whatever. Absolute beginners need direct instruction in phonology. An Anki deck is to build basic vocabulary or literacy for a person who has some. Duolingo is there to get you comfortable with basic grammar or phrases, to get you interacting with native speakers in the first place once you stumble off the plane. A more advanced speaker might need accent reduction work. Anki is fantastic at flashcards. Duolingo is fantastic at translation exercises, way better than what we had a few decades ago. Definitely the author in the OP should be using Anki rather than postcards on her bed. "Mastery"-level linguistic tasks include things like writing creative poetry in the language that another person finds moving, describing the movements of a complex machine, or composing an essay in a specific literary style—things that native speakers may find difficult without formal training. There's just no way Duolingo can do that. I took a survey recently that clarified a lot of this for me. The questions were all things like: What percentage of your time do you spend listening to music in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend watching moveis in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend reading books in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend thinking and interacting with other people and thinking in the target language (and your native language)? If I spend 1% of my time or less in the target language and 99% in my native language, it's no wonder that I have plateaued in it.
- blacksqr 8y ago
  The fact that digital tools can't be used to achieve total native-level fluency shouldn't be used as a reason not to try to improve what's available. It should be possible at least to use digital tools to learn to listen to and understand foreign language media at a useful level... I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossible dream given the available tools and my current rate of progress. If I could reach just that goal, I'd be delighted to explore other more personally immersive avenues for taking my language skills to the next level.
emtel 8y ago
I've been using lingq.com for about two months to learn Japanese, and I think it's lightyears beyond any of the other tools I've used, which include Duolingo, Anki, japaneselevelup, and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study. I think the fundamental reason is that rather than doing some second-order activity like studying flashcards, lingq has you spending most of your time listening and reading. Lingq is based on the idea of input-based learning, which I would summarize as "Read, listen, and stop worrying." This approach has a lot of research to support it (search for Stephen Krashen if you want to learn more about the research), and it is also the approach used by some famous hyper-polyglots like Kato Lomb, as well as Steve Kaufmann, the founder of lingq. There are two main tools in lingq: One, an assisted reader which displays foreign language text, with words color-coded to indicate they are known by you, previously seen by you, or brand new. Looking up a word and storing a definition takes only a few clicks, so you can rapidly get through texts that would otherwise take forever. Even looking up a word in an online dictionary is 10x slower than doing it in lingq. The other tool is the playlist, which you can use to easily listen to the accompanying audio for a text you are studying on your phone. By going back and forth between studying the written text, and then listening to the corresponding audio over and over and over (which is easy to do during dead time like driving, doing dishes, etc), I've vastly improved my listening comprehension and vocabulary compared to any other approach I've tried. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm convinced this is how I'll get there. lingq's language courses also included 50-60 "mini-stories" depending on the language, which expose you to a _lot_ of different grammar and vocabulary. Once you get beyond those, the idea is to start importing native content from podcasts, articles, etc into the app. There is also a big library of content that other users have imported. lingq does have a built-in SRS system but its sort of an afterthought, and I haven't found it very useful. There are a lot of rough edges in the content and the website and phone app, including UI issues, flaky speech-to-text, incorrect word segmentation in the reader, bad definitions, and even grammatical mistakes in some of their original content. Ultimately I haven't found any of these to be a big hinderance. I have no affiliation at all with lingq although I realize that my glowing review probably sounds like I'm astroturfing. It is a paid service ($10/month) but I've found it to be worth it many times over.
- 8y ago
kiba 8y ago
Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools. For tools like anki, you don't want to use someone else's deck in the first place, because making cards is a learning process in itself, which will improve retention.

edgarvaldes 8y ago

>It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. This is the key. I would love to digitally immerse myself in a given language. Nowadays what I do is tune the korean news in Youtube while getting prep for work, listen to some podcast in the commute, attempt to read some korean newspaper in the afternoon. But my whole job as a programmer is in front of a computer, I'm sure the immersion could be more gradual, more fine tuned to be there but not enough to block my productivity, etc. Any tips are welcome.

adrianN 8y ago

Anki+Yomichan integration is awesome for Japanese. Adding a new word with the surrounding context to your deck as you encounter it is as simple as clicking a button.

dsjoerg 8y ago

What are Duolingo/Babel not doing that they should?

Mikeb85 8y ago
They're shit for teaching grammar, verb conjugations and the vocabulary is quite limited, in some cases not even close to what native speakers use.
- spockz 8y ago
  I learned Italian from my mother and grandmother and other family so I can do okay in general conversation. However, conversing with young people is a different thing altogether. They speak faster and less articulated, and use a completely different vocabulary/slang. So it is not just about which technology tools you use but also who you talk with.
- rando444 8y ago
  I agree that they're bad at teaching grammar. That said, I believe it's also the user's fault if they're only using one tool to learn a language. That's quite a high bar that just simply hasn't been achieved yet, and at the moment I would consider it an unreasonable expectation.
- dazc 8y ago
  I have found Duolingo great for revising basic vocabulary (Spanish) but, yeah, for grammar not at all. I have also found that anything I have really learned (in a sense that I don't need to revise, I just know it) has not come from the comfort of an app but from the real struggle of trying to converse with someone in their native language.

ta1234567890 8y ago

Also, what does it mean to "learn" a language? Is it to be able to read it? At what level? Is it to be able to understand the spoken language? Of a kid, an adult, for work, in social situations? Is it to be able to speak it? For what purpose, how often, how well? None of the tools for "learning" a language really address this. They are all kind of linear and very vague about what skills you are training. Most of the popular ones feel like just memorizing words and phrases. In my experience, the only way to "fully learn" a language, is to be fully immersed, i.e. for months, pretty much exclusively, read/listen/speak the language - watch movies, read news, talk to as many people as possible, all in that language. Unfortunately, pretty much the only way to do that is to move to a country that natively uses the language and ideally have a native significant other that you interact with a lot. Also, usually the biggest barrier is being ashamed of making mistakes, most people stay quite because they are afraid of sounding stupid in another language, so they miss out on most of the best potential learning experiences.

panglott 8y ago

The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signals of other human beings, and there's no way to automate that. With the Web, YouTube and internet radio, the actual amount of target-language material that a person can expose themselves to is hugely, hugely more available than it was 20-30 years ago. You have to keep in mind what a tool is trying to accomplish relative to the personal development it takes to grow into another human language. Different levels of learners require different kinds of instruction. Bilingual instruction is quickest if a person has zero knowledge of the language whatever. Absolute beginners need direct instruction in phonology. An Anki deck is to build basic vocabulary or literacy for a person who has some. Duolingo is there to get you comfortable with basic grammar or phrases, to get you interacting with native speakers in the first place once you stumble off the plane. A more advanced speaker might need accent reduction work. Anki is fantastic at flashcards. Duolingo is fantastic at translation exercises, way better than what we had a few decades ago. Definitely the author in the OP should be using Anki rather than postcards on her bed. "Mastery"-level linguistic tasks include things like writing creative poetry in the language that another person finds moving, describing the movements of a complex machine, or composing an essay in a specific literary style—things that native speakers may find difficult without formal training. There's just no way Duolingo can do that. I took a survey recently that clarified a lot of this for me. The questions were all things like: What percentage of your time do you spend listening to music in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend watching moveis in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend reading books in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend thinking and interacting with other people and thinking in the target language (and your native language)? If I spend 1% of my time or less in the target language and 99% in my native language, it's no wonder that I have plateaued in it.

blacksqr 8y ago
The fact that digital tools can't be used to achieve total native-level fluency shouldn't be used as a reason not to try to improve what's available. It should be possible at least to use digital tools to learn to listen to and understand foreign language media at a useful level... I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossible dream given the available tools and my current rate of progress. If I could reach just that goal, I'd be delighted to explore other more personally immersive avenues for taking my language skills to the next level.

emtel 8y ago

I've been using lingq.com for about two months to learn Japanese, and I think it's lightyears beyond any of the other tools I've used, which include Duolingo, Anki, japaneselevelup, and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study. I think the fundamental reason is that rather than doing some second-order activity like studying flashcards, lingq has you spending most of your time listening and reading. Lingq is based on the idea of input-based learning, which I would summarize as "Read, listen, and stop worrying." This approach has a lot of research to support it (search for Stephen Krashen if you want to learn more about the research), and it is also the approach used by some famous hyper-polyglots like Kato Lomb, as well as Steve Kaufmann, the founder of lingq. There are two main tools in lingq: One, an assisted reader which displays foreign language text, with words color-coded to indicate they are known by you, previously seen by you, or brand new. Looking up a word and storing a definition takes only a few clicks, so you can rapidly get through texts that would otherwise take forever. Even looking up a word in an online dictionary is 10x slower than doing it in lingq. The other tool is the playlist, which you can use to easily listen to the accompanying audio for a text you are studying on your phone. By going back and forth between studying the written text, and then listening to the corresponding audio over and over and over (which is easy to do during dead time like driving, doing dishes, etc), I've vastly improved my listening comprehension and vocabulary compared to any other approach I've tried. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm convinced this is how I'll get there. lingq's language courses also included 50-60 "mini-stories" depending on the language, which expose you to a _lot_ of different grammar and vocabulary. Once you get beyond those, the idea is to start importing native content from podcasts, articles, etc into the app. There is also a big library of content that other users have imported. lingq does have a built-in SRS system but its sort of an afterthought, and I haven't found it very useful. There are a lot of rough edges in the content and the website and phone app, including UI issues, flaky speech-to-text, incorrect word segmentation in the reader, bad definitions, and even grammatical mistakes in some of their original content. Ultimately I haven't found any of these to be a big hinderance. I have no affiliation at all with lingq although I realize that my glowing review probably sounds like I'm astroturfing. It is a paid service ($10/month) but I've found it to be worth it many times over.

8y ago

kiba 8y ago

Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools. For tools like anki, you don't want to use someone else's deck in the first place, because making cards is a learning process in itself, which will improve retention.