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Interesting. I speak 2 foreign languages fluently (French and German) learned through formal training and immersion. I go to the Netherlands at least once a ye

Interesting. I speak 2 foreign languages fluently (French and German) learned through formal training and immersion. I go to the Netherlands at least once a year for work and can understand a little. So 2 weeks ago I started The DL Dutch lessons. I think they’re great! Certainly not a substitute for immersion, but I totally think that in 5 mins/day, I’ll be ready to converse a bit in a month or two. Not to say that DL couldn’t be better, but for what I’m paying, Dutch lessons from DL seem to be worth my time.

philsnow 7y ago
Dutch is so similar to German though that you're not having to learn any of the "hard parts". English speakers have a really hard time with German and Dutch piling up verbs at the end of giant clauses. You've already learned that when you became fluent in German. I would probably piss a lot of people off if I were to call Dutch a "dialect" of German, but Dutch is definitely the closest language to German. If you wanted to know whether Duolingo worked for language learning you'd be better off trying a language family that you're not already familiar with, but not one that's renowned for being particularly difficult like Japanese. Maybe Russian?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xnyan 7y ago
  You’re preaching the truth here. I’m an English speaker who learned Russian and then taught russian for a decade or so. Duolingo is not going to help almost anyone significantly. What I mean by that is if you were a casual learner (nothing wrong with that) dedicating 5 to 30 minutes to duolingo a day, you will never be able to do anything other than say a few phrases or maybe pick out a few words of spoken russian here or there. Unless you are a language genius you will never be anything close to functional much less fluent without living in a 100% or close russian-speaking environment for a couple years at least. This is not me calling anyone dumb, russian is just really hard for almost all english speakers and requires an extreme amount of time and dedication. I don’t know if it’s true for other languages but I have a suspicion is that it is.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    There State Department thinks Russian is hard for English speakers to learn, but has Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and others as even harder: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Di...
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      Russian is an Indo-European language, like English, and therefore has fundamentally similar grammar. Arabic, Chinese, and Korean are much more different (from English) than that. That said, the State Department's estimation of the difficulty of Chinese is inflated by the difficulty of the writing system, which has nothing to do with the language itself. When people try to rank languages more-or-less objectively by how difficult they are to learn -- without reference to which other languages the student might already know -- Chinese and English are both common examples of the simplest class of languages. There is a theory in linguistics that seeks to explain this finding by reference to the history of "simple" languages -- they tend to be spoken across wide regions and learned by adults for pragmatic reasons. The theory goes that the influx of struggling adult learners changes the language to accommodate them.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        Chinese would definitely be easier without the writing system (and I wish my two years of studying it had been verbal and pinyin only). But it's also tonal, which speakers of non-tonal languages generally have a really hard time with.
        thaumasiotes 7y ago
        But English is a tonal language; that hypothetical problem can't be a source of extreme difficulty for English-speaking learners. (I do have problems with English tones interfering with my attempts to speak Chinese, but that's really not the same problem as "My language doesn't use tones, so I don't know how to produce them". I do know how; I just don't have good control over them.)
- sjy 7y ago
  I’ve studied French (easy for an English speaker), Japanese (hard but I already knew the basics from school) and Russian (hard and I didn’t know the alphabet when I started) on Duolingo. I assure you I have learned some things about those languages, even if I would have learned more if I spent the same amount of time in class. Of course, some of the courses are better than others, and languages that are less like your own are harder to learn, but that doesn’t mean you can dismiss the experiences of those who have used the app to build their knowledge of easy languages.
- matt_the_bass 7y ago
  Oh I agree with you that Dutch is very similar to German. So far it seems like a “simplified German with mostly English word order and a funny accent”. I agree that’s an advantage for a Germans speaker. But my point was that Duolingo is offering me value. Yes there are other tools. Yes I think language learning can’t be achieved with our interactions. But at the same time I think that duolingo Has been a good use of my time so far. I don’t have 20 minutes at a time to take a class but I do have 3 minutes 6-7 times a day when I can pull out my phone and practice.

philsnow 7y ago

Dutch is so similar to German though that you're not having to learn any of the "hard parts". English speakers have a really hard time with German and Dutch piling up verbs at the end of giant clauses. You've already learned that when you became fluent in German. I would probably piss a lot of people off if I were to call Dutch a "dialect" of German, but Dutch is definitely the closest language to German. If you wanted to know whether Duolingo worked for language learning you'd be better off trying a language family that you're not already familiar with, but not one that's renowned for being particularly difficult like Japanese. Maybe Russian?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xnyan 7y ago
You’re preaching the truth here. I’m an English speaker who learned Russian and then taught russian for a decade or so. Duolingo is not going to help almost anyone significantly. What I mean by that is if you were a casual learner (nothing wrong with that) dedicating 5 to 30 minutes to duolingo a day, you will never be able to do anything other than say a few phrases or maybe pick out a few words of spoken russian here or there. Unless you are a language genius you will never be anything close to functional much less fluent without living in a 100% or close russian-speaking environment for a couple years at least. This is not me calling anyone dumb, russian is just really hard for almost all english speakers and requires an extreme amount of time and dedication. I don’t know if it’s true for other languages but I have a suspicion is that it is.
- jefftk 7y ago
  There State Department thinks Russian is hard for English speakers to learn, but has Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and others as even harder: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Di...
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Russian is an Indo-European language, like English, and therefore has fundamentally similar grammar. Arabic, Chinese, and Korean are much more different (from English) than that. That said, the State Department's estimation of the difficulty of Chinese is inflated by the difficulty of the writing system, which has nothing to do with the language itself. When people try to rank languages more-or-less objectively by how difficult they are to learn -- without reference to which other languages the student might already know -- Chinese and English are both common examples of the simplest class of languages. There is a theory in linguistics that seeks to explain this finding by reference to the history of "simple" languages -- they tend to be spoken across wide regions and learned by adults for pragmatic reasons. The theory goes that the influx of struggling adult learners changes the language to accommodate them.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      Chinese would definitely be easier without the writing system (and I wish my two years of studying it had been verbal and pinyin only). But it's also tonal, which speakers of non-tonal languages generally have a really hard time with.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        But English is a tonal language; that hypothetical problem can't be a source of extreme difficulty for English-speaking learners. (I do have problems with English tones interfering with my attempts to speak Chinese, but that's really not the same problem as "My language doesn't use tones, so I don't know how to produce them". I do know how; I just don't have good control over them.)
sjy 7y ago
I’ve studied French (easy for an English speaker), Japanese (hard but I already knew the basics from school) and Russian (hard and I didn’t know the alphabet when I started) on Duolingo. I assure you I have learned some things about those languages, even if I would have learned more if I spent the same amount of time in class. Of course, some of the courses are better than others, and languages that are less like your own are harder to learn, but that doesn’t mean you can dismiss the experiences of those who have used the app to build their knowledge of easy languages.
matt_the_bass 7y ago
Oh I agree with you that Dutch is very similar to German. So far it seems like a “simplified German with mostly English word order and a funny accent”. I agree that’s an advantage for a Germans speaker. But my point was that Duolingo is offering me value. Yes there are other tools. Yes I think language learning can’t be achieved with our interactions. But at the same time I think that duolingo Has been a good use of my time so far. I don’t have 20 minutes at a time to take a class but I do have 3 minutes 6-7 times a day when I can pull out my phone and practice.