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Duolingo recently introduced a dark pattern where ads are shown after completing every exercise. Before, we were given the option to not see them (or see them f

Duolingo recently introduced a dark pattern where ads are shown after completing every exercise. Before, we were given the option to not see them (or see them for some "gems"). Evaluating Duolingo, I find it is not the most effective language learning app anyways, instead teaching pattern matching for some of the lesser popular languages like Chinese

michaelcampbell 6y ago
If I may ask, what do you find more effective? I've dabbled with Duolingo before and am not a paid user, but it seemed to kind of work for me. But open to alternatives (modulo, "move to the country where <x> is the native tongue" type stuff.)
- johntiger1 6y ago
  I've been using HelloChinese, and find it a little more effective. With a language Chinese, I find reading/writing to be most challenging, so apps that force a little more immersion I have found most beneficial
  - blackearl 6y ago
    Any suggestions for languages with a Latin alphabet?
    - tonyhb 6y ago
      Memrise is surprisingly good, I've found. It focuses on phrases, and has short videos with native speakers talking that you learn from. Also has repetition. It's a good app.
    - prostoalex 6y ago
      Memrise for memorization and colloquial phrases - they film native speakers in native locations, prioritizing everyday conversations over academic study. Drops for pure vocabulary development - spaced repetition for the first 100/500/1,000 words.
- tdrp 6y ago
  I completed Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese on Duolingo (as in level 5/gold completed) and feel like I know the equivalent of at best a 3-month one-hour-a-week type entry level class. The stuff that works better for me are actually online classes (for example Coursera has 6-part HSK Mandarin classes) since they are well structured, they have lots of video with natives speaking, and they deal with relatively useful topics. Duolingo taught me to say things like "the book was eaten by the yellow horse" before I could even ask someone how old they were. That said, I feel like they've been going in the right direction by adding things like duolingo stories. If they expand those and add more interactive stuff it could get more interesting.
  - untoreh 6y ago
    My experience with russian or swedish is that the comments give a lot more insight on many excercises and what it is they are trying to teach and the grammar part of things. If you just chug along without taking the time to browse around then very little remains with you. I am not sure this is a compliment to Duolingo though as I am mostly praising the usefulness if their users...
  - cloudier 6y ago
    Thanks, I hadn’t thought to try beginner language courses as an alternative to Duolingo and similar apps! (I’ve done an intermediate-level university course on pronunciation which was pretty good.) I agree that Duolingo isn’t very useful — and the last time I tried it, it didn’t really help me understand the grammar either. I don’t like how it encourages superficial out-of-context rote-learning.
- cloudier 6y ago
  It varies a lot based on what language you’re looking at, how much time you want to put in and what level of proficiency you’re at. Your best bet is probably to search for the learn $language subreddit for relevant apps, resources and blogs. (I can give pointers for Japanese.)
  - yoklov 6y ago
    What are your recommendations for japanese, out of curiosity
    - osdiab 6y ago
      Not OP but here’s my personal opinion (and I’m sure many may disagree): There’s a bunch of parts of learning a language (a few more for Chinese character languages like Japanese) and learning one often doesn’t help you that much with the others, which most people don’t realize: - recognizing individual kanji characters - recognizing words formed via combinations of kanji - reading passages in context - writing characters - writing passages - understanding grammar rules - forming sounds naturally (people who can speak sound unintelligible because of bad accent, this is not the same skill as speaking - more muscle memory) - speaking (does not actually require understanding grammar, nor sounding reasonable!) - listening and understanding verbal language... - without context - in a casual context - in a formal context - with unspoken, understood context (this and above two require understanding culture) - domain specific vocabulary (everyday speech is totally different than business, and different from speech with a lot of slang) - knowing socially appropriate things to say or do based on unspoken context - and more I probably missed Learning all of the above is a project that people with decades of study can’t necessarily do all well [1] - so first pick what you want to be able to achieve and focus on that, and also acknowledge that learning a language is going to be a daily practice for the next several years of your life. If you don’t want that, then time spent learning a language will probably be a waste IMO (unless you’re just doing it for a general sense of Japanese language and culture - Duolingo is probably good for that), and I’d advise you to spend your time doing something else. For me I wanted to be able to speak in casual conversations and everything else is secondary. That said reading passages is useful for understanding how specific grammar and vocabulary is used in context, so that was my second priority. Working in Japanese companies is legendarily terrible so I never had an interest in professional or very formal Japanese (just enough to understand formalities spoken to me when I go to stores or talk with reps at companies). I’m currently at an intermediate level after ~1.5 years of regular study - good enough for most common social contexts, not good enough for business Japanese or niche topics. Someone deeper than me will certainly have different opinions as well. - The first ~6 months, I liked the Pimsleur series but your mileage may vary. It’s old school mp3s (used to be cassettes) that teach you not by explaining rules but by giving you scenarios and having you use grammar rules and learn by inferring patterns, responding under time pressure (an mp3 can’t wait for you - this is important!). You will not have a formal understanding of the language but it can get you to saying things pretty quickly, and gets you over your fear of sounding dumb in a foreign language quickly since you’re speaking from the beginning. You learn some basic vocabulary and (sometimes overly formal) grammar, which will make more sense when you do formal study concurrently or afterward. It’s all audio so I just listened and spoke responses aloud to it during my commutes (by train, not caring that I look like a crazy person) and otherwise didn’t change my day to day life. - WaniKani is great for learning to read individual Kanji and build vocabulary via spaced repetition (not the same as reading passages), worth the cost (every year they do a $100 off sale for lifetime fyi), though they play fast and loose with the meaning and composition of radicals so be aware of that - also its a fixed order, so if you take classes at the same time it will be out of sync with that. The open-source Tsurukame iOS app for it is phenomenal and I use it all the time on trains. - Skritter is good for learning to write Kanji via spaced repetition (that’s a totally different skill than reading!), but to be honest you don’t need to really learn to write - predictive keyboards are enough for most people to survive, you rarely need to write anything down nowadays. I started using it more after enrolling in classes, since Kanji recognition was a core part of that. Their app is tolerable but not great - I bug them constantly to improve their iPad/Apple Pencil support, the closest digital thing to really writing on paper and pen. - Bunpro teaches grammar points via spaced repetition, it’s pretty decent. The app is not very good. - Learning from large group classes is good for some listening practice and learning grammar rules in general, but not that great for speaking practice because there’s usually too many other students to get that much opportunity to speak. You will learn what you’re doing wrong, but you’ll need to put concepts in practice much more outside of class. - Learning by speaking to classmates in said classes... is not very optimal, since they don’t know what’s right or what sounds right either. Do it for your social curiosity or motivation, not for true language practice IMO. - Learning from a small class or 1:1 will give you higher quality speaking practice - you can find pretty cheap teachers on services like iTalki. For getting grammar and usage right, I’d recommend real teachers vs random people on HelloTalk since the average person can’t explain grammar points well, but for getting to know someone on a non-professional basis/cultural learnings, the random person can be better (but if you have the option to esp once COVID blows over, IRL friends are the best). - Getting a job in Japan can get you a decent amount of practice, though in a particular domain - probably formal, maybe repetitive - Getting a significant other will give you a lot of practice in the specific domain of day to day conversation, but you run the risk of adopting the sound of the SO (guy sounding like a girl, in a very gender-segregated society like Japan, makes you sound funny lol) - Immersion is not really useful until you can at least tread water so don’t think you need to move to Japan to learn - but like I said practice is important so maybe after 6-12 months of study it’s probably worth it if your life is flexible enough to make that happen. - trying to understand movies/anime is hard to do until your listening skills are pretty decent, especially since they usually use a lot of niche vocabulary and grammar (talking like a samurai) not common in day to day life. You can try but I found that a steep learning curve for beginners. But you can find a bunch of well-transcribed stuff at FluentU and Animelon. [1] A funny example: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1247584725503332354 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1247584725503332354
- osdiab 6y ago
  IMO most app-based services like Duolingo will help you to learn basic grammar rules and random vocabulary but learning a language requires speaking it under time pressure to living humans about changing topics with shifting social context, so no matter how good Duolingo gets it will only get you so far. In other words, I’ve never met someone who actually attributed their success in learning a language to Duolingo or any app like it. I do hear a lot of beginners who can’t consistently form grammatically correct sentences lavishing it with praise, however. Old school services like Pimsleur’s tapes, or for more advanced users services like FluentU can help get your listening skills up, and language specific publications like the Chairmans Bao for Chinese can work on your literacy, but ultimately there’s not much substitute for speaking with a teacher or friends (my experience with HelloTalk for connecting you with conversation partners has been mixed - better than nothing but its not like the prolonged exposure & relationship building of a real friend, nor the targeted learning and crisp explanations from a teacher). But yeah if you’re just getting started I personally enjoyed learning through Pimsleur - no fancy app, just mp3s, and it gets you speaking with time pressure from day one - if speaking is your main goal, this was the fastest way for me to get started, and you learn from exclusively listening to people pronouncing correctly (unlike taking a class, where you’re exposed to everyone but the teacher butchering the language), so I find I sound much better than any of my classmates in class nowadays.

michaelcampbell 6y ago

If I may ask, what do you find more effective? I've dabbled with Duolingo before and am not a paid user, but it seemed to kind of work for me. But open to alternatives (modulo, "move to the country where <x> is the native tongue" type stuff.)

johntiger1 6y ago
I've been using HelloChinese, and find it a little more effective. With a language Chinese, I find reading/writing to be most challenging, so apps that force a little more immersion I have found most beneficial
- blackearl 6y ago
  Any suggestions for languages with a Latin alphabet?
  - tonyhb 6y ago
    Memrise is surprisingly good, I've found. It focuses on phrases, and has short videos with native speakers talking that you learn from. Also has repetition. It's a good app.
  - prostoalex 6y ago
    Memrise for memorization and colloquial phrases - they film native speakers in native locations, prioritizing everyday conversations over academic study. Drops for pure vocabulary development - spaced repetition for the first 100/500/1,000 words.
tdrp 6y ago
I completed Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese on Duolingo (as in level 5/gold completed) and feel like I know the equivalent of at best a 3-month one-hour-a-week type entry level class. The stuff that works better for me are actually online classes (for example Coursera has 6-part HSK Mandarin classes) since they are well structured, they have lots of video with natives speaking, and they deal with relatively useful topics. Duolingo taught me to say things like "the book was eaten by the yellow horse" before I could even ask someone how old they were. That said, I feel like they've been going in the right direction by adding things like duolingo stories. If they expand those and add more interactive stuff it could get more interesting.
- untoreh 6y ago
  My experience with russian or swedish is that the comments give a lot more insight on many excercises and what it is they are trying to teach and the grammar part of things. If you just chug along without taking the time to browse around then very little remains with you. I am not sure this is a compliment to Duolingo though as I am mostly praising the usefulness if their users...
- cloudier 6y ago
  Thanks, I hadn’t thought to try beginner language courses as an alternative to Duolingo and similar apps! (I’ve done an intermediate-level university course on pronunciation which was pretty good.) I agree that Duolingo isn’t very useful — and the last time I tried it, it didn’t really help me understand the grammar either. I don’t like how it encourages superficial out-of-context rote-learning.
cloudier 6y ago
It varies a lot based on what language you’re looking at, how much time you want to put in and what level of proficiency you’re at. Your best bet is probably to search for the learn $language subreddit for relevant apps, resources and blogs. (I can give pointers for Japanese.)
- yoklov 6y ago
  What are your recommendations for japanese, out of curiosity
  - osdiab 6y ago
    Not OP but here’s my personal opinion (and I’m sure many may disagree): There’s a bunch of parts of learning a language (a few more for Chinese character languages like Japanese) and learning one often doesn’t help you that much with the others, which most people don’t realize: - recognizing individual kanji characters - recognizing words formed via combinations of kanji - reading passages in context - writing characters - writing passages - understanding grammar rules - forming sounds naturally (people who can speak sound unintelligible because of bad accent, this is not the same skill as speaking - more muscle memory) - speaking (does not actually require understanding grammar, nor sounding reasonable!) - listening and understanding verbal language... - without context - in a casual context - in a formal context - with unspoken, understood context (this and above two require understanding culture) - domain specific vocabulary (everyday speech is totally different than business, and different from speech with a lot of slang) - knowing socially appropriate things to say or do based on unspoken context - and more I probably missed Learning all of the above is a project that people with decades of study can’t necessarily do all well [1] - so first pick what you want to be able to achieve and focus on that, and also acknowledge that learning a language is going to be a daily practice for the next several years of your life. If you don’t want that, then time spent learning a language will probably be a waste IMO (unless you’re just doing it for a general sense of Japanese language and culture - Duolingo is probably good for that), and I’d advise you to spend your time doing something else. For me I wanted to be able to speak in casual conversations and everything else is secondary. That said reading passages is useful for understanding how specific grammar and vocabulary is used in context, so that was my second priority. Working in Japanese companies is legendarily terrible so I never had an interest in professional or very formal Japanese (just enough to understand formalities spoken to me when I go to stores or talk with reps at companies). I’m currently at an intermediate level after ~1.5 years of regular study - good enough for most common social contexts, not good enough for business Japanese or niche topics. Someone deeper than me will certainly have different opinions as well. - The first ~6 months, I liked the Pimsleur series but your mileage may vary. It’s old school mp3s (used to be cassettes) that teach you not by explaining rules but by giving you scenarios and having you use grammar rules and learn by inferring patterns, responding under time pressure (an mp3 can’t wait for you - this is important!). You will not have a formal understanding of the language but it can get you to saying things pretty quickly, and gets you over your fear of sounding dumb in a foreign language quickly since you’re speaking from the beginning. You learn some basic vocabulary and (sometimes overly formal) grammar, which will make more sense when you do formal study concurrently or afterward. It’s all audio so I just listened and spoke responses aloud to it during my commutes (by train, not caring that I look like a crazy person) and otherwise didn’t change my day to day life. - WaniKani is great for learning to read individual Kanji and build vocabulary via spaced repetition (not the same as reading passages), worth the cost (every year they do a $100 off sale for lifetime fyi), though they play fast and loose with the meaning and composition of radicals so be aware of that - also its a fixed order, so if you take classes at the same time it will be out of sync with that. The open-source Tsurukame iOS app for it is phenomenal and I use it all the time on trains. - Skritter is good for learning to write Kanji via spaced repetition (that’s a totally different skill than reading!), but to be honest you don’t need to really learn to write - predictive keyboards are enough for most people to survive, you rarely need to write anything down nowadays. I started using it more after enrolling in classes, since Kanji recognition was a core part of that. Their app is tolerable but not great - I bug them constantly to improve their iPad/Apple Pencil support, the closest digital thing to really writing on paper and pen. - Bunpro teaches grammar points via spaced repetition, it’s pretty decent. The app is not very good. - Learning from large group classes is good for some listening practice and learning grammar rules in general, but not that great for speaking practice because there’s usually too many other students to get that much opportunity to speak. You will learn what you’re doing wrong, but you’ll need to put concepts in practice much more outside of class. - Learning by speaking to classmates in said classes... is not very optimal, since they don’t know what’s right or what sounds right either. Do it for your social curiosity or motivation, not for true language practice IMO. - Learning from a small class or 1:1 will give you higher quality speaking practice - you can find pretty cheap teachers on services like iTalki. For getting grammar and usage right, I’d recommend real teachers vs random people on HelloTalk since the average person can’t explain grammar points well, but for getting to know someone on a non-professional basis/cultural learnings, the random person can be better (but if you have the option to esp once COVID blows over, IRL friends are the best). - Getting a job in Japan can get you a decent amount of practice, though in a particular domain - probably formal, maybe repetitive - Getting a significant other will give you a lot of practice in the specific domain of day to day conversation, but you run the risk of adopting the sound of the SO (guy sounding like a girl, in a very gender-segregated society like Japan, makes you sound funny lol) - Immersion is not really useful until you can at least tread water so don’t think you need to move to Japan to learn - but like I said practice is important so maybe after 6-12 months of study it’s probably worth it if your life is flexible enough to make that happen. - trying to understand movies/anime is hard to do until your listening skills are pretty decent, especially since they usually use a lot of niche vocabulary and grammar (talking like a samurai) not common in day to day life. You can try but I found that a steep learning curve for beginners. But you can find a bunch of well-transcribed stuff at FluentU and Animelon. [1] A funny example: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1247584725503332354 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1247584725503332354
osdiab 6y ago
IMO most app-based services like Duolingo will help you to learn basic grammar rules and random vocabulary but learning a language requires speaking it under time pressure to living humans about changing topics with shifting social context, so no matter how good Duolingo gets it will only get you so far. In other words, I’ve never met someone who actually attributed their success in learning a language to Duolingo or any app like it. I do hear a lot of beginners who can’t consistently form grammatically correct sentences lavishing it with praise, however. Old school services like Pimsleur’s tapes, or for more advanced users services like FluentU can help get your listening skills up, and language specific publications like the Chairmans Bao for Chinese can work on your literacy, but ultimately there’s not much substitute for speaking with a teacher or friends (my experience with HelloTalk for connecting you with conversation partners has been mixed - better than nothing but its not like the prolonged exposure & relationship building of a real friend, nor the targeted learning and crisp explanations from a teacher). But yeah if you’re just getting started I personally enjoyed learning through Pimsleur - no fancy app, just mp3s, and it gets you speaking with time pressure from day one - if speaking is your main goal, this was the fastest way for me to get started, and you learn from exclusively listening to people pronouncing correctly (unlike taking a class, where you’re exposed to everyone but the teacher butchering the language), so I find I sound much better than any of my classmates in class nowadays.