4 ms·
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
by 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 agoMy 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 agoThanks, 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.