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I worked all the way through Duolingo's Mandarin curriculum a couple of years back (after having basic knowledge from studying on another paid site). I can say

I worked all the way through Duolingo's Mandarin curriculum a couple of years back (after having basic knowledge from studying on another paid site). I can say that it was definitely fun, and it was easy to study every day. The downside was that I was still at a pretty basic level when I finished their curriculum. Logged on just now, and they haven't added any new content since I finished. For people who just want to learn a few words of a foreign language and have fun while I'm doing it, Duolingo is great. And I'm sure that the market is huge.

DantesKite 5y ago
I imagine the market for people wanting to learn English is even higher.
- HKH2 5y ago
  Much higher. When I last checked, it was much easier for an English speaker to find a Mandarin penpal than the other way around.
HKH2 5y ago
There are plenty of good Mandarin decks on Anki, especially ones with sentences/idioms. (You just have to be careful with the Pinyin at times as it may be automatically generated and some characters have more than one sound/tone.)
- Apfel 5y ago
  Agree strongly with this. The Spoonfed Chinese deck is so good that it's worth actually paying for. I think it's only $3 or so now.
throwaway09223 5y ago
I'm also working through their Mandarin and I'm stunned they only offer simplified. It would be so easy to implement traditional characters. It's fun and free, which is nice, but it's really nowhere near as good as other paid platforms.
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  Offering Traditional Chinese would require a lot of review work to catch character mapping errors and phrases that are not idiomatic in Taiwan. Given the low quality of Duolingo's existing Chinese sentences, I wouldn't hold my breath. (I've played around with the Mandarin class last year and immediately ran into some mistakes; not sure how much bad luck was involved.)
  - sersi 5y ago
    I was extremely surprised at how poor quality Duolingo's Mandarin class was.. I don't speak fluently but I speak well enough for daily life and even I could find some errors (and confirmed with my partner who is a native speaker) In all languages I speak decently, I've been surprised by how poor quality the lessons were.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Would you mind offering some examples? I'm a beginning learner and my assumptions are based on the character mappings I see in Pleco, and having toggled HelloChinese between simplified/traditional. I would love to study areas where character meanings change.
    - gurkendoktor 5y ago
      Just going through the Mandarin onboarding in Duolingo again, and one of the common errors is that 得 is pronounced de2 in sentences where it should be dei3. There are also common words like 星期 where the characters are the same in SC/TC, but the tone would be different in a hypothetic Duolingo TC class (xing1qi1 vs xing1qi2), and I don't recall ever hearing "下星期" in Taiwan, it was usually 下禮拜. Erhua such as "小一點兒" is also not something that feels natural in TC. But I think you are specifically asking about characters where the mapping from SC to TC is not 1:1. This StackOverflow answer has a few examples and a link to an exhaustive list on Wikipedia: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 I sometimes read TC clickbait articles, and when they use 后 where it should be 後 that's usually a sign of a crappy machine conversion from SC. 發髮 and 干乾幹 are two more really common character groups that map to a single SC character. The rabbit hole goes even deeper because the same Unicode character can have typographic differences by region. Just today I learned that Apple's PingFang SC and PingFang TC fonts use a different "roof" on the character 龜, even though it is the same traditional character in both cases. More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character (but that wouldn't be an issue for a TC Duolingo class)

DantesKite 5y ago

I imagine the market for people wanting to learn English is even higher.

HKH2 5y ago
Much higher. When I last checked, it was much easier for an English speaker to find a Mandarin penpal than the other way around.

HKH2 5y ago

There are plenty of good Mandarin decks on Anki, especially ones with sentences/idioms. (You just have to be careful with the Pinyin at times as it may be automatically generated and some characters have more than one sound/tone.)

Apfel 5y ago
Agree strongly with this. The Spoonfed Chinese deck is so good that it's worth actually paying for. I think it's only $3 or so now.

throwaway09223 5y ago

I'm also working through their Mandarin and I'm stunned they only offer simplified. It would be so easy to implement traditional characters. It's fun and free, which is nice, but it's really nowhere near as good as other paid platforms.

gurkendoktor 5y ago
Offering Traditional Chinese would require a lot of review work to catch character mapping errors and phrases that are not idiomatic in Taiwan. Given the low quality of Duolingo's existing Chinese sentences, I wouldn't hold my breath. (I've played around with the Mandarin class last year and immediately ran into some mistakes; not sure how much bad luck was involved.)
- sersi 5y ago
  I was extremely surprised at how poor quality Duolingo's Mandarin class was.. I don't speak fluently but I speak well enough for daily life and even I could find some errors (and confirmed with my partner who is a native speaker) In all languages I speak decently, I've been surprised by how poor quality the lessons were.
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Would you mind offering some examples? I'm a beginning learner and my assumptions are based on the character mappings I see in Pleco, and having toggled HelloChinese between simplified/traditional. I would love to study areas where character meanings change.
  - gurkendoktor 5y ago
    Just going through the Mandarin onboarding in Duolingo again, and one of the common errors is that 得 is pronounced de2 in sentences where it should be dei3. There are also common words like 星期 where the characters are the same in SC/TC, but the tone would be different in a hypothetic Duolingo TC class (xing1qi1 vs xing1qi2), and I don't recall ever hearing "下星期" in Taiwan, it was usually 下禮拜. Erhua such as "小一點兒" is also not something that feels natural in TC. But I think you are specifically asking about characters where the mapping from SC to TC is not 1:1. This StackOverflow answer has a few examples and a link to an exhaustive list on Wikipedia: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 I sometimes read TC clickbait articles, and when they use 后 where it should be 後 that's usually a sign of a crappy machine conversion from SC. 發髮 and 干乾幹 are two more really common character groups that map to a single SC character. The rabbit hole goes even deeper because the same Unicode character can have typographic differences by region. Just today I learned that Apple's PingFang SC and PingFang TC fonts use a different "roof" on the character 龜, even though it is the same traditional character in both cases. More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character (but that wouldn't be an issue for a TC Duolingo class)