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As someone who has learned and is learning multiple languages this rings true to me. Duolingo is very good for getting started and acquiring the basic vocabular
by emsy 5y ago
As someone who has learned and is learning multiple languages this rings true to me. Duolingo is very good for getting started and acquiring the basic vocabulary. but it plateaus rapidly. After that you don’t get much from it and you should use something that uses mini stories with a larger context and preferably audio read by natives (Small aside: Duolingo has awesome mini story podcasts for Spanish and French which they should incorporate into their app). The best tool I found for the mini story approach is Lingq, which is not so good at getting you started though. You’re also right about the gamification. This is something Duolingo absolutely nails. A friend’s mother is addicted to doing her English lessons and has a 2 year streak. But she also barely speaks English yet, which is unsurprising to me given the fact she only ever uses Duolingo.
- mike_h 5y agoHadn’t heard of LingQ til now, this seems really good.
- emsy 5y agoThe founder (Steve Kauffmann) is a polyglot with a youtube channel where he talks about effective strategies for learning languages, sometimes even in other languages. I can’t recommend it enough.
- personlurking 5y agoIt does seem good, til you compare price ($8-40/mo) with its limited use cases.
- emsy 5y agoWhat do you mean by limited use case?
- personlurking 5y agoWhen I used the free trial, the main activity was centered around pasting text from other sources/sites, then marking the words you recognize. To me that's not worth $8/mo, much less $40 at the Premium Plus level. I realize there are a few other features to LingQ but the cost-benefit of the lowest tier didn't make sense to me. I have free dictionary apps that remember every word that is looked up. I'd rather input those lists into a spaced repetition app and receive essentially the same benefit without paying.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago> After that you don’t get much from it and you should use something that uses mini stories with a larger context and preferably audio read by natives Duolingo has mini-stories, at least for Spanish, and has had them for a while. They're usually around something happening to a bunch of characters. In most of the recent stories, there is a larger group of characters who all know each other and have interconnected "adventures". The lessons then become not just translating random, out of context sentences, but listening to the story and answering contextual questions. They do seem fairly basic, but I think the basic idea is already there, it should only be improved.