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There are definitely more effective methods, just mostly not free and more time demanding. I have a mission to get B1 French, tried Duolingo with some basic le

There are definitely more effective methods, just mostly not free and more time demanding. I have a mission to get B1 French, tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year. You get into the bubble that you think you are progressing but reality is, its a very narrow and not-so-useful progress if whole language knowledge is your goal - mostly passive skills and certain type of language usage that goes along with the type of exercises in Duolingo. If you want real language knowledge, as OP mentions speaking is the hardest part (active & rapid usage of all that you know), and Duolingo doesn't prepare you for this, at all. If your goal is purely passive reading newspapers/articles, then its helpful a bit, but I would still use at least 2-3 other methods if you are even a bit serious about it. Try talking to people after using just Duolingo, heck try writing an official letter on whatever topic. You will not just struggle, you will fail if you don't use any external help. I've made tremendous progress with zoom meetings with professional teacher over shorter period of time. But its because I made it a priority and dedicated my time to it. And it costs quite a bit (doesn't have to, but my case is quite specific).

AussieWog93 5y ago
>tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year To be honest with you, I think you spent too much time on Duolingo. It's definitely not a suitable tool for learning new things after the first 8-12 weeks (assuming you put in around 30-60 minutes a day). To be fair, though, in that short initial period you can pretty easily learn close to 1000 common words, as well as basic sentence structure in your target langauge. This is immensely useful if you want to start communicating with others online or reading texts in your target language; you're looking up the few words you don't know rather than staring at a wall of gibberish.
jfengel 5y ago
Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even if it were, it would take more than six months to get there. A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months. Duolingo could at best help you reach an A3, and even then you'd have to supplement it with reading and (ideally) conversation. Duolingo plus outside reading and listening could get you to a B1 level in a year if you really put your mind to it. They even make a podcast available, to help the listening part. I happen to listen to the French one myself, and highly recommend it. The stories are interesting and well produced, and bring stories (and accents) from all around the Francophonie. Doing it with a personal teacher will always be better than an app, but Duolingo gives a huge jump start on that. For free.
- splonk 5y ago
  They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own. https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/ https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/
  - jfengel 5y ago
    I just completed all of that content up to French level 1. It's helpful in introducing a lot of important-but-uncommon verb cases (conditional, subjunctive), but at least at level 1 I still wouldn't really be able to follow them in context. It sure as hell doesn't help that in French they all sound the same. They're clear enough in written form, but French in particular requires close attention to context. Even other Romance languages draw the same distinctions more clearly.
    - splonk 5y ago
      One of the problems with the Spanish course is that all the later content (past checkpoint 5 or so) just stops explaining things at all, so it's up to the user to figure out things like how the negative imperative uses the subjunctive case. It's okay if you've taken a more structured language course in the past but I can imagine people starting from scratch just getting completely lost at that point.
rjsw 5y ago
I found watching French TV helped get the equivalent of language immersion. One source that isn't region locked is TV5Monde [1], you can view programmes online if it isn't available as a broadcast channel where you are. [1] http://www.tv5monde.com/ http://www.tv5monde.com/

AussieWog93 5y ago

>tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year To be honest with you, I think you spent too much time on Duolingo. It's definitely not a suitable tool for learning new things after the first 8-12 weeks (assuming you put in around 30-60 minutes a day). To be fair, though, in that short initial period you can pretty easily learn close to 1000 common words, as well as basic sentence structure in your target langauge. This is immensely useful if you want to start communicating with others online or reading texts in your target language; you're looking up the few words you don't know rather than staring at a wall of gibberish.

jfengel 5y ago

Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even if it were, it would take more than six months to get there. A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months. Duolingo could at best help you reach an A3, and even then you'd have to supplement it with reading and (ideally) conversation. Duolingo plus outside reading and listening could get you to a B1 level in a year if you really put your mind to it. They even make a podcast available, to help the listening part. I happen to listen to the French one myself, and highly recommend it. The stories are interesting and well produced, and bring stories (and accents) from all around the Francophonie. Doing it with a personal teacher will always be better than an app, but Duolingo gives a huge jump start on that. For free.

splonk 5y ago
They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own. https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/ https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/
- jfengel 5y ago
  I just completed all of that content up to French level 1. It's helpful in introducing a lot of important-but-uncommon verb cases (conditional, subjunctive), but at least at level 1 I still wouldn't really be able to follow them in context. It sure as hell doesn't help that in French they all sound the same. They're clear enough in written form, but French in particular requires close attention to context. Even other Romance languages draw the same distinctions more clearly.
  - splonk 5y ago
    One of the problems with the Spanish course is that all the later content (past checkpoint 5 or so) just stops explaining things at all, so it's up to the user to figure out things like how the negative imperative uses the subjunctive case. It's okay if you've taken a more structured language course in the past but I can imagine people starting from scratch just getting completely lost at that point.

rjsw 5y ago

I found watching French TV helped get the equivalent of language immersion. One source that isn't region locked is TV5Monde [1], you can view programmes online if it isn't available as a broadcast channel where you are. [1] http://www.tv5monde.com/ http://www.tv5monde.com/