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There's a setting to turn off the "ding" when you get something correct. I thought it's annoying, so I turned it off. Suddenly, the app felt very dull, and main

There's a setting to turn off the "ding" when you get something correct. I thought it's annoying, so I turned it off. Suddenly, the app felt very dull, and maintaining my streak felt hard - I kept forgetting to look into the app. So I turned it on again. ... Pavlovian conditioning works, even when I'm the rat. For the time being, I'm okay with that, because Duolingo does help me learn French, let's see how it goes long term.

Jabbles 4y ago
> Duolingo does help me learn French Can you say more about how much it has helped you, in what ways, and what else you have been doing to study?
- Shacklz 4y ago
  Sure! I think Duolingo is fantastic to learn basic sentences and vocabulary. To reach A1/A2 proficiency, Duolingo is absolutely amazing in my opinion (I can only judge it for French though). Once you go into the B1+ area, the usefulness of Duolingo starts to fall off, slow but steady - learning grammar and conjugations in all the different tenses isn't its forté. I think it's still very useful for repetition and constant exposure to the language, but without content outside of Duolingo, I'm not quite sure if it would work out so well. For me personally, YouTube has been an amazing learning source for French - there are a lot of channels out there with tons of high quality teaching videos. If I had to name one, "Learn French with Alexa" is probably my favorite, but for a lot of topics it's very useful to watch multiple videos from different channels on the same topic, both as repetition and also because sometimes having multiple, slightly different explanations helps. Since a few months, I do visit a weekly French course though - self study brought me only so far; reading already works quite well, listening so-so (depends on the talking speed), but I have a hard time speaking myself. It takes a very long to find the words, but the more I have to talk in course the better it goes. One more thing: For purely learning vocabulary, I very much recommend Anki, it's amazing to just memorize words. Ugh, this got a bit longer than intended, hope it gave you a bit of an overview of my approach :)

Jabbles 4y ago

> Duolingo does help me learn French Can you say more about how much it has helped you, in what ways, and what else you have been doing to study?

Shacklz 4y ago
Sure! I think Duolingo is fantastic to learn basic sentences and vocabulary. To reach A1/A2 proficiency, Duolingo is absolutely amazing in my opinion (I can only judge it for French though). Once you go into the B1+ area, the usefulness of Duolingo starts to fall off, slow but steady - learning grammar and conjugations in all the different tenses isn't its forté. I think it's still very useful for repetition and constant exposure to the language, but without content outside of Duolingo, I'm not quite sure if it would work out so well. For me personally, YouTube has been an amazing learning source for French - there are a lot of channels out there with tons of high quality teaching videos. If I had to name one, "Learn French with Alexa" is probably my favorite, but for a lot of topics it's very useful to watch multiple videos from different channels on the same topic, both as repetition and also because sometimes having multiple, slightly different explanations helps. Since a few months, I do visit a weekly French course though - self study brought me only so far; reading already works quite well, listening so-so (depends on the talking speed), but I have a hard time speaking myself. It takes a very long to find the words, but the more I have to talk in course the better it goes. One more thing: For purely learning vocabulary, I very much recommend Anki, it's amazing to just memorize words. Ugh, this got a bit longer than intended, hope it gave you a bit of an overview of my approach :)