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Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were fir

Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the next step or lesson. They want you to absolutely get it right or else you find yourself in a cycle of trying again, to the point of frustration. My German was probably pretty bad for a long time. It took a decade+ to get any kind of accent and comfort with the language (especially since I wasn't living there for most of that time). But I was up and running with the language, having conversations, reading the news, listening to podcasts, etc even if I wasn't "perfect." That, to my thinking, is at the core of what I need a language learning app to do - get me to the point where I'm making progress with it and forming my own thoughts and statements, don't hold me back because I mispronounced an accent or missed the gender on a word, etc. My own experience with Duolingo is that it is ok as a way to memorize some grammar, but the lack of context is a problem. Random sentences just designed to mix in vocabulary don't seem to be as useful as contextualized learning, IE: at the train station, at the bank, etc.

dwighttk 4y ago
spelling too... like the 10th thing I care about is how to spell in a new language...
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  Exactly. Wasn't sure if I was fully conveying my meaning, but yes - spelling can be learned along the way and is a real barrier in these apps.
- barrell 4y ago
  And no typos allowed or you start from zero! Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos
  - meatmanek 4y ago
    I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is yourself.
    - barrell 4y ago
      I don't know Tsurukame but iKnow.jp had the same functionality and it was game changing for me! Immediately any SRS without became unusable
    - b3orn 4y ago
      Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour and you never know if something will be detected as a typo.
      - LorenPechtel 4y ago
        While I don't know the innards of it I suspect the typos are preprogrammed. Note what frequently gets marked wrong and have a human decide if it's a wrong word or a typo. You could also do a string distance comparison--if it's distance from the right answer is 1 but it's at least two from any wrong answer it's probably a typo.
  - watwut 4y ago
    duolingo is fairly permissive with typos
scarface74 4y ago
I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have? But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English. Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.
- FPGAhacker 4y ago
  > But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English. That's pretty clever.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to understand any word with a rolled “r”. Right now, I’m on lesson 29 in Spanish and trying to pronounce “pruebo” - “I taste” (also can translate to “I try”). It keeps thinking I’m trying to say “huevo” - egg. Voice dictation works almost perfectly in English for me, so I’m assuming it’s my own mispronunciation
- davnicwil 4y ago
  > use iOS’s built in Translate app Thank you so much for this tip, it is honestly astounding how well this works and I can instantly see how useful it's going to be!
djmips 4y ago
Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.
  - djmips 4y ago
    I see your point but people still like to interact with people in other languages in person. Babelfish isn't there yet.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Well, for one, learning languages is often just about fulfilling an interest rather than actually needing it.
    - dazc 4y ago
      Learning another language can also teach another way of thinking about things. There are also nuances that AI isn't going to help you with. For instance, 'How's your father?' in Spanish means 'What is your father like?' In English it means 'How is your father's health?' - or it could also mean 'sexual intercourse'. There will be better examples, obviously...
  - coldtea 4y ago
    For talking to actual people, you know... Might as well ask "Why cook when there's delivery?"
- davidzweig 4y ago
  I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game.. I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good: What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake." >> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake." What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years." >> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016." This also works: Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.
noduerme 4y ago
I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pretty good, and definitely not American-sounding. To me, being able to get by speaking while traveling is my main purpose in learning a language so I'm not taking it as seriously or studying as long as someone who wants full fluency. But for a really rapid 2- or 3-week launch point into a language you don't speak at all, Pimsleur is really impressive.
- arminiusreturns 4y ago
  Pimsleur has been my goto for over 20 years now also. It's good enough to spur my memory on stuff I know, and get me base functional in something new if I'm travelling. I had a real cool moment when due to Pimsleur I picked up on Egyptian Arabic being spoken in a place that was mostly Levantine. Next on my todo is Hindi. (I also tend to do sticker books all over common items as an assist)
- kaitai 4y ago
  Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!
- samuell 4y ago
  I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation. The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.
klodolph 4y ago
I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right. This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time. This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.
- dazc 4y ago
  I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this. I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Flip side of this--many years ago, internet cafe in Shanghai. Turns out the clerk did know some English--but her pronunciation was so bad that I couldn't understand her even when I knew what she was saying. I never saw a spelling mistake, though.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I liked the ruthless correction because it meant that I didn’t get into the habit of pronouncing things poorly. I also play piano, and if you make a mistake when practicing a piece, it’s easy to just keep making the same mistake over and over. The more you practice making a mistake, the harder it is to fix.
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  >I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.
Natsu 4y ago
> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).
- posterboy 4y ago
  Interestingly, the loo is a Water Closet.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Are you correcting GP's 'bathroom'? Americans call the public facilities (e.g. in a restaurant) that or 'washroom', despite there (typically!) being no bathing or washing devices. Fwiw, like 'toilet', 'loo' can be either the room/facility or the... 'appliance' itself.
    - Natsu 4y ago
      I think they mean that in French, they call the bathroom WC.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        Are you joking? I've seen the abbreviation in France, de temps en temps, but never spelt out, it being obviously not French. WC is an English term.
      - posterboy 4y ago
        No, I meant etymologically. l'eau is apparently a real hypothesis for the loo. I shouldn't expect anyone to figure out word origin on the spot in a restaurant situation, especially if it's less likely than other hypotheses. But I encourage you to integrate etymology as a method in language learning and as its own effort.
- 4y ago
pkulak 4y ago
I agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff. I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
- barrell 4y ago
  A lot of the language learning methods out there really are built to be graded/measured. Books, courses, duolingo, anki - they all kind of seek to answer this question ‘how can we measure your language and make sure you’re progressing through it’. There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products. I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
  - NickC25 4y ago
    I worked on a product for nearly 4 years that seems very similar to what you're describing. I would love to tell you all about it and what we could have done better, worse, etc... How can I get in touch?
    - barrell 4y ago
      Emailed :) Also added contact details to my about page here in case that didn't go through / got sent to spam
- aix1 4y ago
  I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed. Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly: 1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders]. 2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard. 3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition. Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember. Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell. (I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dazc 4y ago
Not only do your answer's need to be perfect in order to progress but you can also answer correctly without knowing why you are correct. Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly. Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.
watwut 4y ago
It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.
goodcanadian 4y ago
Indeed, years ago now, I tried to brush up on my French which I had learned in school. Duolingo did not like my pronunciation (probably fair), and kept me stuck on very basic French that I knew well rather than actually getting to the point where it was challenging me and helping me improve. There may also have been an element of Canadian pronunciation versus France pronunciation. Anyway, it was annoying, and I quickly gave up. Also, there was at least one time where it would not accept my correct answer and insisted on a (IMHO) worse answer.
ceras 4y ago
In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  Around five years ago, I had to learn a new language because I moved country. I've learned several languages before and so I got good at it quite quickly, and I think my pronunciation in general is quite decent, but you can notice the words I learned very early, because I have a habit of pronouncing them with the wrong stress or vowel quality. It's hard to break those habits once you've formed them.

dwighttk 4y ago

spelling too... like the 10th thing I care about is how to spell in a new language...

poulsbohemian 4y ago
Exactly. Wasn't sure if I was fully conveying my meaning, but yes - spelling can be learned along the way and is a real barrier in these apps.
barrell 4y ago
And no typos allowed or you start from zero! Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos
- meatmanek 4y ago
  I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is yourself.
  - barrell 4y ago
    I don't know Tsurukame but iKnow.jp had the same functionality and it was game changing for me! Immediately any SRS without became unusable
  - b3orn 4y ago
    Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour and you never know if something will be detected as a typo.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      While I don't know the innards of it I suspect the typos are preprogrammed. Note what frequently gets marked wrong and have a human decide if it's a wrong word or a typo. You could also do a string distance comparison--if it's distance from the right answer is 1 but it's at least two from any wrong answer it's probably a typo.
- watwut 4y ago
  duolingo is fairly permissive with typos

scarface74 4y ago

I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have? But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English. Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.

FPGAhacker 4y ago
> But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English. That's pretty clever.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to understand any word with a rolled “r”. Right now, I’m on lesson 29 in Spanish and trying to pronounce “pruebo” - “I taste” (also can translate to “I try”). It keeps thinking I’m trying to say “huevo” - egg. Voice dictation works almost perfectly in English for me, so I’m assuming it’s my own mispronunciation
davnicwil 4y ago
> use iOS’s built in Translate app Thank you so much for this tip, it is honestly astounding how well this works and I can instantly see how useful it's going to be!

djmips 4y ago

Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.

mikeyouse 4y ago
Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.
- djmips 4y ago
  I see your point but people still like to interact with people in other languages in person. Babelfish isn't there yet.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Well, for one, learning languages is often just about fulfilling an interest rather than actually needing it.
  - dazc 4y ago
    Learning another language can also teach another way of thinking about things. There are also nuances that AI isn't going to help you with. For instance, 'How's your father?' in Spanish means 'What is your father like?' In English it means 'How is your father's health?' - or it could also mean 'sexual intercourse'. There will be better examples, obviously...
- coldtea 4y ago
  For talking to actual people, you know... Might as well ask "Why cook when there's delivery?"
davidzweig 4y ago
I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game.. I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good: What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake." >> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake." What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years." >> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016." This also works: Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.

noduerme 4y ago

I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pretty good, and definitely not American-sounding. To me, being able to get by speaking while traveling is my main purpose in learning a language so I'm not taking it as seriously or studying as long as someone who wants full fluency. But for a really rapid 2- or 3-week launch point into a language you don't speak at all, Pimsleur is really impressive.

arminiusreturns 4y ago
Pimsleur has been my goto for over 20 years now also. It's good enough to spur my memory on stuff I know, and get me base functional in something new if I'm travelling. I had a real cool moment when due to Pimsleur I picked up on Egyptian Arabic being spoken in a place that was mostly Levantine. Next on my todo is Hindi. (I also tend to do sticker books all over common items as an assist)
kaitai 4y ago
Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!
samuell 4y ago
I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation. The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.

klodolph 4y ago

I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right. This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time. This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.

dazc 4y ago
I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this. I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Flip side of this--many years ago, internet cafe in Shanghai. Turns out the clerk did know some English--but her pronunciation was so bad that I couldn't understand her even when I knew what she was saying. I never saw a spelling mistake, though.
- klodolph 4y ago
  I liked the ruthless correction because it meant that I didn’t get into the habit of pronouncing things poorly. I also play piano, and if you make a mistake when practicing a piece, it’s easy to just keep making the same mistake over and over. The more you practice making a mistake, the harder it is to fix.
poulsbohemian 4y ago
>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.

Natsu 4y ago

> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).

posterboy 4y ago
Interestingly, the loo is a Water Closet.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Are you correcting GP's 'bathroom'? Americans call the public facilities (e.g. in a restaurant) that or 'washroom', despite there (typically!) being no bathing or washing devices. Fwiw, like 'toilet', 'loo' can be either the room/facility or the... 'appliance' itself.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    I think they mean that in French, they call the bathroom WC.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Are you joking? I've seen the abbreviation in France, de temps en temps, but never spelt out, it being obviously not French. WC is an English term.
    - posterboy 4y ago
      No, I meant etymologically. l'eau is apparently a real hypothesis for the loo. I shouldn't expect anyone to figure out word origin on the spot in a restaurant situation, especially if it's less likely than other hypotheses. But I encourage you to integrate etymology as a method in language learning and as its own effort.
4y ago

pkulak 4y ago

I agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff. I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.

barrell 4y ago
A lot of the language learning methods out there really are built to be graded/measured. Books, courses, duolingo, anki - they all kind of seek to answer this question ‘how can we measure your language and make sure you’re progressing through it’. There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products. I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
- NickC25 4y ago
  I worked on a product for nearly 4 years that seems very similar to what you're describing. I would love to tell you all about it and what we could have done better, worse, etc... How can I get in touch?
  - barrell 4y ago
    Emailed :) Also added contact details to my about page here in case that didn't go through / got sent to spam
aix1 4y ago
I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed. Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly: 1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders]. 2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard. 3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition. Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember. Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell. (I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dazc 4y ago

Not only do your answer's need to be perfect in order to progress but you can also answer correctly without knowing why you are correct. Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly. Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.

watwut 4y ago

It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.

goodcanadian 4y ago

Indeed, years ago now, I tried to brush up on my French which I had learned in school. Duolingo did not like my pronunciation (probably fair), and kept me stuck on very basic French that I knew well rather than actually getting to the point where it was challenging me and helping me improve. There may also have been an element of Canadian pronunciation versus France pronunciation. Anyway, it was annoying, and I quickly gave up. Also, there was at least one time where it would not accept my correct answer and insisted on a (IMHO) worse answer.

ceras 4y ago

In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
Around five years ago, I had to learn a new language because I moved country. I've learned several languages before and so I got good at it quite quickly, and I think my pronunciation in general is quite decent, but you can notice the words I learned very early, because I have a habit of pronouncing them with the wrong stress or vowel quality. It's hard to break those habits once you've formed them.