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My experience: I decided to try a new language on Duo a couple months ago. I unfortunately used the word bubbles because I was too lazy to learn to type Cyrill

by x0x0 4y ago

My experience: I decided to try a new language on Duo a couple months ago. I unfortunately used the word bubbles because I was too lazy to learn to type Cyrillic. The result was, after 2 months, that I could spell nothing and knew almost no words. With the prompting from the word bubbles, it's far too easy to click on words and think you're learning. They don't even do a good job of providing high-likelihood alternatives in the word bubbles. Is it тут там or теш? Well, when you're "writing" a sentence with word bubbles, there's only one 3-letter word that starts with a T, so that's the one. I finally learned to type Cyrillic and was embarrassed and very annoyed to realize that I actually knew virtually no words once I had to type them out. I think it's exactly as you said: Duolingo pretends to teach, and users pretend to learn.

sw104 4y ago
You've seen the worst side of Duolingo. Duolingo is rubbish for learning most languages, but the Russian and Ukrainian courses are particularly bad. Not only do they not really teach you the Cyrillic language foundation, but they don't teach cases and tenses. The whole course is trial and error until you learn the handful of phrases they added in. I think French and Spanish are the only courses on Duolingo that even give proper teaching, probably because they cover most people (Spanish for US citizens, and match up with US/UK school language curriculums). The rest of the languages have much shorter courses, with less content, no teaching, and poorly structured courses, mispronunciations. My Russian other half forbade me from learning her language with Duolingo.
watwut 4y ago
I started Ukrainian in Duolingo and 4 months later I can sorta kinda understand tweets in Ukrainian. The primary limitation is my vocabulary, I have to compensate by guessing through similarity to other slavic language. I can get gist of meaning from Ukrainian youtube videos. With languages, passive understanding comes first, always. The active one is different and harder skill.

by x0x0 4y ago

sw104 4y ago

You've seen the worst side of Duolingo. Duolingo is rubbish for learning most languages, but the Russian and Ukrainian courses are particularly bad. Not only do they not really teach you the Cyrillic language foundation, but they don't teach cases and tenses. The whole course is trial and error until you learn the handful of phrases they added in. I think French and Spanish are the only courses on Duolingo that even give proper teaching, probably because they cover most people (Spanish for US citizens, and match up with US/UK school language curriculums). The rest of the languages have much shorter courses, with less content, no teaching, and poorly structured courses, mispronunciations. My Russian other half forbade me from learning her language with Duolingo.

watwut 4y ago

I started Ukrainian in Duolingo and 4 months later I can sorta kinda understand tweets in Ukrainian. The primary limitation is my vocabulary, I have to compensate by guessing through similarity to other slavic language. I can get gist of meaning from Ukrainian youtube videos. With languages, passive understanding comes first, always. The active one is different and harder skill.