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What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you l

What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same "whole language" method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back to the same "guessing game". Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets, this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome. When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people "this is an alphabet" to "this is how to use words and sentences in that language". That might make sense if you're using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it's just pronounced like "ss" when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ significantly from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they're different compared to yours. I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that's an alphabet with not even that many extra/fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.

nradov 4y ago
I think your experience is atypical. Most students who learn a new language with a fairly "reasonable" alphabet like Korean or Russian find that to be the easiest part and remember most of the letters within a few days. I don't speak Greek but I've been there a few times and learned the alphabet just so that I could sort of read signs (forgot it now). As for Duolingo, is there any independent evidence that it's actually effective? Some of my friends have been using it consistently for a long time and yet don't seem to have learned much. The gamification features are effective at driving user engagement but I'm skeptical whether it's actually a good educational tool.
- noirscape 4y ago
  For clarity, the Ancient Greek alphabet was thought to me using a cue based method exclusively because well, it's ancient Greek, nobody talks ancient Greek anymore, it's considered a dead language (it's still very close to regular Greek in terms of alphabet though... but that wasn't a part of the education method - I will say that it helped out a lot when visiting Greece to be able to read the signs since the alphabet was still virtually identical with I think like, one extra character added over the centuries?). The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system - teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name for every character) and detail how they all looked, but there was never any conversation on how the language was actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken anymore. The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but it did work. I put it together with a small word list that used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching. As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese), it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here. (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based on similarity, which is very different from person to person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.
Muromec 4y ago
For all that is wrong with Duolingo (don't use duolingo as the only tool to learn a language), it does teach writing systems and how to pronounce individual words before throwing you into grammar.
CalRobert 4y ago
Honestly having done a good bit of Duolingo and Babbel and then visiting the country I was trying to study for (Netherlands) I think they're mostly fun games that make you feel like you're learning something. https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ is a decent review that seems similar to my own experience. So far drilling on Anki has been a bit better. Still not sure what else will work aside from moving there.
lalaland1125 4y ago
> What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. The phonics debate is a lot less relevant for secondary languages. The goal of phonics is to teach a person how to write a language that they already speak. The goal of second language instruction is generally to teach someone how to write and speak a language that they don't know in any way. Very different education goals.

nradov 4y ago

I think your experience is atypical. Most students who learn a new language with a fairly "reasonable" alphabet like Korean or Russian find that to be the easiest part and remember most of the letters within a few days. I don't speak Greek but I've been there a few times and learned the alphabet just so that I could sort of read signs (forgot it now). As for Duolingo, is there any independent evidence that it's actually effective? Some of my friends have been using it consistently for a long time and yet don't seem to have learned much. The gamification features are effective at driving user engagement but I'm skeptical whether it's actually a good educational tool.

noirscape 4y ago
For clarity, the Ancient Greek alphabet was thought to me using a cue based method exclusively because well, it's ancient Greek, nobody talks ancient Greek anymore, it's considered a dead language (it's still very close to regular Greek in terms of alphabet though... but that wasn't a part of the education method - I will say that it helped out a lot when visiting Greece to be able to read the signs since the alphabet was still virtually identical with I think like, one extra character added over the centuries?). The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system - teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name for every character) and detail how they all looked, but there was never any conversation on how the language was actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken anymore. The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but it did work. I put it together with a small word list that used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching. As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese), it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here. (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based on similarity, which is very different from person to person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.

Muromec 4y ago

For all that is wrong with Duolingo (don't use duolingo as the only tool to learn a language), it does teach writing systems and how to pronounce individual words before throwing you into grammar.

CalRobert 4y ago

Honestly having done a good bit of Duolingo and Babbel and then visiting the country I was trying to study for (Netherlands) I think they're mostly fun games that make you feel like you're learning something. https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ is a decent review that seems similar to my own experience. So far drilling on Anki has been a bit better. Still not sure what else will work aside from moving there.

lalaland1125 4y ago

> What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. The phonics debate is a lot less relevant for secondary languages. The goal of phonics is to teach a person how to write a language that they already speak. The goal of second language instruction is generally to teach someone how to write and speak a language that they don't know in any way. Very different education goals.