20 ms·
How much can Duolingo teach us?
- hsdropout 4y agohttps://archive.is/8X5GR https://archive.is/8X5GR
- pflenker 4y agoClicked the link to find out how much Duolingo can teach us, but hoo boy is this information hard to find in the article.
- medstrom 4y agoLike most internet articles. Just imagine the title prepended with "Long mutterings on the topic of...".
- norgie 4y agoTangentially, this response is pretty interesting to me in the context of new LLMs replacing traditional search. I couldn't understand why people thought LLMs would replace search entirely, since I search mostly to find content created by people. I want to read the article or watch the video, not just find some particular fact. But maybe I'm the unusual one in this case?
- nanidin 4y agoThis applies to all articles from New Yorker in my experience.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoI'm 280 days into their French course. Have I learned French? no. Have I learned how to game a bunch of XP? yes. Those two are not the same.
- medstrom 4y agoI learn better when I pay less attention to XP and approach it like this e.g. on Duolingo's most common exercise where you have to assemble words into a sentence, I avoid looking at the words and formulate a sentence in my head first.
- codyb 4y agoDuolingo’s definitely gotten better in the last few years at least. I try to do it on a self enforced “hard mode” where I close my eyes and listen before each exercise, and cover the answers. I also type all the exercises instead of the word bubbles which helps with learning the accent placement. But it’s only a supplement to a more rigorous routine which includes a Pimsleur speaking/listening lesson, and two Anki (spaced repetition flashcards) decks, one for conjugation and one for vocabulary. And then chatting with friends. Finally, I listen to radio stations from Spanish speaking countries while working. I suspect if I keep it up I’ll be pretty decent by the end of the year.
- parker_mountain 4y agoI'm about the same in, and I can now read (or get the gist of) most French signs and posters, and generally understand simple written and basic clearly spoken French. It's what you make of it. That said, I've clearly hit a wall of usefulness, and I'm looking elsewhere to continue learning. I'm going to be starting a French course next month - in person - because a huge aspect of what's missing is immersion, conversation, and thinking about the language in a way that's more than just repeating things.
- ghaff 4y agoSome people seem to have a real talent for languages. Others less so. I had 4 years of high school French many years ago and was a pretty good student overall. But I never really used it much afterwards. I've forgotten a lot and was never really any good at understanding spoken French. Mostly I could get a sense for a French newspaper. On the other hand, I travelled to Paris with a friend a few years backwho had zero exposure to French and the amount I know was actually at least somewhat helpful. If I were looking to spend some extended time in France at some point, I'd look to do a refresher with some of the modern language study courses.
- dmurray 4y agoThis was the most insightful snippet in the article for me: > Like all the teachers I spoke to, Zimotti sees Duolingo as supplemental to the kind of deep immersion that language learning requires. But, in his opinion, the time most people spend on Duolingo is time they would otherwise spend on TikTok or watching television, not learning a second language in some more optimal way. Unfortunately, Duolingo doesn't market itself that way, preferring nonsense like "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language". Of course there are many more customers who can spend fifteen minutes a day on it than hours at a time in an immersive context, topped up with fifteen minutes of Duolingo.
- eterevsky 4y agoI think it's perfectly adequate to learn A1 level of a new language. I actually did it with German and started in-person classes from level A2.
- routerl 4y agoAgreed. Duolingo is great for first exposure. I learned how to read pinyin, ask short questions (e.g. where's the bathroom), make simple purchases, etc. Beyond that, I find it almost useless for learning grammar and vocabulary. But this is still an important niche, and Duolingo owns it completely.
- input_sh 4y agoI got my A2 German from Duolingo and dubbed Netflix shows (German audio, English subtitles). Gonna start B1 in person in a couple of months. But while it felt like I was starting from scratch, I didn't. I had 4 years of German in middle school. I can't tell if I just "unlocked" that part of my brain, but what I can comfortably say is that ~1 year of Duolingo+Netflix made me feel much more comfortable than a more formal learning method throughout middle school.
- rcarr 4y agoFifteen minutes a day can teach you a language. In another comment on here, I mention that the FSI estimate that a group one language takes 480 hours to learn. If you study for fifteen minutes a day, that means you will need to study for 5 and 1/4 years to master your language. Duolingo’s marketing is not the issue - the issue is the majority have unrealistic expectations regarding the effort and time involved, get frustrated and then give up.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoDoes anyone know a good prompt to turn chatGPT into a practice partner?
- cultofmetatron 4y agogo on a dating site where the majority of users speak the language you want to learn. use google translate to get by and you'll slowly get better at reading and writing spanish in conversation. I unintentionally learned spanish this way.
- Aachen 4y agoIf you get matches that reply more than once, or a reasonable rate of matches at all
- cultofmetatron 4y agothe dating market is drastically different depending on the country. In general, I get way more interest in Europe, asia or latin america. In latin america, I'd get a respsonse 3 out of 5 tries with 2 out of 5 ending up in an actual date. by comparison, my hit rate was more like 1 in 100 when I'm in america. tldr: the dating market in america is trash.
- silverpepsi 4y agoNot sure if Chad agrees
- Aachen 4y agoI'm not in America
- smcin 4y agoOk, but Example: on a dating app, change your zipcode to Manhattan from any other
- smcin 4y ago
- readthenotes1 4y agoI took a two-week half day Spanish course followed by about a month of Anki cards. I switched to Duolingo because Anki cars just don't cut it for speaking a language. Can I speak Spanish now? No. But I feel that if I were to go back to a Spanish class I would be much better prepared than if I had done nothing...
- pessimizer 4y agoFlashcards don't teach language, they remind you of things you've already learned. Having that first exposure to something be on a flashcard isn't the greatest context for learning, especially since the impulse with flashcards is to move quickly. Don't switch to Duolingo, do them both.
- readthenotes1 4y agoI found making them and using them during the class to be invaluable. It was also good for learning some of the conjugations later. Of course, that is only part of a way to learn a language and can get to be a real grind.
- suddenclarity 4y agoFlashcards can be customised in any way though. I used to segment movies into sentences. On the front you had the audio and a screenshot. On the back, you had the transcription and a translation. I learned all the words in multiple movies and TV series this way.
- pessimizer 4y agoMaking your own flashcards is the definitive way of learning something elsewhere, then putting it into Anki for long-term retention. What I'm saying is that Anki should almost always be supplemental to other stuff. I've got exceptions, though; I do algorithmically generated clozes every day that I got from here: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/ https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/ They're good for me because you have to give yourself a looser standard for grading i.e. "I used a different word but does it make sense? Did I conjugate it correctly? Then Good. You also have to actively suspend bad cards. It can break you of the gamification habit that Anki stats can get you into. For example, no need to cry over leeches that get suspended; you'll get that word again on another card. Weird idiom? Stop doing flashcards and go look it up.
- culopatin 4y agoI really don’t get duolingo. Why does it want to teach me how to say the bear is vegetarian before I can say anything useful is beyond me.
- urubu 4y agoThe Finnish course is especially bad in this regard. You learn the words for 'lynx' (ilves) and 'wolverine' (ahma), but not for 'left' and 'right'.
- lumiukko 4y agoSorry, but this is an incredibly ignorant comment. If you can say "the bear is vegetarian", you are most likely able to say "I am vegetarian", too. Everyone of those silly sentences contains words you may or may not need and grammar that you may or may not need. To dismiss those sentences as useless is short-sighted.
- culopatin 4y agoI don’t think you’ve used duolingo much. I do not know how to say anything other than the phrase it throws at me in that moment. So no, I do not know that. The progression in not linear, jumps around a lot, and doesn’t help you understand how the conjugations work, or how to extrapolate he/she/they/I because all I know is the bear, or apple , milk, motor and radio before I can understand that someone is saying hello to me and how to answer.
- lumiukko 4y agoSorry, coming back to this comment quite late. Duolingo usually offers some introductory notes for each unit, where stuff like this should be described. I agree that the progression in Duolingo could be better and focus on phrases and conversations that occur more likely in daily life, but that's the choice they made. Also note that the example above was in English. There are languages where the extrapolation is more difficult, because of what are prepositions in English, become suffixes, for instance in Finnish or Turkish. Nevertheless, these topics are usually covered with in the first few units, so I really do not understand the criticism on "useless phrases". In case there really is a language course that does not cover saying "Hello", "How are you?", "I'm good, thanks." in the first 5-10 units or so, I apologize, I was not aware. That should obviously be different.
- 121789 4y agoI really don’t understand the criticism of duolingo. No one who uses it thinks of it as teaching fluency but the criticisms always seems to frame it that way. It’s an enjoyable app to help you get the basics of a new language. I’ve seen it work with my partner. We don’t have to compare it to full immersion to think of it as useful
- bluGill 4y agoDuolingo doesn't force people to move on soon enough. If your goal is learn the language instead of playing a game it just isn't a good system.
- merdaverse 4y agoHow would 'forcing' you actually work? Lock you out of the app until you've conversed with a native speaker? If you are committed to learning a language you will naturally seek out the occasions to practice it outside the app. Duolingo doesn't need to 'force' you to do anything. It's not a parent, it's a helping tool. It seems that most critics of Duolingo have unrealistic expectations.
- chpatrick 4y agoI agree, as a passive thing it's definitely better than nothing.
- piffey 4y agoWhat I learned in a year on Duolingo I picked up in a month of in-person non-native tutor sessions. What I learned in a year of non-native tutor sessions I picked up in a month of conversations with natives through apps like preply/italki. I wish I would've just started with preply/italki and been thrown to the wolves. Likely would've been speaking (not fluently) the languages I've learned in months instead of years.
- curiousllama 4y agoOne thing to consider is that it’s a lot easier to assemble things once you have the basics. It takes children months/years to learn counting and addition, but it takes college students minutes to learn the operations to calculate graham’s number. It might be the case that you pick things up quicker in tutoring because you have wide exposure from duolingo
- Swizec 4y agoQuestion: would you have learned from a non-native tutor as fast without Duolingo? Would you have been able to even get started with preply/italki without a baseline? All evidence I’ve seen says it is incredibly difficult to pick up a language from scratch. Anthropologists have entire protocols developed for learning languages from native speakers with no shared language and it takes years. Sounds grueling too. Meanwhile farting around with Duolingo got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion. But I don’t think a few months of immersion would get me far with zero baseline. Just lots of frustration.
- 908B64B197 4y ago> got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion. Keep in mind about a third of the English language comes from Latin (the precursor to French) and another third from French itself (thanks to the Normans). See Anglish [0] [0] https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
- rcarr 4y agoEveryone slags off Duolingo on here but I highly doubt many have put in the time necessary for a fair evaluation. A quick google search will show you that the US Foreign Service Institute (e.g overseas diplomats who probably know a thing or two about this) say it takes 480 hours to learn a group 1 language which are the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. To put that in context, doing three lessons of Duolingo a day for a week will put you somewhere in the 60 - 80 minute region. Let’s say it’s the former because you had a few days where you only did one or two lessons. That means it will take you 9.2 years to become proficient in your chosen language. Duolingo is good, but it is not a fucking miracle worker. If you’re going in expecting to put in two or three lessons a day and then are disappointed that after a year you don’t speak Spanish, you’re completely fucking deluded and it is not Duolingo’s fault. It takes a lot of fucking effort to learn a language and you get what you put into it. I have been using Duolingo for two years to learn Spanish now, and the results have been wonderful. I can read a lot of Spanish texts, I can pick up on a lot of dialogue in tv and movies and I can express quite a few thoughts in Spanish. Am I completely proficient? Probably not - but if I lived in a Spanish speaking country for a few months I think I’d get pretty competent pretty quickly. And the learning I got has cost me a grand total of about £140. I can guarantee that as far as value for money goes, I have gotten way more learning for the money through Duolingo than if I’d have spent the equivalent on human one to one lessons (how many would I have been able to get realistically for the same amount of money - between five to ten 1 hour lessons?) and definitely better value for money than what I would get through my local college.
- j45 4y agoAgreed, and more solutions should try solving a problem shots way. It’s a pretty simple formula. They work to understand something and then experience it repeatedly by reviewing it to move it long term memory. Maybe this approach lays bare and trivializes some plain truths about learning which some academia would prefer to keep as a mystery of butts in seats for hours to measure competency. Skills based and competency based learning is not always a strength of many of the naysayers I’m against Duolingo type tools (mobile learning apps). The proof is in the pudding when it comes to usage. An app doesn’t have to be the best or most efficient or most effective. But if it meets the more in their hand than anything else, it can trend to a large advantage over time. Asking if people can pick something up, keep it up long enough on average to make it stick be a threat to the building of physical campuses. Self-directed learning is also different to learning the theory of language learning vs the practical learning to swim by learning not to drown, then float, then move.
- dyno12345 4y agoI went back to it recently and now I find it so spammed up with gamification and ads and asking for IAP that it quickly gets frustrating. I get that they need to make money off of all of this but after every lesson you have to storm through like six more screens for ads and subscriptions and more gamification points that I don't even understand. It makes me want to close the app and find something simpler.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoYou do have the option to pay a very low monthly fee if you don't want ads.
- godelski 4y agoThe answer is not much. And I'm confused why this is the case. Duolingo treats humans like supervised large language models and only does the babbler stage. That is: they show you a bunch of data and labels and then do a loss function on that. The problem is that humans aren't machine learning algorithms. Because of this, we need more. If you're an Latin based speaker, try Chinese, Japanese, or even Korean (especially Korean). If you haven't grown up around these characters you're going to really struggle with the introductory lessons. How do you resolve this? You get a book. ̶O̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶a̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶(̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶D̶u̶o̶l̶i̶n̶g̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶)̶.̶(see edit) The same is for grammar and even words. It's amazing to me that in all this time Duolingo hasn't added a "supplementary materials" section. This is included in almost every single other app that's directed at these languages. I know they want to upset the market and do things differently, but that doesn't mean to throw the baby out too. Duolingo is great for practicing and keeping motivated. It has successfully gamifyed language learning, getting users to practice frequently. I just wish they would put more focus on language learning, because it's common knowledge that Duolingo can't get you to even a conversational level. A years worth of studying shouldn't have that poor of a result. Edit: it was wrong to claim that there isn't a letter learning lesson. There is a different tab for it and I made this claim off of prior experience. But the app drops you right into words without even knowing how words are constructed, and I think this is a grave mistake (I'm sure they have data that could test this: if there is a higher rate of struggling/dropouts when a new character system is introduced). I do not think this changes my thesis, but I want to call out my mistake. I'll have a followup comment in the replies.
- wardedVibe 4y ago> It's amazing to me that in all this time Duolingo hasn't added a "supplementary materials" section. They have(had?) one on the web version, but I think they cut it.
- rcarr 4y agoOn the mobile apps at least (but I also believe they exist on the web app as well) there is a supplementary materials button on most lessons. They are also lessons for learning the individual characters of languages in non-latin alphabets. The comment is wrong about both of these things.
- aqme28 4y agoWhen I was planning a move abroad I tried Duolingo, as well as every other language learning app I could find recommended online Of the 8 or so apps I tried, Duolingo was by far the worst. It doesn't feel like it teaches me the language whatsoever, but is instead very good at teaching me the gamification.
- comfypotato 4y agoI think this is an issue with Duolingo’s target audience. Its niche is definitely not people who need to learn a language because they are moving abroad. The gamification is a perfect example of how Duolingo is optimized for people whose motivation is low. It’s specifically for people who just casually want to learn a new language. It’s successful not because it carries people to fluency but because it provides a fun way to learn the basics. Those basics are an unmanageable hurdle for people who don’t actually need to learn a language.
- aqme28 4y agoEven if that's your metric, I really do think all the other language learning apps are better for this purpose.
- comfypotato 4y agoYet none of them have worked for me, and I’ve tried many. The plan is to return to Pimsleur once I’ve spent a couple years with Duolingo. Sure, Duolingo won’t give me fluency, but I’m having fun getting to the point I can use an app that can. I don’t have the motivation for anything more intense. Language learning is very difficult, and Duolingo breaks it into painlessly small chunks. I almost got banned over a comment I made on another Duolingo post because I got so frustrated with the gatekeeping here. The attitude on HN is disgusting. It’s blatant gatekeeping. “Your way is wrong. If you can’t do it the right way you don’t deserve to learn a language.” I regret commenting here. I’d delete my comment if I still could, but instead I’m stuck arguing with another language learning snob because I don’t have the self control not to.
- ZunarJ5 4y agoThis is an advertisement Their CEO has gone on Reddit a few times and came off extremely, probably insultingly poorly. I dropped the app like hot lead after they changed formatting late last year and his behaviour was the last nail in that coffin. It's gotten progressively worse and more gamified which doesn't equate to learning. There are some FOSS alternatives beginning to plant seeds. I cannot wait to see what they bring.
- aio2 4y agoWhat are some FOSS alternatives?
- ak_111 4y agocan you give some examples on how he came off poorly?
- ZunarJ5 4y agoCheck the r/Duolingo Reddit. He had an ama there.
- forgotusername6 4y agoEvery time they changed the UI it made it worse for free users and worse for learning. The latest iteration which made it like candy crush almost made me quit. The only thing keeping me is the streak, which isn't a positive reason.
- jonplackett 4y agoIf you want to learn a language please give Michel Thomas a try. He is amazing. I would not speak a word of Spanish without his help. Unlike any other way I’ve found, his method teaches you to form sentences and grammar from the first lesson. If you line to figure out ‘how things work’ which I would guess would be a lot of you guys, it might fit into your way of thinking nicely. I tried so many language learning apps and audio - and was really bad at languages at school but found his lessons just perfect. Bonus 1: the BBC made a documentary about him where he teaches the worst pupils at a school French in 2 weeks. Bonus 2: he was a Nazi hunter in the French resistance. Bonus 3: he taught Doris day Spanish (Que Será, será) Bonus 4: despite the lessons seeming like they’ve been planned out, he recorded them in one take towards the end of his life. He refused to let anyone know his ‘method’ before that, having too many trust issues post WW2 BBC doc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic On Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas Note - just like duolingo or anything else, this is just a foot in the door (but a really BIG foot). You’ll have to go speak to people in Spanish if you want to be able to speak for real.
- pessimizer 4y agoMihalis from Language Transfer teaches in a similar style (but with a Greek accent rather than a Polish one.) He's free (takes donations) and the courses are extensive. The selection is limited, but he's a one man band. https://www.languagetransfer.org/ https://www.languagetransfer.org/
- Apocryphon 4y agoI've been using Language Transfer and it's an excellent resource. I wonder if the method can be truly expanded to more languages, such as Mandarin Chinese.
- jonplackett 4y agoThere’s a Michel Thomas Madarin one but it isn’t done by him (sadly he’s dead) but I still found it a bit useful. Problem was it’s very short and I wasn’t sure what to do after and just stopped.
- Tepix 4y agoDuoLingo is a nice addition to other things such as Tandem or a good grammar book. It will slowly build your vocabulary.
- znpy 4y agoNot much in my opinion/experience (attempted learning german). You learn words but without grammar you can’t do very much.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoJe n'apprendre pas le français vite avec Duolingo, mais je apprendre il. J'adore Duolingo. Je l'utilise avec Apple Translate et Google Translate et j'ai changement ma langue dans macOS et iOS en français pour apprendre en immersion. Ma Spotify Discover Weekly est plein avec français musique aussi, qui aide me apprendre plus mots. Est-ce que mon français bon? Non, sure. Mais, j'essaie et je pence que c'est amusant ! Mais, il faut vouloir l'apprendre en général. Édit : Ah ! De plus, il y a Reddit français sur reddit.fr qui est plutôt cool.
- ptidhomme 4y agoNot so bad, but it shows you are sometimes translating english constructs to french words literally. FWIW I've recently used Michel Thomas method to learn a language starting from zero, and found I got comfortable building my own phrases very fast. It's audio only, you just have to respond to questions in the target language before the answer is spoken, almost painless. (this is not an ad, I have no relation to Michel Thomas method). It's not perfect either but I feel it's the best introduction to the mecanisms of a forein language, after which you can start adding up vocabulary.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoOui, je ne connais pas beaucoup d'expressions françaises, alors j'essaie de les construire avec des phrases anglaises. Mais ce n'est pas vraiment apprendre une autre langue quand tu faites cela.
- anbende 4y agoYou asked if your French was good, so here you go. I have some experience with French standardized testing. I had to pass a B2 (upper intermediate) exam for Canadian immigration and a C1 (lower advanced) exam for my professional license in Quebec. I think this actually highlights a lot of the problems that people have with duolingo. You aren't terrible at French, but you are missing exactly the skills people malign Duolingo for not teaching. There are problems with word order, which looks like a lot of word to word translation or bad Google Translate (e.g., "Est-ce que mon francais bon?" is odd and unnatural). Your present-tense is spotty (e.g., it should be "j'apprends" not "je apprendre"), and your ability to use other tenses correctly appears non-existent (e.g., it should be "j'ai changé" not "j'ai changement" which translates as "I have change"). I don't think you'd pass a B1 exam (lower intermediate) given the above. Maaaybe A2 (upper elementary) for comprehension if your comprehension is better than your production. I suspect you'd have a great deal of difficulty communicating with a native speaker without the help of translation software as well.
- davidgerard 4y agoThere are probably much better courses than Duolingo, but Duolingo has the important advantage that I actually do it. Just racked up a one-year streak in Spanish. I love the gamification. Duolingo uses every scurvy trick of mobile game gamification - and it's all in the cause of getting you to do your practice. I must do my morning and evening sessions so I can rack up the double XP!! I can almost read Salvadoran Twitter! Thankfully, shitposting turns out to be the universal human language and translates near-perfectly. Infuriated to find out just a couple of weeks ago - after nearly a year - that Duolingo Spanish from English just leaves out "vos" entirely. (As well as "vosotros".) And von Ahn's from Guatemala!
- nologic01 4y agoThere are no real shortcuts to learning a language. Immersion, constant practice, high quality feedback from native speakers are essential elements and they dont come cheap, especially the last part. Having said that, it does feel that scalable, cheap software solutions that give you to a tangible boost should be possible. Duolingo isnt that boost though. It is a very preliminary step, so simplistic that its not even clear its in the right direction.
- VoodooJuJu 4y agoDuolingo has more to teach in terms of sales/marketing than language. Study them for the details, but the essence is this: sell people what they want to hear, what they want to believe, not what actually is, not what actually might help them, they seldom buy truth anyway.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4y agoI have the firm opinion that Duolingo is not only worthless for learning a second language, but has negative benefit value. If language learning is measured on a positive scale from 0 (know nothing of it) to n, with Duolingo it is possible to dip into the negative numbers. I've seen this in my own children. My daughter wants to use it occasionally, because it's like a video game. "Papa, look how long I've had the streak going!" but as that number of days climb into the high double digits, she knows less than what someone would know after their first week of a public school class. And I have no flattering opinions of public school, either. It's Greek lessons are bizarre. I once saw a multiple choice quiz where it asked what the alpha character (the font made it obvious, just the single glyph) was... and the four possible answers were "alpha", "a", "Aay", and (phrase) "the ah sound in caught" (might be misremembering this, but definitely a phrase). What sort of nonsense is that meant to be? How is that not more confusing? What it never did was ever show or teach the Greek alphabet. You never learn the counting numbers. You never learn to conjugate verbs. Other languages are no better, best I can see. If I had to guess, I would think the app is some sort of CIA-inspired conspiracy to prevent Americans from ever learning a language other than English. It pathologically horrible, impossible to describe without sounding melodramatic.
- oska 4y agoYou're right, Duolingo is of negative benefit. Good, motivated language learners will quickly discard it and proceed and progress with more effective methods. People who stick with duolingo will end up getting something like the old 'highschool French'. Some basic familiarity with the language but gained through an unsatisfactory, frustrating learning process that actually hinders them from getting to any degree of fluency.
- vanillax 4y agoEveryone seems to dislike Duolingo. So what are your app alternatives?
- bluGill 4y agoDoes Pimsluer have an app? Anki is a good app, but only if you create your own cards. The act of creating cards is more important than the study. The more I learn about learning languages the less I think an app is good. There are useful things they can do, but the problem is it is a lot of work to create great content and it is hard to get someone to pay
- silverpepsi 4y agoPimsleur has an app. It's an incredible loss imo, gone are the days we could easily and safely permanently archive the mp3s to cloud drives "just in case". Now you'll have access to the expensive program for as long as you and Pimsleur have good luck.
- somsak2 4y ago> The act of creating cards is more important than the study I see this claim repeated so often but I've yet to find any actual proof that this is true. Do you have a reference to a study?
- watwut 4y agoI like it. It just have a hate club of people who hate it with passion. The rest of users like it.
- firefoxd 4y agoI'm the pro Duolingo user. I used to pick up new languages just for fun. It did help me a bit when conversing with uber drivers in Spanish, but I was stumped when i completed the Japanese course. I could quickly, and effectively go through the course with no hurdles. But then my sister asked me to count to ten in Japanese. I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese. Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental. I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue. It's still up if you can find it.
- Aeolun 4y agoThere’s also the other side of the coin. I can count to 10 (or 10000) in Japanese, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish the Japanese course of Duolingo.
- michaelbuckbee 4y agoI have a developer friend who failed tried to start an app/service to really teach you a foreign language as he was so frustrated with Duolingo and similar which are almost more like a "Wordle" type game for fun than actual language learning.
- alexjplant 4y agoI'm re-learning Spanish after having been vaguely conversant from taking four years of it in high school. Duolingo is only half of the puzzle; talking to friends/ChatGPT and watching Seinfeld in Spanish has been helping to close the gap.
- deebosong 4y agoI'm gonna go ahead and just throw this out there: the principle of specificity. Like, if you wanna get good at cycling, running will help an aerobic base, but will not help in terms of generative force (vs load bearing), handles, situational awareness with traffic and fellow riders and learning to pick lines, balance and weight distribution on a bike, pedaling techniques for various pitches, etc. Shoot, not even running, but Zwift vs actual cycling on the roads very much demonstrates the principle of specificity to the T. Just makes me think, if you wanna get good at a language, you gotta use it in actual real-life situations with weight and stakes, as opposed to a game where you learn incidental stuff that may or may not have bearing in the real world.
- cogogo 4y agoI don’t believe there is silver bullet to learning a language for anyone - especially your average human. Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, whatever are great for some foundational exposure and I appreciate that service but they aren’t going to get anyone fluent. I am a native English speaker and learned to fluently speak Spanish starting at 25. I don’t think I have any natural talent for languages but I was committed. Multiple intensive full-time immersion courses, immersion in Spanish speaking countries with an effort to assimilate and a lot of watching TV and reading for me to master. My weirdo catalan-ish accent still has serious issues (applicable to anlmost any accent in the Spanish speaking world) and I still make mistakes I know are mistakes the second I make them - 15+ years later. IMO Exposure (which in my janky definition includes at least some of what I described above and required usage to manage some regular task or communication) is the only way to really learn a language. And the thing that separates the real polyglots and everyone else is some combination of intrinsic aptitude and accelerated learning as they pick up more languages that drastically reduces the amount of exposure required.
- bbarn 4y agomemrise, duolingo, clozemaster, etc.. are all useful to get you reading words. If you're going to a place with foreign languages and not english written everywhere, it can be very useful to start understanding basic constructs and word formations. How certain letters are pronounced can also be a big help. Nothing beats immersion though. Duolingo at it's best (in the languages offered) can help prepare you a little for immersion but you're going to find out very quickly so little of it is helpful in conversation.
- es7 4y agoI’m on a 75 day streak learning Spanish and my wife is doing it too. I took 2 years of Spanish in High School many years ago. In those 75 days, I’ve gone from remembering basically no Spanish to being able to express and understand a surprising amount of day-to-day thoughts with her, at least as well as I could have in 2002. We can express what we want, where we want to go, how we’re feeling, etc. Duolingo isn’t perfect, but the gamification and social aspect keeps us practicing day-after-day and provides a natural jumping off point for using Spanish in our every day.
- gokhan 4y agoAs an anecdote, my daughter learned German when she was 6 from Duolingo reinforced with YouTube, all by herself. And English before that. Check my thread history for more specifics. For that, we're greatful that we have Duolingo. Maybe it's an age thing, that it doesn't work on older people. But for her, I can vouch for Duolingo without thinking. Lately, she is trying to learn Chinese in the same way. It's not going well but I think she's nowhere near the necessary effort level, based on the experience with previous ones.
- zarzavat 4y agoUsually adults have some kind of extrinsic motivation for learning a language: to use it while travelling, to become proficient so they can live in a certain country, to talk to their boyfriend/girlfriend, to use it at work, in other words to communicate with other people in some set of situations. Duolingo may or may not help towards their goal of communicating with others in the situations they desire. If you just want to study a language for the hell of it, without a goal in mind, then Duolingo is fine. Adults tend to fail at learning languages with only intrinsic motivation because it’s a huge time sink.
- nmfisher 4y ago> Lately, she is trying to learn Chinese in the same way. It's not going well but I think she's nowhere near the necessary effort level, based on the experience with previous ones. Duolingo's Chinese module is notoriously bad. I haven't looked at the German but it could come down to huge variance between languages.
- input_sh 4y agoGive a child a cartoon in a language they don't understand and they'll do their best to figure out what's going on. Try that as an adult and you'll think it's a giant waste of time. A child can do that for the entirety of the day, an adult will feel completely exhausted after an hour, couple of hours tops. I am confident that was the key difference amongst my pre-Internet generation. I had access to Cartoon Network, therefore I feel very comfortable with English. Some of my peers had access to German TV channels, therefore they speak German. Lucky ones had access to both.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AlecSchueler 4y agoTo really learn you gotta use it and immerse yourself in it. Duolingo taught me enough Dutch that I could start picking out the stories in comic books. That started to teach me enough phrases and idioms and grammar that I could start basic conversations. Once I could do that the rest all fell into place. Got to the level in Dutch in 4 years that I was able to begin working fulltime using no English. I never thought I'd be able to really speak a second language. I'm nowhere near native level, feel like I'm still learning every day, but I can speak it, I can carry out my daily life in work and socially. Duolingo really got me started. I'm not a fan of the gaimification but that's the way of the world. I'm not a fan of a lot of technology but it is certainly very helpful sometimes.
- gramie 4y agoI speak English natively, and have learned French, German, Sesotho and Japanese with a mixture of books and immersion. Obviously immersion is the best way. I used Duolingo to help me learn Spanish, and I was struck by how artificial it is. It may teach you to understand a language, but not to speak it. Far superior, in my experience, is https://www.languagetransfer.org https://www.languagetransfer.org, which has free audio lessons to learn French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and Swahili (and English for Spanish speakers). This is the most natural method short of immersion I have ever experienced, and very effective. Amazingly, it is all done by one man, and runs on donations. There is an app, which is delightfully clean and usable. Mihalis also has an introduction to music theory, which gets excellent reviews!
- CoastalCoder 4y agoThanks for the pointer! FWIW, it looks like it also teaches German. EDIT: I just noticed this comment: "Please note: Complete German remains unfinished. The course will be either continued or remade by a new teacher directed by Mihalis."
- aix1 4y agoThanks for recommending Language Transfer. I browsed the site a bit (I'm on mobile, at an airport) but can't quite figure out in what way it's different to other methods. If you could say a few words about your experience using it, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Thanks!
- lock-the-spock 4y agoMaybe easiest to compare: it is purely audio and relies on you playing along with the lesson you listen to. So somewhat similar to Michel Thomas but more modern. His main effort is to make connections between material that you already know and new material, this reinforcing both and building a network in your mind. I did the first 30+ Greek lessons (each a ~10 minute audio which takes 15-20 minutes to complete as you pause to think and complete the answer). Then was forced to take a short break. l and struggle to get back in so I will restart a few lessons back. I have to say that I've never had so many "whoa, cool I figured this out" moments in a language course.
- user3939382 4y agoIn my experience Pimsleur is way better, and a good primer to be able to quickly get a lot out of immersion.
- docandrew 4y agoI don’t get all the hate for Duo. It’s fun, a better use of my screen time than a lot of other things I could be doing, and even if it doesn’t get me fluency, it has given me enough exposure in less than a year of training to speak with native speakers and be understood for basic things. It makes me more excited for travel opportunities too. I don’t need to be mistaken for a native but at least I’ll be a tourist who’s _trying_.
- lisasays 4y agoI don’t need to be mistaken for a native but at least I’ll be a tourist who’s _trying_. The hate comes from the fact that Duolingo positions itself as something that can do much more for you than that -- "The world's #1 way to learn a language" in fact, from its marketing materials. When in reality it just doesn't do all that much. And there are infinitely better (albeit less passive) ways to learn a language.
- ComodoHacker 4y ago>When von Ahn saw what it was capable of, he scrapped the two programs involving human teachers. “It took me approximately one minute,” he told me later. If someone has been waiting for the moment when AI start take human jobs, this is it. And I have mixed feeling about it.
- codeisawesome 4y agoI find Duolingo’s cartoons racist, somehow the Brown people are always doing funny / silly things, and sound weird. But the other characters are a lot more ‘normal’.
- TheRoque 4y agoDuolingo is a bad app. It makes you think that you're doing progress with satisfying rewards, while actually you don't do a lot with it. Forget about this and do it the traditional way: get Anki, learn grammar, practice, and you'll get better results. "Gamification" and other ways that try to not frustrate people in general, sugarcoating everything as if it was possible to go through life without any hardship, are really the worst thing of our decade IMO.
- oslac 4y agoI would say it is minimal, the help it provides. It will not get you to B1.
- bramathon 4y agoI'm currently using Duolingo to learn Portguese. I've found it to be a very effective way to build up a basic vocabulary and grasp the pronunciation. I plan to start to in-person classes in a couple months once I know ~1000 words. It seems about as effective as anything else to me. In my experience learning a new language is almost entirely about how much effort you put in, rather than the method. One thing that strikes me from these comments is that many people become focused on completing the exercises and getting points. I can see that could happen, it requires a conscious effort to make sure I understand every sentence and say it out loud.
- goste 4y agoStarting Duolingo about a year prior to moving to a German speaking country me helped a lot. I can have some very basic conversations at the store and understand ~half the words I read. I think I've managed to not fall in the gamification pitfall by taking the "Learning how to learn" class, which was a good learning catalyst. I'm starting classes now, and after speaking basic German with the teacher during the intro, she was surprised to learn I only used Duolingo. She said most people didn't progress much with Duolingo.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoSomeone I know has been doing Duolingo every day for 5y for learning German, but their phrase forming and grammar is still quite bad. I think the missing part is speaking the language and trying to make correct phrases.
- pfoof 4y agoIt's not perfect but for people scared to talk and take part in real life classes in order to learn english it is the only viable option as it has large selection of source languages.
- Kelamir 4y agoI only used the app in the beginning of my language learning with English, so 6 years ago, but the learning was artificial, making you feel good about making no progress, and I was doing the hardest mode they had with 30 experience or something daily. I switched onto real methods of learning such as immersion and Anki later on, which is when I really learned a number of languages. The gamification is fine, but it should be combined with real progress. As an alternative point, Duolingo is fine to start with as in following the paradigm of "starting small", however has to be abandoned shortly after.
- jhoelzel 4y agoIt works surprisingly well for me. My wife is Spanish and i have been duolingoing for 4 years now and every year we go to Spain i do understand and speak more than i would normally. I tried other apps like Busu but really they dont fit into my day to day as much and i would skip days much more often. I can understand that it is not very useful for people who don't have a broad understanding of languages, but everyone who already speaks more than one language will have success with it. The problem is that people give up way to early. Yes its designed to be easy in the beginning because its supposed to form a habit with you. Every night, before i go to bed i will do at least one exercise to keep my streak up. Obviously its artificial, but do you guys remember how learning a second and third language in school is? Just like this. The best way to learn a language is of course immersion into the country and not an app. My Mum and my Mother in law are both respectively learning the other language the same way and the progress they make by investing 5 minutes each day is still astonishing. Furthermore having all of us in that app means we regularly challenge each other, which leads to each of us making hundreds of points that week and progressing much quicker than you would alone.
- soufron 4y agoI would like to point that duolingo is not only a great tool to learn languages - coupled with other stuff, but it's also a great tool to re-study languages you learnt and you forgot ! Then you already know the grammar, the pronunciation, etc. You used to be able to read books, but you can't anymore. There I found duolingo to be especially useful.
- NikolaNovak 4y agoOne thing to note is that Duolingo is often compared to various "better ways of learnng a language". Which I think misses the point - it should be compared to not learning a language at all. For me and everybody I know, Duolingo is the gateway drug - something you use for 5-10 min at a time instead of Facebook (or hacker news:). Then one day "if serious" you graduate to other methods. Or you don't, and you're still better off than if you hadn't used it:)
- KaiserPro 4y agoSo there is a lot of negativity about duolingo, and yes I can see some of the arguments. But. It is largely free, and builds vocabulary. It is the only system that has kept a language in my head. Through it, I can now converse with my family in their native language. Sure, immersion is miles better, but its also n months wage. Yes, its not great for talking. there are better apps out there for it. but again they are not free. As a companion to learning, its brilliant. as a replacement, its sub par
- numpad0 4y agoReading comments here, it seems to me that Duolingo is based on a small set of common misunderstandings, or potentially a set of predication, similar to the following: 1. Universal Grammar gotta be a thing. 2. Perfect parallel texts must always exist. 3. From 1. and 2., "learning a language" must be about projecting an existing UG-to-language matrix into the new one. It's just the matter of how to do that cheap and accurate. ( 4. Also, from 1., any pieces of text must be complete and free-standing, that translation should always be possible and accurate for texts of arbitrary lengths. It's just sometimes complicated. ) But languages don't work that way; sure you can take a C++ program and port it into bare C to JavaScript or Rust, but try between C-like and functional languages and it falls apart. And that's just for artificial language. Language, in reality, is more like a programming language, or like an image codec, heck, like a codec. That's where/how things like these apps as well as machine translations do not work; because UG is not real, because there aren't parallel texts for everything, and there's no such conversion matrix, and you won't even be thinking the same way looking at a same thing in two languages. Personally I think Duolingo is a great introductory tool and a help, but only to go from nowhere to an overlap region where an illusion of 1. and 2. exists. That region sure exists but definitely a subset of either languages, and that above predication just cannot be pushed outwards to make it a thing. It's just a convenient illusion.
- _xivi 4y agoDuolingo is the digital version of the toys that teach counting and basic vocabulary for toddlers. Same principle and methods.
- divan 4y agoHas anyone tried VR language apps? There are a couple of apps for Oculus right now with AI speech recognition and some interesting ideas. I only tried a free trial of NounTown - you're basically being put into a colorless 3D world in which you can navigate, touch/move/throw objects and see/hear what they're called. Once you can repeat their spelling, objects become colorful, and gradually, the world around you becomes colorful. Really interesting concept. There is something to it, yet I wasn't sold fully to try the paid version. I felt like something important is lacking, can't say for sure what.
- smcin 4y agoDL is a freemium app with ever-increasingly heavy gamification and upsells, which cannot be turned off. 75+% of DL's revenue comes from the small number of its users who are subscribers. The former Chief Product Officer openly discusses how they optimized/sacrificed pretty much everything since 2019, to juice their metrics (CURR, DAU, $/user) and monetization for the 2021 IPO ("How Duolingo reignited user growth") [0]. Stock ticker DUOL. See our recent discussion of DL's strengths, weaknesses, business model etc. [1] with a developer who was acquihired by DL. I've been using Duolingo for 1300 days now. Currently learning Chinese; the Chinese course was sadly locked in 2021 when China banned for-profit foreign tutoring, but DL locking it prevents volunteer users fixing and improving it. Strengths and weaknesses: DL does help you to "learn a language" if by that you mean basic competency, vocabulary, basic grammar. But not to exam or conversational level. Some categories of user need the gamification, friending, leaderboard, challenges, streaks, badges etc., but for the rest of us you generally can't turn these interruptions off. Most people find the daily reminder feature legit useful. Other apps could legitimately learn from DL how to gamify and reduce learning to daily chunks, but without going overboard on metrics and retention and sacrificing a large chunk of the learning time to gamification features interrupting the learning. See [0b] for how Duolingo's claim “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education” is misleading because it's based on their long-discontinued (pre-2013) SRS algorithm. Sounds like false advertising. Note the comparative absence of peer-reviewed studies confirming DL's claims about language acquisition. Privacy: DL embeds FB tracking which is an intentional trust and GDPR violation, default-on, no informed consent, and the opt-out is pretty buried; doesn't sound ethical [2]. [0]: "How Duolingo reignited user growth" 2/2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 [0b]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34978841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34978841 [1]: "I bought back my acquihired startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456 [2]: "Facebook Still Tracks People on Yelp, Duolingo, Indeed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319215
- hydrok9 4y agoSomeone else in the comments said it; learning a human language should be approached the same way as learning how to construct anything else. Learn how everything supports each other and why. Then it will click in your brain because your brain actually understands why things are the way they are, and how to use them. For example French "je." Okay, sounds and looks nothing like "I." Maybe a bit if you force it. "je(i)?" But both come from Latin. So what's the connection? Well, French "je" is descended from Latin "ego." Which means "I." ego-eo-jo-je So now your brain knows that. You don't have to consciously recall the direct translation or use a mnemonic anymore. You actually understand how French works.