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Everyone 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 U

by rcarr 3y ago

Everyone 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 3y ago
Agreed, 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.
- rcarr 3y ago
  > Agreed, 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. Coincidentally, this is also a major reason why Duolingo switched to “the path” (something else that gets flak on here). Spaced repetition is now built in by default. With the old layout a lot of users would complete a level and move on in an effort to complete the tree, rather than levelling up each level in a section before moving on.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
The problem is that's how Duolingo sells itself: "learn a language in 15 min" With Duolingo I can do half an hour in transit, but the remembrance is not great. I do think there are more effective ways of learning a language. Probably the most effective and not so well known is Pimsleur. Half an hour of Pimsleur asks so much focus of me, and im tired after, but I learn quickly. It's an audio class that has a very smart way of repeating and reproducing conversations. The repetition is done in a way that it advances the conversation and slightly alters the repetition so it forces you to use your active focus & memory. (no affiliation)
- rcarr 3y ago
  15 minutes a day gets you your 480 hours in 5.2 years. The problem is not the marketing line, the problem is people expecting to learn a language in 1 year with only 15 minutes a day practice. There is a reason why a full time university course in a foreign language is typically 3 to 4 years long including one year spent abroad. In your defence, the 480 hours is also only for group 1 languages. If you are learning a harder language it may take many more hours than this. Category 5 languages take 2200 hours. 15 minutes a day is totally reasonable for a category 1 language. For a category 5 language, not so much as it’s going to take you about 20 years. But I strongly suspect that the main problem is not the “15 minutes a day” but the fact that people are not expecting (or willing) to do it for years.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    The marketing line speaks of learning a language with little effort. So it's setting an expectation.
    - comfypotato 3y ago
      And it meets expectations! That’s the point of the person you’re arguing with. The “low effort” is made possible by Duolingo segmenting lessons into tiny chunks. It doesn’t lower the total hours necessary because that would be witchcraft.
comfypotato 3y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. I wish this was the top comment. I got so frustrated with the HN language-learning gatekeeping on another Duolingo thread that my comment got flagged and I received a nice message from dang (luckily no ban because I’m normally not a lunatic). Duolingo is awesome. It’s made language learning possible for me where it used to be impossible. I wanted to pick another language up so casually that I wasn’t willing to put in the effort that other tools require, and Duolingo gives me a way to pick up the basics. I’m confident that in a couple of years I’ll be able to progress to more serious methods for developing conversational skills. And it would never have been possible if I wasn’t able to use Duolingo to slowly but surely learn a new alphabet and basic present tense grammar. I think the issue is the target audience. HN has a lot of educated global folk that have had to learn other languages. Duolingo is not the ticket when you need to learn a new language. It shines specifically when the language learning is not a requirement.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aix1 3y ago
> doing three lessons of Duolingo a day for a week will put you somewhere in the 60 - 80 minute region [...] That means it will take you 9.2 years to become proficient in your chosen language. This makes several assumptions, namely: 1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics. 2. That an hour of Duolingo is equivalent to an hour of US Foreign Service Institute tuition. I don't have first-hand experience of the FSI. However, I have recent experience of learning a language (German) outside Duolingo. After watching ~40 short grammar videos and taking 65 hours of 1:1 tuition, my command of the language is WAY further along than that entire Duolingo French tree from a while back, which took many more hours. Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.
- rcarr 3y ago
  > 1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. My point is that how many people here have put in the requisite time to even find out. I’d wager less than 0.01%. Duolingo have come out and said their long term aim is for each course to get you to B2 standard eventually. I’d say they’re not there yet but they’re on their way. The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re looking at this from an English perspective. The Duolingo English language test is widely accepted at universities as a demonstration of English proficiency so they must be doing something right in that regard. > Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics. What do you mean by “completed the French tree”. Do you mean you went through and unlocked every lesson once. Or did you gold every single lesson? There is a significant difference. You unlock extra vocabulary and the lessons became more focused on writing and listening comprehension when you complete the higher levels of each lesson. This is now baked into the new format as you go along. > Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study. I disagree with this. Hours of study is an important metric. You need proficiency on a standardised test along with hours studied for a true measure of method efficiency. And as you mentioned cost is also a massive factor. Most people cannot afford 65 hours of one to one tuition.
steveBK123 3y ago
Yeah I think everyone, as an adult, underestimates the immense time requirement to learn a language. I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun. It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve. It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time. At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old. When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me. Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy. For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.
microtherion 3y ago
I agree regarding the time needed, but it's not clear to me that the Duolingo way would really lead to proficiency, even if one would invest all the time in the world. Over the last couple of years, I've invested some serious time into learning Portuguese, first in Duolingo and then in an actual classroom. Duolingo was definitely helpful for reading proficiency, but did almost nothing for my conversation skills (let alone pronunciation). The real classes helped with the conversation skills, though I ended up supplementing them with a spaced repetition app for vocabulary drilling. Grammar is still lacking. Another Duolingo language that I've spent quite a bit of time on is Yiddish, and I find that I can now read it quite well — but only in the exact font the app is using. I'm not entertaining much hope of ever being able to write or speak it.
soufron 3y ago
Thank you for this comment. I was looking at everyone asking myself wtf they hope to achieve off. Duolingo works perfectly well if you spend the necessary time with it. I don't think it's faster. It's just convenient. And... just add stuff to it! Like watching movies, reading books, meeting native speaking people or travelling. Why the hell would people want to learn a language anyway if not for these? The comments here made it look like learning a new leanguage is a form of abstract art or something lol.

by rcarr 3y ago

j45 3y ago

Agreed, 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.

rcarr 3y ago
> Agreed, 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. Coincidentally, this is also a major reason why Duolingo switched to “the path” (something else that gets flak on here). Spaced repetition is now built in by default. With the old layout a lot of users would complete a level and move on in an effort to complete the tree, rather than levelling up each level in a section before moving on.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

The problem is that's how Duolingo sells itself: "learn a language in 15 min" With Duolingo I can do half an hour in transit, but the remembrance is not great. I do think there are more effective ways of learning a language. Probably the most effective and not so well known is Pimsleur. Half an hour of Pimsleur asks so much focus of me, and im tired after, but I learn quickly. It's an audio class that has a very smart way of repeating and reproducing conversations. The repetition is done in a way that it advances the conversation and slightly alters the repetition so it forces you to use your active focus & memory. (no affiliation)

rcarr 3y ago
15 minutes a day gets you your 480 hours in 5.2 years. The problem is not the marketing line, the problem is people expecting to learn a language in 1 year with only 15 minutes a day practice. There is a reason why a full time university course in a foreign language is typically 3 to 4 years long including one year spent abroad. In your defence, the 480 hours is also only for group 1 languages. If you are learning a harder language it may take many more hours than this. Category 5 languages take 2200 hours. 15 minutes a day is totally reasonable for a category 1 language. For a category 5 language, not so much as it’s going to take you about 20 years. But I strongly suspect that the main problem is not the “15 minutes a day” but the fact that people are not expecting (or willing) to do it for years.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  The marketing line speaks of learning a language with little effort. So it's setting an expectation.
  - comfypotato 3y ago
    And it meets expectations! That’s the point of the person you’re arguing with. The “low effort” is made possible by Duolingo segmenting lessons into tiny chunks. It doesn’t lower the total hours necessary because that would be witchcraft.

comfypotato 3y ago

I wholeheartedly agree. I wish this was the top comment. I got so frustrated with the HN language-learning gatekeeping on another Duolingo thread that my comment got flagged and I received a nice message from dang (luckily no ban because I’m normally not a lunatic). Duolingo is awesome. It’s made language learning possible for me where it used to be impossible. I wanted to pick another language up so casually that I wasn’t willing to put in the effort that other tools require, and Duolingo gives me a way to pick up the basics. I’m confident that in a couple of years I’ll be able to progress to more serious methods for developing conversational skills. And it would never have been possible if I wasn’t able to use Duolingo to slowly but surely learn a new alphabet and basic present tense grammar. I think the issue is the target audience. HN has a lot of educated global folk that have had to learn other languages. Duolingo is not the ticket when you need to learn a new language. It shines specifically when the language learning is not a requirement.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aix1 3y ago

> doing three lessons of Duolingo a day for a week will put you somewhere in the 60 - 80 minute region [...] That means it will take you 9.2 years to become proficient in your chosen language. This makes several assumptions, namely: 1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics. 2. That an hour of Duolingo is equivalent to an hour of US Foreign Service Institute tuition. I don't have first-hand experience of the FSI. However, I have recent experience of learning a language (German) outside Duolingo. After watching ~40 short grammar videos and taking 65 hours of 1:1 tuition, my command of the language is WAY further along than that entire Duolingo French tree from a while back, which took many more hours. Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

rcarr 3y ago
> 1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. My point is that how many people here have put in the requisite time to even find out. I’d wager less than 0.01%. Duolingo have come out and said their long term aim is for each course to get you to B2 standard eventually. I’d say they’re not there yet but they’re on their way. The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re looking at this from an English perspective. The Duolingo English language test is widely accepted at universities as a demonstration of English proficiency so they must be doing something right in that regard. > Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics. What do you mean by “completed the French tree”. Do you mean you went through and unlocked every lesson once. Or did you gold every single lesson? There is a significant difference. You unlock extra vocabulary and the lessons became more focused on writing and listening comprehension when you complete the higher levels of each lesson. This is now baked into the new format as you go along. > Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study. I disagree with this. Hours of study is an important metric. You need proficiency on a standardised test along with hours studied for a true measure of method efficiency. And as you mentioned cost is also a massive factor. Most people cannot afford 65 hours of one to one tuition.

steveBK123 3y ago

Yeah I think everyone, as an adult, underestimates the immense time requirement to learn a language. I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun. It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve. It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time. At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old. When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me. Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy. For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.

microtherion 3y ago

I agree regarding the time needed, but it's not clear to me that the Duolingo way would really lead to proficiency, even if one would invest all the time in the world. Over the last couple of years, I've invested some serious time into learning Portuguese, first in Duolingo and then in an actual classroom. Duolingo was definitely helpful for reading proficiency, but did almost nothing for my conversation skills (let alone pronunciation). The real classes helped with the conversation skills, though I ended up supplementing them with a spaced repetition app for vocabulary drilling. Grammar is still lacking. Another Duolingo language that I've spent quite a bit of time on is Yiddish, and I find that I can now read it quite well — but only in the exact font the app is using. I'm not entertaining much hope of ever being able to write or speak it.

soufron 3y ago

Thank you for this comment. I was looking at everyone asking myself wtf they hope to achieve off. Duolingo works perfectly well if you spend the necessary time with it. I don't think it's faster. It's just convenient. And... just add stuff to it! Like watching movies, reading books, meeting native speaking people or travelling. Why the hell would people want to learn a language anyway if not for these? The comments here made it look like learning a new leanguage is a form of abstract art or something lol.