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Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
- volvogradSaint 3y agoI am curious how difficult it is to run a business with apple and google's 30 per cent overhead on every transaction. Must be onerous.
- zzzbra 3y agoHave to say I really hate it when people boost the Anki clone AnkiApp over the original open source project.
- janislaw 3y agoThat's their official mobile client and main source of revenue, isn't it?
- yorwba 3y agoNo, it's a copycat with a slightly different name undercutting them.
- S04dKHzrKT 3y agoFYI: https://faqs.ankiweb.net/anki-knockoffs.html https://faqs.ankiweb.net/anki-knockoffs.html
- edanm 3y agoCame here to say this. Anki is one of my most-used apps, been using it for years and it's rock-solid and amazing. It's open source and completely free, except for the iphone version, which is their only source of revenue.
- ryandrake 3y agoThe formatting on this web site kind of sucks too. I measured 9 inches of horizontal whitespace border on each side of the strip of content that measures 4.5 inches wide. So a full 4/5 of my browser window is unused empty space.
- refulgentis 3y agoI think they have a custom tumblr theme, it's not usually _that_ compact.
- wishinghand 3y agoDo you enjoy reading a line of text 13.5 inches long?
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoHas Duolingo ever worked for actual language learning? It has always seemed more like pseudo-productivity to me.
- galleywest200 3y agoFor speaking, maybe not. But for just reading comprehension in another language it works great. I used it for years and now I read the news in French quite often.
- softfalcon 3y agoI'm really happy it worked for you, however, it's a bit bleak that a language learning tool was only able to help you learn to read in French (from already reading/speaking English) and not even speak it. The difference between French/English is relatively small, I would have hoped to set my sights higher than that if I was Duolingo. That being said, props to you for your progress! I somehow feel it's more due to your perseverance and focus than Duolingo though. It sounds like you focused on absorbing more than just the app lessions (you read news now) and that speaks more to your discipline for language learning rather than it does Duolingo's capabilities.
- karaterobot 3y agoAs a data point, I stopped using it 10 years ago because I noticed I'd maxed out all the content for the language I was studying at the time without being able to actually, you know, speak or understand the language very well. Since then, all my friends who brag about their 1000 days streaks still can't speak those languages either. I think it's just gamified language learning that heavily emphasizes the gamification part at the expense of the learning part.
- tylerFowler 3y agoI'm actually a bit surprised to see this, I've been an ardent Duolingo user for years and it works fantastically for me. Do you need to pair it with learning formal grammar rules on the side? Yeah, if you want to go deeper, absolutely, and when I have paired grammar rule learning with Duolingo it like 5x'd my learning & comprehension speed.
- amilios 3y agoOne of the main disappointments with Duolingo's recent path for me has been the removal of the forum. It was so useful whenever I was confused by a certain phrase or new concept to just hop directly into the discussion forum page for that exercise and see others asking the same questions and getting well-written intuitive answers to them. Just boosted my understanding so much plus added a sense of community, that we're all going through this learning journey together and thinking about and getting confused by the same things :P Now I'm relegated to Googling the text of the exercise to find similar info online, just far less useful :(
- ted_bunny 3y agoThose forums were mainly a band-aid for DL's complete refusal to actually explain any of the grammar.
- hbn 3y agoThere's an overview for each unit section that has some pretty important explanations, and nothing really directs you towards it. Still, in terms of forums, a lot of the time Googling will lead you to various subreddits that have some good conversations and explanations.
- ted_bunny 3y agoI'm in Unit 6 of Italian, 11 in Russian, and there have been zero of those. I know which section you're talking about, I check it every time I reach a new unit. Shouldn't have to google. They made the space for it and created the expectation. They're charging a steep price for flashcards and little else.
- trey-jones 3y agoCrowd-sourcing is a valid form of support.
- ted_bunny 3y agoIf that were even implied to be how the site works, that would be acceptable. They also removed all that. That's garbage "support."
- wintorez 3y agoSays who?!
- AndyKelley 3y agoWaniKani is great for reading Japanese.
- dymk 3y agoI hope this isn't too nit-picky, but I'd qualify that it's great (fantastic, even) for memorizing kanji and their readings, but not for reading and understanding Japanese text. You need something like a grammar course and lots of comprehensible input for that.
- frankus 3y agoIt has a built-in spaced-repetition system with predefined, extremely silly (but effective) mnemonics to help memorize the various kanji (and their various readings) and vocabulary. The first three levels are free, with the prerequisite of learning a bit of hiragana and how to type them on their website (I don't know how well this translates to an actual Japanese keyboard). The emphasis is on reading, and they suggest you don't put a lot of effort into understanding actual Japanese in the wild (or media) until level 10, when you have enough vocabulary to not be completely lost. I'm only on level 5, just trying to be somewhat less functionally illiterate for an upcoming Japan trip than I was when visiting Taiwan 20 years ago. Although I can't read many kanji, I'm often able to recognize a few as well as enough of the radicals of the ones I don't know to sometimes make sense of them.
- S04dKHzrKT 3y agoA couple alternatives to WaniKani are: * https://kanji.garden/ https://kanji.garden/ * https://www.readthekanji.com https://www.readthekanji.com (includes hiragana and katakana as well) You can also use the following for just memorizing hiragana and katakana: * https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/ https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/ * https://www.kana.pro/ https://www.kana.pro/ And then there are online resources like the following that provide a guided, DIY approach to learning Japanese as a whole: * https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/ https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/ * https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/ https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/ * https://docs.google.com/document/d/10bRzVblKVOsQJjTc2PIi1Gbj_LrsJCkMkh0SutXCZdI/edit#heading=h.y8ddvvjj86ty https://docs.google.com/document/d/10bRzVblKVOsQJjTc2PIi1Gbj...
- jszymborski 3y agoAnki is suggested for SRS, but are there decks available with audio? That would be a pretty near Duolingo replacement in my books.
- mindcrime 3y agobut are there decks available with audio? Yes.
- yorwba 3y agoThere are lots of decks. Some have audio. Quality varies. https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks You can also make your own decks using audio from e.g. Tatoeba or Mozilla Common Voice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gms7777 3y agoI really like the Refold 1k decks. They're paid but have good audio (both the word and example sentences), the definitions and examples are well edited, and unlike most "top 1000 word" type decks, are curated to remove common cognates so you're not wasting your time on things you already know. Only available in 6 languages at this time though.
- Benjamin_Dobell 3y agoI've been running through the Japanese course daily for the last 2 months. I'm learning to read somewhat, but I doubt that if I was to speak I would be understood. I understand there are limitations to this format. However, what drives me nuts is the fact I can't just enable the Japanese keyboard (which I've installed) to type out answers. Instead I just select the correct predefined answer from a list. This allows me to pick the "most likely answer" with a very high success rate, but that's not going to help me in the wild.
- ted_bunny 3y agoEven worse, they only give one coherent response to multiple choice questions. No similar words that learers frequently mix up. Usually words that are never mentioned in the unit.
- hbn 3y agoIs that something unique to Japanese, or maybe if you're on Android? I'm learning Spanish on the iOS app. I installed the Spanish keyboard, and whenever a text field appears my keyboard is automatically set to Spanish
- Benjamin_Dobell 3y agoMay well be Japanese course specific. I am on Android and checked on web also — same experience. I have an iPhone too though, so will check it out and report back. In my experience with the Japanese course, there are no text prompts at all. Well, not in the main course. You do receive prompts when learning the Japanese alphabets, but these text prompts are specifically asking for the Romanised pronunciation.
- CubsFan1060 3y agoSame on iPhone. I assume they only allow typing on languages that use the same character set?
- 93po 3y agoI just started Japanese and on the web client for me I can type answers with my keyboard in Japanese mode just fine. Including submitting answers with kanji even though it hasn’t covered any yet
- alexawarrior3 3y agoDuolingo doesn't actually do much if anything to help you become fluent. Nor does almost all the language learning apps such as Drops, Rosetta Stone, etc. What you need to move towards fluency is a lot of "comprehensible input" like with "Dreaming Spanish". Learning about a language is different from acquiring a language, Krashen et. all has a lot of research on how people actually gain fluency. What most people are doing with language learning is like learning "about" chess, not learning to "play" chess. It's why you have people in China, Japan with seven years of English and they can't engage in simple conversation, or likewise people in the US, UK with seven years of Spanish and have trouble asking for anything beyond where is the library. This is a great read (worth reading it all if you're really interested in acquiring a second language as an adult) about a guy who taught himself French as an adult to a high level of fluency via only watching TV and radio: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365 https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365
- appstorelottery 3y agoI'd love to read this - but can't log into UQ. Can you repost or provide more detail please?
- stavros 3y agoI don't know what the research is, but the best way I know to learn a language is to acquire a lot of data at the edge of your comprehension. Basically, keep just listen to/read things in the target language, that you barely understand. Don't bother with grammar and rules, that's not how anyone thinks or speaks a language. I'd love to see what's in OP's link, though.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoI can't access the thesis either, but I believe it's "‘Picking Up’ a Second Language from Television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning". https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/189928232.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/189928232.pdf
- alexawarrior3 3y ago
- andrewtbham 3y agoI recently wrote a langauge app... my approach has been.. 1. start with ear training. (minimal pairs) 2. learn some vocab (anki) 3. then use social media. tik tok specifically. https://www.oohwoo.com/ https://www.oohwoo.com/
- kebsup 3y agoAnd yet again, I'm promoting my app on HN. SRS flashcards, sentences and audio generated with AI, Wiktionary, YouTube, Webbrowser integration: https://vokabeln.io https://vokabeln.io (landing page is old) Only works for German right now, but I'll be adding Spanish and English in the coming months.
- kebsup 3y agoAlso I'm looking for an investor to be able to work on it full time, so if you have money to spare... :D
- tremarley 3y agoI had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language. When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner. Someone suggested the free language learning website called ‘Language Transfer’ here on Hacker News last year. Within the first day listening to Language Transfer I was fairly conversational. By day 21 I could understand some Spanish shows without sub-titles. Clozemaster is another excellent tool if you want to become proficient in a language.
- mikepurvis 3y agoI'm 250 days into the Duolingo French programme and feeling similar things— I traveled to Quebec City recently and was only very barely functional at the simplest tasks. Duolingo goes to great lengths to make you feel productive, but I think it's prioritizing the wrong things— particularly if you mostly care about spoken communication, there's just a ton of stuff around verb conjugation and gender that really doesn't matter at all; getting it wrong makes you sound like a noob, but it doesn't actually impede understanding the way barely being able to piece together a sentence does. And some of it is just plain invisible in speech, like an English speaker not being able to tell the difference between its and it's; they're the same until you need to write one down. Anyway, yeah. Putting so much emphasis on streak-maintenance and leaderboard position has me following silly patterns like doing enough of a lesson to net a 2x exp bonus and then cranking on the "match madness" mini game, which is all vocabulary I already know and isn't teaching me anything new.
- Almondsetat 3y agoDoulingo is in the interesting position of having such a big userbase with a locked in reward system that they could change their learning strategy overnight and completely revolutionize languge learning forever. If course they won't do it, it's simpler to just space-repeat vocabulary and spend the money on people with green bird costumes making tiktoks
- pigcat 3y ago+1 for Mango Languages (available free with my Library Card) It's very well designed. The spaced repetition is effective. The lesson order is sensible. The Romanian lessons have a real speaker narrating the pronunciation, compared to Duolingo's AI narrator, which was terrible for learning. I tried Duolingo briefly but the over-gamification wasn't for me. Everything was about gems and lives, major turnoff.
- ConnorMooneyhan 3y agoTwo more: For a course format with more audio exposure? Speakly For an immersion-based approach that will help you improve reading fluency massively once you know just a little bit? LingQ
- maerF0x0 3y agoNot speaking relative to other apps, but I have found DL useful for learning more words in a language I already have some training in. (and for reviving after breaks from the language) For Spanish (a really fast language) it wasn't that useful for actual conversational practice. It's much slower than native
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoDo Duolingo users actually want to speak the language? Or just read it? Because it does the latter a bit, doesn't do the former.
- pizza_pleb 3y agoImmersion with native content: develop listening+reading comprehension. Success is measured with time spent with the language. Find something that interests you at your skill level: https://languageroadmap.com https://languageroadmap.com and Anki for top 1000 words + sentence mining if you like flashcards.
- ecto 3y agoMy current project is a "Duolingo for everything" called RubberDuck. GPT4 is used to generate the curriculum. I started it as a tool to teach myself new programming languages but realized it could be generalized. Right now I'm taking the Linear Algebra and Ancient Greek History courses. Would love if you checked it out! https://www.rubberduck.gg https://www.rubberduck.gg
- martinrue 3y agoI've been building https://yakk.app https://yakk.app for the past 2 years. It's only good for anyone curious to learn Esperanto right now, but Spanish + German books coming next.
- can3p 3y agoCan't recommend anki flash cards enough. One thing that I found important is that you need to build the deck yourself and you'll miss out a lot by using prebaked decks of any kind. Reasons: - Context is the king. Most of the words have multiple meanings and it's easier to remember them if you just added them from a text you've read. Moreover, this approach gives you an opportunity to see the words being used in the wild which gives confidence on when to use the word/idiom - Words with no context are just harder to learn - 3rd party decks will give you loads of words you don't care about For learning French I've found kwiziq much more useful. Very little gamifications and lots and lots of training and exercises with examples that actually make sense
- readthenotes1 3y agoI took a in person Spanish class for 2 weeks and then tried to continue with Anki and I found it painful since it did not do anything for my pronunciation... Of course, using it during the class was invaluable
- xrd 3y agoI've been working on an idea for a long time which is to break classic public domain books (in the original foreign language) into small chunks for study of the source language. An example passage is here (from one of the greatest works of Japanese literature, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki). https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-paragraph-9/14129 https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag... If you click on any passage, you can see all the kanji and the translation of that passage in full. Each kanji is clickable and displays the proper stroke order and animates it. You can practice writing the kanji and then save that for later. What's unfinished is I want to allow you to save kanji into Anki and build out flashcards. If there is a cohort of people reading the same passages, they can help each other with grammar questions, and this is all facilitated because the site is built on the incredible discussion platform "discourse." I would love to hear any feedback: chris@public.do
- Moldoteck 3y agoYou can take prebuilt decks and alter some cards if needed to accomodate for different meanings of the same word
- jmyeet 3y agoI did Duolingo every day for a year. I don't remember any of it. Add that to the constant trend of adding features to make you a paying customer, like the hated hearts system, and I honestly don't see the point. Whatever the solution to language learning is, this isn't it.
- rareitem 3y agoI disagree with premise of this article. I don't see how the quality of Duolingo has fallen, I keep learning more and more. For me, Duolingo made the friction of starting to learn a language (Spanish) very low. It provides with a clear path to follow. I can practice my reading, listening, speaking and writing all in one place. Of course, someone shouldn't restrict themself only to Duolingo.
- chrchr 3y agoYeah exactly. Is Duolingo the optimal way to learn a language? Probably not, but it's really approachable and not terribly onerous, and it does expose the learner to some challenging stuff. The people up thread who say not to do it for more than 100 days probably didn't do all the content and saw a pretty shallow slice of how Duolingo teaches. I'm at 1000 days today, and it's definitely improved my knowledge of Spanish and my ability to use it. I'm a long way from fluent, but I wasn't going to undertake a more difficult language learning self-study plan in the last few years anyway. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who seriously needs to learn a language for work or for immigration or something, but it's been a great use of 10-20 minutes a day for me as a Spanish-curious dilettante.
- aSithLord 3y agoImmersion school is the only way to learn another language. tutors, apps, classes are all garbage in the real world.
- brandly 3y ago> Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI Source?
- hughesjj 3y agoFor mandarin, excelmandarin (grammar, conversations) and HackChinese (vocab) have been incredibly useful for me. Biggest issue is spare time, or the lack thereof.
- bossyTeacher 3y agoPeople create solutions for problems that don't exist. You want to learn a language? Go to a language school with actual human teachers, socialise with native speakers of your target language, watch media in the target language. Unless the language in question is a minority language, or its speakers live mostly in specific regions (like the americans, for example), this is the oldest and most reliable way to learn a language
- huimang 3y agoI really hate that duolingo is perceived by so many people as a singular resource to learn a language. For certain languages it's a great -complement- and can be great for motivating you to study. But you need stronger primary resources if you desire to actually -speak- the language to a non-trivial degree with natives. It's very frustrating watching people waste so much time on duolingo and then burning out after they "study" with it for a year and don't see much progress toward fluency.
- ksherlock 3y ago> Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) ... Posted Jan 9th, 2024, but that would seem to be an evergreen sentiment. Based on my streak, I've been using it 4 years. I don't think I've never seen a change that improved the user experience or learning and many of them (removing discussions and dictionaries) made learning worse.
- monissiddiqui 3y agoThe best test for language mastery is playing deception games like coup or Avalon while speaking the language. Sorry I have no input on how to actually get to that stage, just had that shower thought one day.
- swatson741 3y agoI like Duolingo a lot. I don't think it sucks at all. The only problem I've had with the app is that the sentences per lesson are planned by a teacher with clear learning objectives. But, despite this they use speech synthesis for everything but the stories. The synthesized speech is comprehensible but, it seems sort of lazy on the part of the Duolingo team. Especially when so many apps use native speakers for their quizzes.
- bluGill 3y agoDo not think too hard about this question. Find an answer that seems to work and start studying. There is no shortcut to time spent studying the language. Sure some methods are better than others, but don't spend too much time finding the best, just pick something fast and start in it. Daily study is the key, the more the better - just don't burn out. Beware that most people who tell you something is the best way have not actually done a formal study. They either used something and it works so they think it is best, or used something, didn't feel like they learned, then used something else and give all the credit to the second thing even though it built off the first.
- tropdrop 3y agoI have not found Duolingo valuable for learning a language from scratch – my experience with German, in particular, was terrible. Then I tried to do Japanese with it, and trying to use it to learn Japanese from scratch was also terrible. However, after I took a couple of years of real (institutional) coursework in Japanese, and needed to just get a little better at recognizing proper grammar constructions, it actually proved very useful – at the paid level, anyway, where one can "skip"/place into higher levels – and it seems their Japanese module in particular has drastically improved in the last couple of years. So my two cents are that used for language learning alone it's pretty useless. But used as a reminder aide for concepts already learned it can be a good app, especially to just hear how one might phrase a sentence more "naturally" (for a Japanese ear). For Kanji, though, WaniKani is king.
- Balgair 3y ago"A language isn't something you learn so much as something you join." ~Arika Okrent Now, they are talking about a computer language, but I think that the same holds for human languages as well. I've used Duo on and off for years now. It's near perfect for picking up the basics and keeping me motivated. However, as many others here report, it's not as good for fluency. For that, you have to join the language; you can't just expect to be able to sit on your phone and never talk to anyone. It's a bit of a scary step, you're outside your comfort zone, almost by definition. But I think that viewing the new language as something that is inherently done with others is a better way to view the process of learning it. That said, yeah, supplement Duo with a YouTube soap opera (that you like) in the language that you're trying to join, that helps a lot.
- burner420042 3y agoI live in Mexico and have for the last several years. I moved here not knowing any Spanish. I now speak at a B1 almost B2 level. Every extranjero (foreigner) I know learned Spanish differently. What they all have in common though is they all read books, starting at the Spanish equivalent of the US "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", magazines, the newspapers. Additionally, they all like to talk to people and they're never embarrassed by their errors, thus they practice listing to and talking in this new language all the time. You have to lean into practicing with other people and doing it in public. Book learning for the grammar and vocab, and writing all of it out on paper. Typing notes out on Duolingo or your computer doesn't work. For me I needed a Spanish teacher, for me it's a lady that teaches English in a local grade school.
- garspin 3y agoI too tried DL & learnt too slowly & gave up on the irritating gamification. I run alone (at a slow conversational pace) for 5-6 hours a week, and see that time as an opportunity to learn conversational German. Any ideas what I could be listening to... maybe a listen & repeat type app ?
- sotix 3y agoPeople overthink language learning. Use Language Transfer[0] for lessons and Anki[1] for flashcards. Both are completely free. You'll be at a passable level within 3 months, which is an amazing rate of growth. [0]: https://www.languagetransfer.org/ https://www.languagetransfer.org/ [1]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/
- spiffytech 3y agoMy wife switched to Univerbal/Quasel (they've done a couple Show HNs). It's an AI that holds conversations with her, either text or audio. She wouldn't suggest it for a total novice, but as a B1 French speaker she's pretty happy with it. It's great practice, and is helping her pronunciation, vocab, etc.