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I'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 simple

I'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.

pests 3y ago
Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  Yeah, I probably will. I originally bought a year of Super to do it with my daughter (yay "friend quests", more stickiness!), but I think she's also been on and off the bandwagon recently, so that's less of a factor as well.
  - pests 3y ago
    You can still use it and learn with your daughter. Just purposefully miss a day so you know you are using it out of joy instead of out of obligation.
- spiffytech 3y ago
  If one accepts that the points are meaningless, they lose their value as a motivational tool, which could compromise a person's goals. There's also the guilt factor, where the meter says "you must be THIS active to be serious about your goals", so disappointing the meter means (supposedly) you've fallen short on something that matters to you. Framing it as "back to square one" doesn't help.
rtkwe 3y ago
Making the gap to conversational is probably always going to require more than just an app. You've got to hear real people speak the language and interact with them, maybe it could be done with a lot of very expensive work with LLMs and advanced text to speech generation but there's a big gap between the basic grammar and vocab that language apps teach to really understanding a native speaker. French in particular is rough for this though because of the... loose... association between the spelled word and the ways it's spoken.
tarentel 3y ago
I also had this issue. I had to ignore all their social features but overall I think the core app is fine. It won't make you fluent but it does teach a lot, and at least for me, I remember a lot of it. I can't say I learned french from the app, I married someone french so I had a lot of extra help, but I learned a lot of vocabulary that probably would have taken much longer to learn from regular conversation with the same few people in the U.S.. People expecting to learn a language from it probably will be disappointed but as an addition to other things I was doing I think it helped a lot although I have no real way to quantify this.
- borroka 3y ago
  You are comparing doing something with doing nothing, so it is quite likely that doing something gives better results than doing nothing. For a more fair and balanced comparison, you should compare the use of Duolingo with some other "methods" of language learning. For example, for learning new words, spaced repetition would give way faster results than using Duolingo
soperj 3y ago
I did years of French immersion in Canada, only to go to France a few years after i had finished and realized I didn't know French as well as I thought I did (I felt like I was nearly bilingual). A few years after that, with zero practice, I went to Montreal and could understand everything perfectly, and had zero problem communicating. That's when I realized that I had learned Quebecois and not French.
- wenc 3y ago
  I'm curious where you did French immersion? As far as I can tell what my friends' tell me (their kids are in French immersion in Ontario), French immersion teaches standard French, not the Quebecois patois (which we call le joual). Canadian French differs from European French in few areas like pronunciation and vocabulary, but it is very much still the same language and mutually intelligible.
  - soperj 3y ago
    In Alberta, one of the original French Canadian communities with a number of families that have lived there for generations. Accent differs considerably, and use of slang in France seemed significantly greater. We definitely learned things like "les bas" as socks, and not "chaussette".
andylynch 3y ago
I’m curious about how Duolingo fits betwern Quebec, and Metropolitan French etc; I gather it can be like a Glaswegian talking to a New Yorker - one can find the other much harder to follow than vice versa. (My wife for instance speaks metro French fluently, but finds Quebecois really hard to follow )

pests 3y ago

Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.

bowsamic 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
mikepurvis 3y ago
Yeah, I probably will. I originally bought a year of Super to do it with my daughter (yay "friend quests", more stickiness!), but I think she's also been on and off the bandwagon recently, so that's less of a factor as well.
- pests 3y ago
  You can still use it and learn with your daughter. Just purposefully miss a day so you know you are using it out of joy instead of out of obligation.
spiffytech 3y ago
If one accepts that the points are meaningless, they lose their value as a motivational tool, which could compromise a person's goals. There's also the guilt factor, where the meter says "you must be THIS active to be serious about your goals", so disappointing the meter means (supposedly) you've fallen short on something that matters to you. Framing it as "back to square one" doesn't help.

rtkwe 3y ago

Making the gap to conversational is probably always going to require more than just an app. You've got to hear real people speak the language and interact with them, maybe it could be done with a lot of very expensive work with LLMs and advanced text to speech generation but there's a big gap between the basic grammar and vocab that language apps teach to really understanding a native speaker. French in particular is rough for this though because of the... loose... association between the spelled word and the ways it's spoken.

tarentel 3y ago

I also had this issue. I had to ignore all their social features but overall I think the core app is fine. It won't make you fluent but it does teach a lot, and at least for me, I remember a lot of it. I can't say I learned french from the app, I married someone french so I had a lot of extra help, but I learned a lot of vocabulary that probably would have taken much longer to learn from regular conversation with the same few people in the U.S.. People expecting to learn a language from it probably will be disappointed but as an addition to other things I was doing I think it helped a lot although I have no real way to quantify this.

borroka 3y ago
You are comparing doing something with doing nothing, so it is quite likely that doing something gives better results than doing nothing. For a more fair and balanced comparison, you should compare the use of Duolingo with some other "methods" of language learning. For example, for learning new words, spaced repetition would give way faster results than using Duolingo

soperj 3y ago

I did years of French immersion in Canada, only to go to France a few years after i had finished and realized I didn't know French as well as I thought I did (I felt like I was nearly bilingual). A few years after that, with zero practice, I went to Montreal and could understand everything perfectly, and had zero problem communicating. That's when I realized that I had learned Quebecois and not French.

wenc 3y ago
I'm curious where you did French immersion? As far as I can tell what my friends' tell me (their kids are in French immersion in Ontario), French immersion teaches standard French, not the Quebecois patois (which we call le joual). Canadian French differs from European French in few areas like pronunciation and vocabulary, but it is very much still the same language and mutually intelligible.
- soperj 3y ago
  In Alberta, one of the original French Canadian communities with a number of families that have lived there for generations. Accent differs considerably, and use of slang in France seemed significantly greater. We definitely learned things like "les bas" as socks, and not "chaussette".

andylynch 3y ago

I’m curious about how Duolingo fits betwern Quebec, and Metropolitan French etc; I gather it can be like a Glaswegian talking to a New Yorker - one can find the other much harder to follow than vice versa. (My wife for instance speaks metro French fluently, but finds Quebecois really hard to follow )