> Actually, Duolingo as a technology isn't necessarily that bad either, it's just Duolingo-the-company with its business incentives that limit its potential. C

> Actually, Duolingo as a technology isn't necessarily that bad either, it's just Duolingo-the-company with its business incentives that limit its potential. Clearly that’s not the case when multi-year streakers don’t have a clue what to do. They followed the instructions of streaking and didn’t get anywhere. The ones I have seen anyway (YouTube). > And of course not everything that requires effort is necessarily a good way to learn, but I don't think there's any way to learn that's also effortless. No one said effortless. You can’t bolster your side by making up that someone marked a place on the complete opposite extreme of the spectrum. > E.g. the least-effort way to play a video game in a foreign language is to figure out how to operate the interface through trial-and-error (or watching someone else play) and then rely on spatial memory to press the right buttons without having to read the labels. And people who watch foreign-language movies or shows typically do so with subtitles that free them from having to learn anything, so they might just pick up the names of characters and maybe a few common expressions. I don’t know why you are setting up this armchair theory. I said what has worked for people. Not in theory. IN REALITY. People who have immersed enough time into English indirectly by playing video games, watching Netflix and whatnot. And also seeing no real correlation with their practical, day-to-day abilities and their formal studies of English that they have to go through in school. You can see this every time someone goes from relatively passive learning through single-player video games to participating in voice chat in multi-player video games and discussing things in English online. Do you think they stop themselves half-way through this process and grind grammar/whatever other English books in order to work up to talking to people in real life? > The comprehensible input approach requires a lot of effort upfront to make the input comprehensible in the first place (even if it's toddler-level content, that still means it targets people with a vocabulary of several thousand words) and then you still need to push yourself a bit to actually learn something, rather than mentally skipping over the parts you didn't understand. What it requires is a lot of time and exposure. Where your “actually learn” weasel phrase fits in is unclear since all that seems required is sufficient interest in the associated topics (not the language per se).