17 ms·

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's ev

by Tor3 1y ago

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".

devrandoom 1y ago
What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?
- damnitbuilds 1y ago
  I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English. Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried. Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)
    - damnitbuilds 1y ago
      No worries - I was exaggerating for comic effect. I don't speak the local language like a local, but I do do it all day at work. I often wish the locals here would refuse to use English, but I enjoy speaking other foreign languages when I get the chance, so I understand when they want to do the same.
- navigate8310 1y ago
  Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.
  - watwut 1y ago
    That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end up only translating words in always the same sentences. That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.
    - yorwba 1y ago
      You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation. Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
      - watwut 1y ago
        You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it all for the first time and looks for "app I can download and use" will do. They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher. Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here. To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card. More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.
- joshdavham 1y ago
  > What are the modern methods It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall > what's to back up they're better? Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion") In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)
  - laurentlb 1y ago
    I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach. One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau... It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books. Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed. It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org https://lingostories.org
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.
  - froh 1y ago
    is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?
    - bluGill 1y ago
      I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time. Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.
- jamager 1y ago
  I wrote https://thehardway.guide https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.
- bluGill 1y ago
  I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best. unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.
mobtrain 1y ago
This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.
- sudahtigabulan 1y ago
  I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners. With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though. You can also sign up to in-person classes.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much. Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.
    - 0xf00ff00f 1y ago
      Many language learning books used to come with audio media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with cassette tapes. Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.
      - watwut 1y ago
        I am old enough to remember them. Comparably, you got maybe 4 hours of media - meaning sentences from the book being read and short boring dialogs. You cant compare it to what is currently available. It is like comparing a puddle of mud to Atlantic Ocean. And I mean it in a positive way - those audio tapes were almost nothing comparably. Beyond projects like Dreaming Spanish, you have around infinite amount of French, Italian, Spanish or German Youtube about whatever topic you want to. There are even dedicated playlists for total beginners you can start to consume with zero knowledge. You have thousands of shows on Netflix in foreign language with various difficulty - some actually suitable for beginners. Some you have already seen in own language, so you can understand them more easily. For major languages, there are dozens if not hundreds of podcasts with simplified news, "for beginner" discussions. Some of them are useable with literally miniscule amount of knowledge.
chrisco255 1y ago
Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version. If you have that, you don't need the other things. One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language. (You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)
  - broodbucket 1y ago
    There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want, and are fine at translation, but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. > They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you want for language learning. > but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience Doesn't matter.
      - deeThrow94 1y ago
        I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output. Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
gary17the 1y ago
> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses. The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite. If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one. The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.
  - gary17the 1y ago
    > This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite. I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar". In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.
    - frabcus 1y ago
      You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language! Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network. Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.
mawadev 1y ago
I like how this type of critique pops up when someone sits down and makes a free/libre version of an app with a flawed premise.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).
  - bluGill 1y ago
    One thing duolingo should he is after every 5 ten minute sessions it should be a ten minute "slow news in the target language" session. There are lots of other options on this line. Really every duolingo style app needs to tell people sooner "you are done, go find something else", either do that by refusing to let them use the app (that will make the VC's unhappy), or give them a different style of study that is more useful than flashcards.
switch007 1y ago
Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language. Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans. It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space
zsoltkacsandi 1y ago
> Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language. While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly: - this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials - at what point you should move on from Duolingo
- palata 1y ago
  > but that they do not communicate two things clearly: > this alone won't make you a fluent speaker Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it. > at what point you should move on from Duolingo I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.
  - zsoltkacsandi 1y ago
    > Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it. Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the app. If critical information about how to use the product effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's poor communication. Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-learning app for people all over the world, many of whom don't speak English well enough to even understand their blog. > I won't blame them for assuming common sense. It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers (who their target audience are by the way). Many users assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are "done."
znpy 1y ago
My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless. Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words. The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting). So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.
luotuoshangdui 1y ago
Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.
wkat4242 1y ago
Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification. I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.
- gary17the 1y ago
  > Duolingo is obsolete. I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more. I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language. And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro. Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).
    - Tor3 1y ago
      That was simply an example of what's actually used in schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo. (Though it must be said that this particular school I mentioned has a very good track record in churning out able speakers, though this is not something a casual learner would want to try. It's basically full time. Very, very hard.) For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources. Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.
anonzzzies 1y ago
Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.
arghwhat 1y ago
I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better. Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it. On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests. Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for. (Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
- Tor3 1y ago
  I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    You've twice written about what is the wrong way to learn a new language -- what's your right way? Why did you use Duo' instead of 'the right way'? Perhaps that explains why one might create a OSS version of Duo.
cess11 1y ago
I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages in such a lazy way. TFA might work for my use case.
trueismywork 1y ago
One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language. For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts. I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.
porridgeraisin 1y ago
It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then it is absolutely productive.
jamager 1y ago
There is nothing wrong with learning via translation. What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
crispyambulance 1y ago
People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine. If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level. To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.
- dilap 1y ago
  You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language. Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.
  - watwut 1y ago
    > but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language. Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort. That is just not how it works. Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later. You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
    - 1y ago
dfxm12 1y ago
Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point. It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.
Ajedi32 1y ago
Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    I'm not sure exactly what method they're using, but inference costs for speech to speech models are pretty significant so it does make some sense to charge more. The LLM-based text explanations for translation problems are also in the super premium tier though, and those can't be that expensive, so maybe it's just an attempt at market segmentation.
    - ben7799 1y ago
      The LLM based explanations actually explain what is wrong with the user's specific answer, not a generic explanation. They are of the form: "You entered X, because of Y grammar rule you should instead enter Z". So they aren't something that can be pre-generated for all possible inputs. Some of these questions are free-form input.
      - Ajedi32 1y ago
        That's fair. I've just been screenshotting the page and asking Gemini what I did wrong for free but I guess Google has deeper pockets than Duolingo so they can eat the cost of that for longer.

by Tor3 1y ago

devrandoom 1y ago

What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?

damnitbuilds 1y ago
I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.
- bluGill 1y ago
  My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English. Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried. Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)
  - damnitbuilds 1y ago
    No worries - I was exaggerating for comic effect. I don't speak the local language like a local, but I do do it all day at work. I often wish the locals here would refuse to use English, but I enjoy speaking other foreign languages when I get the chance, so I understand when they want to do the same.
navigate8310 1y ago
Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.
- watwut 1y ago
  That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end up only translating words in always the same sentences. That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.
  - yorwba 1y ago
    You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation. Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
    - watwut 1y ago
      You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it all for the first time and looks for "app I can download and use" will do. They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher. Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here. To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card. More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.
joshdavham 1y ago
> What are the modern methods It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall > what's to back up they're better? Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion") In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)
- laurentlb 1y ago
  I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach. One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau... It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books. Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed. It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org https://lingostories.org
wodenokoto 1y ago
Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.
- froh 1y ago
  is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time. Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.
jamager 1y ago
I wrote https://thehardway.guide https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.
bluGill 1y ago
I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best. unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.

mobtrain 1y ago

This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.

sudahtigabulan 1y ago
I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners. With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though. You can also sign up to in-person classes.
- watwut 1y ago
  Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much. Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.
  - 0xf00ff00f 1y ago
    Many language learning books used to come with audio media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with cassette tapes. Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.
    - watwut 1y ago
      I am old enough to remember them. Comparably, you got maybe 4 hours of media - meaning sentences from the book being read and short boring dialogs. You cant compare it to what is currently available. It is like comparing a puddle of mud to Atlantic Ocean. And I mean it in a positive way - those audio tapes were almost nothing comparably. Beyond projects like Dreaming Spanish, you have around infinite amount of French, Italian, Spanish or German Youtube about whatever topic you want to. There are even dedicated playlists for total beginners you can start to consume with zero knowledge. You have thousands of shows on Netflix in foreign language with various difficulty - some actually suitable for beginners. Some you have already seen in own language, so you can understand them more easily. For major languages, there are dozens if not hundreds of podcasts with simplified news, "for beginner" discussions. Some of them are useable with literally miniscule amount of knowledge.

chrisco255 1y ago

Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version. If you have that, you don't need the other things. One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language. (You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)
- broodbucket 1y ago
  There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want, and are fine at translation, but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. > They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you want for language learning. > but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience Doesn't matter.
    - deeThrow94 1y ago
      I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output. Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.

gary17the 1y ago

> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses. The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.

tossandthrow 1y ago
This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite. If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one. The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.
- gary17the 1y ago
  > This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite. I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar". In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.
  - frabcus 1y ago
    You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language! Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network. Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.

mawadev 1y ago

I like how this type of critique pops up when someone sits down and makes a free/libre version of an app with a flawed premise.

bornfreddy 1y ago
Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).
- bluGill 1y ago
  One thing duolingo should he is after every 5 ten minute sessions it should be a ten minute "slow news in the target language" session. There are lots of other options on this line. Really every duolingo style app needs to tell people sooner "you are done, go find something else", either do that by refusing to let them use the app (that will make the VC's unhappy), or give them a different style of study that is more useful than flashcards.

switch007 1y ago

Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language. Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans. It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space

zsoltkacsandi 1y ago

> Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language. While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly: - this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials - at what point you should move on from Duolingo

palata 1y ago
> but that they do not communicate two things clearly: > this alone won't make you a fluent speaker Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it. > at what point you should move on from Duolingo I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.
- zsoltkacsandi 1y ago
  > Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it. Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the app. If critical information about how to use the product effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's poor communication. Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-learning app for people all over the world, many of whom don't speak English well enough to even understand their blog. > I won't blame them for assuming common sense. It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers (who their target audience are by the way). Many users assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are "done."

znpy 1y ago

My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless. Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words. The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting). So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.

luotuoshangdui 1y ago

Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.

wkat4242 1y ago

Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification. I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.

gary17the 1y ago
> Duolingo is obsolete. I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more. I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language. And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro. Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).
  - Tor3 1y ago
    That was simply an example of what's actually used in schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo. (Though it must be said that this particular school I mentioned has a very good track record in churning out able speakers, though this is not something a casual learner would want to try. It's basically full time. Very, very hard.) For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources. Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.

anonzzzies 1y ago

Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.

arghwhat 1y ago

I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better. Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it. On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests. Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for. (Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)

Tor3 1y ago
I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  You've twice written about what is the wrong way to learn a new language -- what's your right way? Why did you use Duo' instead of 'the right way'? Perhaps that explains why one might create a OSS version of Duo.

cess11 1y ago

I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages in such a lazy way. TFA might work for my use case.

trueismywork 1y ago

One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language. For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts. I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.

porridgeraisin 1y ago

It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then it is absolutely productive.

jamager 1y ago

There is nothing wrong with learning via translation. What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

crispyambulance 1y ago

People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine. If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level. To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.

dilap 1y ago
You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language. Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.
- watwut 1y ago
  > but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language. Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort. That is just not how it works. Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later. You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
  - 1y ago

dfxm12 1y ago

Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point. It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.

Ajedi32 1y ago

Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.

HWR_14 1y ago
I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.
- Ajedi32 1y ago
  I'm not sure exactly what method they're using, but inference costs for speech to speech models are pretty significant so it does make some sense to charge more. The LLM-based text explanations for translation problems are also in the super premium tier though, and those can't be that expensive, so maybe it's just an attempt at market segmentation.
  - ben7799 1y ago
    The LLM based explanations actually explain what is wrong with the user's specific answer, not a generic explanation. They are of the form: "You entered X, because of Y grammar rule you should instead enter Z". So they aren't something that can be pre-generated for all possible inputs. Some of these questions are free-form input.
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      That's fair. I've just been screenshotting the page and asking Gemini what I did wrong for free but I guess Google has deeper pockets than Duolingo so they can eat the cost of that for longer.