5 ms·
Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple l
by whyowhy3484939 1y ago
Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago.
This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2]
“It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3]
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/adult-skills-in-literacy-and-numeracy-declining-or-stagnating-in-most-oecd-countries.html https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...
[2] https://archive.is/zCxBl https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college students who can't read books)
[3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)
- zzzeek 1y ago> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoWhat introductory German class does not use books and does not talk to people?
- zzzeek 1y agooh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo? Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive versions of language books and they also include conversational practice with language models. Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just learning a language and can't have simple conversations yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a traditional language class in how it's structured. It's pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as often as I want, from my car or whatever.
- pessimizer 1y agoI suggest that they meant that the process does not involve "reading a book" or "talking to people."
- watwut 1y agoIn most of them, you talk to people with an equally horrible accent as you have.
- cpmsmith 1y agoSurely those things entail reading books and talking to people.
- croes 1y agoYou definitely meet other people in local colleges
- sumeno 1y agoAnd few of them are native speakers of the language you're learning.
- zahllos 1y agoI don't think it is an odd take. I live in Switzerland, which has 4 national languages (Swiss German is spoken in dialect form that varies between towns, while Romansh has well-defined idioms with distinct spelling, although the 5 or so idioms are mutually intelligible). I speak French, passable German and one of the Romanshes, and I'm a native of none of them. Between French and Romansh I can more or less read Italian, although I can't understand it when spoken. The same thing that has worked for me as a method for learning languages has always been the same. Get books, particularly short stories or children's stories aimed at A2/B1 level, and read them. Practice grammar. Get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down. Boring but effective. And of course practice listening and talking, which means either having native friends, doing a course, using audio materials from somewhere, etc. Courses with actual humans make learning go faster (in the case of Romansh, it would have been impossible without the course). I don't find duolingo to be effective at all, as others mention beyond the A1/A2 level. I'd be a bit more skeptical and say even A2 you need to expand your horizons.
- zzzeek 1y agoSo I think people who grew up in Europe surrounded by many languages have a huge language learning advantage over mono-lingual Americans. Also exercises like "get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down" this is exactly what language applications have you do, just minus the pen and paper. (I'm not a young person so I have deep familiarity with pens and paper)
- djeastm 1y agoIn my own personal experience, the pen and paper is actually a very important tool of memory to which tapping on a phone doesn't compare.
- skeaker 1y agoOpposite for me, I struggled with courses that required thorough notes until college where they didn't care if I brought in a laptop. Once I could take digital notes I excelled thanks to the speed and organization of it. I don't think the physical instrument for note-taking matters so much as the act of note-taking.
- wannadingo 1y agoAll your counter-examples directly depend on the part you quoted and are presumably arguing against.
- cyanydeez 1y agogood thing most of the people driving techno fascism dont news to meet those street people
- next_xibalba 1y agoDuolingo is techno fascism? I looked up the definition as: > authoritarian rule, often involving the fusion of state and corporate tech power, where technology is seen as the driving force of the regime and used to consolidate control, suppress dissent, and erode public trust. I’m trying to connect the dots between the above and Duolingo.
- cyanydeez 1y ago[flagged]
- next_xibalba 1y agoWait so Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are coordinating with the government and Duolingo to exert absolute control over our lives? I searched about Peter Thiel’s views on AI seem fairly generic and cautionary. Maybe he’s lying?
- djeastm 1y agoI think they're going for the idea that it's an addictive mobile app engineered by a 23 billion dollar publicly-traded company ostensibly meant to help people learn but focused nowadays on extracting money as fast as possible. It's not like it's a local school helping out students.
- next_xibalba 1y agoOK, sure, but that seems a very far cry from "techno fascist".
- qgin 1y agoDuolingo is for getting to an A2 level. It’s hard for most people to get much value from trying to read a book or talk with someone unless they’re at least at A2 level
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoThat's bad news for the millions that had to do just that and learned fine in fact better. I'm not saying you should read the Upanishads in the original, I'm saying a proper intro textbook is fine and some teacher-figure ("human") to actually use your body and read theirs. Heck, Latin even has a Latin-only method: LLPSI. "Roma in Italia est", you'll figure it out quickly enough.
- pjc50 1y agoHumans are (very) expensive and Duolingo is free if you can put up with the advertising.
- watwut 1y agoAs someone who had to learn languages from textbooks back when it was the only thing that existed, it was massively ineffective way of learning. The typical outcome was a person who spent a lot of effort and still was unable to do anything useful with the language after years (reading real book, watching movie, chatting).
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoNotice I included interaction with people, but you're right. I think just using books is about equal to just using apps. Both won't get you there but books will get you further along the way.
- pessimizer 1y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=graded+readers https://duckduckgo.com/?q=graded+readers https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dual+language+book https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dual+language+book https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comic+book https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comic+book
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- frm88 1y agoSide note: the linked articles are really disturbing, particularly in regards to the growing numbers of illiteracy worldwide and - absolutely astonishing for me - the extraordinarily high number of education/job requirements mismatch in Western countries (first link and then directly to OECD report). This suggests that we're doing education wrong with the US leading at 25%.