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I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll l
by mtalantikite 1y ago
I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language. It's not that it's a bad app, it's just that that's not going to happen. There's no one resource that will get you to even an intermediate level in a language. And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].
For me to put a foundation for French down it was: Assimil for about 6 months (30 min/day), 30 minutes of daily comprehensible input, and Anki & Clozemaster for vocabulary (~15-20 min/day). Mixed in there was a couple months on Yabla doing listening comprehension, some grammar study from Bescherelle books, and some tutoring on iTalki. After about maybe 9-12 months I could listen to RFI's broadcast targeted to learners [2], but even then I still needed to go to the transcription a lot at the beginning.
To mislead people into thinking that doing some vocab study for 30 min a day in Duolingo is going to get them anything beyond the most basic grasp of a language is kinda not cool.
[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-language-training https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
[2] https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/ https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/
- jimbokun 1y agoThat's a super helpful list from the State Department! Good to know ahead of time what you're getting yourself into.
- jmkni 1y agoSo what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one? Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?
- qingcharles 1y agoI have Dutch friends who swear they learned all their English simply by watching Friends on BBC in the Netherlands.
- golemiprague 1y agoThose two languages are very close, if he had to learn Japanese or Arabic he won't be able to do it.
- kabes 1y agoYou don't need to watch BBC for that. Not a lot of tv shows, even child programs are dubbed on Dutch tv. So you get accustomed to it early on. Combined with the fact the languages are closely related means the Dutch usually have a reasonable grasp of English before it's being taught in school.
- qingcharles 1y agoYeah, IIRC they mentioned most movie releases in the cinema are also in English too.
- draven 1y agoI learned english at school in France, and we're notoriously bad at teaching foreign languages. The approach is way to academic and mainly based on reading. That's why our accents are often atrocious. I was good at written tests, but what allowed me to actually get fluent (as in being able to think in english and convert my thoughts to speech in real time) was watching tv series in english with subtitles in english (no translation involved.)
- stevesimmons 1y agoThen they're lying... (Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)
- barrenko 1y agoFor me in Croatia it was The Simpsons.
- wizardforhire 1y agoProbably traveling to the local and living there.. ie full immersion. If I were to wager and riff off ya ;)
- byearthithatius 1y agoYou would still need to study or this would be super slow. When I went to China even after I did DuoLingo for two years I understood only super basic sentences and sometimes I even missed those because of accents. I couldn't learn "new" words or concepts or grammar through immersion, it only gave me the question to ask my wife so I could learn it through study.
- nemomarx 1y agoThat's part of immersion or comprehensible input, yeah. Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much
- summarity 1y agoImmersion and transferring patterns you already know from other languages. Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org https://www.languagetransfer.org
- TheAmazingRace 1y agoThis looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.
- byearthithatius 1y agoIts in the article itself.... Nothing wrong with coming straight for the comments but this is what the author recommends as an alternative lol
- Alex-Programs 1y agoLanguage Transfer is great. On the topic of immersion, I made https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app in my gap year. It estimates the difficulty of sentences in webpages and translates the ones at your knowledge level into the language you're learning.
- vintermann 1y agoThe danger here is that you're not learning German - you're learning machine German. Even if the app makers have structured the machine translation so that it's smart about taking context into account, it will be at best subtly different from actual German, and at worst you'll pick up nonsense and think it's good German. The safe way to use this would be in reverse. You shouldn't be browsing English pages and get 1 in 10 translated into German. You should be browsing German pages and get 9/10 translated into English. You'll still get machine translation artifacts, but they're much less likely to interfere with your learning, and you'll be much better equipped to spot them.
- ileonichwiesz 1y agoTransferring patterns only really works when the language you’re learning is similar to ones you already know. I’m learning Chinese, and to my Western mind it feels like an alien language.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoAs others have said, immersion is the only way that you have control of. If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
- academia_hack 1y agoI hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actually true? It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.
- Escapado 1y agoI keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning? For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
- 1y ago
- themightyquinn 1y agoHad a friend in college learn Ukrainian by switching his phone language settings and watching only Ukrainian reality tv… and then he also spent a summer in Ukraine
- xormapmap 1y agoComprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1). I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English. Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoWhy are you learning Ukranian?
- entropie 1y agoWhy is it important?
- skinkestek 1y agoFor me it was because I dabbled in Russian before, but recent events have led me to avoid anything that could be seen as supporting Russia in any way, including culturally. I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.
- luckydata 1y agoIn an immersion context I can get to conversational fluency in about 3 months and to complete mastery in a year. I've done it twice, once for Spanish and once for English. A few things in my approach helped me move quite a lot faster than my peers: 1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY. 2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot. 3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months. 3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way. Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.
- subscribed 1y agoThis is how I learned English myself. Good enough to pass a phone interview with the mumbling Dutch softie, and then it was easier. (motivation, I guess, plays a role too)
- elil17 1y agoI'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturally push you to the limits of your abilities when you talk to them. There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work. Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.
- Roxo 1y ago> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).
- elil17 1y agoWhat I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods. It is certainly a way to learn a language. But is it a good way to learn a language? You are smarter than a baby and you can learn a language faster (e.g. with fewer hours of study) then a baby.
- adriand 1y agoThere are some new AI apps out there that I would put in the “hack” category for being a lot more effective than all the stuff I used in the past (which also included Duolingo, Anki, etc). The one I used the most over three months to refresh my Spanish is Langua (bad name with too much competition, but I put the link below). This app, and I’m sure others, is a polished “overlay” of sorts on top of one LLM or another, but it’s very well done. By far the best way of learning a language is conversation with a native speaker. This puts 90% of that in your pocket on demand. You can chat (out loud) on various topics, or any topic, and this is augmented with various tools, way to save words to a vocabulary list with a flash card UI, etc. After each conversation you get an evaluation. I found it a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, than anything else I’ve tried. https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id6737520234 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id...
- teiferer 1y agoThe hack is immersion. Move to a country where the language is spoken, and have a girlfriend/boyfriend native in the language whom you move in with. That's it.
- flurdy 1y agoIt is so often dismissed how important the second part is. Many think that just moving to a country is enough, and you will pick up the language. Maybe the basics, but not if you don't speak and think it 24/7, however uncomfortable that is at the start. You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast. Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer. This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.
- teiferer 1y agoA native-language workplace helps too, but that's step 2. Step 1 is getting to a level that allows you to switch from english to local language at the workplace.
- lawn 1y agoImmersion as others have said. But you can speed up the process by simply getting better at memorizing words to give you a much wider vocabulary. There are various hacks to memorize things such as decks of cards or long sequences of numbers and similar techniques can aid you here too.
- mtalantikite 1y agoThe hack is there isn't really one thing, it's using multiple tools like I mentioned in my original comment. If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.
- qingcharles 1y agoLord have mercy. All the languages I'm learning are: > Category IV Languages – “Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
- kevmo314 1y agoGiven that four of the five are Asian languages, there's a lot of transferability. Not a crazy amount but enough to give you a boost. Knowing Chinese made learning Japanese feel a notch easier, and learning Korean afterwards felt yet another step easier. The 2200 hours represents learning from scratch.
- midtake 1y agoI hate this take. Duolingo users understand fully, once they clear their language's Section 3 or higher, that they have a long road ahead. The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language. Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duolingo? Posts like yours are doomer cringe.
- Uehreka 1y agoThis is an app that constantly nags you to use it, to the point that its mascot is so widely known as annoying that they play it for laughs in their ads. All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads. And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t take initiative and build a better habit-based approach that incorporates Duolingo, but that’s not what the app is pushing you to do.
- midtake 1y agoMost apps are nagware, that is not a Duolingo issue. The ads are for converting users to paid subscribers, not just "ads." I don't see your point at all.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 1y agoI'll vouch for the nagware. When I was studying with duolingo, it was the nag features that got me to practice every day.
- ileonichwiesz 1y agoA lot of apps are nagware, but I’ve never seen any as blatant and forceful as Duolingo. They diligently A/B test their notifications, constantly looking for the variations that’ll show a higher click rate. They’ll hit you with “[Your friend’s name] will hate you forever if you don’t do Duolingo right now!” if you start slipping. I’ve dropped it after a year or so when I realized that I wasn’t really learning any Turkish, but I was caught in some sort of corporate-designed psychological trap.
- j45 1y agoConversationally might be different than reading/writing alone.
- ghaff 1y agoI accept that some people are doubtless much more talented in acquiring languages than I am. But I did take 4 years of high school French and was considered "good." And, traveling with a friend in Paris, I clearly knew a lot more of the language than they did. But I'm a very very far way from being fluent. Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or maybe they're BSing.
- amonith 1y agoA few weeks is definitely BS, but I took 3 years of German in high school and after roughly 3 months of 30min-1hr daily Duolingo I was already past the high school material. I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.
- ghaff 1y agoTo be fair, you already had the high school material and you spent at least as much time on Duolingo as in the classroom. Styles are different oo. I would say my high school was a lot more focused on writing, translation, and grammar than anything truly conversational though they did work on on pronunciation to some extent.
- huhkerrf 1y ago> And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1]. It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.
- bombcar 1y agoThere's also various levels of "fluency" - and what you're trying to achieve will inform how you're going to go about it. There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."
- bunderbunder 1y agoAlso the FSI estimates are for what it takes to get people who've tested into a FSI language program to that level. Individual differences are known to be a huge factor in language education, and FSI has the luxury of only needing to worry about teaching people who they know are well-suited to learning using their methods. I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.
- mtalantikite 1y agoYeah, for sure, thanks for pointing that out. For them it seems like fluency is defined as the ability to work comfortably in a professional setting in that target language. I self studied some of their French courses and found them helpful. I've never taken a course of theirs before, but a family member did do a year immersion in Arabic as part of their training for the foreign service, and of course it was a lot more intense than self-study.
- adrian_b 1y agoFor me, the best way to learn a foreign language was (besides also studying the grammar separately) to read some books in whose content I was interested and to watch carefully some untranslated movies spoken in that language, until I became able to understand perfectly the books and the movies. Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier. So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested. Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.
- memsom 1y ago> I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1. The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.
- mtalantikite 1y agoBy learn another language I mean getting to C1 or equivalent. Being able to comfortably spend time in a country that speaks your target language. Having regular, improvised conversations of various depths. Reading literature in that language. Things like that. I really don't think Duolingo can get you there on it's own, but hey, I'm open to being wrong. I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.
- ix101 1y agohttps://www.languagereactor.com https://www.languagereactor.com is something similar to Yabla I think... But you can use it indefinitely and subscribe if you need the premium features.
- mtalantikite 1y agoI tried it for a few months, but never was really able to get it to work for me, although I did find the dictionary hover overlay in YouTube videos to be helpful at the beginning. Yabla is different in that they will break up a video into pieces, have you listen to it without subtitles, and then ask you to type out what you heard. This was really helpful, particularly on the advanced levels, as picking up various accents can be difficult until your ears adjust.
- cretinoid 1y ago[dead]
- marssaxman 1y agoI'm not sure how you can be so confident about that. A year of Duolingo got me far enough along to comfortably follow "NOS Journaal in Makkelijke Taal", seemingly the Dutch equivalent of the RFI broadcast you linked. No transcript needed, though I do pause on occasion to look up an unfamiliar word. Maybe you call that "the most basic grasp of a language", but it doesn't seem to have been less effective than the approach you took with French.
- mtalantikite 1y agoThat's great! Maybe Duolingo has changed things up since the last time I tried them years ago. Being able to listen to even simplified native content and understand it would of course be beyond a basic grasp of the language. What were your study habits with it? My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.
- marssaxman 1y agoI started out doing 5-10 minutes a day, building up to 30 as motivation grew. I'm still at it, 633 days later, though I'm no longer pushing Dutch quite as hard now that I'm also learning Spanish. (I figure that exposure to Dutch through youtube, reddit, etc helps me continue to learn now, anyway.) My goals are: maintain the daily streak; stay in the diamond league; do all the "legendary" bonus levels; get all three daily quest points. That's enough work that I'm usually pushing myself a bit, but not to the point of tedium. I'm sure that if I actually needed to learn a language, for some practical reason, Duolingo would not be the quickest or most thorough way to do it. As something I'm doing for fun, though, using downtime I'd otherwise waste on puzzle games or pointless web scrolling, it feels like a pretty good deal. Feeling the world of Dutch-language media starting to open up was kind of magical. I'm not there yet with Spanish, but I look forward to it. How much bigger can my world get, I wonder?
- jamager 1y agoDuolingo doesn't work because that's the point. Same problem as dating apps: if you could actually learn a language with Duolingo, then you would stop using Duolingo. No good for business. The hard part is how to trick people into believing that it works or even "it's better than nothing". Hence gamification.