Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

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I am a regular Duolingo learner but I have yet to see how this is better in a significant way (I am not trying to be a dick but just giving honest opinion - sorry :( ). Or maybe I just missed something.

I played around with your product and I've found that I need to enter words or select missing ones like in Duolingo. It seems a bit more difficult than Duolingo though.

The biggest problem to me with Duolingo that it doesn't explain certain language rules (I am learning German) and you have to brute-force until you "get a feeling" and memorize patterns.

Another problem, is that there is very little focus on developing your speaking skills which (to me at least) are the most important.

I would really love to see some emphasis on speaking skill development.

Even more, Duolingo sucks at text understanding development - you get to learn sentence by sentence, but you are never getting a "full picture". So when you get a proper, full text (some short article, for example) in another language, it just feels a bit overwhelming.

Basically, what I am trying to convey and what's missing (for me) in this kind of apps, is that learning language is not about filling in missing words in the sentences.

Btw, I really like that you charge $8 - IMO Duolingo here misses out a huge chunk of money. I would easily pay $5 and probably up to $10 but now I have just to "endure" one ad every 5min which doesn't bother me at all.

Language learning also isn't about finding the one app to rule them all. It's about using various different approaches in parallel that, together, expose you to the breadth.

This doesn't need to be better than Duolingo, it just needs to work a different part of the brain.

One problem with Duolingo is that its fill-in-the-blank always comes with a word bank which makes them all pretty trivial. You don't need much understanding to choose between a bank of "girl", "cloud", "yesterday", and a single verb conjugation.

Open-ended cloze tests, on the other hand, actually force me to think.

I think it's outside of Clozemaster's scope to care about speaking. Didn't Duolingo remove speaking tests from their app recently because everyone toggled them off?

True. Learning a language just from a single app is a lost cause (at least for now and, IMO, for foreseeable future).

>Open-ended cloze tests, on the other hand, actually force me to think. In this regard, the Duolingo web-app fares much better, because all the answers you have to type in. After you get used to that, using mobile app feels like cheating :).

>Didn't Duolingo remove speaking tests from their app recently because everyone toggled them off? They are still there. Web app has even a version of that on steroids - they give you a sentence in English and you have to vocally translate it.

> The biggest problem to me with Duolingo that it doesn't explain certain language rules (I am learning German) and you have to brute-force until you "get a feeling" and memorize patterns.

I'm not trying to be contrarian but, in my opinion that's a strong point, not a weakness.

I work with language learners a lot and many of them spend a long time looking at explanations of foreign languages in their own language. This basically never works. The people who really progress dive in and let their brain soak up the new rules and patterns. In a metaphor: reading grammar explanations is like try to learn to play the piano by reading about on how a piano works. You might learn a lot, and even work out how to play simple tunes but your fundamentally practicing the wrong thing.

I finished the Duolingo French tree. I now use Clozemaster for French ( and a number of other languages ) and find that it is a very efficient and entertaining way of studying French in context. I can now slowly and not too painfully, read some easy authentic French material, including parts of Le Monde and the French version of ZDNet. I have of course, used a bunch of other resources, including the excellent Assimil.

Le Monde, mais Die Welt. :)

(Right?)

You are right, it is "Le Monde" and not "La Monde" as I originally wrote.

As you can see, the materials I have used ( Clozemaster and Assimil ) are not too grammar heavy. :-)

Thanks for the feedback! always_good's response is really on point. Clozemaster isn't intended to be better than Duolingo, rather it's meant to be a complement and another tool to add to your language learning toolbox. Speaking is also beyond the scope of Clozemaster at the moment. I'd totally recommend Clozemaster to help get more exposure, expand your vocab, and improve your comprehension, but for speaking - something like italki is probably your best option. Regarding learning sentence by sentence vs. getting a "full picture" - I would like to try to expand Clozemaster to include short texts at some point with a missing word per sentence. Hopefully down the line!

Your problem learning German probably stems from "Deutsche Methode", i.e. throwing you without any preparation into talking in a strange language without explaining anything, not even meaning of words very often. For some reason this is extremely popular and distinguished method in Germany, maybe stemming from German masochism formulated in "if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't count", which you see around here everywhere. More pragmatically it probably brings Goethe Institut much more money than making the language more accessible (which is certainly doable).

Well, there's also another thing: according to empirical research, "explaining things" about language doesn't make you better at that language. The part of your brain that handles language is simply incompatible with that kind of input data. (The input data that makes your brain better at language is comprehensible linguistic input embedded in communicative context. That is, language that is trying to communicate meaning to you, and is simple enough for you to get the rough understanding of that meaning.)

Not that it hurts, though.

> The biggest problem to me with Duolingo that it doesn't explain certain language rules (I am learning German) and you have to brute-force until you "get a feeling" and memorize patterns.

I think gaining a feel for a language and memorizing patterns is more useful at the beginning of your journey. I am learning Spanish and I find it works better for me when I 'feel' something is right and then finally understand the reason why it is so.

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