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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

I blame Duolingo. Two months with their app brought me from not knowing any Esperanto to being terrible at it.

I never learned much from Duolingo. It makes learning languages incredibly boring, and my eyes would glaze over every one of the dozens of times I had to match/construct some variance of "der junge trinkt die milsch." I learned more German just reading English translations of Rammstein lyrics. Anything by Pimsleur is still not very interesting, but at least it can hold my attention.

Consider coupling Anki[0] with one of the many existing German decks out there[1].

I've been using it for Spanish[2] and I've found it to work extremely well. It has somewhat brought back my interest after Duolingo became repetitive.

[0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german

[2] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish

Anki is pretty awesome. I spent about 1000h learning Japanese with Anki so far. Together with Yomichan it's pretty much the ultimate learning tool, imho.

I learned more French from a day of trying to read Le Petit Prince in French, with the English translation beside, than I did from 3 months of Duolingo.

Rote learning just doesn't work that well for most people.

Duolingo also assumes it can condition you without teaching you the exceptions AT ALL

And thats annoying AF

Five seconds of a teacher or native speaker telling you the reason is way more valuable

Just FYI, it is: „Der Junge trinkt die Milch.“ German quotes are weird, Junge and Milch are capitalized, and Milch is spelled with ch, not sch.

Thank you. It's been a while.

I find Memrise much more interesting and "powerful". It only shows you sentences and relies on your brain to know how the grammar works (a bit like how a child learns how to speak).

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