Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language.

There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses.

#1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking.

This is just the basics of a language.. enough to understand basic expressions. You're never going to learn a language without further practice and tools. Spending time in books, trying to form your own thoughts. Duolingo is a great start, but if you never progress beyond it, of course you're not going to learn a language.

#2: and most important. When you complete a course you're not done.

I see this all of the time, people just get to the last exercise and stop.

You're not going to learn a language this way because most people can't retain a 2000+ word vocabulary by only seeing a word a couple of times.

There's a reason why your "strength" in categories decreases as time passes.. because it's unlikely that you've actually remembered every single word you were taught.

I've participated in a large number of duolingo related discussion over the years and one thing stands out is that there is a strong correlation between people that think you can't use it to learn a language and people that go straight through the course, reach the end, and stop.

Anyway, it has its flaws, and is far from perfect, but I can't imagine having a better product that does not come with a fee.

That immediately destroyed any trust with them. When you put out educational material, it has to be correct. That has to be the foundation.

Well, if you're coming from a European language background, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to benchmark on. I mean, there's three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji) for starters! And then unlike European languages, it's not alphabetical and kanji is not even really syllabic - which means, the background you need to get to be able to read texts is huge.

E.g., for Spanish, I can read the newspaper (not understand yet, but just reproduce, look for words I recognize, etc.) without even touching a language course. And if I get the basics, I can see grammatical structure, and given common Romance background, get about 20% of vocabulary for free just from knowing another European language (well, not true for all European ones, but for many it is).

I spent a while using Busuu instead, which presents something more like a curriculum and lets you formulate your own answers to questions which are then reviewed by native speakers (in return for you reviewing the submissions of others). I found that incredibly effective because I wasn't stuck with putting strange sentences in the right order, I could get creative about how I described a red flag or a holiday I went on. More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion, and generally refactor the sentences until my gut said I had something that flowed reasonably well. Very intense and deliberate but it didn't take long to start posting to Facebook in Spanish. The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking.

I’ve yet to find a single app that beat out a one-time read through of a Japanese grammar guide.

That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that.

The streak is actually the only thing I really like about it, I want to keep it going because it shows me how long I've been working on it. For everything else I completely agree with you, Duolingo is borderline worthless for actually learning a language IMO. I can make a random list of complaints in no particular order:

- The spaced repetition aspect is ridiculously poorly calibrated, at least for me. Basic words decay way too fast which means that if I actually try to keep the skills "golden" (in the pre-crown era) I keep drilling the same basic skills again and again. Anki or Memrize manage that tremedously better. It's not even that complicated to implement correctly, I wonder why it's so crap. Maybe to keep you coming back and stretch the existing content? Now with the crown system they got rid of skill decay altogether, instead having you drill the same sentences an ungodly amount of time to reach a higher skill level. Also no matter how much I've drilled any lesson the majority of the exercises are asking you to translate foreign-to-native instead of the other way around, which would be more interesting as you improve.

- The actual "lessons" for each skills are so bare bones that they're basically useless. I think they know that since I don't think they're accessible at all in the android app. I know that grammar isn't sexy for most but if you want to learn a language you'll have to bite the bullet at some point, an english speaker will have some trouble learning the nuances of the perfect and imperfect past in romance languages by examples alone.

- Meanwhile, on top of not actually teaching you proper grammar they like to mix concepts in the same lessons, because otherwise it wouldn't be confusing enough. For instance the Portuguese subjunctive course contains examples that are actually imperative but "by chance" happen to have the same form as the subjunctive. Because obviously the subjunctive is so trivial that you have to spice things up by adding a completely different tense in there.

- The actual vocabulary they teach you is absurd. You can do the entire tree and not know how to say basic stuff, but you'll be able to say "the painter opens the power outlet" or "my tiger ate my pillow". Those are real examples.

- Worse than weird vocabulary you also have very confusing sentences. For instance take a look at this: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2121481$from_email=comment&... "Se nós nos encontrássemos mais vezes?" which is translated by "If we met more often?". What does that even mean? It's not even a full sentence. And that's for the past subjunctive lesson, you know, that trivial thing that definitely requires trash sentences like those. And it's been there for 4 years judging by the comments, so the authors of the course stand by it.

- These types of weird sentences are super common and they keep you wondering if you're not getting an idiom of the language or if it's just a super weird sentence. 90% of the time it's the latter.

I don't understand why Duolingo is so popular, IMO Memrise is massively better. It's a lot more focused, it only pretends to teach you words and simple phrases, but at least it does the job. If you want to learn a language buy a good grammar book, a dictionary and drill vocab on Anki or Memrise. Use something like lang-8 to practice your writing. Forget Duolingo.

I do enjoy their "Duolingo Stories" service though, but there's not enough content there to keep you busy for very long and there's no "replay" value.

I also disagree about Japanese, I used to it learn the kanas and I am continuing to learn with it.

I don't understand why there are people that hate on this free language tool so much.

This is interesting.

I took six years of French in high school + college, and did immersion in Québec. I had not spoken French since then, so a couple years ago when I was planning a trip to France I got Duolinguo and worked through the French course to refresh. I didn't notice anything odd about it. And in France I was able to communicate with people, though one person asked if I was Canadian -- apparently I have an accent.

Did I perhaps learn French incorrectly?

It can't be expensive to get this right, not considering what Duolingo must be doing in revenue, so why is it that way?

It hasn't done a whole lot for my listening or speaking skills, but to be fair I often disable the listening and speaking exercises since I tend to do the exercises at work while I'm waiting for something to compile.

Duolingo will not make you fluent in a language, but it can give you the basics to build upon.

Looks like fun, but not a tool that would teach you to speak a language correctly.

It's mediocre at teaching you how to write, bad at teaching you to listen, and useless at teaching you how to speak.

I've found that if you just grind through lessons without actually reading the supporting material, you don't learn much at all. If you actually read the supporting material you'll learn a lot more.

Duolingo is best used as a tool in a toolbox of language learning tools. It's good for reinforcement learning, but not great for actually developing an understanding.

As an analogy, you could learn algebra by looking at a lot of examples and working through worksheets of algebra problems, but you're not going to actually understand what you're doing, or learn very well.

Human Japanese is great for gentle explanations of grammar, but its flashcards are horrible, so one can't get the spaced repetition needed to remember everything it throws at you. Memrise is fantastic for vocabulary with its spaced repetition, but I couldn't string a sentence together, as Memrise (at least the course I did) mostly ignores grammar. Duolingo is great for practicing reading and writing sentences, checking the comments for sanity if the sentence looks fishy. But it doesn't try and teach anything, just get it wrong until you get it right. Does sentence order matter? Why do we use "wa" here and "ga" there? Duolingo doesn't say.

An app that combines actual lessons with spaced practice sessions would make the whole process a lot smoother.

* Many of the English translations don't seem like idiomatic English. Sometimes I think it is even grammatically incorrect. This has made me worried about some of the Japanese not being super great as well. With other people chiming in about how languages they already knew having this problem, it doesn't look great.

* I agree with numbers. They way Duolingo handles numbers, days, months, etc is to me worse than the traditional way. It took a long time to get decent at numbers, and I screw them up a bit. I don't know any of the days of the week, but I know what day of the week words look like. They only ever include one day of the week word it the word bank, so you never actually have to learn.

* On the subject of the word bank, I think if the incorrect words where more plausible. For many lessons, you don't need the Japanese input. The word bank only provides one plausible English sentence.

* It needs more sentence variety. For example, if a less has "The tea is hot." and "The ramen is cool.", why not also add "The tea is cool." and "The ramen is hot."? I find if Duo selects the same lesson a few days in a row, I start to memorize the answers and can punch them in without needing the input.

* I can form original sentences. I'm not very fast at it, but I think that is to be expected. I don't think I'll get better until I start trying to actually speak to people.

* The bigger problem I have is a lack of vocabulary. Duolingo seems to like to jump around a lot, never getting good enough at any one thing. Even in a situation where you are able to get by if you stick to a script, eg at a restaurant, there are still gaps that would prevent me from doing everything in Japanese. Looking at Memerise, it seems to focus on giving you more depth. For example, Duolingo taught me how to say "How are you?" and respond "I'm fine.". Later I've been able to add "I'm tired." and "I'm scared." Memerise teaches you "I'm fine.", "I'm tired.", "I'm happy.", "I'm angry.", "I'm hungry.", and "I'm sick.". That feels more useful.

* The audio quality is crappy. Sometimes it sounds like the syllables are clipping into each other or something. Sometimes it seems like their text to speech engine got confused about where word boundaries are. I took a brief look at Memerise's Japanese course, and the audio quality is much better.

* About 50% of the time when I try to tap the button to replay the audio clip, it seems to think I want to quit the lesson.

* It would be nice if there was something you could tap to temporarily see Japanese sentences with spaces between words.

* While I expect Duolingo would never do it, I think a few lessons on innuendos would be useful. It would save some embarrassing situations.

But yeah, I think they're going to have to do a pretty complete revamp of the Japanese course, and possibly add some more features like handwriting recognition for learning the characters. I did a little of that on my own, putting together a flash card deck that I could type in Japanese in, and used Android's Japanese handwriting input method to enter characters, and found that pretty good for learning kana, but I didn't feel like putting all of the work in for building such decks for the kanji I was learning as well.

I find Duolingo much better for the lessons that are more well developed, and which the software was originally written for, like French. I think that they could eventually get to the point where the Japanese lessons are useful, but now is not that point; they will need both some software updates that make Japanese learning work better, and a revamp of the curriculum.

The first half of this is dead on. The second half is wrong.

Duolingo's top languages are in the Indo-European family. (Their most learned language is English, next is Spanish.) Their techniques are perfectly adequate for gaining elementary vocabulary a basic grounding in the grammar of those languages. The most common languages in that language family are positional. You really do need to learn to say "black shirt" in English versus "camisa negra" in Spanish. Saying it in the other order is wrong.

Their tools don't work well for other language families. However they do work for lots of languages that people want to learn.

https://www.memrise.com/course/1091685/sgjl-05-core-2k6k-voc... (first of 500 of 6000)

https://www.memrise.com/course/1125407/sgjl-07-core-2k6k-voc... (next 500 words)

https://www.memrise.com/course/1125874/sgjl-10-core-2k6k-voc...

https://www.memrise.com/course/1125879/sgjl-12-core-2k6k-voc...

The "SGJL" series also does grammar but it was easier to just reread tae kim every so often: https://community.memrise.com/t/course-forum-suggested-guide...

It's not only useless for learning the kanji, it's useless for learning the rest of the language is well. Long strings of kana are harder to read/parse (even when you don't recognise the kanji, you can parse to something like <noun><grammar><verb><grammar etc. just based on the structure and see where the parts you don't understand are, which is much harder to do with just the kana form), and there are multiple times where after learning the kanji I've thought "Oh, _now_ that thing in Duolingo makes sense.

It's also easier to remember when building off the other kanji, and lets you build understanding. Say you know that 姉 is "older sister" and 妹 is "younger sister" -- you can make a pretty good guess that 姉妹 just means "sisters", even if you can't actually pronounce it. You can't really do that when all Duolingo has taught you is "older sister" is ane/あね and "younger sister" is imouto/いもうと and not the kanji form, and you certainly won't see how they are connected when "sisters" is introduced as shimai/しまい. Learning the kanji steepens the learning curve for sure (which is why I suppose Duolingo introduce very few), but it gives you a _much_ better understanding and I felt more comfortable manipulating the language.

I've found I end up looking at the comments frequently and just hoping that someone was kind enough to plainly explain the grammar at some point. Failing that, I end up asking fluent Spanish speakers random questions like, "Are adjectives gendered and pluralized in Spanish?" Which works up to a point, but when you start asking about things like "gerunds" and "past participle" you end up having to explain what those things mean in the first place (using English) and then ask the question again about Spanish.

Would love to see an app that focuses less on implied methods of teaching and is more willing to dive in to grammar lessons.

He's gathered a vast amount of material for French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and more on his website, https://fluent-forever.com. I've used his pronunciation trainers for Spanish and Japanese, and it's obvious the enormous effort he's put into all of his materials. Wyner obviously loves his work.

Learning a language has no shortcuts - only different methods with varying levels of effectiveness, i.e. fluency gained per hour of work put in. I can say that of all the apps and methods I've tried, from Pimsleur to Rosetta Stone to Duolingo and Memrise, Fluent Forever is by far the most effective one.

I used it to learn Spanish for a few weeks - his approach of learning pronunciation first, then basic vocabulary, seems counterintuitive at first, but it really, really works. Which I found out to my pleasure when I went to Spain on vacation with my friends. Even though they'd studied Spanish all throughout high school, both my pronunciation and my fluency were miles above theirs. I couldn't employ advanced tenses, but as he explains in the book, it'd be impossible for me to fluently internalize more advanced grammar before the simpler forms for any language, anyways.

I've moved on to Japanese for now, since I have a much longer trip there coming up. This will take much, much longer (it's a Category V language versus a Category I language), but so far it's been just as effective at teaching me pronunciation and hiragana/katakana (their phonetic lettering system).

I highly recommend the book - it's practically free at that price. Compare it to the $300 you'd spend on Rosetta Stone and don't hesitate.

That said, DL's Irish course is useless for anything except a little vocab. There's tons of incorrect answers, or things that only work in certain situations, or direct translations from English nobody would say, or things that are mistranslated, etc etc.

I am far from fluent, but I could get by in nearly all situations.

I'm learning Swedish now, and it's getting to the point where new languages are easier and easier to pick up. My partner is further than me, and knows a shocking amount of Swedish just from the Duolingo app.

I find the "you are 53% fluent in Spanish" notifications laughable, though. I'm maybe 10% fluent, on a good day, when listening, and about 20% when reading. Though assigning a percentage to fluency is a bit weird anyway.

So...yeah, I think you kinda get out what you put into learning a language, and Duolingo is way closer to putting in "nothing" than it is to putting in "something". One shouldn't expect to get much out, if you're just doing little memory quizzes a couple times a day. But, I can do it without needing a lot of free time, and maybe it'll help some day when I am able to spend a few months in Mexico, so I can immerse myself in the language, to really learn it.

That said, I've cumulatively taken about 6 years of Spanish throughout middle school, high school, and community college.

As this article points out, they are adding an impressive amount of new content. The new "Stories" feature is cool (I think it's still under the "Labs" section). So is their podcast, which is an NPR-style story that alternates 1 paragraph in Spanish, then the next paragraph in English.

Years ago, I had a project for an app that proposes collaborative language learning quizzes. Sometimes, I think I shouldn't have abandoned it because existing software still doesn't exactly provide what I want.

I had a trip to Kiev a bit ago, and decided to take some lessons while there. I hated it. I couldn't keep up with the class, felt like I was learning nothing and wasting money.

Different learning styles work best for different people.

I recently picked it back up again (couple of months ago), and tried doing both Japanese and French. I find the French one much more helpful. The Japanese module is still in beta, and it shows; tapping on one word to look them up if you don't remember them doesn't work well in Japanese but it works fine in French.

And yeah, I found the Japanese curriculum pretty lacking, and the kanji really hard to learn in this format.

I did find an interesting way to practice my hiragana and katakana, though. I created a slide deck using Tinycards (Duolingo's flash-card app, I found it a lot easier to set up and use than Anki even if it's less powerful) in which I would have to write the kana using the handwriting input method for Japanese. I found that actually trying to write out the characters was way more helpful for remembering them then just clicking on the right one out of a list.

However, I couldn't figure out a good way to get Duolingo to give me a list of the kanji I was supposed to have learned by now to use that with kanji, and figured it would be too much of a pain to go back through all of the lessons, write all of that down and then create the flash cards manually from that.

I've quit with the Duolingo Japanese lessons by now, I think I want to wait until they're a little more fully baked, and even then I'll probably need some other outside resources to study along with.

I think Duolingo in its current form is a good way to stay practiced with a language and learn some vocabulary and grammar, but only for some of the languages. However, even for those languages, you will need some other resources to really develop fluency.

Also learning Esperanto (I don’t think it’s teaching me enough) and Greek (no idea, only half way through the course, but I can now touch type Greek on an English keyboard).

Conversations out loud might be a different story.

I tried Dulingo for a bit but found it mostly annoying as I prefer the structured way I've been taught and learned in the past. Maybe it's just how I enjoy learning though.

> DuoLingo will bring you to 15% understanding of Hiragana before dumping you into Katakana

Personally that's how I prefer to learn -- I got to being able to read about 50% of the hiragana without too much effort then went straight to WaniKani, and found I was making much more rapid, reliable (i.e I feel like I'm actually _reading_ them, not just being able to remember the meaning/having to think about it) on the remaining 50%, and I've mostly learn the katakana through context/use -- but of course YMMV.

I've been doing Duolingo for French for the past few months, trying to dust off the couple of semesters of French I took in college and get a bit beyond that to maybe get to the point where I can get by. Yes, there is a bit skewed towards things like family relationships, clothes, the house at the beginning; things that might be important if you're living somewhere but possibly less important if you're just visiting. But they are always adding new content, and as the original article points out they just did a revamp to give access to a lot of newer content they hadn't provided access to before.

I don't know; a language generally has a huge amount of vocabulary, as well as grammar to learn, and you need to learn it in some order.

The main thing I do find lacking is that it's pretty much all translation or transcription of simple sentences, or word matching. I do find these helpful for learning vocabulary and grammar, but they aren't going to lead to fluency. The article does mention that something that they are working on is longer listening comprehension exercises, which I think would help out with that a lot.

Saved you a click

It takes you into a lesson that it thinks you should review next. Duolingo is meant to implement spaced repetition in that it keeps track of all the times you have seen every word, and it tries to give you lessons that are "due" for repetition according to its algorithm. In the web interface they show you how "strong" each word is in their opinion, but I found that their data on when you last saw a word was buggy.

Anyway, the barbell is useful to keep you up to speed by revisiting stuff once you have finished all the lessons once.

People often respond well to a bit of encouragement, and replies are more likely to be seen than a meta-comment.

Also, certain topics end up reinforcing earlier topics. I lost count of the number of times that the stupid "algorithm" would make me go through the exercise of translating "no, nada". At some point, don't I just know this?

Additionally, when you have topics that aren't "gold", it simply selects the first non-gold one to repeat. This can mean that a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the tree gets rusty because you don't get to it while you end up redoing stuff you know backwards.

I made this observation in the forums but couldn't really get any traction on the issue.

At some point they also introduced the stupid heart system, which was pretty much my trigger for just abandoning the whole thing.

Also, I'm really not sure how much this format actually works. Like having completed the Spanish tree, I'm honestly not sure if I really remember anything more than a small fraction of it.

Introducing them all together is helpful. However after some level of proficiency I would like to receive them separately. In a group with unrelated exercises. On a schedule indicating how well I know that phrase.

That said, they have been a painless way to gain a basic foundation.

If you look at some of the core languages like German the course has a 'words' tab and it shows you exactly how strong it thinks you know each word and when you saw each word last.

It could be different between languages, and who knows how well it works.. but it's definitely something they seem to be working on and putting thought into.

2. It's not bad to forget words during the learning process.

3. Purely personal: SRS reviewing is the ultimate bore, however you design your cards. And making the cards is even more of a bore. It's the opposite of fun.

* Start the Duolingo tree

* Start Pimsleur French around checkpoint 2 when I realized I couldn't speak at all

* Start taking classes at Alliance Francaise when I started struggling with the grammar, starting at 103

* Spend at least a week in immersion in a Francophone country to solidify the learning

* Start drilling nouns + gender with Anki when I noticed that native speakers kept correcting my gender usage

Also, I've been putting a lot of time in the Russian module and I'm really disappointed that there's no way to learn the grammar rules in Duolingo. Russian especially has surprising behavior depending on the characters used.