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Comment by cosarara | Hacker News Reader

The worst part of Duolingo is how boring it is to level up a skill to 5 when you already understand the topics taught. When learning German or Italian and testing out of the earlier levels, the exercise you get most of the time is just "sort these English words to translate the sentence". You can get it right all the time just by looking for a grammatically correct sentence with the most superficial of understanding. And if you really understand the sentence, you feel like you are wasting your time. What's the point? Let me take the level 4 or level 5 test directly!

I feel that over time, the app has been too optimized for user engagement instead of efficient learning. A/B test abuse, and looking at the wrong metrics.

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I'm going through Duolingo to actually learn Spanish for the first time, and I definitely agree that the direct approach for leveling up a lesson to level 5 is... tedious at best.

Instead I'm taking a different approach. I'm getting each skill to level 2, which is the point right before lessons start asking you to type answers and take away the word bubbles. That gets me basic familiarity, and I move through the coursework fairly quickly. Then once I'm past a checkpoint, as I have extra time, I slowly level up the stuff I've already completed. Right now most of my coursework is level 2, and the top like 1/5 of it is level 3. So far, this seems to work surprisingly well; it's kindof a crude, guided spaced repetition. The practice feature does actual spaced repetition I think, but I like this guided approach more.

The other key takeaway of course is that the "subject" of a given lesson is a head fake. The vocabulary matches that lesson, but the app is also careful to sneakily introduce grammatical constructs over time as well, and if you don't read the tips (I don't if I can help it), then you end up picking up a lot of those rules organically. For example, "a la" (roughly "to the") condenses to "al" in Spanish, and that was never explicitly taught in a lesson, it was just introduced in a sentence one day. It was confusing... and then it "clicked" and I got a feel for it. That part is very neat.

Anyway, the app certainly isn't for everyone, but as a total beginner who's tried other language learning approaches, mixing Duolingo (for consistent vocabulary acquisition) with organic language sources (in my case: games and TV in Spanish) seems to be really effective. The app may feel easy, but it's working and I can feel my understanding in the organic sources expanding as I go. If nothing else, it also gives me a baseline; I can knock out my 50xp in 20 minutes or so, and I do that every day. I think eventually I'll be able to read at a basic level and then I'll leave Duolingo in the dust, but until then, as a total novice, it's been a good starting point, and that seems to be what it's trying to be.

> For example, "a la" (roughly "to the") condenses to "al" in Spanish

“a el” condenses to “al”.

You might want to get a book on Spanish grammar to cross-check when you encounter new rules.

Ha, I would mess up the example. :P You're completely right of course. I guess I assumed it applied to both genders, but I'm still picking up the gender of a lot of the words; that's not terribly intuitive.

(almost) All the nouns ending with "a" are feminine - la silla, la mesa, la casa, la luna, la montaña. (Notable exception: el agua). Also feminine all that end in "ción" such as: la nación, la configuración, la confirmación.

Almost all the other nouns are masculine - el carro, el niño, el oso, el barrio, el avión, el camión, el árbol.

Pretty sure with those 2 simple rules you will catch 90% of genders right.

Actually, agua is feminine. But it takes el instead of la because it starts with an accented a. The common language-learning advice is "Don't learn the genders of nouns; learn the articles that go with them." But it doesn't quite work in Spanish.

poeta, nauta are two -a nouns that are masculine; sofa if you count a with accents

Nauta and poeta are both members of a small set of profession words which are masculine despite being in the first declension (-a) in Latin. My textbook provided a comprehensive (again, small) list and just suggested they should all be memorized; the only other one I remember now is agricola, farmer.

Manus, hand, is one of an even smaller set of feminine fourth declension nouns. I believe this oddity has also been preserved in Spanish as "la mano".

This makes me wonder whether the Spanish words for trees tend to be feminine while having masculine-looking forms; that is regular in Latin.

most nouns ending in -ma (but not all) are masculine. Basically the ones with Greek roots. I was taught -ma is masculine like your mom.

> When learning German or Italian and testing out of the earlier levels, the exercise you get most of the time is just "sort these English words to translate the sentence".

Just for fun, I tried passing that test in three different languages.

Italian: I don't speak Italian at all, but with cognates and guesswork, I still managed to answer many questions correctly. Not enough to skip any lessons, though.

Japanese: I've been learning Japanese for maybe 6 months and the test result would've let me skip 60% of the course. That's despite the fact that I don't know any vocabulary related to some of those skipped topics (such as clothes).

Chinese: I'm fluent and answered all questions correctly, but was only skipped past 86% of the course.

>the app has been too optimized for user engagement instead of efficient learning

Yes. As an ad-supported app, the developers overwhelming motivation is to get users to take the next lesson, rather than to progress them toward mastery. The app seems designed to stimulate every reward center in the brain toward that end, the mechanisms for which usually ending up getting in the way of accessing the lesson content efficiently.

Duolingo also has a website, which is what I used studying German 6 years ago. Not only did it not have ads (don't know if that's still true), input with he keyboard was much easier and I felt gave me a little more memory than swiping a keyboard.

At that time each grammar lesson also had a page summarising the rules you were about to learn with examples and explainations.

From my experience most language learning products get boring once you advance. Happened to me with Pimsleur and also Duolingo. At some point you are ready for real conversation with people and the constant repetition that is necessary for the basics gets tedious.

Repetition is the mother of learning, as the old Russian proverb states.

The point is making a phrase really get memorized.

The Pimsleur method, which relies on a progressly timed learning technique really helps commit language to long term memory. It's audio only, but I really recommend then. I believe Ankh is based on this as well.

If you are interested in repetition, Assimil is similar.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimil

> These are some of my favorite Christmas gifts because they're the only self-teachers I know that work. In just 20 minutes a day -- if you do exactly what they tell you to with the books and accompanying recordings - - then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan 3-year old.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=502158...

Pimsleur really hammers the language into you until it becomes instinctive.

Then make me type it in the target language.

you can switch between using keyboard input and word banks (at least on desktop)

and you only need level 1 of something to move on to the next lesson.

Yes, that's true. But level 1 doesn't force you to write in the target language - the real value is in the last level. You can go through the level 1 of all lessons relatively quickly, but you won't be actually learning.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of the distinction between the levels as I'm running them all up to five since Japanese is so completely foreign to me.

The Japanese course seems to be hated by the reddit crowd for learning the language, but it's been very beneficial to me. At least one reason is that if I stuck to writing the language in a workbook my progress on the language would be glacial. I would physically be able to write the characters better but would know a lot less of the language.

Too much repetition is inefficient.

Perhaps you have heard Russian epic of Cinderella?

> the exercise you get most of the time is just "sort these English words to translate the sentence". You can get it right all the time just by looking for a grammatically correct sentence with the most superficial of understanding.

I think this is just a regression that came in as a result of their mobile app push. They expected it to be difficult for new users to get started with input methods, so they replaced typing exercises with word arrangement exercises, this means that the whole answer is just sitting on your screen, which defeats some of the point.

You can fix this by configuring these exercise types to be typing rather than word rearrangement, there's a little toggle IIRC at the bottom of each of this exercise type.

I agree that in the last year or two they seem to have optimized for metrics which do not map well to linguistic attainment. IIRC they used to have speaking exercises, and as far as I'm aware those are gone (maybe they couldn't make them good enough that they weren't making some people worse at speaking).

Actually we can jump up a level directly with fewer than 4 mistakes. To take the level 4 test we only need to take three additional tests which would cost only about 20 minutes.

In the desktop web app you can at least always take a test to skip a level or four. On mobile you have to spend credits to skip.

You can do this on their mobile web app as well which is why I use that over the mobile application. The mobile web app experience is actually quite nice.

>"sort these English words to translate the sentence" //

If I remember correctly you can choose to type in the words, but on mobile it can be easier mechanically to choose the words from the list and place them in order. Later on I think it removes the choice in some tests and has you type full sentences.

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