A foundation course in reading German
courses.dcs.wisc.edu
courses.dcs.wisc.edu
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/: "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996, i.e., since before much of this book's audience was born. "beeinflüssen" should be "beeinflussen".
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-no...: Not an error of German per se, but I find "memorizing the gender of every noun is not particularly important" and "It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn each noun with its definite article" contradictory and confusing.
On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine." Counterexamples I came up with in a minute or so: der Brei, das Allerlei, das Benzin. The reason is that in these cases -ei and -in are not suffixes in the same sense as they are in the common case illustrated by the authors' examples, but a beginner would not be able to tell.
This feels like it could be a better resource with more attention to small details.
It is now a "open textbook was launched publicly on 22 October 2014 and is revised continually" so I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections.
>The second edition of this textbook was published in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, copyright Howard Martin, primarily edited by Sue Tyson. Earlier versions apparently date back at least to a University of Wisconsin-Extension Independent Study course guide titled “A Guide to Reading German” “revised and expanded” by Howard Martin and published in 1975.
The page in question was last revised in 2017, 21 years after the reform. Clicking on one of the most recent revisions, https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/common-da-word..., revised on December 10, 2018, I see that they spell "nass" as "naß". If they missed this, I'd say they don't care.
I certainly don't care enough to go through all occurrences of ß in this book and point out to them which ones to fix.
Nichts der Art.
"Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996,
Which many adults I know continue to thumb their noses at, to this day (in personal communication, at least). In any case, arguably one needs to be aware of the pre-RSR spelling conventions to have a solid grip on the language as a whole. So I would prefer a reference that made us aware of both variants, actually.
As to feminine nouns -- good call. It's a difficult task to put together reference materials that are both comprehensive (and approachable) and obsessively accurate.
That was one of the goals of the spelling reform to make the use of ß more consistent and use simpler rules for it. Exactly because there is no difference in pronounciation between ss and ß.
So what I’m trying to say is that s/ss/ß have distinct use cases which follow consistent rules.
Cultural identity and pride in one's lingual heritage play a part too. As a Dutchman, I like the German ß. Nothing conveys the notion of a foreign country better than another language and a differing orthography.
The ß even has a proper capital these days: ẞ. While no word ever begins with ẞ, you do need it when capitalising a whole word — e.g., on a sign.
Really? I need to fix all my regular expressions..
Absolutely, but I'd argue that the first example in the book is not the best place to put this. Learners will at some point encounter pre-RSR texts (or personal communications that don't care about RSR or other standard language features), but much of what they are likely to encounter at the beginning will be newer texts that use the current conventions.
But I still think it’d be fine to teach beginners that nouns ending in -tion are “always” feminine.
Anyway, just above the example in question, the authors manage to point to a rule that "usually" (their emphasis) holds, so they could just have written "usually" here as well. They could also have pointed out that the suffixes they list have the effect they state when added to a root that is a word in its own right: Bäcker-Bäckerei, heiter-Heiterkeit, Land-Landschaft etc. though admittedly this might add too much complexity this early on.
I would hazard the guess that, in this explanation, the author refers to syllables and not just a combination of letters.
The counter-examples you gave all end in syllables different from those mentioned by the author:
der Brei - one syllable / das Aller-lei / das Ben-zin
It's basically different in any county and different counties can be right next to each other.
But while I did eventually get my C1, my German isn't great so I don't want to claim any expertise.
EDIT: This may be interesting for you though. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:German_nouns_which_h...
https://infothek.rotkel.de/rechtschreibung/genus.html
A well-known example is "die/das Tram" (rather a Helvetism; this words means the same as in English; the more usual German word is "die Straßenbahn). In Standard German, "Tram" is considered as an abbreviation of "die Trambahn" - so it is female. In South Germany and Switzerland, "das Tram" is used.
- der/die Butter
- das/die Huhn
see e.g., https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zwiebelfisch/zwiebelfisch-der-... (German) for more local linguistic peculiarities.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Joghurt
More examples here
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:German_nouns_which_h...
However the point about knowing noun articles is extremely important, and the more you stick with it from the beginning the easier it is when you are learning the different cases later on.
I happen to be learning German and Latvian right now. The way I'm approaching them is to find easy-level texts (https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de for German, children's books for Latvian), and reading a couple of paragraphs. Whenever I find a word I don't know, I use Google Translate, and add it to a custom Anki deck. Then I practice vocabulary every day.
This is a slightly more structured way of how I learned English back in the day (my English improved tremendously by playing Monkey Island, especially trying to understand the pirate insults).
My girlfriend (Latvian, and the reason I'm learning the language) says there's a lot of Latvian words adapted from German (due to long occupations over time), but I haven't really found them yet.
Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? My native language is Spanish, and I can get a decent sense of meaning from texts in Portuguese and Italian. We went to the Louvre last year, and I could also understand some French. My girlfriend, however, couldn't understand a word, despite being fluent (but not native) in Spanish.
Often two languages share a word, but it's much less common (or even obscure) in one of them and it's unlikely that non-natives know it.
For example, "die Kartoffel" means "potato" in german, while in in polish it's "ziemniak", so they aren't similar at all.
However, polish also has "kartofel" which is a word that every native speaker knows, but you won't find it in e.g. newspapers.
I think this is similar to understanding dialects. My native language is German and I can make sense of most German dialects (some are really hard tho' like Platt or Niederbayerisch). On the other hand, my English is proficient (CEFR C1/C2), but I regularly trip over dialects and even strong accents (Irish is especially hard). My personal guess is that you have memorized a much larger "network" of similar words (in meaning or sound) in your native language than in any language you learned in a structured/artificial way based on top of your native language.
Fun fact: At least here in Bavaria, we often say German is our first foreign language and our dialect is our actual native language. So we already organically learned two similar languages as child.
ISO 639-3 does aim to classify languages and not dialects, but that means the classification needs to change as the linguistic evidence is reinterpreted.
For the time being, there's a test Wikipedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf
I tried reading some articles, and while it mostly feels like Standard German with fantasy spelling, there were some words I didn't understand, e.g. in the article about cows: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou
I guess the words you didn't understand are mostly due to absurd spelling to capture the pronouncuation and the use of colloquial words in Franconian dialect (high german jetzt -> colloquial etz -> Franconian etzadla). I had trouble reading it.
> A Kou (Anschbachisch: Kua, Hoaloisch: Kuâ) is a weiblichs Rind un a Väich as der Familie vo däi Honndräächer. Sie is a Nudzdier un a Milch- un Fleischlieferand. Der wilde Schdammvadder is der Aueroggs. Vor ungfähr 8000 Joahr hams a boarr vo denne eigfangd und an Menschn gweend. Däi Nachgummma davo sin edzadla unsre Käi.
High german (verbatim): Eine Kuh ist ein weibliches Rind und ein Vieh aus der Familie der Hornträger. Sie ist ein Nutztier und ein Milch- und Fleischlieferant. Der wilde Stammmvater ist der Auerochse. Vor ungefähr 8000 Jahren haben sie ein paar von denen eingefangen und an Menschen gewöhnt. Die Nachkommen davon sind jetzt unsere Kühe.
I do remember an unfortunate situation during a summer camp in Croatia. I was sitting next to a very attractive girl from Switzerland and I was simply unable to have a conversation with her, because I couldn't understand at least half of what she was saying :(.
In general I think it helped to learn them in parallel rather than in sequence. It made it easier to pick up the more fundamental grammatical/linguistic things.
I wouldn't do it outside of full time education though. It was a lot of work.
The problem is that it not only takes hands-on time to build the mental infrastructure, but also calendar-time.
In general, if you learnt a certain Word X time ago, you have a good chance of forgetting it after X further time. There clearly is a distribution, but this general rule of thumb does generally hold. I know I could learn a few hundred words in a day to remember them the next day, if I really wanted to (using mnemonics). But they would fade within days, or weeks at the most.
I just wish there was a good way to incorporate specific words into all that.
1. It needs parameter tuning. If you get everything right, you were re-shown cards too quickly. There's a variety of ways to tune how that happens, some by showing you cards further apart, and some by introducing more cards. Either way is fine for language learning, IMO.
2. Users hate the experience when the parameters are tuned correctly. It should be something of a struggle, and you should be failing about 20 percent of cards you see. When every card you see is on the cusp of forgetting, each card is legitimately cognitively taxing.
3. Flashcards don't really fit into society. College classes tend to be a series of topic focused exams, and once the exam has passed, any time spent on retention of knowledge gained competes with time for acquiring knowledge for the next exam. Also, folks tend not to like the idea of failing 20 percent of their exam questions due to forgetting.
After revealing the answer you should be able to say "repeat this soon, later, much later".
A different kind of app shouldn't use time at all but rather a queue of all words/cards and then put cards back a certain number of positions, depending on level and user input.
The queue system works a lot better with different timescales (practicing over short or long terms), and it doesn't tell you how much time you have to put in at any given day. It also takes less parameters, I think.
That also has the advantage that you'll understand the common words first instead of what someone considered to be a sensible order (one of the first words I learned in French was the French word for parrot, which I have used exactly never since except for joking around with people who learned from the same textbook).
But in general, by learning and repeating any words in a language you build the mental infrastructure to learn more words easier.
It is almost scary to me how easily I can memorize new Chinese vocabulary compared to a few years ago. You could say my brain was pre-trained as an autoencoder!
As the introduction states, the book assumes that the student works with a dictionary. So, it explicitly does not address vocabulary.
Your site looks really promising... I will definitely give it a shot!
What was your driver for creating it? Language is a very competitive space these days.
Duolingo says they don't currently aim too teach beyond A2/B1, so you may already be past that.
Having learnt a few languages with and without duolingo, I think you will usually need 2000+ words in a language, and close to 90% of the grammar to read native texts well. Duolingo can get you quite close to, but not past that mark.
Vocabulary is easy to learn by consuming a lot of media.
Finally pronunciation may be the next hurdle, especially if you're not used to germanic languages.
I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.
You see this in English, too.
That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands.
Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.
There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words.
...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!)
I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice.
Of course that doesn't mean that people don't use language consciously. It's just not that one way of talking can be assumed to be the default for everyone.
It's not, really. At least, not in the sense that it doesn't actually happen. What GP describes is part of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “register” [1], wherein people have different little context-dependent “dialects” or “styles” that they use in different situations: for example, you might use a different sublanguage when speaking at home than you'd use at work, and even that one might be different from one you'd use in a job interview, or giving a TED talk, or writing a paper for CACM, vel sim. A particularly well-known, if extreme, example would be “babytalk”. The obverse of babytalk,—uh—“smartypantstalk”, seems to be a perennial literary criticism throughout history, sometimes famously so (Mark Twain (v. James Fenimore Cooper) and Ernest Hemingway (v. William Faulkner) come to mind).
> There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words.
Although registers and register-switching are a natural part of language (and people switch between registers all the time without even being aware of it), I think it also true that different people have different registers for the same situations. So, perhaps your casual register seems to many of your speech partners more like their own formal register, or otherwise more like what they expect a formal register to seem like. Or maybe you were raised in an environment where the formal register was perfectly appropriate for use in casual contexts, and so it actually is your formal register (which just so happens to also be your casual register).
In fact, I think it might be harder to reduce your vocabulary than to build it, since in adding words you need not consider any particular speech partner or their understanding, but in removing words you must consider many possible speech partners and whatever you might know of their vocabularies, to make effective decisions about which words need removed. I imagine it involves a lot of trial and error.
> I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice.
This is certainly true, and one of the main topics of sociolinguistics. The particulars of our speech as perceived by our listeners are used to infer a deal of paralinguistic (and usually social) information, right or wrong (factually or morally). This is one of the reasons for register-switching: if I'd written this comment in the same register I'd use to talk to my 8-year-old nephew, I suspect you'd come away feeling rather confused and put-off (or you might infer that I'm mentally handicapped); on the other hand, I doubt my nephew would understand much of this comment as-is. By register-switching, I'm able to optimize my language not only for an appropriate level of linguistic competence, but also for an appropriate social setting, depending on how I want to be perceived, and how I want my listeners to judge my own perceptions of themselves. In some sense it's tactical, but it's a mostly subconscious and automatic operation, instinctive and reflexive, a natural part of language.
I think, however, there's something worth keeping in mind: depending on the situation or context, speakers of even standard dialects can be subject to prejudices. This is more seldom and, in most cases, less consequential (I think) than what speakers of non-standard dialects have to deal with, but, myself being a native speaker of “General American”, it's something I've experienced first-hand. I think that, perhaps, it has less to do with “standardness” per se than with the prestige associated with the dialect—it just happens that standard dialects are also usually prestigious. At the same time, I think the prejudices come from usual in-group vs. out-group dynamics, where your dialect can be a pretty distinct marker of your membership status. (I'm not much of a sociologist, however).
> ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!)
I know this is difficult— Good luck! :)
--
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
Thanks for the amazing reply!
If I am perfectly honest, reading articles and things written by non-native English speakers is easier for me. If I read articles in WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. it is harder to comprehend and takes more time to understand, compared to a Medium article or blog post written by a non-journalist.
?????
Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?
I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it.
A horrible example of state control.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237
I have several other apps but they don’t have a progression for working with a small group of words at a time. At some point, I’ll revise them to be like the 100 Word app.
The article here is not about words (which you can look up in a dictionary), but everything else, namely how the words are put together and what typical grammatical constructs mean.
BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.
There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
It's more app- and website-oriented, but the Tofugu website has quasi-monthly roundups of new Japanese learning tools.
I feel like Chinese - for a variety of reasons - doesn't have the same high level of pedagogical curation. But the Fuller book is good for learning classical, and Pleco is a great platform for dictionaries, flashcards, etc -- some paid, some free.
Isn't this book skipping the most important part of learning kanji, ie their readings? If yes, it's a total waste of time.
Basically learning the meaning and writing of all characters first, then their pronunciation is faster than learning each character fully, one at a time. Experience bears this out.
It is super interesting, as I want to learn to read Russian in order to learn more about the various languages of the region, many of which have only had monographs published in Russian. Now to see if I can find a used/cheap copy anywhere.
So, I can either learn how to read, hear, speak, and write a a single language or I can expend the same effort and learn to read many languages. For me, the later is much more appealing. But then, I'm a voracious reader and too introverted to be interested in talking or writing to actual living people.
If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language.
It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.
Daub. 1975. Comprehending Technical Japanese.
Gould. 1972. Russian for the Mathematician.
Stack. 1986. Reading French in Arts and Sciences, 4/e.
Franco & Sandberg. 1998. Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course.
That said, Germans often speak English like it was German indeed.
It's unfair that English should be the international lingua franca. But we can't change two facts of history: the British Empire, and America.
I agree English is not a particularly logical or phonetic language. However it has two things going for it -- it's easy to speak badly and it is easy to extend. Its grammar is simpler than most Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages (that I'm aware of -- correct me if I'm wrong). And being a mongrel language, it's used to absorbing other languages.
Plus no need to come up with a grammatical gender for every neologism or loanword. Chai latte? Done. Twitter? Done. Whereas in German, is it "der Tic-tac" or "die Tic-tac"? Or default to "das Tic-tac" since we don't know the origin of the word? This matters because the endings in all four cases of German depend on the grammatical gender. For instance, in the dative case, if it's "die Tic-tac", then it's "mit der Tic-tac", otherwise it is "mit dem Tic-Tac". Or in accusative, if it's "der Tic-tac" then it's "fuer den Tic-Tac". And then you have to get everyone to agree (for instance, der Joghurt or das Joghurt? depends where you are.)
In practice it's not a big deal obviously (neologisms enter the German language all the time), but in English there's just less friction and fuss. English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).
Neither does German. If you refer to the "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung", this is as the name implies just a transnational organisation from the German speaking countries to keep the orthography (somewhat) consistent.
Which is something that English is dearly missing. A consistent orthography actually helps language learners a lot. This is one of the few points where English sucks as a lingua franca.
If you think about the "Duden" dictionary, this is also not true. The Duden has always been a descriptive dictionary, not a normative one.
There is no organization in German on the level of the Académie française.
There are some small private clubs fighting for the "purity" of the language (which of course is ridiculous for a language with so many imported Latin/Greek/French and now English words) but nothing with enough authority to dictate the evolution of the living language.
Even the most fluent non-native German speakers I know still mix up genders and adjective endings every second sentence, at least in speaking.
I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish?
I'm a French native speaker trying to improve my Spanish at the moment. Should I brush up on French shenanigans (yes even native speakers make mistakes and need reference material) from a Romance language point of view?
Quite a lot, since even though English is a very strange Germanic language it is at its core in many ways still Germanic, so it has a large overlap with German that it does not at all share with Slavic languages like Polish. It also shares a lot with Danish (which I find to often sit somewhere in the middle between English and German) and I presume Dutch as well. So yes, that book might very well be helpful in learning Dutch too, it is just a way smaller niche.
Source: I could be considered a native speaker of both German and Polish.
Personally I think it helps if you understand your own Grammar in order to learn a different language. So it definitely can help if a text book points out how your _own_ languages Grammar works and how it differs from the language you are trying to learn.
Learning latin in school helped me a great deal understanding etymology of words in English, Roman languages and Grammar in general. When I took Linguistics in university it opened my eyes about the quirkiness of German (and English) grammar. We always used English for examples, as German has more exceptions.
The 'surprising specific' bit is in how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents. e.g. the German edition might try and show how English emulates declensions with prepositions, while the Spanish might explain how the auxilary verb 'have' has multiple uses covered by tener/haber.
I'm not a native Romance speaker but yes, knowing 'French shenanigans' would perhaps help understand the other - when I learned Catalan on duolingo (from Spanish), I made more blunders in my rusty Spanish than in mistakes in the Catalan I was trying to learn!
Yeah, if it has comparative grammar it's not that much surprising.
From the context of the paragraph I was assuming this would be a volume purely about English grammar. Since it's aimed at native speakers that already know the grammar of their own language, this would be an advanced text, for students looking to improve their knowledge of English architecture itself. And somehow improve this advanced knowledge in ways that are not generic, but specific to the fact that they are simultaneously learning X or Y language...
In sharing this link I'm not advocating a total technical approach!
As for exposure/absorption you are completely right, I have attempted to create a mini Germany head space.
What I'm doing and recommend to whoever interested:
- I switched my Phone's language to Deutsch. When searching the web I end up with results in German that I try to comprehend if I have time: looking up the word on the translator (and less often on an online german dictionary - which i should be doing more)
-I started listening to songs in German (I came to like the first albums by Tocotronic)
-I have joined a discord server titled "German Learning And Discussion" (should anyone want to search for it) , if I have time at night I join a call with a couple of natives and learners.
-I check Duolingo's stories and exercises now and then, although not my favourite methodology.
- Watch movies / TV series with (German) subtitles. Recommendations: Dubbed stuff that is easy to digest like e.g. Crime Stuff / Big Bang Theory.
- Or more advanced, German productions: Dark on Netflix; Babylon Berlin; Bad Banks; Stromberg (The Office clone); Tatortreiniger; Tatort.
- Read books like that you might know in your native language: the Little Prince, Harry Potter.
haven't unfortunately watched a lot of those the past days but will look for what you recommended!
When I played this for the first time, it took me a while to figure out why their lips weren't agreeing with what they were saying. By default Netflix played the English dub for me instead of German audio with English subtitles.
The subject matter of Dark is good enough that I would watch it anyway, but if it's originally in German? Huge bonus. I have been watching it on German audio with "description" in German (so there's a narrator talking about things people are doing, describing their facial expressions, etc) and English subtitles. I wish there were more content like this available in the States.
OT: is there a good source for interlinear translations of texts on the Internet? In whatever languages? I‘ve never come across such a source.
Is that the sort of thing?
Screenshot without CSS: https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg
Add-on that I used: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/
I have completed Spanish, Mandarin and Norwegian. The Spanish and Norwegian ones are very comprehensive, the Mandarin tops off at around 1000 words. German also seems to be one of their most polished languages, contrasted with courses in Hawaiian and Navajo.
For instance, I completed the entire French course but I still can't have even a basic conversation when I'm in France.
What do you think is holding you back? Is it that you don't know how to form a sentence, are you unsure to come up with the right words, do you think the course didn't contain the words you need?
In my opinion the Duolingo course does contain the necessary words, phrases and grammar for holding a conversation. But it may not be enough to understand native speakers at native speeds. And maybe you need to be more confident!
I would recommend listening to French podcasts or videos even if you don't understand them. With subtitles if available.
I went through all the levels.
>> What do you think is holding you back?
What was holding me back was: 1. Spoken French goes much faster than the French spoken in the course so I wasn't able to understand most of it.
2. To form a sentence to express yourself in real life is much more difficult than to translate a given English sentence like in DuoLingo.
I agree that to be able to use a language you need to do more than just follow a course like DuoLingo; you have to read books, watch television and most important practice it in real life.
Forming sentences gets easier once you make the switch from translating sentences into composing them without the intermediate step. That's also possible when translating in Duolingo, you just have to concentrate on formulating the idea in the foreign language.
I made that switch in English first, and I seem to do it by default in any other language. It's much easier that way.
I used Duolingo for a month when starting out and consider it a mistake. It doesn't teach grammar, vocabulary goes faster when you space repitition individual words, and even after the full tree is unlocked there isn't really that much depth.
The sentences are not taken from corpora, but edited by Humans, mostly volunteers. The courses are improved using user data. Some of the courses are indeed not the best quality.
If TTS is used (many courses use natural speakers), it was OK for me, so far.
Duolingo isn't perfect but I think it's the most efficient way to learn a new language from nothing up to a certain level (A2, maybe B1). If used correctly. You need to decide yourself how much time you spend on repetition vs progress. And yes, you probably need something else for full grammar explanation or Chinese/Japanese Characters. Though they are reportedly working on better Character exercises.
Ok, I’ve never been far enough on their website to see it (I mostly test the mobile app). I’ll check it soon.
> Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.
Which defeat using Duolingo in the first place. And no, some language have quite complicated grammar (Czech, Turkish, Finnish for instance) and somewhat lacking in ressources if your native language isn’t English.
Yes, it might help to have a more organized grammar reference, but Duolingo does make you practice grammar quite efficiently in my experience.
For those complaining about Duolingo: Are there better routes? The convenience of the app, integrating audio, grammar and vocabulary are really hard to beat in terms of learning efficiency, even if you might have an in-person course.