Duolingo becomes first VC-funded $1B Pittsburgh tech startup
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Is that enough? Definitely not. Not for me at least. They basically give you the 'hello world' of a language.
I speak 5 languages (learned through school and life choices) but when I tried to learn a 6th on Duolingo I felt like the experience was not good enough for me. A tutor or a class would probably be mandatory and using Duolingo just for re-affirming some basic concepts would be a nice to have, like a companion app..but they have to be able to let teachers create their own lessons.
Having said that, I’ve found the learning experience on Duolingo varies wildly depending on the language. French, for example, has an excellent curriculum with stories and live conversations with bots. Dutch or Hindi on the other hand are extremely lacking.
I go to the Netherlands at least once a year for work and can understand a little. So 2 weeks ago I started The DL Dutch lessons. I think they’re great! Certainly not a substitute for immersion, but I totally think that in 5 mins/day, I’ll be ready to converse a bit in a month or two.
Not to say that DL couldn’t be better, but for what I’m paying, Dutch lessons from DL seem to be worth my time.
English speakers have a really hard time with German and Dutch piling up verbs at the end of giant clauses. You've already learned that when you became fluent in German.
I would probably piss a lot of people off if I were to call Dutch a "dialect" of German, but Dutch is definitely the closest language to German.
If you wanted to know whether Duolingo worked for language learning you'd be better off trying a language family that you're not already familiar with, but not one that's renowned for being particularly difficult like Japanese. Maybe Russian?
That said, the State Department's estimation of the difficulty of Chinese is inflated by the difficulty of the writing system, which has nothing to do with the language itself. When people try to rank languages more-or-less objectively by how difficult they are to learn -- without reference to which other languages the student might already know -- Chinese and English are both common examples of the simplest class of languages. There is a theory in linguistics that seeks to explain this finding by reference to the history of "simple" languages -- they tend to be spoken across wide regions and learned by adults for pragmatic reasons. The theory goes that the influx of struggling adult learners changes the language to accommodate them.
(I do have problems with English tones interfering with my attempts to speak Chinese, but that's really not the same problem as "My language doesn't use tones, so I don't know how to produce them". I do know how; I just don't have good control over them.)
Is this actually true? I only did some basic Mandarin, but its tonal system is so simple (and plainly transliterated) that it seemed like a non-issue to me. Done & dusted in a couple of hours or so, compared to the hundreds of hours needed for vocabulary, idioms etc. Not to mention the terrifying writing system. And I have no natural advantages, carrying a common disability (native monolingual English), and having only learned German previously.
I am biased so I personally think Russian is a fantastic language both to speak and read. In addition to the literature and people, russian seems to be the most common non-English language after chinese on the internet which lets me see some corners of the web I would not otherwise.
But my point was that Duolingo is offering me value. Yes there are other tools. Yes I think language learning can’t be achieved with our interactions. But at the same time I think that duolingo Has been a good use of my time so far. I don’t have 20 minutes at a time to take a class but I do have 3 minutes 6-7 times a day when I can pull out my phone and practice.
DuoLingo isn't optimized to learn a language, it's optimized to give people the feeling they're learning a language.
Flash cards are better, books are better, CDs are better, Spotify is better, YouTube videos are a lot better, and learning in person is way better.
I'd agree that Duolingo significantly compromises effectiveness for the sake of engagement, but to most people engagement is the hardest part of learning a language!
This is not just a throwaway comment, either. I've built and run a language school for four years (with two partners), taught thousands of children, worked at a language learning startup, and have read a lot L2 acquisition papers and know this space pretty well. I also contributed to Anki long ago, but I'm not a huge fan of using SRS for learning vocabulary. Extensive reading (and listening once you can) is a far better strategy. (Anki is pretty good for memorizing discrete pieces info though, such as how to write each Chinese character or all the atomic weights and numbers on the periodic table).
As for engagement, I think Duolingo is pretty boring compared to making new friends, talking with people or even just reading a book about something I'm curious about. If you're learning any popular language (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, etc), you'll be able to find some pretty good graded readers aimed at beginners that let you start actually reading in your first few months of studying.
Can you explain your logic and how you measure success? FWIW I'm ~8 languages deep and started using SRS with my 5th language. For the last couple languages I've tracked my metrics extensively (i.e. words learned and retained per day). Also with the SRS tool I use I read sentences along side the words I'm learning so I get some context.
I covered some of my reasoning about the limitations of SRS in the 2nd half of this podcast: https://alchemist.camp/learning-machine/spaced-repetition-sy...
[1] SRS flashcard apps as an exclusive language learning system
[2] Extensive reading
While (2) is clearly better if those are your only choices, as you point out yourself SRS can easily be integrated into other curriculum or used as a supplemental tool. I'm not sure how many languages deep you are but I find getting through the first 1000-3000 words a real slog in the language and it is also quite hard to read in a language when you are at sub-3000 words unless you are reading especially prepared texts in a textbook for language learners.
My preferred method is to do the basic grammar of a language and first 2000 words as quickly as possible with a cram method and then work on speaking and transitioning from passive to active vocabulary. SRS is a nice tool, esp. if the SRS tool you are using also has included sentences in context (I mostly use learnwitholiver.com). Then usually I work to train for the state run test of the language that I'm studying at a reasonably high level.
In the link you're responding to, I said:
> "The second situation where spaced repetition works really well is when you're studying something more complex, but you can use spaced repetition as a scaffold to get through the initial phases a bit faster. Learning vocabulary is like this. Though there are the issues that pointed out earlier about context and collocations and word boundaries, spaced repetition can still be a huge win. And that's because you don't have to use it to learn and remember everything. You can use it to get a scaffold, to get started with whatever foreign language you're learning or medical vocabulary or whatever kind of vocabulary. And after having memorized, say, five hundred or a thousand or even five thousand words in this new area that you're studying, you can then do a lot of reading and use those words and encounter them in many different contexts and actually acquire a solid grasp of that topic."
I would definitely start with training my ear to the sounds in a language at the very beginning, but flashcards can also be a useful supplement early on. It's funny you mention Oliver! I was in contact with him when he first launched his site (just for Chinese, initially). For what it does, it's made well. LingQ is probably my favorite for getting the initial base down, though.
FWIW, I don't think I've every encountered anyone who saw SRS as an exclusive language learning system, except maybe a few hopeful app developers who have realized how easy it is to make a flashcard app.
The real question is how much of your study time do you want to spend on decontextualized sentences or words vs time spent on sustained reading, listening or conversation?
What makes you say that explicit instruction in grammar (which does exist in Duolingo, although you’re right that the emphasis is on vocabulary) and pronunciation is necessary? That’s not how people learn their native languages. Considering that anyone can learn any language with enough exposure, and most people fail to achieve their language learning goals due to giving up after less than a thousand hours, I’m skeptical of this kind of pedagogical criticism.
Babies spend a lot of time babbling, basically brute-forcing their way to a correct pronunciation. But what if you could make use of phonological research and resources like https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/ to help you get there faster?
Parents spend a lot of time playing "look at the X" games to help them learn vocabulary from examples. But what if you just look up unknown words in a dictionary and use spaced repetition to efficiently retain them?
Second-language learners have already bootstrapped their way to being able to communicate with other humans. So why not just make use of that, rather than repeating the same slow process of trial and error for another language?
In terms of grammar and vocabulary, five year olds have a much higher level than all but the best L2 speakers. I would regard the ability to speak as well as a 5 year old native speaker as an excellent outcome for five years of full time study of a language. Very few people achieve such a high level within that time.
I don't know about grammar, but I found a study [0] that estimates children in kindergarten (age 6) to have a mean vocabulary size of about 3000 root words. If you wanted to beat that in 5 years using spaced repetition, you'd only need to add less than 2 new flashcards per day. In my experience, 10+ new flashcards per day is doable. (When I was adding that many, I spent an hour a day on reviewing flashcards, which eventually made me scale back because I was only studying for fun in my free time.)
If you know full-time language students who don't have as large a vocabulary, I wonder how full their time actually was.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232518465_Estimatin...
Testing reported herein was conducted in Mayand June of 1999. Testing was done individually for children in kindergarten through Grade 2. The investigator introduced herself and said
I’m going to ask you what some words mean. Later, I'll ask you to read the same words and some others. Some of these words are common and some aren’t. If you want to stop at any time, you can. I’m going to read you a sentence and then ask you what a word means in that sentence. You can use words, pointing, or acting to explain the meaning of that word.
We then gave three examples, including, “ ‘I bought a new car.’ In this sentence, what does car mean?” We continued with “ ‘Johnny fell and broke his arm.’ What does arm mean?” If the child had difficulty with these examples, we would go over them and explain how to answer. (In the arm example, pointing to one’s arm would do.) A final example involved a hard word: “ ‘The material was translucent.’ In this sentence, what does translucent mean?” This example was given so that we could explain that there would be words children did not know, and that it was alright to say, “I don’t know.” (No children actually knew translucent.)
This seems to me like a test of which words children know, not the range of words typically used.
I can't find the term "expressive vocabulary" anywhere in the paper. Did you assume that's what they were estimating because the number seems low? Actually, 3000 words is quite a lot. The Simple English Wikipedia tries to use only the most common 1500 or so words, for example. Most concepts can probably be expressed in words a five-year old is familiar with. It's just that not everyone takes care to express themselves that clearly, so having a larger vocabulary is still beneficial.
Yes, look for any estimate of 5 year olds' vocabulary and it's much higher than this (unless it's an estimate of expressive vocabulary).
You don't really need to look at studies, though. Just talk to some 5 year olds.
Maybe not, but learning a language by passively listening to podcasts is a popular strategy.
http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html#langua...
(should update the catalogue data though, bit old now.)
- Can one disable the voice when looking up words in the dictionary?
- Does it only work with Netflix or do you have plans for Amazon/Disney+?
- Do you have large costs (hosting?) and plan paid pro features?
-- Just Netflix for now. We'll release a beta version for Youtube in about two weeks. Most of our users are in East Asia (75k in Korea), so, we'd look which services are popular there.
-- Hosting costs, well, not too bad. We use firebase.. outgoing data is 10c per Gb, but, we might add a few nginx catches on a digital ocean VM (in different regions) for some endpoints to get this down, and reduce latency for dictionary. Machine translations are the main cost (it's actually a paid feature already).
I wish they opened this up to community curation a bit for the less lucrative languages.
Get some basics and then practice by reading, watching stuff and most importantly: talking with other people. Duolingo is pretty good to get you to the start line.
Here's a crazy thought: People are different, and different people will have different best ways of learning a foreign language, depending on what they know beforehand, and how they like to learn.
Some people are having great success with duolingo, good for them. I'm not one of them, I think its structure sucks for me, I need way more grammar and structure rules, not an endless string of random sentences.
And the thing is, duolingo could add what I wanted to their lessons. They could absolutely add lists of pronouns or prepositions, or several sentences with small variations to their repertoire.
I think it's one prong of a multi-pronged approach to language learning.
I used this method to learn some basic phrases and greetings in Russian. It helped me get by as a tourist, along with earning some surprised looks from the locals.
Buy (or pirate, but really, you should buy them if you can afford it, they’re great) the entire set of Pimsleur French tapes. There are 90, each 30 mins long. Do one tape every day. Note that this will take you longer than 90 days as you are supposed to repeat tapes when you don’t remember ~80% of the content.
Concurrently, get Anki (flashcard program) and find a French vocabulary deck ordered by frequency. Learn as many new words per day as you have time for. Do all your required reviews every day.
Concurrently, spend as much time as you can every day reading or listening to appropriate material and trying to understand it. Search for “French graded reader” for some good books to buy.
(I've also heard Assimil is a good alternative to Pimsleur.)
I think a lot of language learns focus too much on vocabulary and grammar when starting out but they don't take the time to drill/ use the vocabulary they are learning in actual conversation. There is no point in passively knowing 1000 words if you can barely use 100 in an active conversation.
Another resource that I like but wouldn't recommend it unless it was on sale is the mimic method. Learning the phonetics and how to hear/create the unique sounds of your target language is really important but it's too expensive for what you get imo.
[0] mangolanguages.com
I'm intrigued by the fact that you can see this requirement coming up. What's imposing it on you? What defines "success" in learning French?
If you're interested in the experimental views of a random person on the internet, babies learn language in the following sequence:
1. Listen to the language with no understanding or context. By the time you're born, you will be able to tell the difference between your language(s), and a foreign language.
2. Practice producing sounds that could be part of the target language. If you're learning French, then at this stage you're pronouncing nonsense syllables, but at least they're nonsense French syllables.
3. Be exposed to many example sentences for which you already know the meaning. (This is actually an ongoing process which never terminates -- seeing an unfamiliar word used in a sentence for which you know the meaning is how you learn new words.)
4. Learn some single words. ("Mom". "Moon". "Jump".)
5. Use your words to communicate with the people around you. Look how they smile!
6. With your growing understanding of sentence structure, move on to sentences.
---
As an adult learner, you can collapse the phases (as do babies, really) and take advantage of formal instruction to learn things much faster than a baby can. I strongly recommend using formal instruction to go from "nothing" to "beginner" level. But stages 2, 3, and 6 remain crucially important for pronunciation, understanding, and production, and you should probably focus some time on each of them.
You may not need certain abilities. Foreign learners frequently never achieve native-like pronunciation, because strange pronunciation is only a minor barrier to communication. And many people learn a language to the point that they can understand it but can't really produce it themselves.
And a word of warning from personal experience -- I can converse well enough over text messages in Chinese for Chinese speakers to feel basically comfortable. All of my practice is in text -- in person, I still can't speak at all. You'll only develop skills that you use.
This is similar question I had. I think a lot of people on HN think learning means becoming an expert, but many people just want tourist level of fluency. That means vocabulary, phrases, and basic conversation. Whether someone learns perfect pronunciation and sentence structure or not means little as a tourist trying to get by.
I found Duolingo sufficient for tourist level fluency.
My first and last name are not sounds in English apparently and polite people try to pronounce them correctly (I do not really care how it is pronounced; I am not important) them, English and American (and Australian) cannot even hear side by side that they pronounce it really differently. They ask me to record the correct and then their way and they cannot even hear they are pronouncing it differently. How can you learn a language correctly like that? It must be practice right? I came here from another thread because I am sure this is the same as me learning Mandarin; I have been ordering green forks instead of green tea for a long time...
I see Duolingo as more of an interactive digital textbook, but as always there is a gap between completing exercises and applying your knowledge to the real world.
I believe it gives people basic, basic competency like you would get if you were a Chinese person who never learned English formally but watched English movies all the time.
For speaking it seems useless.
Memorizing nouns is what Duolingo does best
To get any good at a language, you need more than one magic bullet, anyways.
I don't really understand these posts from people who have allegedly learned a language yet lambast Duolingo for not making them fluent. There is literally no magic bullet for fluency. You need to be running the whole gamut (books, shows, interaction, podcast, whatever) every day to get good. So it's hard for me to take the critique seriously.
"Duolingo won't make you fluent" sounds like the critique of a beginner who is just now, after a month, discovering that there isn't a magic app that can take you from 0 to 100. But Duolingo is a great tool for daily exposure as part of your repertoire.
School language classes are notorious for leaving their students unable to function in the language that was supposedly "taught". I don't think that's the fault of the school or the classes, but I also don't think an improved grade in such a class is evidence of much additional competency.
> I believe it gives people basic, basic competency like you would get if you were a Chinese person who never learned English formally but watched English movies all the time.
Without some instruction at some point, the level of English competency you'll get by watching English movies all the time is zero, exactly the same as if you never watch anything.
Maybe try something like this: https://www.conversifi.com
It allows you to practice with a native speaker in your target language.
Disclaimer: I'm friends with one of the founders
I ain't putting them down, I am saying they have a lot of headspace to improve now that they proved their worth and valuation. Sharing ideas and feedback on startups is still the focal point of HN last time I checked.
I look forward to your upcoming "Show HN". Good luck.
If anything, I think it makes the world a slightly worse place. It means that someone committed to learning a language spends a lot of time on Duolingo and not something that works. They feel like they've made progress, but after weeks and months, they still can't read a label in the language.
I'm saying this as someone who has been using Duolingo heavily this week and was getting frustrated at how inefficient it is.
Well of course it isn't, but that's like saying "I'm a fighter pilot (trained in the air force), but when I try to use Flight Simulator X, it feels like the experience isn't good enough for me." The DL experience isn't really for you at all. It's for people would a little bit like to learn a new language. Not people who want to do it so badly that they'll invest substantial time in school and "life choices" to make it happen.
First she’s really dedicated to it.
And then she also has a lot of exposure to it. My kid goes to Spanish school, my parents speak Spanish, and she already understand a third latin language.
So I see duolinguo as a way to systematically increase vocabulary so that you can better understand the language your exposed to.
Typing word and sentence translations from your L1 into a language you don't speak just isn't a good way to learn a language.
I'm often hanging on the (absolutely terrible from a usability perspective) Duolingo forums to help people attempting to learn French and as such I often encounter people complaining that they can't figure out what the voices are saying. As a native speaker I can generally make out what it's supposed to say but it definitely sounds off and artificial. And even when the pronunciation is technically correct it's completely flat and lacks the natural emotion and emphasis a native speaker would use.
The fact that an app who's supposed to teach you languages relies on crappy text-to-speech to teach you pronunciation tells you everything you need to know about Duolingo.
Right now I can comfortably comprehend any A1 text, and can get by with A2 text when I look up the meaning of some words. I'm only halfway through. I can speak enough to at least successfully use speech to text on my phone (I answer textual questions on my phone by speaking and letting it turn my speech to text). I can understand some children shows. I have ONLY worked with Duolingo (and I read Dutch reddit comments). If it weren't for Duolingo I would never stick to it.
The app teaches you facts, but not conversation. The sentences increase in grammar complexity, but not depth or diversity of topics. Even with their language bots, you’re still having super basic conversations about nothing.
They could easily fix this by simply improving the quality of the sentences in the later lessons. Or switch to a different testing format, which worked in the beginning but don’t scale well once you’re past the middle and comfortable with the language. Maybe include substantial reading and listening comprehension exercises (i.e., multiple sentences), instead of a single complex sentence.
Duolingo has concrete problems with concrete solutions.
Older versions were a little less tuned to keeping the large audience, did typing without seeing the options, and went into some areas of interest of members of each language group. Reverting any of which would be improvements for teaching the most engaged users at the cost of losing 10X as many barely engaged participants.
It is the general problem of tuning content to learner's with out an outside authority preventing tuning to learner laziness.
The only added value I have from using Duolingo is getting some amount of practice actually constructing my target language but even then it's hugely limited because:
- You never have any context which makes the experience always completely artificial and makes it harder to get a feel or the language. IMO Duolingo would be 10x better if lessons followed (even very loosely) an internal story instead of just having random, often contrived sentences one after the other. Something as simple as recurring characters, simple common situations etc... It would make it a lot easier to have a mental model of the world you're talking about and it doesn't seem like it would complicate things heavily.
- The bulk of the practice involves translation exercises which is limiting and can even be counterproductive. A very important step towards fluency in any language is to stop translating and start constructing the language directly. I'm not a native English speaker but as I write these words I'm not translating a French internal monologue, I know what I want to say and I say it in English directly. It's faster and more natural that way.
- The killing blow is that those translation exercises are corrected by, as far as I can tell, some sort of complicated regexp engine. It's very common for a correct-but-unexpected solution to be rejected and when it gets reported it can lingers for years without being fixed. As such you start not to trust the correction given when you don't understand precisely why your sentence was wrong.
That last point is really frustrating. I'm a native French speaker and I tried finishing the "French for English speakers" tree using shortcuts to get an idea of the quality and I simply can't reliably unlock the checkpoints on my first try because some of my perfectly fine and idiomatic French sentences end up not fitting the regexp and be marked wrong.
(I've since been told that people in France do say "le menu", but I stand by the rest of that comment.)
The correct comparison is between motivated and unmotivated people.
Duo lingo is trash for learning languages, particularly Asian ones. People just get suckered in with illusions of learning a language without doing any real work, which is flat out impossible.
You’re better off using almost anything else, such as glossika.
I learned all sorts of vocab and conjugations from Duolingo at a time in my casual learning where I certainly couldn't be fucked to open a grammar book. That didn't come until years into being able to read books in Spanish.
To me, it's like telling people that jumping into a programming project does a disservice to you vs studying programming books and source code. Instead you need to realize that the most important thing is to be doing anything. There is no magic roadmap to learning something. Do whatever you can to practice daily even if it's just in the form of Duolingo exercises. You'll outgrow them eventually, but most people don't even reach that point.
Most people dabbling in a language don't even know if it's something they want to do for the 5+ years it takes to really learn it. Duolingo excels here. Giving someone some long term serious roadmap does not. They will probably just lose interest and give up.
I need grammar rules and lists of prepositions and verb endings. I need ten examples in a row where you change out a single word, to teach you how it changes the rest of the sentence.
Duolingo is just random flashcards, claiming to be grouped into lessons. I can absolutely see it as a companion tool to a proper language course, but it's not sufficient in itself, at least not for me.
The products are not necessarily useless, but they only help some people make some progress some of the time. They never live up to the hype around them.
Language acquisition is a multifaceted endeavor which takes time and effort. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or lying. (There are some outliers who can learn/acquire languages with great speed, but they're very rare.)
> Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or lying.
> Basic 1XP | Casual 10XP | Regular 20XP | Serious 30XP | Insane 50XP per day
So, according to Duolingo, it is "Insane" to devote 25 minutes per day on learning a language. To learn a language typically requires 50,000 minutes. And that's just to reach a basic level.
I wonder if Duolingo's "Casual" learners realize that that setting implies a 30 year commitment.
I’m also using Duolingo for Esperanto and Greek, and I don’t feel like it’s teaching me either of those languages to the same standard it taught me German.
Nevertheless, it’s good enough for me to subscribe.
Would you mind sharing the podcasts you're listening to? I'm watching "Arte journal" in German but it sometimes goes too fast and news for kids like "ZDFtivi logo!" do not teach you a lot of vocabulary after a while.
News: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-na...
Interviews with videos: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/video-thema-deutsch-le...
More general German language learning podcasts:
* https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/coffee-break-german/id...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/slow-german/id10858281...
This is true, but I don't think it's damming. It's also true of exercise books, flash cards and such that they replace.
Duolingo teaches a basic vocab grammar, "spoken" in one-liners. Within that scope, it is, imo, a nice app. The core theme is "no pain," and it is enjoyable.
"Not good as a tutor" is a high bar. Not sure it's fair.
OTOH, "as good as a tutor" is the right bar. It would be awesome if they (or anyone) had software that teaches through to working fluency.
In any case, I think we should avoid thinking of good outcomes in tech monolith/monopoly terms.
We don't need Duolingo to "eat the world" of language learning. Say we have 20 or 30 duolingos^ that add up to online language learning.
Grammar is so fundamental as it is the spinal core of any language. Without comprehension of grammar, we effectively cannot construct full sentences that make sense. We would be limited to just knowing random words and phrases.
There are many different ways to express the same idea in Spanish and so without understanding why a sentence was written in such a specific order, it is almost impossible to formulate a long-term pattern for that sentence structure in our brain. This is why grammar acts as a spinal core that holds all vocabulary together.
For Duolingo to improve its effectiveness beyond its current capability, its development team needs to add additional modules/lessons that focus more into this area.
on the website, I would have a little written blob of theory, which I found missing from the app.
other than that I had a much smoother user experience on the website, faster and fewer ads.
also typing on a keyboard is a personal preference over a thumb on a touch screen in my hand.
that said, I found it to be a reasonable basic intro to a few new languages.
https://xmpp.redsolution.com/upload/4bddf4f264f5c6577f16551f...
I started re-learning it on Duolingo a year ago, and rapidly caught up at the level I had in high school (which was very low, but still), and now I'm making some progress. eg. I can read a newspaper article and have a rough idea of what it's about.
I can't say whether or not I could learn a new language from scratch with Duolingo, but at least in my case it was helpful.
The actual lesson content is basic, and you'll want to supplement it with broader learning materials and reading in the target language as soon as you're remotely able, but as a jump start from "never spoken a word of this language" to "able to recognize basic grammar patterns, and get the general gist of what I'm reading" it accomplishes this goal quite well, and for very low effort on the part of the user. I can finish my Duolingo rounds in about 15 minutes every day; the hardest part is just remembering to do it. There's something to be said for what they've achieved there.
Within 4 weeks of class I'd stopped using Duolingo, but I'm still studying and continuing with classes (lessons with a native speaker). I felt that in many places it was inaccurate, prepared me poorly for written conversations with Danes (and don't even get me started on speaking/proununciation), and didn't provide any of the cultural nuance really needed to understand the language and how Danish people construct their sentences.
I guess it's good for vocabulary, but not as good as simple flash cards.
I believe the idea of Duolingo is to "bootstrap" yourself enough into the language that you can read more material about it, and then start speaking with other people to improve yourself with real conversation in real situation. The teacher may be a good addition, but also costs more and may be confusing.
I get that Duolingo is "basics", but it captures a lot of your time that are better spent learning with other means. Off of this, the company has a $1B valuation. They don't charge for their service and it's not really worth paying a lot for. The users who use it the most probably won't pay.
I don't know how they're ever going to justify that valuation.
Online realtime, or face-to-face course in your town with a selection of human teachers. A Platform to match teachers and students.
The platform could simply list professionals (with a fee), or take a fee per minute of course video, or a fee per booking, etc
It depends on your language, but widely spoken languages have "easy language" media available, which is a good place to start. But also, look on YouTube for native speakers talking, listen to podcasts, read books (keep Wiktionary or WordReference at hand), and find people online! It'll be hard at first, but you'll quickly get a lot better.
In addition, Duolingo (and every other language learning tool) is significantly better for some languages than others. There is now the "story" feature for some languages, which helps a lot with reading comprehension, especially after you get past the first few easy tiers of stories.
I'd say that completing the Duolingo tree in German got me through a similar level of grammar that my four years in high school did, but what it is lacking is the many hours of listening practice and vocabulary practice.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to Duolingo or any of the other tools I mentioned; I am simply a fan.
I learned German at a University in a German speaking country, and the classes were completely in German from day one which I found helpful. I also bought quite a number of books and studied quite a lot before I become fluent.
So I don’t think an app is a one stop solution, it takes a lot of material, I’m not sure why people think any one system is enough, especially considering you never stop learning a language. Fluent just means you know enough to continue to learn in the language on your own.
So long as the investors are in the Bay Area, it will continue to be the startup mecca of the world. That does seem to be slowly changing, but not nearly as fast as anyone promoting their city as the next startup hub is willing to admit.
I wouldn't necessarily discount the city for this; in my time there, I realized there were really two Pittsburghs. You'll see the steel-town football-obsessed side any time you walk past a bar, but near the CMU/Pitt bubble it actually had a really intellectual vibe that I miss now that I've left. Not just the abundance of grad students, doctors and the like, but good libraries and bookstores, a fantastic symphony orchestra, a quality coffee scene, etc. Has a Portland/Seattle-like (including gray weather) vibe. And Steelers games are great times to go grocery shopping!
The travel situation isn't great though. PIT has direct flights to most east coast cities but getting to the west coast indeed sucks. (United does have a direct SFO flight, IIRC, if a bit pricy.)
There's something to be said for places that overlap multiple cultures.
Perhaps entrepreneurial engineers that leave the area should cross train and bring those skills back to Pittsburgh once they've got some years behind them.
Basically it's nice enough to be comfortable, but not great enough to be desirable.
What's the point of all of this? Well, the hipsterism and average engineer tenure at a single company in silicon valley (which last I heard was 1.5 years) leads to everyone in silicon valley kind of being homogeneous cogs that are interchangeable. 20 years ago we all used PHP, Java, 10 years ago it was Rails and jQuery, and now it's React.
I think that Pittsburgh is cut off from the talent here in silicon valley, because if you dropped a React developer into a company there they might as well be a space alien.
Uber ATG is still heavily based in Pittsburgh/CMU.
Avere Systems was (2018?) acquired by Microsoft, but the terms weren't disclosed, so it's unclear if they grew a centrally located cranial horn or not.
There've been others in similar ranges.
Memrise is more useful on free tier but quite buggy.
I was looking into building a language learning app the other day to help my spouse with their passion but the market appears over-saturated. The only niche I see is for a good game teaching English alike https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prodigygam... but that's not something I can arrange.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pC4k3i-U8-uSAsd2qrg_EX-k...
I also take lessons on italki and my gf is a native spanish speaker. It's a great supplement tool if you're consistent.
I have used several of the alternatives, and all of them are more effective at teaching languages. Granted, Duolingo is better at raising money.
If Duolingo were as effective as sites that require the user to make actual effort, its popularity would be more than justified.
Full disclosure, I wrote the software (Mochi).
[0] https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a-...
There are a lot of individual apps and sites that can you can cobble together, and that play a part in a lot of people's personal systems. Spaced repetition is a great idea. But you will want to do it using a DIY-oriented app like Anki, and make your own flashcards. Forvo is a fantastic website and app for working on your pronunciation. For any popular language, YouTube will offer a wealth of channels offering video content (with transcripts) that you can use to get in your listening practice. Reverso is great for pinning down idioms. Just grab whatever grammar book from your local used bookstore (at least for starters - once you've spent a while learning, you'll have a better sense of what you want in a grammar book, and that's the time to pick a specific one and pay full retail price for it.) Once you're able to read a comic book or watch a slow-paced nature documentary in your target language (this is quite attainable within 6 months if you work steadily), get 1:1 tutoring on iTalki. Etc. etc.
The common criticisms about canned courses, at least according to a lot of folks in the recreational language learning community, are:
1. There's a speed limit. In a class, your pace is limited to that of your least motivated classmate. In a freemium app, you're limited by their monetization policy. With Rosetta Stone, you're limited by excessive animation crap in the UI.
2. You're stuck using whatever content someone else thought would be interesting. If it's not so interesting to you, your motivation is going to suffer.
3. You're stuck learning stuff in the order someone else thinks you should learn it. This can just murder your pace if, for example, the order in which your brain wants to pick up grammar rules doesn't exactly match what the course designer thought the right order should be. Which it won't.
4. Apps and courses sink way too much effort into metrics, either in order to assign grades or in order to gamify things or just to control your pacing. This creates a streetlight effect: They teach you what's easiest to drill on with short answer and multiple choice questions, not what's going to best enable you to use the language independently.
As for how a homegrown system should work, there are a lot of books and blog posts on that; I'm disinclined to endorse any one of them because it's better to read several and cobble together your favorite ideas into a system that's all your own than it is to follow just what happened to work for some other person. It's got to be your system that you worked out for yourself because it's got to be something you actually enjoy doing if you're going to have any chance of sticking with it for the long run.
Duolingo also has a weird discrimination between iOS vs Web/Android. In the iPhone App you lose health with wrong answers and wait for regeneration or have to buy "hearts", this restriction is not present on Web.
The premium version is not worth it at all.
You need to find a good curriculum for your language for grammar. Typically this means taking a class or buying a good textbook. Sometimes you get lucky and find a comprehensive website.
For audio / speaking practice, I recommend glossika. It’s like a modern version of pimsleur.
For vocabulary I recommend Anki. I have used that for the last two years and written about it. Generally you can start with a premade deck and eventually make your own once you’re a little bit more advanced in the language.
For talking to people, try HelloTalk. You can make posts and natives can correct them, and you can have conversations with native speakers.
Once you are intermediate or advanced+, you need to start consuming native material. Try searching on YouTube, or look for graded readers.
Searching reddit about recommended textbooks / etc is usually useful, depending on how popular your language is.
Erm, so Alphabet threw in $30 million for 3% in a Series F that has already taken $138 million (I wonder what kind of preferences they got on that, LOL) and magically Duolingo is a unicorn.
Uh, yeah, sure.
Basically, Alphabet paid $30 million for a lot of user information to throw into the voracious Google maw.
The financials simply don't add up.
So there is some very important aspect of the deal that can't be publicly announced. The only thing Google would want from Duolingo that would have to be kept on the down low would be lots of user data.