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Comment by jaredhansen | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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.

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No, Duolingo is just actually bad. They gamified language learning and I have “beaten the game” in a few languages and it did not make me conversational in those languages. Nor could I read a real world newspaper or Wikipedia page in the target language. That is entirely Duolingo’s fault.

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.

I think the issue is that they want people who use it less than 10 minutes a day to still make progress and feel they are making a lot of progress. Following spaced repetition rules they can only add minimal amounts of vocabulary and they need to spend that vocabulary on intros to new themes that can be completed in 30 minutes or less.

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.

Duolingo is useless on its own, especially for harder language pairs. The only reason it's popular is because of the gamification, I find that apps like Memrise or LingQ are massively more useful to actually improve your language skills. Those apps focus on specific skills (vocabulary learning through spaced repetition for Memrise, learning comprehension for LingQ) which means that you have to use other methods to work on other aspects like grammar and conversational skills but at least they attempt to do one thing and they do it mostly well.

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'm a non-native French speaker, but I had very similar thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16827225

(I've since been told that people in France do say "le menu", but I stand by the rest of that comment.)

They aren’t promising the equivalent of a flight simulator, they’re claiming you’ll actually learn these languages. So I think the parent comment’s is a valid critique.

My parents are a good example of their target audience. They live in Alaska and planned a weeklong vacation in Panama, so they used Duolingo for 4-5 months before they left in order to learn enough spanish that they could ask and answer basic questions during their trip, but they have no desire to spend the time required to be fluent enough to have a full conversation.

How did they go? Was it sufficient?

Anecdotally I did the same before a trip to Brazil and I found it very useful.

The sad thing is that if they'd spent just one month on a Michel Thomas or Pimsleur course, they'd have been at a higher level and been ahead in accent, too.

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.

Duolingo has (automated) vocal lessons.

That's the worst part of the app because they use synthetic voices for most courses (the only one I know that doesn't is the Latin one, probably because there aren't many off-the-shelf Latin text-to-speech).

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.

The Spanish voices are quite good—real people, and with similar pronunciation to what I hear from native speakers.

Nothing sad about it, those cost money and are not as gamified so they require consistent willpower. If duolingo didn't exist, they would not put in the work to start learning, period. Different people have different aims. I'm halfway through the Dutch course (230 day streak, so I put in at least 10 minutes every day for the last 230 days) and found it immensely valuable. It helped me build a habit magically, which is something I struggle with all my life. I would never work on something 200+ days in a row. Some days I study more than an hour, some days I do the bare minimum but I do it every day to keep my streak. I am able to form novel sentences and express my ideas with the vocabulary I have. That is all I need.

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.

My wife is using to learn Spanish, and she doing pretty good.

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.

You can’t learn a language without making substantial investments of time. Anyone can “learn” some words and maybe a little grammar, but that’s not learning a language in the slightest.

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.

The comparison to fighter pilot is inaccurate, because literally anyone can learn to speak a language.

The correct comparison is between motivated and unmotivated people.

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