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"...the same level as flashcard vocabulary learning"

How exactly were you using it? It speaks to you, which is invaluable for developing an ear for the language. It forces you to translate both ways, which helps with reading and writing immensely. And optionally you can even speak answers in the foreign language to practice pronunciation (such that your phone can correctly transcribe what you're saying).

It's not exactly an immersive language course, but it is vastly more useful than flash cards.

I know a lot of people like to speed through the tree and only complete the first level, which I suppose is a more vocab-focused way of using the app. But if you go deeper on each level it forces you to grapple with grammar a lot more.

> I know a lot of people like to speed through the tree and only complete the first level, which I suppose is a more vocab-focused way of using the app. But if you go deeper on each level it forces you to grapple with grammar a lot more.

Probably a fair point - as mentioned I wasn't really using it to learn the language, rather to get a feel for "how useful would this have been when I was learning". So I admit I didn't dive into the later levels.

Conversely, there is this to train tone pronunciation. :)

https://mandarintonetrainer.com/games

Yes, I have come across that one too! Acoustically speaking, tones are actually really interesting. Are you associated with that site?

No I'm not. I always disclose it when I'm associated with anything that I promote.

I have been learning Mandarin casually for a few years. A while back I went all the way through Duolingo. I picked up some new vocabulary, but it was probably the least effective study method I used.

With that said, it was reasonably fun, and I did stick with it for a while due to the gamification, so maybe there's hope for the feature. Just getting people to study a foreign language regularly is probably a good step.

I also think that they have implemented some more advanced learning features with a few languages.

I agree. Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary, but if you really want to learn a language you need to supplement this with listening to the language as well as speaking it.

I've been learning French and have been using Duolingo for vocab, but then I listen to a French-teaching podcast as well as trying to work on reading/speaking it.

I'm not at the stage where I can listen to it since it's such a fast language. I've been reading LeMonde newspaper and trying to decipher it that way. I live in Canada but the French here is quite different in each region; Quebec, Acadian, Métis. Duolingo French course is France French not Canadian French I think it's standard French aka Parisan.

There are podcasts for learning such as "Coffee Break French". Basically they start with very basic french and build up. This can be good for starting to learn to listen to french.

Regarding the differences between Canadian and France French, are there that many differences that it would make it difficult to understand someone from another region?

In addition to what others have said I can only offer anecdotal evidence.

I have friends and former coworkers some from Quebec, some from New Brunswick all fluently bilingual. We've all worked with people from France on projects and my Acadian friends remarked they couldn't understand a word the people from France said.

Although the reverse of that a friend went to northern France on vacation. When he was there he said everyone asked him where he was from he told them New Brunswick Canada. From what I understand Acadian (French dialect of New Brunswick, Canada) is older and closer to northern France than the Quebec dialect. I'm not sure if my friend meant the regional dialect or standard Parisian French, I'm pretty sure he meant the former.

And this may be totally wrong but I believe the southern France dialect (Occitan) is quite different than the north. I've had to call Monaco (I know it's not France) and I was surprised at just the accent of the French person speaking English. I've been around French all my life but southern France to me sounds like stereotypical cartoon French like Pepe LePew.

The entire history of standard French for their language is quite interesting. It's not been accepted for as long as you may think and there are many dialects.

edit: I think Canadian French has a lot of slang not used in France which makes it hard to understand. Kind of like a Cockney from England coming to the US, sure you can understand his language but not the meaning the way he uses words.

Native French here. One day I was in a place with 4 people from Québec speaking with each other. I could understand perfectly three of them, then it took me 15 minutes to understand the last one was speaking French too and not a foreign language. So, accent could vary quite a bit between region and people but most of the time it’s similar enough that there is no problem.

Definitely, it can be really hard for me as a native french to understand a canadian-french speaking if he has a strong accent.

What if you don't need listening or speaking skills, only reading? In your opinion is Duolingo a good fit for someone who only needs to learn to read the language?

Not the gp, but I used Duolingo quite a bit, and recently learned Spanish to an upper intermediate level. In my opinion, Duolingo is just as weak with pure reading as with spoken language. You'll learn some vocabulary and be introduced to ideas, and that's valuable, but not enough. Just like spoken, to learn to read, you have to read a bunch of stuff you can understand. I jumped straight from Duolingo to children and young adult books, and it was a difficult transition with lots of intensive looking-up-every-other-word study, but, I mean, you do that long enough, and eventually you're just reading.

1 . duolingo for vocab/grammer

2. italki for conversation with native speakers. You can find super cheap if you are just looking to talk.

3. hellotalk is free but takes more effort and mostly just spanish/english.

Some of those recordings are bonkers haha. 得 in particular seemed... Worthy of a double check. And 二（or 儿？) Had a surprising cadence to it.

Swell idea though. Mobile support is a bit rough but not unusable.

Thanks - the voice is actually synthesized, not recorded, and slowing the pace occasionally produces some artifacts. I'll double check the ones you mentioned!

Out of curiosity, what mobile issues are you encountering? This is actually a Flutter web app, which isn't officially production-ready yet, so I'm keen to provide feedback to the Flutter team if something's going wonky.

Just CSS stuff, things seeming to run off the right side of the screen.

Thanks! I'll investigate further.

> App is currently live @ https://fluent.academy

I'd love to try this but I don't have a Google account. Do you have any plans to add registration using an email address?

I've enabled e-mail signups this morning - feel free to check it out again (you may need to refresh your browser cache).

Thanks! Recognizing and remembering tones is one of the things I struggle with most, so I'd use this a lot.

A couple of comments: for 水果, it only accepts shŭi gŭo, not shúi gŭo. I know that is technically correct, but the voice synthesis sounds it out with the sandhi. More a question of philosophy I guess, but thought it was worth mentioning.

Also, it might be nice to have an option that hides the characters, so you're forced to rely on hearing rather than just knowing that e.g. 多 is dūo.

Looking forward to seeing what else you do with it!

What if you only need reading proficiency - no conversation skills needed? Would Duolingo be a good fit for that use case?

for spanish, yes.

> Self-plug - ...

Asked me to sign in with Google. Couldn't click behind. Closed window.

Come on, don't make me sign in everywhere. This is just email harvesting. I get if you want to sell a service, but then I need to know what you are providing. If it is good I'll pay for it (as someone trying to learn Mandarin. There just aren't good tools out there). But please don't just blindly collect user data.

Totally understand - at the moment I was just asking for registration so I can stay in touch with people who might be interested as more features get added or when the larger app is released.

In the meantime, I've enabled e-mail registration without verification, so feel free to signup with a throwaway :)

Okay, I did. Now I have to say that I do not find this helpful. The audio is very synthetic and has audio distortions. 三 had a weird glitch in it. Have you tried using one of Bidu's models?

Also, in counter part to Duolinguo, I suggest at checking out Hello Chinese, and using that as the metric to beat (it is popular among Mandarin learners).

Thanks for taking the time out to provide your feedback, it's always very helpful.

You're right, there are a few artifacts in the audio. Most of these are due to generating speech at a slower cadence than "natural".

Native/enunciated recorded speech would probably be better for this specific purpose, but not necessarily practical for the larger app.