Duolingo's language notes all on one page | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo's language notes all on one page

duome.eu

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As a Duolingo user, I am pleasantly surprised to find this site today. This site seems to ~~solve~~ mitigate problems I've been having with tips (or more accurately, lack of tip accessibility on the iOS app for certain languages).

To be honest, I've never really thought about viewing all tips on the same page, although that is very convenient. A fine feature that should probably be adopted by Duolingo as well.

The convenient one-page format ~~solves~~ mitigates a different issue I've been having lately though. Duolingo doesn't consistently publish (existing!) tips to all Duolingo frontends/apps. Well-supported languages get the best tip-content support, but languages that aren't as supported sometimes don't have tip present even if the tip content exists.

For example:

- Duolingo Web always has tips if tip content exists. This acts like a source of truth, as far as I'm aware.

- Spanish is a language which has tip content both on Web and iOS. I believe this is because Spanish is popular and well-supported.

- Greek is a language where tip content is not accessible via the iOS app, but is present on the web site. I believe this is because incorporating the presentation of tips is probably some hardcoded markup thing (React?) and nobody has gotten around to doing it yet. Also, there's a possibility that the underlying documents need different rendering treatment or style enforcement, and have been omitted from the mobile app on purpose. Still, this is a thorn in my side.

So for me, a one-page-tips fills a gap in the Duolingo UX (which should probably probably be fixed on Duolingo's end since this simply seems to be a prioritization/maintenance/time/effort problem).

As a user, I'd like an easy way to refer to the tips before each lesson without pulling up the actual Duolingo web app - otherwise, why don't I just do my actual lessons on the web app as well? Usually I'm doing lessons on my phone, not my computer, because the phone is not only more convenient (small) but it's easier to change keyboards and type in non-latin alphabets.

To me it seems like Duolingo is doing a lot of A/B testing, but in a really weird manner. I was also annoyed by not having access to language tips in the mobile app, while they were available in the browser. I also have a friend, for whom the whole app changed after reinstalling: they didn't have the heart system before, now it was on; the gem system changed to gem of a different value, while prices in the store stayed the same. They always had notes on every platform in every language though.

Succinct. What a useful reference.

An IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) reference would be helpful, too. After taking linguistics in college, I found these Sozo videos of US english IPA consonants and vowels that simultaneously show {the ipa symbol, example words, someone visually and auditorily producing the phoneme from 2 angles, and the spectrogram of the waveform} but a few or a configurable number of [spaced] repetitions would be helpful: https://youtu.be/Sw36F_UcIn8

IDK how cartoonish or 3d of an "articulatory phonetic" model would reach the widest audience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

IPA chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

IPA chart with audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio

All of the IPA consonant chart played as a video: "International Phonetic Alphabet Consonant sounds (Pulmonic)- From Wikipedia.org" https://youtu.be/yFAITaBr6Tw

I'll have to find the link of the site where they playback youtube videos with multiple languages' subtitles highlighted side-by-side along with the video.

Found it: https://www.captionpop.com/

It looks like there are a few browser extensions for displaying multiple subtitles as well; e.g. "YouTube Dual Subtitles", "Two Captions for YouTube and Netflix"

When I was learning Swahili while living in Tanzania, I used the Teach Yourself series and it really helped me. I loved how it had such a strong focus on grammar.

Similarly, I think I will love this link. I didn't like having to click through Duolingo's gamified structure to get at the grammatical rules, and I've also struggled to find such coherent sets of grammar on other websites. Maybe Duolingo is less gamified than it was before, and yet, I still think I will love having all of the grammar lessons in one spot.

Thank you for building this!

I always wondered why the grammar notes were so hidden in the app. I didn't even know they existed. Does anyone else know resources that list language grammar rules in one page?

I hope this is relevant enough to plug, but if anyone's learning a language because they have a partner that speaks it, I'm working on a project for couples learning each other's languages: https://learncoupling.com

I've been using Duolingo for some time and I wasn't aware there are grammar notes. How do I see them? I can't find them. I'm using the Android app.

They are easy to miss, I had them pointed out to me when complaining about no formal instruction in the app.

Click on of the lession categories on the home page, and it will give a drop down. Then pick tips

Know if there a way to access these tips from the iPhone/iPad app?

Not a bad idea to skim through the appropriate page when you’re starting a program to avoid the inevitable gotchas. The Spanish one would have instantly solved my confusion over the idiomatic “buenos dias”.

For me it just now clarified the accent marker homophone thing in Spanish in a way that Duolingo didn't (My only other language experience was high school Latin, where accent markers are more likely to be declension/conjugation indicators).

Amazing how much clearer it is having this all in one place and not just sprinkled like bacon bits across a million screens.

The hints around how letters should be pronounced are a killer feature on their own. I've been on-and-off learning Ukranian, and the expectation that I should magically know how to make heads or tails of Cyrillic is a pretty big oversight. The link to that Peace Corps reference is something I wish I had when starting out, and now that I have a bit of a more solid reference for that sort of fundamental knowledge, I feel like it'll be a lot less frustrating getting through the courses.

Seems weird that these hints ain't readily accessible from the Android app.

You can do bunch of cool stuff on there too like view your profile

https://duome.eu/<profile-name>

compare yourself to other profiles ect.

After seeing this. An AI neural net I want to see is if it can take a whole bunch of English -> language input:output training docs and churn out a guide like this. Bonus points if the guide is machine computable as a tiny program that can be used as a dictionary, noun conversion, plural conversion etc.

Our neural networks are insanely huge blackboxes. If they can churn out inspectable code and guides like humans can, I’d be a huge believer.

Not that I love Duolingo, but isn't that copyright infringement? Are this "notes" simply copied from the app?

Volunteers do free work to make all of the language content so it shouldn't be.

That doesn't make it not copyright infringement. Either the volunteers retained ownership of the content they produced, in which case this is infringing on their copyright, or they assigned it to Duolingo, in which case, Duolingo's.

> so it shouldn't be.

I specifically framed it that way so that the WELL AKSHUALLY crowd wouldn't say what you just said.

> but isn't that copyright infringement

And your parent comment specifically framed it to ask whether it is, not whether it "should" be, so the response to you was hardly a "well ackshually."

Technically yes, but they've been in touch with Duolingo's CTO and it seems like Duolingo is OK with it for now.

https://duome.eu/copyright

https://duome.eu/blog/16.04.2018

> Durung the past few weeks I have been talking to Severin Hacker, the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo. To make a long story short: they do like the idea, but they need to own the domain [context for HN: original domain was duolingo.eu] and they're going to redirect it to duolingo.com so the old forum links will stop working in a couple of weeks from now.

That’s pretty nice of them to see the value that this drives more sales for Duolingo. Most execs would shut efforts like this.

How come Spanish is so short as compared to French. Even German and Dutch pages are really long.

Cool, I guess. But you're probably better off just downloading a real textbook. The PDFs aren't hard to find.

Different programs present content in different ways. If you're learning with Duolingo, it's convenient to have the content organized in the same way.

Duolingo is a lousy way to learn a language, but it's great for vocabulary practice. It also teaches typing on a phone keyboard, which is a great skill for languages that use a non-latin charset.

Having these handy might help with some of the gotchas if you forget while using it.

It's lousy in a vacuum, but it's a good tool for a subset of the problems associated with learning a language. There's no singular tool that solves all of the issues, so success in learning any language unfortunately relies on a certain level of self-guided learning (and perseverance more than anything).

Yep, complaining about Duolingo suggests to me that someone thinks any single resource is going to be a silver bullet. Otherwise it’s meaningless to complain that a single resource isn’t a silver bullet.

I used Duolingo to reach a place where I could read books in Spanish, and then I switched to books. It can’t be that bad.

The best tools are the ones you use. If Duolingo is the tool that compels you to advance your practice, then it’s de facto better than the ones that don’t compel you that you never use.

I didn't mean to criticize Duolingo for not being a silver bullet, but they definitely do market it as one. They literally say right on their homepage that using it for 34 hours is equal to a semester of university language class. When googling it I got an ad with the text "All you need to learn your next language".

FWIW I like duolingo, but I wish they were clearer about their strengths and weaknesses. I've maxed out Arabic, and am halfway through French. I got about 1/3 through Japanese before giving up because their approach just doesn't work for it. It clearly works much better for latin languages, and even in Arabic it's great for vocab but lousy for grammar and idioms. As I said in my top post, I think phone typing is an underrated skill, particularly for a foreigner in a new country.

Nothing short of time and immersion are going to solidly teach just about anybody a language, but I have some friends who've tried it and then got discouraged on language learning all together because of the frustrating parts of the app, and the fake sense of progress that's inherent in some of their marketing =(. On the other hand I'm on a 600+ day streak and have gained a ton from the app pressuring me to come back every single day.

Lots of people learn Latin, Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, etc. without immersion. Immersion is nice, but it assumes the point of learning is to chat, rather than interacting with great minds using the language that may be long dead (whether or not the language in question is).

Actually, there is. It is called language acquisition. It's not a tool, but a method. Trivially simple method, just require some basic material at the very beginning, say, first 3 months plus SRS like Anki. And a most importantly a will to practice every single day.

If you think about it, how well did you speak your native language at 4? How well at 7? Did you attend any classes to teach yourself? No, I assume not. So how come you are fluent?

Turns out, it is all about ingesting as much as possible. Even if you barely understand at the beginning. More of it - learning grammar is just a distraction. You can skim the book to have an overall grasp of it, but that's it. You weren't learning your native language grammar by the age of 7, did you?

The key is to ingest comprehensible input. If you can't understand the sentence, have a visual cues. Start simple by learning most frequent 1000 words (should take you 2-3 months max with Anki) and then you can easily switch to sentences. Just keep your senteces at the level that you understand almost everything but a word or two. One word ideally.

Read or watch only context you like, you are interested in and you have fun with. That's it. Do it long enough, every day, and you are set.

As an example, I've been learning Japanese in class for 2.5y and could not read nor speak as well as I'd like to. Not to mention I couldn't read kanji at all. Now after 9 months of trying language acquisition I can read children books (Winnie the Pooh) and comic books. If that's not a win, I don't know what is.

And I am glad it exists because of that. I can read any language grammar book and maybe even try some exercises but what only Duolingo offers is what's missing when you are not in the country : practicing the language every day. (The site is better than the app I think)

It has some strengths as well as some weaknesses.

I’ve used it to teach myself the equivalent of GCSE grade B (but sadly not a useful CEFR level) in German several years ago, yet after reaching that level of total effort in Greek and Esperanto a little more recently I feel almost useless in the former and only slightly better in the latter (and Esperanto is the easy one!)

I’ve also been doing at least one Duo Arabic lesson per day since 24 September last year, and still don’t know that alphabet. (Doesn’t help that particular course renders some of the pronunciation guide symbols as “2” and “3”, but this is definitely not the only thing holding me back).

Yeah, I've finished Arabic and I'm on the fence if I'd do it again, Arabic just doesn't work that well in their model.

I came into it already knowing how to read and write, and just wanting vocab, grammar, and typing practice. It was pretty decent for that, although the early lessons were absolutely jam packed with errors. I think that may have been fixed now. The later lessons they released were much better, so I assume they've improved the earlier ones.

As a side note, https://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Alphabet-How-Read-Write/dp/081... is really excellent, and not very pricey. If you do a few letters a day and really practice you'll be able to transliterate in a couple of weeks.

I think Duolingo is fine for reading comprehension and basic sentence-building skills, but I think there are many better apps for vocabulary learning, such as Anki, Memrise and Closemaster.

The problem with Duolingo is that it doesn't really implement spaced repetition if you go down the tree in sequence. If you do a lesson about, say, technology you'll end up being prompted for "file", "mouse", "website" etc... over and over again, then you'll move on and basically never meet these words until you decide to redo this lesson.

I've just ended my 1200+ days Duoling streak literally two days ago, so I won't pretend that I hate it, but I must say that finally reaching my objective of getting a fully gilded Russian tree was a relief. I was getting really annoyed at the owl and its idiosyncrasies towards the end.

How well would you say you know Russian after a fully-gilded tree?

I was in the process of pushing French up to level 2 when they introduced a ton of new content. So I'm projecting my way back up to a full level 1. (I had boostrapped that with Pimsleur.)

That, plus reading, a few podcasts, and Netflix has gotten me to the point where I can push my way through a young adult novel (with a dictionary) or watch a kid's show (usually with the subtitles, since French is a terrible, terrible language to listen to).

So I'm curious what it's like after 1200 days. (My current streak is about 400. Early in the pandemic I'd do a dozen lessons a day; now I do the bare minimum.) How would you describe your familiarity with the language?

I have 760+ streak in Spanish, 6 milestones fully done, 7th is done to level 3. I can understand about 75% of what is spoken in youtube videos, and about 90% if the video is slowed down to 75% speed.

Weakest skill is speaking, but I'd do mostly ok renting a hotel or ordering food.

My 1200 day streak was actually first Portuguese, then Russian (with some overlap), and I've used many other resources to help learning in both cases, I never only did Duolingo for long amounts of time. I don't think using only any single app or method is a good idea anyway, they all have their pros and cons, things they're good at and things they're bad at.

My Portuguese is good enough to have day-to-day conversations and I can read things like newspaper article without problem. Note that my native language is French though, another Romance language, so the gap was really not that large to begin with. I'm sure you must find the complicated French conjugation system, plus the gendered nouns a bit of a headache if you're a native English speaker. That stuff works pretty similarly between French and Portuguese, so I had a big headstart here, I could just focus on memorizing the differences (the portuguese subjunctives can go fodar themselves by the way).

Russian is a whole other ordeal however, I still have a long way to go until I reach fluency. I can usually decipher newspaper articles okay-ish, but oral comprehension is still very low and my ability to construct the language is still pretty basic, although I could probably go through a simple conversation with a native with a lot of effort and many mistakes. The main difficulty at this point is learning and remembering all that vocabulary, I can't rely on cognates like for Portuguese and to a lesser extent English. I need to relearn basically everything. That takes a lot of time, and Duolingo really only gets you so far.

I'm so jealous that you learned French as a native. The language is such a pain. I had some basic education in Spanish and Italian before starting French, so I was familiar with the concepts. (In fact, I'd been starting Portuguese on Duolingo in preparation for a trip there, but with all travel being put on hold I switched back to French.)

English is a big leg up on French. Some of the cognates may be unfamiliar or dated, but I've got a big English vocabulary and a lot of that has French and/or Latin origin. I'm still very bad at advanced conjugation, in part because things like the subjunctive and conditional just don't come up in as great a number (as well as being more complicated than their English equivalents).

Well, félicitations, and удачи!

I think all of us who yearn to master a foreign language felt that way at some point. When some concepts seem to fly above your head, you gain new appreciation for the natives who can just juggle with all of that intuitively.

One thing to always keep in mind is that there's no trick really, learning languages is not about being smart or being super good at anything, just having enough discipline and dedication to keep working at it until it starts making sense.

Thank you for your kind words and bonne chance à toi aussi !

Just to add on to what other folks are saying in reply to your question, I studied french in school for 7 years (middle school, high school, and lit in college). At the end of all of that my reading comprehension is really good, my listening comprehension is so-so (highly dependent on region), and my ability to produce sentences in french, in my opinion, sucks. So I'm amazed by these other folks self-assessment. It is high praise for Duolingo, in my opinion.

A lot of textbooks are group based or not test friendly

There are tips for Arabic? Only see them for spanish but none appear to be available for Arabic. Must be a bug.

Thanks! I'm using Duolingo and I'm sure I'll get some extra use from this.

I love Duolingo but they really drop the ball it making it great and not just good. Why can't I bookmark useful info, see it all in one place, share stuff etc. This solves onr of those.

I'm a bit pessimistic that it might become a public company.

Their objective is to keep you "engaged" (watching ads and/or paying), not to actually be efficient at teaching a language, since once you learn the language you would have no reason to "engage" with the service anymore.

The CSS is less than ideal. I clicked “Japanese”, and despite I have a 4k display with 150% DPI scaling, difference between す and ず is barely visible.

It’s totally OK here on HN because 99.9% is English, but I think this is quite important for language learners.

Looks fine for me, but I'm using a 1080p display. Maybe change the font settings in your browser?

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