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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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