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Comment by Jakobeha | Hacker News Reader

I use Duolingo to learn Spanish. It's very simple but the streak system has kept me making slow progress. I've only gotten to "Checkpoint 3" (of 7) but it seems to be working well - I don't speak fluent but I can usually read signs etc. in Spanish and actually understand them.

The main issue I can see them facing is: it's very simple, so easy to clone. And Duo has its flaws, so I wouldn't be surprised if of those clones are a lot better. I like Duo, I use it now, but I could switch to another service in 1 second.

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In the Risk Factors section

> The online language learning industry is highly competitive, with low switching costs and a consistent stream of new products and entrants, and innovation by our competitors may disrupt our business.

I don't personally like Duolingo. Formal education has been better for me, with languages. Both Duolingo, Memrise and Rosetta Stone neglect to tell you why any language rule exists or what contexts its used in and just procedurally generate gendered ways to ask for an Apple for 50 levels of lessons, pretending like rote memorization and classical conditioning is useful. I would say that it is not, context is very important.

Enough people believe this is useful, like you, you want to read signs. This won't help you notice that the entire color spectrum can be wildly different in different languages and cultures, or that you sound like you used Google Translate and everyone will look at you weird because they speak in a trendy way.

As for a company, its just ARR. Enough people will pay for it and use a subscription, that's good enough.

I should've mentioned that I actually took Spanish classes a few years before Duolingo. Those classes taught me the grammar and why the rules exist, but I didn't memorize many words (or I forgot) and I had serious trouble understanding actual Spanish speakers.

Duolingo "teaches" alternate tenses weirdly and IMO too late. But it does well for memorizing words, and it has people speaking with actual Spanish accents and forces you to understand them. So it's particularly helpful for me.

Ah okay, yes that’s good you coupled it with a class

I think people should understand that it’s a supplement, and not a solution when you’re on the plane to that country already

I wish I had done a couple of months of Japanese on Duolingo before traveling there. Simply knowing katakana and hiragana is a huge leap forward from zero knowledge. There were many words I would have known already just from exposure if only I could have read them.

Train line names for example, and all the dozens of english words written in Katakana. You also can't learn from exposure if you can't read the alphabet so I missed out on that too.

> and I had serious trouble understanding actual Spanish speakers

This is why I much prefer Fluent Forever. They play clips of words or phrases that sound similar to non-native speakers but are easily differentiated by native speakers. If you do it enough (and have immediate feedback about whether you heard it correctly) you can eventually learn to hear the distinction. For me it was be the difference between being able to read/write in another language and being able to listen and converse in it.

Some examples that I can remember:

Dutch- broek (pants) vs. boek (book)

French- bague (ring) vs. bogue (bug)

I suspect that many Duolingo users are not choosing between Duolingo and a formal language course. I suspect they're choosing between Duolingo and some other smartphone activity.

I enjoyed my formal language education but four years of high school Spanish was about as useless as any other high school class. The ~10m a day I spend on Duolingo is as much of a "waste" of time in terms of language aquisition, but it's almost as enjoyable as my language classes were, feels slightly less wasteful than whatever other smartphone game I'd be playing, and lets me maintain the fantasy that one day I'll actually get around to (committing the time necessary to) learn a foreign language.

Yes, sure, I was just commenting on its utility

Foreign language classes by choice or immediate necessity is different than high school

Duolingo is great for me as a complementary tool of formal education.

I haven't looked at Duolingo for a while, I tried it for Polish about 4 years ago and it seemed ok.

I've used a lot of tools over the years for Korean, Japanese & Mandarin, all are ok, but I usually go back to Anki for pure flash cards.

The only exception was Memrise for Japanese that I used for several years because everyone in my original class signed up at the same time and we were all "friends" on it so the competitive nature in us kicked in. IIRC Duo has a similar feature, but the challenge is getting that initial social pressure going. Once my cohort dropped off Memrise, so did I.

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