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Comment by 41209 | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, I like the general idea of Duolingo. But for Asian languages it's worse than useless. You're never taught grammatical rules, it's like you might learn a couple of random words.

Far better specialized apps exist for both Korean and Chinese ( Hello Chinese is my favorite).

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You don’t need to. Read up on the grammar if you encounter an odd construct or as a refresher, but remembering grammar rules is useless (And I say this as someone who can cite most of the grammar rules for English and German). It’s better to expose yourself to a lot of language and etch the patterns in your brain. In fact, I think not explaining grammar sparks curiosity, which is much better for remembering the rules you really need to know.

Duolingo just doesn't have enough content for this, at least when I used it (2017). I did the whole tree, and could remember the correct answers to sentences I couldn't understand.

German only clicked for me when I got a tutor who sat me down and started explaining the grammar.

I think the issue is that Duolingo just isn’t good for learning a language at all, just for learning vocabulary. For example, we learned the English conditionals in school. Never once in my life have I actively thought about how and which conditional to use (except for the exam of course, but that just shows how dumb testing languages is).

They remade the more popular trees recently to make them CEFR compliant and added grammar lessons to some, I'm doing Spanish and it's very good, tons of immersion stuff, audio lessons, stories, podcasts.

That is the approach Duolingo takes intentionally, I think some people assume it's just lack of content but their philosophy is "show don't tell"

This might work for German or another European language, but Asian languages work radically different.

Korean and Japanese for example completely change the word order around.

I'm learning Japanese. Of course you have to learn the grammar at some point, but you're not going to analyze a sentence were "hodo" and the negative form are used for a comparison. The best way for this pattern to stick is to know the meaning of the sentence you listen to in advance and then getting used to hearing it. No amount of grammar learning will help you understand the construct in a fluent conversation.

Seconding Hello Chinese as a fantastic app. But I just want to share the apparently unusual-around-here experience that Duolingo was one of my best tools for learning and retaining Chinese vocab. I suspect it’s because the whole experience is fine-tuned to be vivid across so many sensory dimensions; when I remember a word I learned in Duolingo I can often also remember the exact place I was standing when I learned it. That does not happen for me with Anki or Hello Chinese. It could depend on brain type or something but I don’t think their success is purely a fraud.

And oftentimes what it "teaches" is outright wrong. I've seen a good number of posts of people having fun with Duolingo in their native language and picking apart the mistakes.

Which one do you recommend for Korean?

Check out eggbun and lingodeer. They're both pretty good, one might work for you.

TTMIK is my fav resource for Korean. Not an app though, just audio courses / books.

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