Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

334 pointsdoppp342 comments

I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your target language from taking a course in it, either.

Language learning is hard and a multifaceted thing that no single application is going to adequately prepare you for. Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages). Rote memorization is necessary. Immersion is necessary. Comprehensible input is necessary.

Language learning apps like Duolingo sell the idea of learning a language which is an extremely attractive idea to a lot of people. They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement with humor and gamification. The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will.

I suppose in the end Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually learning a language, though.

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

More people learn languages to feel good and for bragging rights than for any actual use.

Bollocks. In Europe you learn languages to be able to go abroad and to at least try to meet strangers halfway. Knowing just your own tongue is rude.

In America, plenty learn for fun and status. You can travel thousands of miles in the US and still speak to someone in English making language learning extremely rare.

This is pretty valid, but sometimes people with limited knowledge will do something seemingly innocuous like ask where the 'toilet' is rather than the more polite reference and totally freak a complete stranger out. I think it's not a bad idea to do your best to try and learn at least a little bit beyond this before dropping into a foreign country, at the least because it makes the whole meeting new friends thing a lot easier.

Cultural context is difficult but it also can’t be learned unless you already have some language skills. It’s not helpful to expect 2nd language speakers never to make mistakes Like the foreign exchange student asking for a rubber instead of an eraser, those mistakes can be great learning points.

Except you won't be able to do that with Duolingo. I'll go as far as saying that Duolingo is (very) negative for learners: it sells them the idea they are learning a language and progressing when they are in fact not.

A good example of that is a comment I read here on HN from a user defending Duolingo since it allowed him to master hiragana (one script of Japanese) after two years and half. This is normally taking a week, for a slow learner, and the rest is practicing for fluency.

Source: myself; learned and learning multiple languages, at university and by myself. Working in edtech research.

Replying to deleted post:

First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. Then count 400-500 kanji per year if learning at university and being motivated (lot of people stops).

For conversation count two intensive years for the bare minimum, add one for more fluency. Actually all depends on how much effort you spend on it, I know a guy who was JLPT N2 or so after it's first university year (needless to say, he spent an aweful amount of time practicing, especially with natives). Then add at least one year in Japan to really get a good grasp (I went from N3 to N2 in a year while basically partying).

> First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough.

You’re still grossly over-representing what is needed to read Japanese.

1. 10k characters is utter nonsense. I assume that people conflate the 10k words needed for JLPT N1 with characters. They are totally different, since words are often combinations of characters.

2. Joyo kanji has 2,136 characters. All government documents and pretty much all mainstream media use only these characters plus some kanji specific to names. Any kanji outside of joyo (e.g., an unusual name or a stylistic word) typically have a phonetic reading (furigana) next to or over the character(s). Joyo is what is tested for the JLPT 1 (the top level).

3. Hundreds of joyo kanji are very context-specific — that is, they are relatively low utility.

4. There are a few additional kanji outside of joyo that are widely known. Educated folks also know more than joyo that are specialist terms or stylistic words. It would be like an English speaker knowing words like “deoxyribonucleic acid” (DNA) or “ceteris paribus”.

5. Lastly, for anyone reading Classical Japanese or historical documents… well, much of the above is not relevant due to changes in the language (mostly simplification over time). It depends on what is being studied or read.

6. 3000 kanji nets someone “highly educated native speaker” status — think teacher, doctor, lawyer. 5000 kanji gets you nerd status — think professor or logomaniac.

While it's been posted before, with just under 800 kanji you can have coverage of 90% of kanji in the wild. Of course, one still needs to learn all the clustered terms that these kanji can play together to create, but it reduces the barrier to native media substantially. [0]

[0] https://japanesecomplete.com/777

Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right. I chatted as soon as yesterday with someone studying Vietnamese dictionaries written in kanbun and nôm, so indeed that person need to know a lot of kanji. That's not representative of the whole society, but you can't rule out the existence of those people. It's also telling that the biggest dictionary of Chinese characters is the Daikanwa Jiten, compiled by a Japanese.

> Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right.

We might be talking past each other. I’m speaking specifically of non-native learners of Japanese.

I think you overrepresented for non-native learners of Japanese (who don’t get the benefit of 9 years of joyo kanji education), but you were closer to “right” than most.

Most learners of Japanese should focus on about 1000 kanji (roughly kyouiku kanji). This is easily learnable in a year for most people, and that amount will get them over 90% of text coverage that general learners will be reading.

Pretty much no learner should have an initial goal of learning 3000 kanji. Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction, especially if they plan on being a professional in Japan. Unless they find it to be a fun hobby, I would ask them why they are choosing to reach that level as a goal. The 2000th to 3000th most frequently used characters have very low utility, and this knowledge is far beyond “need this to survive/thrive” level. Some people who answer the “how many kanji” question in English-speaking forums (not you) seem to treat 3000 characters as almost semi-literate, and this couldn’t be further from the truth.

For a learner of Japanese, I would never recommend that anyone start with an initial goal of 5000 kanji. For anyone who ends up there, it would usually just come naturally over time to anyone being an academic (most likely in some sort of language or linguistics field)… and the masochists who try to take kanken 1.

Finally, to address your initial comment about 3000-5000 kanji being enough depending on what someone reads, I would put that number at more like 1200-1300 being enough with very mild use of a dictionary or lookup function on a computer/phone for learners. This will get folks though the vast majority of kanji in newspapers, magazines, and general audience books. At that point, just reading and looking stuff up will add to their kanji knowledge base organically.

> Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction

For the vast majority of people (including native speakers), knowing a few extra kanji outside of joyo brings very little benefit.

Most natives get by just fine by having a very rough understanding of even joyo [1], thanks to smartphones and computers.

Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change how you are perceived by natives [2], so it may be worth a try if your goal is to get closer to native speakers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHQcHSaj-c4

> Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change how you are perceived by natives

100% agree. Nailing accent helps smooth some wrinkles as a foreigner.

That's fair, though I think in the case of wanting to be able to be a tourist in a place with a foreign language, you'd be better suited using phrasebooks and a translation app. Duolingo isn't going to really prepare you to have those kinds of conversations and isn't really a reference book, so being able to look up the few phrases you need to get around isn't practical. It's designed to teach you the language in a structured way and while the ordering of it and most language courses does attempt to get people proficient at very basic touristy things, depending on what it is you're doing, you might not even get to the point where you can do that.

Reading a menu requires cultural context along with reading comprehension. Unless you're intimately familiar with the culture, being able to read it (as in sound it out by reading the characters) is pretty useless. نان (naan) is probably something you could understand because it's a loanword we use in English from Arabic but without cultural context could someone guess what قابلی پلاؤ (Kabuli Pilau) means? Probably not. If you're in Japan and China, learning to read a menu is in itself a huge barrier.

> قابلی پلاؤ

I’ve spent most of the last year struggling to learn the Arabic alphabet with Duolingo, yet FWIW my guess for what sort of dish Kabuli Pilau might be was fairly close.

I wonder if anyone outside the UK knows, or can guess, what sort of dish a “spotted dick” or a “toad in the hole” is?

American here:

1. I have had some incredible Kabuli pilau. I hope everyone gets the chance to have some. There are quite a few restaurants in the Bay Area that serve it, but homemade is best in my experience.

2. Spotted dick is a cake (steamed?) with currants… at least the stuff I had. Delicious.

3. No idea about toad in the hole. It better be good with that name.

I presumably made the same guess (spiced rice grains mixed with meat/veg), but British people have the cultural context to know what pilau means. They even a section in Tesco (not just a search, an actual section).

From Denmark, I can suggest brændende kærlighed (burning love, which for Danes is mashed potatoes and bacon), dyrlægens natmad (vet's night snack, rye bread with pâté, beef and meat jelly etc), æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple).

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/food-cupboard/dri...

> æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple)

That reminds me that the regional name for deep fried rectangular potato prisms in Berlin is “Pommes”, which is the French for apple, because everything else was dropped from the bowed French “pommes de terre friets”.

It’s a Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel situation ;)

For which the best tool is a phrasebook and learning enough pronunciation. Duolingo won't help with that.

In theory their valuation is based on expected future returns. There are a lot of apps that have no or limited benefits that still drive traffic and revenue (all the brain training apps come to mind).

Yes, I agree. I think that there's a lot of value to be extracted from people's desire to learn a language, whether or not the product is actually effective at creating that environment to do so. That's kind of what I meant in my original comment.

I find it really useful for practice, but it's obviously not the best thing to be using solely if you think that's going to reach you to proficiency.

It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive. I've got books for learning Russian and German to go through along with using Duolingo as a pretty good option for practicing basically everything else. It's fun to compare how I got Spanish down via immersion without really practicing too hard on anything outside of rosetta stone (Didn't teach me a damn thing, was a very bad tool back in the day)... Just reading a book from the 1950s (Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish -- highly recommended) and sinking myself into that world for a while took so many years. I'm pretty sure I would have done better off with some better programs and proper study instead, but it definitely gave perspective to where tools like Duolingo have their place and where they're the most useful in pretty much giving you gameified drills and tests.

> It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive.

I've tried to use Duolingo to learn a new language. I found it very effective for a few weeks (of daily exercise).

I remember though, that at some point the questions were repeated frequently, went off the intended theme, and overall, they were not intended to make users think or remember.

Getting off track was something that irritated me the most, as I couldn't focus on a subject.

Essentially, after the initial phase, it's completely useless as a learning tool. It's a shame because it could be effective and fun at the same, but I have the suspicion that mid/long-term learning effectiveness is not their target.

Yeah, that's kind of the point where I reached with German on it and I think I'd have to agree with you. The only problem with German is that practicing in-person outside of that country and the conversation usually veers into English much too easily as their English is often quite good.

I'm surprised how much I get now between translating words I don't know on leo.org and just reading what I know already on news articles which is how I'm keeping up casually on that. The journalism in that country is top notch and it is probably worth learning the language for this alone.

First if you enjoy learning new languages and you find it useful thats great! Not trying to put you down in any way. However, you say:

> it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive

This makes it sound like video games are useless and learning a new language is super useful. In your situation this could totally be true but for some people (like me!) learning a new language isn't super useful! If your a video game dev playing games would be 100x more productive than learning a new language and if you travel around the world then learning a language would be 100x better than a video game! I feel like its almost impossible to know whats more "productive" in general.

I feel the same way about Duolingo. I used to be able to speak a moderate amount of German and let it lapse. I picked up Duolingo because it substituted for some other casual activity I might do on my phone (crossword, read hackernews, etc.) And learning some conversational German feels like a better use of time. However it is pretty basic. I know there are hundreds or thousands of units and spending 10 minutes a day probably won't get me very far. Still if I keep it up and take a trip to German I'll at least know some of the basics. I practice with my long-suffering family who has to listen to me say Mein sohn is sehr klug! and other stuff like that all the time.

Pick up a book or two to round out your formal understanding of grammar, and make some German friends, maybe even just online if that's easiest to help you with your pronunciation.

Exactly. I learned russian to B2 level without any paid material. I used Google translate to learn about 50 words per day. I went for couple of months to the country. Took me about 10 months to get to B2. Advancing further now is harder. Guidance needed from a professional.

It's free and it certainly isn't worse for you than watching tv.

If you're watching TV in your target language it can actually be very productive for your language learning and definitely better than Duolingo. Granted, you have to get to a point in your language learning for that to be the case. Perhaps Duolingo can get you over that first hurdle, though there are probably better resources for that.

> The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will.

It still improves you way more then anything else you can do alone with low effort.

Being fluent is absurdly high goal. At first, remembering basic structure of sentence and vocabulary is already achievement.

I've learnt both English and German at school, for pretty much equal amounts of time - about 12 years each. And well, I can speak fluent English, but barely any German, despite usually having at least ~2 hours of lessons a week, plenty of homework, oral exercises.....

For me, it has everything to do with actually using the languge in practice. English was and is everywhere - it's much easier to practice when all your favourite movies, games and books are in English - but my real life experience with German was limited to those few times we went to Germany or Austria.;

I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much you "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can practice somewhere in the real world.

It works if you're learning the language while you're in a place where it's spoken.

But then one got to wonder why not spend that time learning in the wild. People have forgotten how it works I suppose. It would take less energy.

There are a few options to learn a language. Some say immersion. What's most effective for the brain to capture and memories is _needs_.

We tend to learn languages out of a desire to add them to our skill belt. Or out of fun. And we are having a hell of a time this way. Duolingo innovates and will happily monetize their effort.

Learn a language? Move to the country where it's spoken. Get a job where interactions are a necessity, but where one would perform to some level without even the basics. Think kitchen porter in a buzzing restaurant. 6 months later you are fluent, and have actually learnt local expressions and the way people actually communicate. From there you can read books and ramp up your vocab to proper fluency.

I took English, by force, for 12y , 4h per week. I could still barely read, and in no way get a face to face conversation even started other than hello, what time is it.

Months in an environment where communication was a need, and suddenly I found myself nearly fluent. Never having to open a grammar manual or do extra effort for the sake of learning.

The teaching models are flawed. They are designed to extract a profit, at the detriment of the learners.

For the vast vast majority of people, if learning a language is "immersion or bust," their entirely rational response will be bust.

That said, relatively casual language learning isn't likely to yield a lot outside of essentially entertainment value. I had four years of high school French which likely tops the relatively casual bar. On the one hand, I classify my French as pretty terrible. On the other hand, I've traveled to Paris with a friend who doesn't know any French and it makes me realize I actually do have a bit of working knowledge especially when it comes to reading.

I've found that immersion alone doesn't work for me either. I've lived with roommates from China who spoke primarily Mandarin, and despite spending a lot of time with them, trying my best to learn, and them being very patient, I never got anywhere. I was also going to a university in Germany where students could enroll in German-language engineering programs with only limited proof of German proficiency. A lot of the less-experienced German speakers ended up just hitting their heads against the wall and not learning anything (about German or their field), even though they had significant pressure to pass their classes.

In my experience, most people need both some explanation of the fundamentals of grammar/pronunciation (formal education) combined with opportunities to use the language (immersion is perfect for this, but you can practice on your own as well). Figuring out what differences in Mandarin pronunciation are essential for meaning (tone) vs. which ones are meaningless, for example, is very difficult to do from immersion alone.

It's possible for the formal education to be in the target language, but if so it has to be very carefully designed. In my experience Duolingo does a somewhat decent job at the formal education part, but is more helpful if you had some formal education in a language, so you know what variations to look out for.

It sounds like you already had quite a lot of formal education before you had a chance to do immersion. Glad it worked for you!

Duolingo has been very effective for me, not because it's perfect, but because it's something I can actually do, while moving to a Spanish-speaking country or getting a job at a restaurant run by Spanish-speakers is not. Could I learn faster? In theory, but in practice it's the only strategy I've been able to stick with and I still am making progress. It's given me the foundation to practice using the language in other ways.

Language learning also requires you to actually be invested in the learning. I don't think any learning method works if you are totally passive. You have to be trying new things. You don't have to necessarily put yourself in a situation where you need to use the language. I've seen plenty of homesick people studying abroad who really need to learn the local language, but resent it, and end up sitting around learning nothing. But you do have to want to use the language. My German teacher was great at this. German had no practical applications where I studied, but we would play games, make jokes, and generally toy around with the language, which helped us push the boundaries of our language knowledge.

Immersion is absolutely essential to language learning and English has an abundant amount of resources, as you say.

I understand the difficulties you've had with getting immersed with German, given that my target language while in the military had very little content period, let alone things I was particularly interested in. It might be worthwhile to look for German translations of works you've read/watched in your native language or English, though, if you're still interested in learning it.

> I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much you "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can practice somewhere in the real world.

Yeah, there's too many methods you need to use to facilitate language learning and while Duolingo can potentially fill a lot of these holes, I don't think it can be your holistic one stop shop.

We're expanding LLN into this: https://www.languagereactor.com/ "Language Reactor ... helps you to discover, understand, and learn from native materials." It's still rough. TurtleTV is kind of useful already. (P.S. looking for a good mobile dev in Europe).

Learning Language with Netflix is a great resource and I'm really happy to see you're expanding! This looks awesome!

And yeah, anyone that's trying to learn a language should definitely try immersing with a tool like this. Connecting words with things on screen and hearing different people speak are really useful, and your retention of vocabulary is going to be better when you can see it in different contexts.

If you use Netflix and VPN into Germany or Austria to watch movies then many of them have closed captioning offered only in German.

I find it fun to learn language on Duolingo as a kind of game. But unless I have a need to regularly use the learning, I know for sure it won't stick.

And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags.

There are plenty of people effectively native in multiple languages. It’s not guaranteed (I have that missing part for one language despite having done all of High School and college in it), but i know people who speak perfectly in two languages (usually English+their parents native tongue)

I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well, so it’s easier to spot non-native speakers.

> I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well

I'd think that English is not unique there.

To speak Chinese at the level of an educated native, I'd say you have learn not only the language, but also the country's history, and have some familiarity with canonical Chinese texts such as the "Four Books and Five Classics" (Confucius, Mencius, etc.), "The Dream of the Red Chamber", etc., to understand idioms such as "四面楚歌" (four sides of Chu song = facing insurmountable difficulty, defeat [1]).

As another example, Hong Kong has its own lingo (a variety of Cantonese) that evolves so rapidly that HK people that have been abroad a few years tell me that they note that the language has evolved and shifted when they come back.

I'm fairly certain that it is easy to spot non-native speakers in many languages, maybe even easier than in English.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/四面楚歌

> I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well, so it’s easier to spot non-native speakers.

This applies to every language out there, English is certainly not an exception in this aspect.

> And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags

But those last .1 % are not very useful anyway if you're not living abroad. You want to be able to communicate fluently and not make noticeable mistakes, but it's not necessary to seem like a native speaker. Unless you want to become a spy maybe.

That's fine, because I only need 90%. I have no interest in passing for native, my intention is to communicate.

I think a lot of people miss this point.

Conversational literacy is a huge step on its own.

Language learning is like Math, without consistent practice nobody is going to get anywhere. In some ways, languages are harder than Math - Math is logical, languages are often not (tons of arbitrary rules on spelling, grammar and especially pronunciation). More and more languages are going to die, despite best efforts from linguists to preserve them. English is going to be the dominant language for the foreseeable future, and we'll soon have apps (if we don't already have them) interpreting in real time. Given the long time commitment needed to even get to a basic fluency in a language, most people are going to give up quickly, except a tiny percentage of population that genuinely loves learning new languages.

If everyone learned at least one foreign language, the world would be a much better place.

I got huge value out of Duolingo as a first step. I live in a German speaking country where it’s entirely possible to speak no German. Duolingo and textbooks got me far enough to enroll in a B1 course and find some speaking partners. The alternative would probably have been paying for a year of A-Level courses, and to be honest I may not have found the time. For absolute beginners, Duolingo has a lot of value.

I'm glad that it worked out for you! I can't comment on the quality of every individual course, but if it propels you towards your language learning goals, then it's definitely doing its job.

I do think that for many languages there are more effective ways to learn in a given time period than Duolingo, but if Duolingo helps you stay motivated and keeps you practicing in a way that other methods couldn't, that in itself has a ton of value.

I have been learning languages on Duolingo and Babbel for years now. None of them I can speak well, but certainly well enough to have a good base of knowledge to start with. Duolingo has the advantage that you can do it whenever you want, while commuting, quickly a lesson before lunch, or on the loo. It just sums up if you consequently keep doing it.

I totally agree with your point, though, that some languages are better suited for Duolingo style of learning than others. For example with Russian it was quite difficult without any grammar basics explained so I needed to additionally read about it, while with Danish it was much easier to grasp the mechanics. Not quite so with the pronunciation...

The alternative could be a $40 textbook and an open source flashcard / srs program.

The problem with just textbooks is you don't get to hear or speak the language at all. There's also very little structure so you're expecting a novice to know how to effectively test themselves.

The beginner textbooks I've used have accompanying CDs, and also audio available on their websites. The best beginner listening practice is to focus on minimal pairs so that you can start to hear the difference between different sounds that originally sounded the same. Some textbooks include this (I remember having to combine initials and finals in Chinese with my teacher)

For speaking, Duolingo speech recognition isn't very good and is not going to provide specific feedback for improving your pronunciation. I'm not even a fan of practicing pronunciation virtually with a live tutor. I have found in person pronunciation practice to be very valuable compared to doing the same thing but online. A textbook doesn't solve this and neither does Duolingo.

They are also boring to the extreme and don't bite size it for you. They are also unpactical format- fiddling with cd requires you to be at home and have cd player available when you want to learn. So basically you have to be near laptop.

I don't know anyone who did stick with textbook approach long enough to learn something.

Ok, boomer.

I also used those things! I used Anki and Quizlet (which isn't open source but you can import your own word lists so it doesn't feel too "sticky"). Duolingo was still key, though - it felt less like work, because it was nicely gamified. (I give all this praise with a twinge of dread now, because I'm sure that with the IPO, Duolingo will be twisted in the way that all publicly-traded companies are).

The immersion is definitely the most valuable. Very few language apps can help you learn idioms or slang, even if they are in common usage.

Even if you were learning English, you are more likely to learn "that is very good" rather than "that is amazing" or "sweet!".

I think we also underestimate how much immersion forces us into thinking in the other language when we are surrounded by it, even passively. If you use English all the time and learn German for 2 hours per day, it's not even close to what it would be like living in Germany, even if you were speaking English there.

Every foreign language that I've learned (4 in total) I felt it's necessary to get basic vocabulary and grammar and then just try communicating it in. Obviously living with people surrounded by the language helps, I don't even know if 'remote' is possible. For that purpose duolingo is pretty good.

This was the only way I could do it as well, formal courses didn't really help me after the basics. It's the same way I learned to program and I think some people are just wired that way.

> I suppose in the end Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually learning a language, though.

> Language learning is hard and a multifaceted thing that no single application is going to adequately prepare you for.

Why do you sound disillusioned with Duolingo? It's just an app. I think the hacker news community undervalues it for no reason

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages).

In my opinion it's the other way around.

Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach.

Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want.

Reading instruction is strongly amenable to automation. You can just sit and do exercises on an SRS until the cows come home and you will eventually learn to read. Not on duolingo through.

Speaking is the next easiest, you can't go at any speed but you can at least go slowly. Plus you only have to deal with one accent when speaking, your own.

Most languages have more consistent spelling than English, so if you know how to read an IPA phonology chart (and if you are embarking on the multi-year journey of learning a language then spending a time to learn IPA is a no-brainer) then you can probably figure out how to speak in a way that is understood.

Listening is the hardest because you don't control either the content, the pace, nor the accent. If someone is throwing words out like a gattling gun or in a non-standard dialect then tough luck. The learning curve for listening is a cliff in most circumstances.

Neither speaking nor listening are amenable to automation. TTS is no substitute for native speakers, and automatic speech recognition is a joke. So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.

I in fact did indicate that reading is the easiest in my post.

Speaking is harder than listening because it requires you to produce language and convey ideas from your own mind, with proficiency in pronouncing it in such a way that a native speaker might understand you. Things like idioms you may be able to infer meaning from interpretation when you are listening or reading but you will never use them in speaking unless you really truly know them. You’re correct that the variables of listening are out of your control (which is what makes it so difficult as compared to reading), but that does not make it harder than speaking.

In the military where the DLPT actually tests all three categories for proficiency, speaking is consistently and universally, regardless of target language, the one language learners are least proficient at.

According to the test specifications.

You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or using words you have no knowledge of.

Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages, and the same for my fiancée who is a native English speaker with one secondary language.

> According to the test specifications.

...Which define proficiency nearly identically between the different skill sets. Your relative proficiency for speaking is expected to be worse until you reach native proficiency, where you are still worse at speaking than reading or listening, but it doesn't very much matter in most situations.

> You will not speak what you don't know.

Yes, and what you don't know with speaking is invariably greater than what you don't know with listening and reading, hence why everyone scores lower in proficiency with speaking relative to their ability in listening or reading.

> Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages

If all my utterances in English were "I go school," "I eat pie," "I clean teeth," native speakers will easily understand what I'm saying. That doesn't mean I'm proficient or that it's easier to speak than it is to listen, just that I can create coherent and correctly understood sentences in English.

Re-read the thread.

Test results and fet experience are not connected.

Felt experience is not relevant. Your own evaluation of your speaking vs listening skills is incredibly irrelevant.

I'm surpised this is getting downvoted. The OPs assertion that listening is easier than speaking makes sense in the context he describes, a closed testing environment. In a more practical setting, as someone who is living in another country and learning the language, it is far easier for me to convey my meaning with limited vocabulary, than to listen and interpret another speaker, and especially a group conversation.

Certainly listening is easier than me speaking at the same proficiency as the other speaker, but in terms of what matters for using the language on a day to day basis, it is the other way around.

I'm a native Russian speaker but have forgotten most of it since I moved away from there. One thing that makes listening so much easier than speaking is that I can often infer context of a sentence based on just a few words, even if I don't know what the other 5 are. With speaking, I might know what I want to say but I get stuck on the one or two words that I just don't have in my vocabulary, and it crushes my ability to communicate(in Russian).

Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an anecdote :)

When we're speaking of proficiency and comparing them between reading, listening, and speaking, you look at them through a similar lens. How well can you understand or communicate ideas in the language? Can you convey complicated and nuanced thoughts in your target language? Can you understand those? How would your speaking ability compare to a well educated native speaker? How does it compare against a less educated native speaker?

You feel more fluent in speaking because you're only working within your own ability while listening you'll encounter things you don't understand or situations where it's difficult to understand things all the time. That doesn't mean you're more proficient at speaking and in most cases you aren't going to be nearly as proficient at speaking as you think.

Well apparently reading isn't so easy either since so many missed what the points being defended were.

In this case I agree with OP. Yeah, you have much more control in the output when you speak. However, most of the case, it'll take forever to brute force your brain to compose the right words/sentences and even found no result most of the times when you're not fluent. On the other hand, in listening, you've built the pattern recognition during your study and easier to spot the speech pattern.

In my country, lots of people are bilingual due to the nature of the ethnic composition. I know way more people whose much better at listening than speaking with the language that they're not fluent with.

>So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.

TV, movies, anime etc can fulfill the listening purpose. But you have to do it in copious amounts and turn off subtitles.

Or turn on subtitles in the language of the audio; it might let you discover the writing of new words you hear.

As someone learning a second language through classes, immersion, and - when I remember - apps, I don't really agree.

Certainly early on speaking is easy because you have a handful of words and know how to put them together, and listening is very hard because you can barely make out the sounds.

However, in my experience and I've noticed this in others too, after a while you get better and better at listening and it quite handily overtakes your ability to speak as now you're wanting to construct sentences more complex than "a table for four please", but you can't necessarily pull out the words and put them in the order you need in any useful timeframe.

Yes, this right here! Not being able to reply to something you understand because you can't express yourself quite yet (but almost)...

The parent did claim that reading is easiest (you've even quoted that), so I don't think you're disagreeing there.

I do agree with the parent that listening is easier than speaking. When you're speaking, you have to know the right words, and know what order to put them in. Sure, there's some leeway: if you put words in the wrong order, or incorrectly conjugate a verb, or forget some types of words, your meaning will probably still go through. But if you forget other types of words, you just can't be understood. And sometimes conjugating a verb incorrectly does completely change the meaning of your sentence, which can confuse the listener.

I agree that the things you mention -- accents, pace, content -- are somewhat out of your control. But you can always ask the speaker to speak slower, and that will often lessen the impact of the accent on your ability to understand. The content problem is still there, just as it is with speaking, but I've found that I can usually understand more words than I can think of to speak on my own. And often you can get the meaning based on context even if you don't understand a word here or there.

I'm just a single data point, but... I took Spanish way back in primary school, for 5 years. I'm terrible at speaking it nowadays (over 20 years later). When I hear others speak Spanish, however, I can usually understand things that I'd never be able to speak on my own, even if I had all the time in the world to think about it.

Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have things repeated.

Speaking is hard, but those native in the language is more likely to understand slow and broken speech with a little effort than a learner is to understand fast and unclear speech that takes shortcuts.

This is my experience with learning Mandarin at least, both using classroom teaching and Duolingo.

> Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have things repeated.

This is definitely not the case. Yes, listening to difficult audio is really hard to interpret. Your proficiency in listening isn't defined simply by how well you can listen to people in a perfect scenario, but also your capacity to understand the language.

Reading is usually easier than listening because it provides a ton of context clues, a visual indication of what is being said (as in... writing), and essentially no time limit. If you can work out what is going on surrounding unfamiliar words, you can, at least sometimes, figure out through the context of the entire piece of writing what the meaning is. With listening, you are constrained because you are listening at the pace of the speaker, but there's still plenty of advantages that exists to help you interpret the meaning.

With speaking there's none of that. It's entirely dependent on your own mastery and because of this people will almost always speak at lower proficiency than they can read or write. It might not be apparent to you because you're the one doing the speaking, but I can almost guarantee you that your level of proficiency is greater in listening than it is speaking, because you can't convey the same level of complexity in your speech that you can understand from someone speaking it.

If there are multiple ways to say something, I only need to know one of them to speak clearly. For listening I need to be ready for anything.

My ability to succeed in approximately deciphering an arbitrary sentence conveying meaning A is lower than my ability to communicate that approximate meaning myself. The odds are made much lower if communicating with a new person not already aware of my exact vocabulary.

Of course, I can decipher much fancier sentences than I can produce (especially in a controlled environment as I originally mentioned). My produced sentence will be much more awkward than the sentences I can decipher, but it will work.

From my perspective, this makes listening harder than speaking - I will not be fluent in a language until a decade of practical use, so the only metric that matters to me is whether something had practical application and acceptable understanding. In that sense, removing parts of a sentence you can't produce before you say it still passes as a success, but not understanding anything or most what a person is trying to say to you is not. Most people are not able to sufficiently simplify their speech as they do not know what or how you have been taught. If you are already able to have the meta-conversation needed to inquire about and discuss meanings of words and sentences comfortably, then you are already an advanced speaker.

Note that this is very subjective. I am expressing my current state of learning as it is, and claiming that this is wrong is silly. On the other hand claiming that you will experience the same would also be silly, but it's none tell less worth sharing experiences.

Yep. I studied French on the side while I was at uni. It was incredibly valuable as I learnt a lot about English and language in general, and a little French. I got to the stage I could actually read books in French, and write a little (I had a pen pal). But when I went to France, I could barely ask for a baguette in a shop and, once the reality set in, I prayed they didn't ask me any follow up questions because I just couldn't understand.

Duolingo was the new kid on the block at the time, but there were still some people recommending Rosetta Stone at the time. They used to say it was "used by the US military" or some rubbish. All of these language learning things are the same: they claim to be easy and painless. They tell you it will be like acquiring your first language as a child. Nobody seems to remember the years of babbling and years of schooling that were required to become fluent in their native language.

The good news is, learning a language as an adult is easier than learning your first language. The reason is simple: you already have language! You can learn about your second language using your first language. Immersion is still absolutely necessary, but learning grammar and vocabulary using your native language will greatly accelerate the whole process. But, bizarrely, Duolingo etc. actually refuse to use the most powerful tool you'll ever have. It's completely the opposite way you should be learning a language as an adult.

Can you talk about the resources you used to learn in the classroom? I learned German using the Foreign Service Institute handbook and I thought it was great introduction to the language. I'd love to know what's in use nowadays.

I’m pretty sure this person was learning Pashto or Dari.

The materials were mostly (all?) developed in-house.

If they were learning Dari, they would have been better off just using externally-produced Farsi textbooks since they have a more robust history of development.

The specific recommended materials for an introduction to a language depend on what your goals are for learning the language.

Yeah, the Dari course was notoriously bad quality and rife with controversy with some of the highest failure rates in the entire Presidio at the time. Not sure if anything's changed at this point?

Things improved slightly, then the program got reduced and then cut due to less demand.

Somewhere in there, they got creative and had folks who passed Farsi take a 3-month Dari course to bridge the gap between Farsi and Dari, and those folks had a lot of success.

The language resources were largely designed in house as the other comment mentions, so unfortunately unless you attend DLI, you probably won't get to see them. I don't think there's much in terms of content that you can't find in civilian courses, just that it's designed specifically around being in class for 6-7 hours a day rather than the 3 hours per week you'd be attending at University.

There were audio recordings made specifically for the course and there is some deal with Transparent language to provide language software to the military like Rapid Rote, though Anki is just as capable as Rapid Rote is.

Big things are access to native speakers (most of the instructors) and non-native "military language instructors" who can help navigate difficult to understand concepts for non-natives. Also the whole spending every day doing it over and over again part.

Sorry if this isn't as helpful as you were hoping.

> won't achieve any sort of fluency in your target language from taking a course in it

For a randomly picked person, yes, but it doesn't matter to apps that specifically cater to motivated language learners. It's like saying "new training shoes will not make a random person run better or become healthier".

Obviously talent and motivation are mandatory.

However, any stock-market valuation right now is divorced from the success potential of the business. That's a separate issue.

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening

Listening is much harder for me. I find it easy to mimic/parrot sounds, but not distinguish them when listening.

Speaking in this case isn't simply speaking words out loud intelligibly, but the entire process of thinking and communicating ideas in a foreign language. There is almost always a gap in your knowledge with regards to what you can understand being said and what you can actually say which is why I say it is harder, even if you can say everything that you can say fluently.

This doesn't ring true to me. I can memorise a phrase, mimic it, and associate the whole phrase with a meaning. But that comes before I even know what each individual word means.

I imagine it’s helpful for their valuation as well that there’s no accountability on Duolingo’s part whether anybody actually learns or not, which makes think you’re spot on. They don’t have graduation rates like a school would, or job placement rates or any meaningful metric. There’s no measure of success they can track apart from how many people finish the “course” which means nothing with regard to whether they actually learned anything or not.

You're not going to become a triathlete thanks to training wheels either, but if you don't know how to ride a bike, the training wheels give you a good start. I've learned two languages using Duo Lingo as a supporting tool early in the process. I don't think I would have been able to have conversations so early without it. And for me, having conversations (even poorly) in my target language is the single most important factor for achieving fluency. Yeah, you're not going to become fluent from Duo Lingo alone, but early on in the process it's an essential tool.

but you see people still using Duolingo after 6 months or 1 year. If you saw someone still using training wheels after 1 year, you would tell them to stop because it's handicapping them. Duolingo is the same, it's a terrible investment of time after 1 month.

As someone who has used Duolingo and spaced repetition apps for ~10m/day for the last four or five years, is there something specific you recommend transitioning to?

I've started with some Netflix and podcasts, but they're a little more awkward in 10m chunks.

If I only had 10 minutes a day, I would go to an online newspaper and go to the advice column. There are people who write in for advice/discuss and people in the comments will reply. They're going to be using native expressions and idioms, making references to shared knowledge that everyone there knows. It's also going to be about a wide variety of problems (although a lot tend to be relationship based) which means you'll be able to naturally recall a large variety of words.

Try to read it. If you don't get some words or sentence, skip the sentence for now. Then once you're done with the first read lookup in a dictionary or glosbe and then finally text someone for an explanation to that phrase. (It can be hard to find those friends without visiting a country that speaks your TL and befriending people there).

And then feel free to enter that phrase in your SRS.

---

I went abroad for 6 months to study my TL (target language) at a foreign language school and would roam campus finding (local) people who don't look busy to help me accomplish this task in real time.

Thank you, I'll look for some newspaper columns.

Not the commenter you're responding to but I recommend switching to your own custom set of cards using Anki after you've done the basics of Duo Lingo. I use Anki Droid almost every day, and there's also an iOS, desktop and web version that all sync.

I’ve been using a spaced repetition flashcard program called SuperMemo every day for more than 15 years. It has worked really well for long term retention on stuff I’ve made flashcards about, which includes languages and other stuff I find interesting.

A 16 month course of 6 to 7 hours per day with a lot of exercise and you didn't learn the language at all?

I don't think Duolingo is a good solution but in your case you had all the opportunity to become fully fluent with that kind of regime, it starts to be your fault.

I think this is more of a Dunning-Kruger situation. The more you know a language, the more nuance you recognize and the more you see there is to learn. I only speak English, and I still feel my command of the language could grow.

Obviously I knew my language well enough to perform a job which required some amount of proficiency in it. I'd imagine that some people might describe my level of proficiency as fluent. If you were to compare it against university, it'd be around the level of a four year degree, but undoubtedly worse than someone with a master's degree in the language.

I think this is more a case of your definition of being "fully fluent" is vastly different from mine.

At this point, we are talking about a really high education of a certain language on a thread about a tool to help people going from zero to say basic sentences on another language.

They are two different things. I mean, I am sure that there are academics with superior knowledge than me on my own native language.

But Duolingo makes people happy because you can sit on your ass, or in bed, not really try and feel like you're putting in the hard yards.

Kind of like watching sport instead of playing / training.

10/10 satisfaction score.

>The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will.

I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language.

It is an amazingly powerful tool to bootstrap you from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talking about", though.

I cannot think of a single more effective method than Duolingo to get over this first hurdle.

DuoLingo is great as a first hurdle (better than e.g. Babbel, as it's friendly and eases you in gradually) - but there are diminishing returns. I found it useful to jump ship partway through the course and move to LingQ (which has a comparatively crude UX but exposes you to much more context.)

There are definitely more effective methods, just mostly not free and more time demanding.

I have a mission to get B1 French, tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year. You get into the bubble that you think you are progressing but reality is, its a very narrow and not-so-useful progress if whole language knowledge is your goal - mostly passive skills and certain type of language usage that goes along with the type of exercises in Duolingo.

If you want real language knowledge, as OP mentions speaking is the hardest part (active & rapid usage of all that you know), and Duolingo doesn't prepare you for this, at all. If your goal is purely passive reading newspapers/articles, then its helpful a bit, but I would still use at least 2-3 other methods if you are even a bit serious about it.

Try talking to people after using just Duolingo, heck try writing an official letter on whatever topic. You will not just struggle, you will fail if you don't use any external help.

I've made tremendous progress with zoom meetings with professional teacher over shorter period of time. But its because I made it a priority and dedicated my time to it. And it costs quite a bit (doesn't have to, but my case is quite specific).

>tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year

To be honest with you, I think you spent too much time on Duolingo. It's definitely not a suitable tool for learning new things after the first 8-12 weeks (assuming you put in around 30-60 minutes a day).

To be fair, though, in that short initial period you can pretty easily learn close to 1000 common words, as well as basic sentence structure in your target langauge.

This is immensely useful if you want to start communicating with others online or reading texts in your target language; you're looking up the few words you don't know rather than staring at a wall of gibberish.

Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even if it were, it would take more than six months to get there.

A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months.

Duolingo could at best help you reach an A3, and even then you'd have to supplement it with reading and (ideally) conversation. Duolingo plus outside reading and listening could get you to a B1 level in a year if you really put your mind to it.

They even make a podcast available, to help the listening part. I happen to listen to the French one myself, and highly recommend it. The stories are interesting and well produced, and bring stories (and accents) from all around the Francophonie.

Doing it with a personal teacher will always be better than an app, but Duolingo gives a huge jump start on that. For free.

They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own.

https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/

I just completed all of that content up to French level 1. It's helpful in introducing a lot of important-but-uncommon verb cases (conditional, subjunctive), but at least at level 1 I still wouldn't really be able to follow them in context.

It sure as hell doesn't help that in French they all sound the same. They're clear enough in written form, but French in particular requires close attention to context. Even other Romance languages draw the same distinctions more clearly.

One of the problems with the Spanish course is that all the later content (past checkpoint 5 or so) just stops explaining things at all, so it's up to the user to figure out things like how the negative imperative uses the subjunctive case. It's okay if you've taken a more structured language course in the past but I can imagine people starting from scratch just getting completely lost at that point.

I found watching French TV helped get the equivalent of language immersion.

One source that isn't region locked is TV5Monde [1], you can view programmes online if it isn't available as a broadcast channel where you are.

[1] http://www.tv5monde.com/

The old FSI language courses are very effective. And free and in the public domain.

FSI combines hundreds of pages of print materials with hundreds of verbal audio drills. I used it to supplement a French course in college and my professor asked me how I advanced so quickly. The course materials were doing very little for the rest of the class because they didn't force natural language thinking. FSI grammar drills make you think on your feet in conversations with different roles and grammatical rules.

I had also tried Rosetta and Pimsleur at the time. Years later I tried Duolingo for another language. To me they all feel like fun toys, but only toys compared to FSI. If I wanted to learn another language, I'd check if it had an FSI course.

I've not heard of FSI before. Thanks for the recommend.

If you search, you’ll find plenty of people willing to sell you some “FSI” courses for hundreds of dollars. Is there an official source for FSI courses?

It looks like https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/ is what you want.

Surely there are updates to the FSI courses, right? Like what does our state department today use? Have they entirely farmed the job out to private institutions like Rosetta Stone and community colleges?

> I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language.

I'm active in various Facebook/Reddit groups dealing with language learning. The average user, who's never learned a language before, does think DL will make them fluent. And DL advertises themselves in this manner as well. It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I understand natives?"

> I cannot think of a single more effective method than Duolingo to get over this first hurdle.

I think an actual coursebook is more useful, but it also likely depends on person. DL doesn't really teach language skills for most the courses. It has you translate, you never practice reading for comprehension, listening for comprehension (or listening to natives at all, in the courses with TTS), or writing. And not to mention the default of 'click the words' in the mobile app doesn't force recall at all.

Audio is the most important and hardest component of learning a language so apps have a huge advantage over textbooks any day. I really don't think recommending textbooks is at all relevant these days. Graded readers are better for simulating immersion. Apps are better for getting your feet wet. Textbooks can teach grammar but so can apps and really you have to be pretty far along for grammar to be the main stumbling block (over listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary).

> Audio is the most important and hardest component of learning a language so apps have a huge advantage over textbooks any day.

Assuming the apps actually use native speaker audio. Which Duolingo doesn't do.

> I really don't think recommending textbooks is at all relevant these days.

I disagree completely. Textbooks are still, in my opinion and experience, the most efficient way to start learning a language.

> really you have to be pretty far along for grammar to be the main stumbling block (over listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary).

I wouldn't agree you have to be "pretty far along". Grammar becomes a huge stumbling block as soon as you get outside the pleasantries section of learning. Once you start trying to talk about your day and what you'll do and did, then the grammar really starts to matter.

Why do you say Duolingo doesn’t use native speakers? Their Spanish speakers for example are either native or indistinguishable from native speakers.

Then that's an update. For the longest time it was simply TTS, with all the downsides that contains.

They've been working on improving their recordings for years. It's a lot better now.

I use newsinslowfrench.com for this very reason. They have a whole library of grammer lessons and language learning courses, but the main product really is that every week they produce 4 "news broadcasts" actually talking about news of the week by native speakers. In addition to the general listening reenforcement, each weeks script emphasizes a particular element of grammer and comes along with that topics lesson. They product both a speaking slow and speaking at a normal speed version so you can start with the slow one to get an understanding of what is happening, then listen to the actual speed lesson and have a chance. It's an awesome program, but it doesn't scale to other languages in the way that some general-purpsoe learn all the languages startup can.

≥ you never practice reading for comprehension

This has existed for at least two years: https://www.duolingo.com/stories

Yes, it does not cover every language but the intent is to address that ( perceived ) complaint.

I disagree that an actual coursebook is more helpful.

I used Duo for 6 months prior to moving to a Germany. It gave me an incredible confidence boost to be able to at least understand what was going on around me.

After living in Berlin for 6 months I did a course and I was far ahead of others who had taken formal courses before.

It has been 2 years since I left Germany, I still do my Duo daily and have continued doing German courses.

It has helped maintain my minimal ability.

> it also likely depends on person

Indeed. My partner at the time did the same as me and Duo did not work for her at all.

> This has existed for at least two years: https://www.duolingo.com/stories

I'm aware of stories, but given that it's only available in a small minority of languages, I'd say it's fair to say DL doesn't offer it when the majority of their languages don't (and likely won't ever) have stories.

they used to have you read wiki articles like, 6 years ago? I feel that over the years, Duolingo started focusing way more on the game aspect than learning.

The spaced repetition is also mostly gone, only somewhat available on desktop.

This is not true, they've made changes recently to their premium features that forces you to do training (spaced tasks).

I see... It's kinda true still, as before we had that on the free plan.

> It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I understand natives?"

As an alternative anecdote, I've been using Duolingo for years and spend some time in the forums + different Spanish learning communities whose users frequently use Duolingo and I have never seen anyone ever ask this.

It's always struck me as obvious to everyone that you would need multiple resources to become fluent, but Duolingo is useful as a good quality free resource that can be done anywhere at any time.

I'm not saying you're wrong, as we probably come across different posts or groups, just an another experience to share.

This. Duolingo is a great introduction to a language and can get you from not knowing a word to being able to understand something and maybe have basic tourist-level conversational skills.

Nothing gets you to fluency without actually just immersing yourself in a language for awhile.

I agree. I feel like there's 3 phases to learning a new language.

Background: English first language, French second, and I've been trying to learn Japanese.

The three phases are:

1. Learning basic alphabet (if different from your own), basic grammar. Unlocks: being able to access more learning material and more rapid progress. Progress on these first building blocks is slow and can be discouraging.

2. Learning full grammar control. Even the most basic prose uses ~all of the tenses and conjugation rules. Unlocks: reading/watching non-educational native material.

3. Learning the culture and filling out vocab. Lots of languages are idiomatic, and understanding real-world usage can require just as much that you read Candide as that you memorize flashcards of more-obscure vocab (more-obscure meaning things like "chandelier". It's not an uncommon word, but a second-language learner probably won't run into it in wordbanks or anything.)

I think Duolingo is good for doing 1, and like, half of 2. I don't think it can get you to 3.

Duo is pretty good if your are a second language learner, with some courses/living experience under your belt and want to make sure you've covered all of the basic vocabulary. Like, maybe you never learned the word for "turkey" and it never came up.

For 2, how often do you see Future Perfect Continuous or just Future Perfect anywhere outside of literary works?

I'd put grammar at much lower priority than vocabulary & common phrases, since knowing just a bunch of words (at least in most languages) can get you very far.

> from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talking about", though.

I think this too vastly oversells what Duolingo can do.

Duolingo is a great example of gamification done well, I'd argue that's the whole selling point of it!

I'll also say it was useful for me to learn basic German for a trip to Germany, 6 months of Duolingo + a few extra (beginner) books do wonders

> They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement with humor and gamification.

That's the part I hated the most and the main reason I stopped using it. I wasted more time in front of "achievement" animations and shiny rewards than on actually learning the language

When learning a new language, one uses a lot of tools.

Duolingo is just another tool at your disposal.

Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language.

If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement / scamming.

> Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language.

Lots seem to have that belief, though. As I said in another comment, it's something you can see quite often in various language learning forums in Reddit (/r/duolingo) and Facebook, as well as on the DL forums themselves.

> If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement / scamming.

They might not explicitly claim it, but they certainly imply it in my opinion.

It's not perfect but I found that it was the easiest way to just get started. Japanese is intimidating but Duolingo got me started. Immersion and other material such as detailed books on the subject are still absolutely necessary but without Duolingo I'd still be planning to learn japanese instead of doing it.

duolingo is A2 which is very good to continue own to B2

the problem isn't that it's hard to do. the problem is that their business model relies on their app not achieving it's portrayed purpose - learning. success means losing your customers. that's why I don't use it anymore and I'm baffled by how good they are at being bad. or rather - staying on the exact thin border between "not good enough" and "not bad enough".

This just isn't true. Duolingo's mission is 'to make education free, fun, and accessible to all'. And for the most part they have succeeded at(or are striving towards) doing those things and have left the learning part to you. Maybe it is not working out for you, and that is likely the case for many people, but to say that their model is to create an unsuccessful learning environment sounds a little bitter.

Such a silly way to think about it. You could frame every service as having this conflict. Does Google want to obfuscate results so I'll spend longer looking for results?

Duolingo is extremely popular because people get use out of it and like it. You've taken a tiny perverse incentive and jumped to the conclusion that it trumps all the other more important incentives.

As a general rule, modern-day capitalism produces products based on whether you can market it to somebody with money, not on actual results. For a lot of markets, the revenue is nearly as good and it's much cheaper to make something that doesn't work well, or doesn't work at all.

The most obvious example here is make-money-fast schemes. Those things never work; if they did, they wouldn't be offered for sale to randos. But there are a ton of others.

> * Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages).*

I’ve always found speaking and reading to be far easier than listening—especially keeping up with native speakers of a foreign language.

I think Duolingo's valuation says more about the current stock market than it does about Duolingo.

Can I just say that 'cryptologic linguist for the army' sounds like an incredibly far out occupation, and also that 16 months of 7 hours a day of linguistics training sounds like a very daunting undertaking. Kudos to you!

Everything you say is true, which is why when I talk about language learning, I discourage people from setting fluency as their goal. Just knowledge of another language is good for the brain, and the fact that you can't become a native speaker should not deter anyone from trying it for fun.

Duolingo is great for producing a cursory introduction to a language. But yes, there is no substitute for immersion. For example I spent some time in Spain after learning the language basically on Duolingo. I’m sure I spoke like a 2 year old, but at least I wasn’t totally helpless (I was even able to give someone directions to the airport!). Contrast that with my experience in France where I barely knew anything, and felt totally out of place and awkward.

Totally echo all of this. I'm one of the owners at the Orange County Lingual Institute (oclanguages.com) and we see Duolingo as the gateway for people to tap into their language learning interest but then get serious with in-person or online language learning classes. We have seen firsthand hundreds of students unsuccessful with apps since they are not practicing live conversations and not understanding grammar. With 80+% retention of our 2 month/once a week classes, adult professionals get through a college textbook in a year and can become fluent enough to travel to those countries, speak with relatives, and read novels & newspapers with high levels of profiency. Language learning is hard work with no shortcuts but can still be accessible without apps that overpromise and underdeliver. Ping me privately or check out our site for more info.

Duolingo is such a joke. They don't have even a single textbooks worth of content for the languages that I've tried.

>>"Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually learning a language"

Duolingo is a game 1st and then a learning app. It's very engaging at first but it failed for me since I started to play it without learning much even though I was advancing (which I equated as learning, wrong..). I think it's certainly better than nothing but ultimately it's just a game.

I think it could be a great part of a structured language program. I hope that they use some of the IPO money to create such a program where you need to learn the language to advance in it.

I believe that games can be used to learn. In nature, playing is a way to learn so we should be able to use games for learning.

I never played it, but a friend used to play EverQuest and he told me how he had friends that had become Leather Craftsmen as a result of playing it. I wonder if Duolingo could be that inspiring to language learners in the future?

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

I moved on to Babbel.

Thanks for the pointer.

Quick search gave this review: The main differences between Babbel vs Duolingo are: Babbel is best for learnings looking to completely master a language, whereas Duolingo is better for sporadic learners who want to dabble. Babbel offers lessons with conversational practice and cultural immersion, whereas Duolingo offers adaptive learning lessons.

yeah babbel seems better although iirc the interface was a bit clunky.

I also found busuu and linq to be okay as well.

Yeah I used Babbel to pick up some basic Italian a few years ago and thought that while a bit more “boring” than Duolingo, I felt like I was learning more useful stuff. It’s structured more like a language class at school.

Memrise is worth a look as a Duolingo alternative. It’s similar but feels a bit more “serious”, there are some nice features like you get videos of native speakers saying phrases with a variety of accents.

Memrise also has fun sketches that offer something most language tools miss: entertainment. They’re dumb but can cause a little chuckle (extra satisfying when it’s in an unknown language)

Babbel is great and they also have shorter subscription plans. I only needed a quick fresh up of my French skills and did not see why I should subscribe to a full twelve months plan, which was the shortest that I could find on Duolingo.

It serves as a useful tool for learning some fairly basic words and phrases, not much else. Languages have many subtle nuances that simply can not be taught via spaced repetition.

My personal experience leads me to disagree. I've been using Duolingo to learn Chinese for about 400 days now. I recently took another step and started taking private zoom lessons and my tutor said a few of her students have come from the same path. Duo has given me a good understanding of sentence structure and raw vocabulary. Even though my pronunciation needs work, Duo has given me so much for watching a few ads and I hope to continue with it. Given everything, my tutor said I would pass HSK 1 and maybe level 2.

I learned Chinese in college and then lived in China for a year and a half. Personally, I think sentence structure and basic (spoken) vocabulary are the easiest parts of Chinese since there's no real conjugation and particles do all the heavy lifting instead of messing with word forms [1]. The hard parts are memorizing a decent number of hanzi and properly pronouncing with tones. I tried duo to learn some Japanese and found it... not great.

[1] Note: Personally, I find Chinese superior to romance languages in this regard - it was actually really refreshing as a learner.

I agree, building the mental map of written characters->translation was certainly difficult early on.

Duo is not going to be as good as institutional schooling or immersion but I don't think it has to be to be considered a net positive for all of us. It has lowered the barrier enough to allow people to get started for what is essentially free. I remember 10 years ago I saw rosetta stone cds being sold in barnes and noble for $179+ for just a single level. Sacrificing the time of just 170 SWEs for something like this just seems like a no brainer to me, valuation aside.

If it took you 400 days to pass the HSK level 1, I would argue that you're absolutely doing something wrong or extremely inefficient.

It depends how much time he spends per day, no? I always thought of Duolingo as something you do in 15 minutes of downtime here or there. Nowhere near the level of time commitment that a class would be.

I averaged about 10 minutes a day for ~20xp.

Hrm maybe you're right. I was doing 50 lessons a day, spent thousands of hours on the app. Quit my job even. Maybe I just suck and am a horrible person. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of people. The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks.

I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful enough to look beyond Duolingo.

That's cool I'd love to hear more about it, I've actually been thinking about ways that a language app could work better. Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical, an app that just played me conversations, had me read text, etc and 'creatively' formulate responses, not just simply fill in the missing word, obviously in increasing difficulty would be ideal.

Immersion provides the strongest motivation to learn and to try. When you want something or have a problem that needs to be solved and the other party doesn't speak English, you're going to be very motivated. The 'dopamine hit' from getting it right and communicating successfully in another language is also way better than from an app/game. The results are just so much more real and tangible.

Immersion also creates connections between the language and other stimuli (visual, emotional, etc). Connections are powerful for creating reliable memories.

> Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical

This, a hundred times this. Immersion is not only effective in getting you used to the language, but also really helps you solidify what you've learned, and is extremely motivating.

Virtually all of the people that I know in the Japanese learning community who learned the language really fast heavily immersed in a lot of content.

In my own language learning app that I'm making I'm explicitly targeting a feedback loop which looks something like this:

1) You pick an easy show/book/etc. to consume. (I have a list ranked according to difficulty, generated through machine learning.)

2) You prelearn the vocabulary used within using an SRS.

3) You consume it.

4) You continue maintaining your vocabulary through SRS, so the app knows which words you're supposed to know.

5) The app recommends you the next show/book/etc. to consume based on what you've already learned.

6) Rinse and repeat. Gradually the whole thing snowballs and you have to learn less and less for each new work you consume.

I personally believe this to be the most effective way of learning a language, and I'm already seeing some of my users having a lot of success with it.

I had a somewhat similar idea once.

You share Twitter accounts with a service, and it would use the tweets of that account to generate a language course.

I was hoping that this would lead to learning something that I could use right away.

We are moving 'Language Learning with Netflix' in this direction. There's some stuff to see already: https://www.languagereactor.com/ (my email is in my profile, I'd be happy to hear from you :)

If you could do step one that wasn't based entirely on anime I'd love it. That's always been my biggest hurdle with the Japanese learning community -- almost all recommendations seem to be anime, and I'm just not that interested.

I also have Japanese dramas, light novels, a few normal novels, visual novels and I recently started adding YouTube videos, so it's definitely not only anime.

Perfect, thank you! Please let me know when you release, I'd definitely be interested in it.

Well, it's already publicly available. (:

Here's the link in case you want to take a look: https://jpdb.io

Just a fair bit of warning: it still has ways go to, so don't expect a perfectly polished experienced. That said, in spite of its rough edges I do already have users who use it do hundreds of cards per week and successfully immerse, so it is usable.

Thanks, looks interesting!

My "theory" is that learning a language is like learning any other discipline to a high degree of fluency. If you study a couple hours a week even if you don't forget what you learned in short order it's something which requires a period of immersion for you to be able to recall it as well as the day you learned it. To be able to expound at length on a topic at the drop of a hat you essentially need to dedicate a few hours a day every day. I think languages work the same way.

I'm targeting couples that are bilingual that want to learn each other's languages. Immersion is difficult to achieve alone. So I'm trying to channel a native speaking resource that is around you all the time.

Right now the system is a mixture of SRS on your own, sourcing vocabulary from songs and podcasts, and combined with immersive multiplayer mini-games with the native speaking partner.

> The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks.

I think this is an issue of mismatched expectations. For actually getting to know a language a tool like Duolingo is too limited, as knowing a language is an umbrella term comprising multiple skills and Duo helps with only vocabulary, a bit of grammar and pronunciation to some extent (but I have no experience with that aspect). If someone starts a course thinking they'll be able to speak the language once it's over, no wonder they eventually end up disappointed. What Duolingo is excellent at, however, is kickstarting the process of learning a language you're interested in. Hard to find a better tool for that.

Duolingo has worked great for me. I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely forgotten it. In a few months of consistent practice, I learned enough to get around. And after 6-9 months, I could have basic conversations.

I was never good at learning languages and Duolingo has been the best system for me. I like the paced repetition it does. Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and listening.

> I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely forgotten it.

I would argue this is why it worked well for you. You already knew the language and just needed to revise, which is something I would argue DL does do good at, especially the web version.

> Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and listening.

The thing is, in most courses (the home-developed ones with stories might be exceptions), you don't practice those skills. You learn to translate stuff from the target language to English; that's not reading. You don't learn to read texts and interpret them in the language. The writing is awful as well, since it's just reverse translation, not actually responding to a prompt or natural conversation.

The speaking leaves a lot to be desired, unless it's massively improved since I last tried it. I once said "blah" on the Spanish course and it was accepted as correct; I've also had it accept background noise before too. And the same with listening -- it's a TTS, you don't actually practice listening to native speakers and understanding what's being said with comprehension questions, etc.

It doesn't really teach the four skills as they would be applied in the real world at all. Not to mention that default on the app has you click words in the proper order instead of actually recalling them. That's another huge negative.

>You don't learn to read texts and interpret them in the language.

Are you sure? I regularly come across questions that involve a few sentences, a question, and a multi-choice answer. All in language, and some of them are somewhat tricky. Something along the lines of: "Juan's is with his girlfriend. Her name is Antonia. She is buying a green dress. Where is Antonia?" "A: A restaurant. B: A clothes store C: A party."

There are also questions that are a few sentences and you have to fill in the blank, which often require understanding the context, in language: If Juan is speaking to waiter, then the place he is at is a restaurant...

>Not to mention that default on the app has you click words in the proper order instead of actually recalling them.

Not at all true. I've been using DuoLingo for less than a month and I regularly see questions that are an English sentence and a free form text box for you to type the translation into. And one of the questions for the second "Checkpoint" is: Here is a sentence in language, and a free form text box to type the response.

As far as the clicking words, I'll say I really like that as one of the components of learning, because it lets me focus on the structure of sentences without getting frustrated by typos or misremembering words or even in some cases forgetting words. The prompts of the bubbles are good and still make me remember the differences between the conjugations and the like.

I spent a semester in a class in Jr HS, and was much more frustrated and less educated than I feel after 3 weeks of solid DuoLingo. For me, it's a fun tool for establishing some confidence and understanding.

it's not multiple choice if there's only Juan answer

I'm learning tons of grammar and vocabulary through Duolingo. Are you not learning these things, or do you find them useless?

BTW the quality of the language programs differs vastly. Spanish, which I'm studying, is very fleshed out. Tried Arabic and it was anemic and even broken in parts.

having just returned from mexico for 2 wks i can say the pace of duolingo is waaaay to slow compared to conversation.

Its UX is good enough to gamify the starting language learning process, but that is where it stops - novice excitement

I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is still an unsolved problem.

I took foreign language courses in high school and college. I couldn't actually communicate until moving to the country where they spoke it and living there for six months. Then I had to go back home :(

I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach

If your native language is english, surely romance languages are going to be easier than something like japanese

even though english is a germanic language?

The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to Romance languages than Germanic languages.

You can convert many English sentences into a sensible (if not idiomatic) Spanish sentence by translating one word at a time.

German has not so forgiving been :)

> The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to Romance languages than Germanic languages.

I'm pretty sure that's not true.

from Wikipedia: "Of the Germanic family, English is exceptional in having predominantly SVO order instead of V2, although there are vestiges of the V2 phenomenon."

Romance languages like French and Spanish use SVO so I think it's correct to say English is like them.

An example given by wiki of German sentence structure translated directly to English:

"Before school played the children in the park soccer."

The wording you quote, "Of the Germanic family, English is exceptional", implies English is a Germanic language. One that borrows heavily from Latin, but still, a Germanic language.

Also from wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English "English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. However, a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources."

English borrows from both quite heavily (for historical reasons listed there), to where I don't know that classifying it makes a lot of sense, but having dabbled with both, just from a language learning perspective, I'd say German definitely feels closer. Some simple counterexamples -

"What is that?" - "Was ist das?" vs "Que es eso". Same grammatic structure, but obviously very similiar words between German and English. Not so much Spanish. The Latin is "quid est".

"I see him" - "Ich sehe ihn" vs "Lo veo". English and German are very similar in both grammar and word; Spanish is very different from both, putting the direct object before the verb as it does, and not requiring the subject (yo). The Latin is "i videre eum".

I'm familiar with V2 and how English doesn't exhibit it. Look at the following weird deviations from how you'd say things in English

* I am hungry

* Ich bin hungrig

* It is raining today

* Es regnet heute

* Where is your house?

* Wo ist dein Haus?

It turns out that Germanic V2 is SVO in the case of simple declarative sentences! But what about other kinds of ordering, below the full sentence level?

Look at this, about the ordering of attributive adjectives and nouns in Spanish vs. German:

* un hombre alto

* una chica muy bonita

* ein großer mensch

* eine sehr schönes Mädchen

Like German, English places attributive adjectives before the nouns they modify.

Consider the possibility of eliding pronouns:

* Yo tengo hambre

* Tengo hambre

both are fine in Spanish.

* I am hungry

* Am hungry

Dropping the pronoun in English isn't ok in English, unless you're going to produce a fairly contrived context - like a text message, etc. It's not normal speech. In case you're curious, you can't drop the pronoun in German, either.

Language has lots of tiny facts that fit together in interesting ways.V

I've had some success with talking to the Apple Translate app (formulating my own sentences) while learning Arabic using Duolingo. Arabic people could actually understand my simple, mostly nonsense sentences

No, Japanese phonology and therefore pronunciation (what the grand parent post is complaining about) is one of the easiest out there. There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. I don't understand how pronunciation could be remotely a problem with Japanese.

There are also some other easy things like grammar (very few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and some basic sentence pattern (heck you can make full sentences, sometimes conversations, with a single word [the predicative adjectives]).

> There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant.

Except that l/r is pronounced differently than most English speakers, the vowels aren't always pronounced yet take up time ("Nan desu ka" is almost always pronounced like "Nan dess ka", for example), and syllable accent is tone rather than volume for emphasis.

Other than that, it's completely easy. </s>

You say that sarcastically, but those are all easy things you can master in a week, and they are the sort of thing you might find in the English language or even a dialect. It doesn't compare to learning Chinese or Arabic it seems to me.

Just the fact that you can write out romanji and get reasonably understandable Japanese makes it easier than a significant amount of languages out there.

In my opinion the only thing that makes Japanese truly hard is that they decided for some insane reason to borrow the Chinese writing system, which is the most insane writing system in the world, for half (why half!?) of their writing.

A guess as a beginning Japanese learner: Japanese has a lot of homophones because it has so few syllables. It is also almost always written without spaces. Kanji is actually pretty helpful in reading because it provides semantic meaning that disambiguates homophones as well being more terse and breaking up the writing along grammatical boundaries.

I'm approaching this from the angle of wanting to understand video-game Japanese, and when I am trying to parse some 8-bit era all-katakana chunk of text I find myself wishing it included kanji even though I can only recognize a few dozen just so the grammar is more clear.

Imagine thinking learning ONE phoneme is a hard task... Please never have a look at Arabic or you'll have a stroke.

Moreover [ɾ] can be replaced by [l] perfectly fine and the vowel devoicing is not something you need to do anyway (it's not even occurring in all dialects). So even searching really hard for "difficulties" you can't find even one thing that is remotely difficult which just proves my point.

I find their approach of "drag and drop these 6 words to form a sentence" or "fill in the missing word in this sentence" was just leading me to recognize correct patterns of letters, not words or meaning.

"aog" always goes after "Lor" and before "san" (obviously made up example) - I couldn't tell you what the individual words meant or what the full sentence said; but I knew that those groups of letters belonged in that order.

I'm also a lapsed B2 in German and played around with that course a few years ago. 3 or 4 weeks ago I got an email that they finally accepted my correction on a blatantly incorrect translation, which had apparently been unfixed in one of their most popular courses for years.

It’s useless for properly learning a language. For getting the basics of a language in a game-y way that doesn’t feel like studying, it’s great. My wife managed to pass her German A1 (CEFR [0]) exam almost completely by just using Duolingo. She took some free Deutsche Welle exam prep courses in the week before, but to even get to the level to understand those, she used Duolingo.

If you need to learn a language quickly, I’d call it the wrong tool. If you are okay spending time properly studying a language, I’d say that will be better. But for certain cases, Duolingo is great.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

So I am using Duolingo as I will have to take the sane exam at some point over the next year or two. I think it works ok for being able to consume simple German but less well for understanding spoken German, or constructing one’s own ideas.

In other words, it doesn’t make the hard things easy or easier.

It is a great alternative to wasting time on social media or news sites, however.

The A1 exam is a pretty simple test ;)

Is that right? So how come they’re charging a fortune for the course in London??!!

Their business model isn't to teach you languages, it is to make money off the millions of people who want to learn a new language.

The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations. You have to decipher confusing sentences, handle unfamiliar words and wrestle your brain into thinking in a different language.

You can't really make a fun game that does this. Therefore Duolingo makes a game that focuses on translating the foreign language to your native one. That's great for starting out, but eventually you gotta start composing sentences and ideas in the foreign language.

>The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations.

I think that's a really good description of learning in general.

Growth in general really. Stretching and building muscle, for instance, or training endurance.

> The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations

Immersion is the only way you’ll ever truly learn a language. All the classes, flash cards, etc., in the world can’t teach you how to clear up a misunderstanding with the manager at hotel in Spanish.

I remember at some point we did Duolingo in Spanish, and the Spanish speaking kids were shocked how fast we (black) tested out of topics and progressed. The reason was pretty obvious; we’re around y’all a lot lol.

My recommendation is even if you don’t have many people speaking the language you want to learn near you, immerse yourself. Read popular modern authors in the language, listen to podcasts in the language, join a game server and practice in-game interaction in the language (hard mode).

Maybe it is useless. But you may find that those encounters take place on a foundation built by some little green bird named Duo.

Also, native languages are weird. The last sentence above, for instance. If I had said “green little bird” or even “little cute green bird” you would have clocked it as wrong immediately. Apps alone aren’t sufficient to learn these nuances; every language has tons.

I wouldn't call it "pretty useless". I think it has two distinct places in a language learning process.

1) They make learning a new language very accessible and fun to get started. Books and courses do not have such a low level of entry. 2) It's good for learning new words in a context. Memrise for example often just gives you a single word and translation. But I think it's much more effective to then put words into sentences.

That said, if you really want to learn a language past the "I can manage for a few days as a tourist" you need to add other methods to it. Read books, listen to audio content, watch TV, have lessons (speak the language!), study grammar etc.

Then not everybody is alike. So try different methods. See what works for you. Some might have more success with Duolingo, some will have less.

For Duolingo, you might mix it with other materials for a much better experience. I told our kids' experience learning foreign languages here [1]. My wife used the same technique to learn some French, Duolingo reinforced with audio and visual materials, songs with lyrics, regular learning books, podcasts etc.

Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not seeing ads.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408576

This proves the OP's point. Duolingo is trash if you aspire to fluency. It's only useful in fluency as an additive to a robust training program. You don't get fluent by following Duolingo alone.

I disagree. Duolingo is not trash as the op suggests, it's a great fire starter and makes you able to use other materials by handling the intro well. Peppa Pig is a sustainable language learning tool if you did something before to learn the basics and Duolingo handles that part well for free. How is that trash?

Yeah, I've gone through not quite half the introductory Spanish audio course from Language Transfer [1], and it feels like I've made massively more progress than Duolingo, even though I'd spent at least twice as long on the Duolingo courses over the year. All the Language Transfer is available free too so that's nice.

It's a shame, because Duolingo is fun, the art style is cool and the gamified stuff is potentially useful for keeping people coming back and doing the lessons. It just really hasn't felt very effective to me at language learning at all...

1. https://www.languagetransfer.org/

Can only agree. Duolingo gives some basic vocabulary but after that basically is useless, especially as the way it teaches grammar forms (and on the mobile app barely any explicit rules) is 100% useless. Native speakers looking at example sentences in the target language are often shocked at the nonsense that is provided.

But worst for me is that it wastes time. The unnecessarily ineffective repetitions, all the features and ads intended to upsell 'Pro', etc. There are dozens of other apps that do it better for free (e.g. good old Anki, or newcomers like Clozemaster) and when on a desktop a whole wealth of professional learning resources are available, both old ones that are now public domain, the world of wikis and collaborative learning and flashcards, and no-profit materials. For instance lots of organizations fund free courses, e.g. the EU funded a bunch of sites for learning languages, like https://deutsch.info, and national broadcasters like RF1 (French), DW (German) provide great professional and current materials. Podcasts and youtubers teach any language imaginable, etc.

Try Duolingo to get a taste, but after a few lessons look for your language online and you'll find much better stuff.

Same here. This valuation makes no sense to me. I’ve spent a LOT of time optimizing ways in which I learn languages, and duolingo doesn’t do much.

Here’s what I can recommend:

- follow as many instagram account as possible to teach you the language. There’s so many “teaching chinese” instagram account for example. Every day when I check instagram I learn a few chinese words.

- check browser plugins to display subs in different languages simultaneously on netflix

- use memrise or anki or other app or real world flash cards. There’s a reason people always go back to the flashcards.

It’s all about input. You need to learn a lot of vocab, fast. Don’t even focus on grammar at first, and even less on output. Output will come naturally after a while.

My partner is doing a “cocktail” of Duolingo, Memrise, and a grammar textbook for French. They are progressing a lot in just a month (and given the early learning curve from the grammar, I’ve found it good)

I think that these language tools work best when you have a mixture, because they can complement each other and keep on feeding into the novelty factor.

(In particular Memrise and Duolingo operate on different sort of teaching strategies so just those two together is really interesting)

I find that Duolingo is to human languages what Codecademy is to programming languages. It's gamefied and fun but will only scratch the surface teaching you the very basics. In order to truly learn the language you have to put in the much harder work elsewhere. That's not to say that both platforms dont have a place, they still can be pretty valuable tools for beginners.

For non-ubiquitous languages (everything other than English), part of the difficulty of learning is not just the basic learning, it's retaining what you've learned; it might be difficult to practice it unless you're on the country that speaks it. Of I'm in the middle of Tennessee, probably don't have a lot of opportunity to prescribe my Japanese. That's where Duolingo shines, in my opinion: as a learning companion.

Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before.

How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable?

How is a $6.5B valuation justified?

You can just put a variable where you mention duolingo based on the recent market.

Discounted cashflows to infinity and beyond plus a massive user base. Add zirp to the mix and I'm surprised they're not worth $65B.

I'm sure they'll be profitable in a decade...

Also don't forget this is an IPO: ideally you want to overstate your value.

'Following the IPO, the company will focus on improving its flagship app and getting more active users to switch to paying subscribers, von Ahn said.'

I switched to being a paying subscriber once and the experience was more or less the same as being a free user with the aid of an ad-blocker. Enough said.

I think we're closing in on a point where you can't reach a multi-billion dollar valuation if your company is profitable.

Just keep burning through investor cash until you're acquired by a bigger corporation. Then a year later they announce that they're killing your company because, surprise, it couldn't turn a profit.

Somewhere a rich stock owner makes a huge profit. Everyone's happy.

Those are pretty small numbers in an absolute sense. Growth is all I would worry about.

Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue growth. They have 40 million monthly active users. Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.

>Every company at this stage loses money

The company is ten years old. I would have to imagine almost zero companies lose money ten years in because they literally do not exist anymore.

Average time to IPO for tech companies is 7-8 years, so ten years without a profit for a VC-backed company is not at all unusual. Palantir is coming up on 20.

>Palantir is coming up on 20.

Palantir is a dumb shitty company that will file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately the VCs have already dumped it on to the dopes on Wall Street bets.

https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/PLTR/Probability-Of-B... says

Current Palantir Technologies Probability Of Bankruptcy = 24%

That analysis seems to be full of shit. When plugging in companies with much better financials than PLTR I end up with higher % of bankruptcy.

Then short it for free money

"Markets can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent"

Shorted it down from $40 to $30. Bought a watch with my proceeds.

There’s a ton of companies which exists solely to burn other peoples cash.

I think VC funding makes IPOs a bit more confusing. It makes sense to IPO, if you need to money to boost your business. Duolingo needs money to update their app, so they can use the IPO to fund it.

The problem is that if you’re VC funded it now looks like the VCs have lost faith in the company. They paid for the bill for ten years and now they won’t help push the company into profitability? That makes an IPO look like an exist strategy.

> That makes an IPO look like an exit strategy.

Every IPO is an exit strategy or a refusal to run a balanced budget. If you have cash flow you can invest for free and compound the growth internally. If you have responsible financial management you can tap the bond markets for basically free.

VC's want a 10 bagger - they have had it and more - is Duolingo going to be valued at $65B in a couple of years? I doubt it.

I think it was a typo, but I agree that the IPO is their “exist” strategy as in the purpose of the companies existence is to IPO, lol.

The IRS tells small business owners that it's a hobby if they aren't profitable by year three.

I'd guess...this is just a way for the VCs to exit and pass the bag to someone else.

> Every company at this stage loses money.

... why are companies still getting a pass with this 10 years in? No, this isn't an acceptable excuse here.

Because investors are interested in making money in the end, not some arbitrary metric over if a company is behaving as they should.

Whether or not this company makes sense, there are plenty of companies that have been losing money at this stage and ended up working out. (Plenty that didn't too)

Making money “In the end” (in this case) seems like a cash grab at the IPO.

And the question is whether those “plenty of companies” were valued at 6.5 BN.

While I agree with you that focusing on profitability for valuation at this stage doesn't make much sense, I still don't understand how a 6.5 billion valuation is ever something they can live up to. That amount is 40 times their revenue for 2020, and even for a fast growing stock that's a huge multiple, especially for a 10 year old company.

>Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site?

Because a lot of these companies seem to be doing the underpants gnomes business strategy, as in 1) Register a bunch of users 2) ??? 3) Profit

> 2) ???

Isnt the second step, show Ads

In 2008 Myspace had 110 million monthly active users worldwide, 74 million in the US.

https://venturebeat.com/2008/04/24/one-small-step-for-myspac...

Because this site is mostly used by software developers who have no clue about finance.

"Balance sheet is red" is about the only thing they can understand about an IPO, and thus they comment about it.

>Every company at this stage loses money

This is the most retarded silicon valley vc tech bubble comment I have ever. There are 11million companies in the US, many will fail making money let alone being 'strong' companies that drop $10 mil a year.

If the numbers are so great and they have so much money at hand why are the people who run the business selling some of their share? Possibly due to high market valuations of all kinds and a very attractive price to dump a well established business that you have milked the most out of to date?

This is a liquidity event. Why are you surprised that people are selling?

Even if the IPO didn't pop as much people would still probably be selling because their equity has likely been illiquid for years, especially if they were a founder, early investor or early employee.

He didn't say anything about being surprised.

No shock at all this is how the game works! You slap out a float, ideally small enough so that the supply and demand inbalance pushes the price up.

So 3.7mil shares were issued at $102, and opened at $140, so that is a 'cost' to the company of $140 million + underwriting fees etc (probably another $30mil + the 700k shares they have options on at issue price). Additionally insiders dumped out 1.4mil shares at the issue price.

Now execs + VC's have a 'liquid' market to sell or short against without paying the high costs for goldmans to price you up a private hedge which is the whole point of an IPO.

Its litterally writting into the offering - 'The principal purposes of this offering are to increase our capitalization and financial flexibility and to create a public market for our Class A common stock.'

What I meant is that regardless of the financial situation of the company or whether shareholders still believe in it, don't you think insiders would be selling at IPO because it is probably the first major liquidity event ever?

Even if you completely believe in the future of the company, locking in returns and getting some liquidity (Even if the stock didn't pop heaps) would be nice for people who have been illiquid for years.

And this is why the IPO market is broken. VC's are riding startups through multiple rounds of funding for way longer than before then dumping the late stage mature companies onto the public markets.

Those that locked in their returns, recieved the proceeds of thier 1.4million shares of $142.8 million into their accounts just before the bell rang for the market open. The bell rang everyone cheered and the shares they just sold are worth $196 million. Regular joe with a robin hood account makes the money and the CEO/VC loses money ... who knows more about the company though?

> Even if you completely believe in the future of the company, locking in returns and getting some liquidity

Worth it if you get $10 a share instead of $100? All about value. Why not dump some out in the previous 8 funding rounds? The reason is not many VCs would be in there cashing out the guys from the previous rounds, or would only do so at a heavy discount or to gain control over the company.

You're right. The notion of "if they believe in the company so much why are they selling?" implied to me that it was unexpected for people to be selling their shares.

That is what I meant by "surprised", though in hindsight my choice of wording was poor.

growth rate. low customer acquisition cost. the expenses weren't from marketing, which is good.

My biggest concern would be how much of the growth was from people having free time at home due to covid. And if deep learning will make language learning less relevant in the future. You may be less likely to learn a new language if audio can be translated in real time almost perfectly

Babelfish! Sign me up

1. So it looks like they lost $14M on revenue of $71M in 2019, and $16M on revenue of $162M in 2020. Revenue more than doubled YoY, which is impressive. Costs also grew (by a smaller percentage), but they're presumably spending a lot to chase after the growth opportunity and can dial back later.

2. They had positive free cash flow of $14M in 2020, which may be a better metric to look at when assessing their financial health.

40X 2020 (Covid bump revenues). That's a pretty healthy valuation--bordering on extreme. But with so much cash washing around, it's really hard to say what is correctly priced these days.

> How is a $6.5B valuation justified?

The hope is to make a locked-in user base and a captive audience.

They are probably hoping to create various sorts of "attachments" between users and their "achievements" to drip revenue from users through either premium accounts or ads.

Duolingo is already cash flow positive and if you back out some non-cash costs can say they are profitable. However some of these non-cash costs should be included but that's another story. Their target model is for 35% adjusted earnings margins which is aggressive. I did publish a post with our "present future value" model that goes out to 2026 and discounts things back. I only see them getting to 22% operating margins at this point but there are some areas like testing fees that could push that higher. Using the model I get to a $145 stock price that I'd say puts a full value on the next several years of growth. It's just a preliminary model now. After they report a few quarters we can put a finer point on it. Details here: https://ipocandy.com/2021/07/making-sense-of-duolingo-duol/

"lost $25M" doesn't necessarily mean they set it on fire. If the wording is changed to "invested all their revenues and a further $25M of raised or borrowed capital", wouldn't that make more sense?

The way these arguments are usually phrased doesn't do the company justice. Amazon "lost" money for decades because they were building giant and ambitious infrastructure, not setting burning in on executive parties.

They are pushing 'plus' HARD. Plus is basically the feature set everyone had for years, so it's basically, "Pay to keep features or we'll take them one by one". I have an > 2000 day streak, so I have seen it change a lot over the years and I have 0 urge to pay, I will just stop playing.

I was a Duolingo launch user, when revenue was driven by crowdsourced translations. I used Duolingo to learn basic phrases in some languages over many years, but I had to stop using the app. There were too many basic mistakes in grammar and vocabulary. Duolingo innovated by bringing a structured language course with spaced repetition to mobile early in the previous decade. It seems they will need another burst of innovation, this time in novel language apprehension techniques, in order to stay relevant beyond this initial public offering.

Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker brought language learning to the global, mobile masses. I hope they will succeed again in the next phase of language technology.

I'm not sure they innovated much. Other apps like Babbel are older and had the same features, if not more and better. Duolingo rode the 'free' and 'hip startup' publicity wave and had an interesting idea that they'd use the users to crowdsource translations. But that didn't pan out - everything afterwards seems to have been just scaling with no innovation whatsoever.

The innovation is the publicity and public image. I’ll get downvotes for it, but it’s the same innovation that Uber, Tesla, GoPro, Facebook, and countless others have rode to billions. Our economy is post-materialism and values public image and publicity greater than innovation and value. If you want to get rich, don’t do something innovative, focus on how you will make a good story to grab free publicity and cement an image as being ‘cool’ and ‘hip.’ Then you don’t ever have to make money or innovate anything. Investors will pour money on you because you’re cool and hip. I’m a little salty about it, but there’s something important there.

One more I just thought of, even if it’s not the same scale: Rap Genius. They took what’s pretty much a weekend project and turned it into a business and careers for themselves. The fawning press at their launch was overwhelming and impressive.

One small counter example: weebly. They made something actually innovative that provided real value to people. Grew quietly and made (by all outward appearances) a fantastic business. But since you didn’t/don’t see tons of gushing press about them, they (again, just by outward appearances) didn’t launch into the stratosphere like they absolutely could and maybe even should have.

As an English speaker, DuoLingo didn’t seem that interesting to me. Then I listened to a podcast where the found Luis von Ahn explained why he started the company [1]. He grew up in Guatemala, and he noticed that learning English would essentially triple anyone’s earning potential in his country. Sure, I might never learn Chinese in DuoLingo, but if I could triple my income by doing it I bet I’d be much more motivated. English speakers that think this app is a toy aren’t the target market.

Luis also invented the captcha and used it to digitize the full archive of the New York Times. I can’t speak to the quality of the instruction in DuoLingo, but I’m willing to bet that if there’s a computer-assisted approach to language learning that works, Luis is one of the people most likely to invent it.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/05/22/860884062/recaptcha-and-duoli...

The article says the USA is their biggest market, with about 20% of the users and revenue.

Everytine Duolingo is in the news here, I find the anecdotes and suggestions of alternative solutions interesting, but we rarely discuss what is making Duolingo so successful.

They have become a household name. Almost all non-tech people around me know what Duolingo is. Kind of like Tinder, they may not use it, but they know it.

I also view Duolingo as a game that provides a bit of exposure to a new language, but won't get you very far unless combined to other resources. I wonder where the IPO will lead them. They did encourage a ton of people to be curious about new languages. It worked for me. I hope they can help them get to the next level, and not become, as someone else mentioned here, the next Farmville.

I've always found Duolingo too boring and it didn't help me at all.

I was able to learn 7 languages using different routes. I already knew Russian, I've learned English the usual school + moving to the country route, and I've learned Spanish, French, German, Italian and Latin by mostly reading books and watching online videos and movies.

Having bookstores nearby (especially the Strand) with a lot of interesting books in Spanish, French, German and Italian were key for me. I completely switch 100% of all book reading to the language I'm learning.

I would not be able to learn anything without a steady supply of interesting books.

For Spanish, most movies on netflix and disney will have subtitles and dubs.

For French, there's Arte Karambolage and the newer Disney films are available in french.

For German, there's also Arte Karambolage and newer Disney films and 'Dark' on netflix.

For Italian, there's a great youtube channel by Iliana Zodiaco with interesting book discussions and reviews. Again newer Disney plus films have Italian. And italian is just very easy in itself.

Latin is a lot tougher because there's not as many books in it, and they tend to be not as easy. I've only read Caesar's Gallic wars and Winnie the Pooh. And the grammar is hard. I recommend checking out Lingua Latina Per Se, and youtube channels on Latin Grammar (there's one really good one, 'latintutorial'). Still, this is by far my weakest language. I've started Cicero orations against Catiline, but it's tough going!

I didn't learn to speak in any of these because I don't have daily contact with native speakers, but once I do, it will be fairly easy.

At what point do you start reading a book in a new language? Do you already know say 500 words? Otherwise I'd imagine you have to look up almost every word on the page

I only know English but am in the middle of studying Latin and I've found that the pain of having to look up works makes them stick in my mind pretty well. Once you can understand a decent number of words you can construct the meaning surprisingly quickly just based on context and the endings of words.

I really recommend interlinear editions for Latin. And also again want to mention Lingua Latina Per Se. If you are ever in NYC there's East Village bookstore that has a lot of interlinear editions in Latin at affordable price. Other than that, you can also get Winnie the pooh in latin on amazon and another edition in english and read them in parallel.

There's also wizard of oz in latin which is a lot longer than Winnie the pooh (and more interesting), but it's hard to find and expensive, alas.

Depends on the book. I usually used Alice in wonderland, through the looking glass, and wizard of Oz as my first books in these languages, (except latin), and though I don't know the exact starting word count, I think a couple of hundred + familiarity with the book is enough for me. Some other easy and interesting books to consider are Tom Sawyer and The Hobbit, and Peter Pan.

For some languages, there are books written with restricted vocabularies (500 words, 1000 words, 1500 words, etc), called "graded readers."[1]

There are some really nice graded readers out there, with the entire vocabulary defined at the back of the book, and any word outside the restricted vocabulary defined in a footnote on the page. I've even seen editions that come with a matching audio book, so you that you can practice listening as well.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graded_reader

huh, I've learnt 8 languages, mostly through conversation

Which languages and how well did it work for you to transition into reading books?

the Scandinavian languages + English, German, French, Spanish, Italian

I don't really read books much but in general it's easy to read once you've learned to speak and listen

That's cool, the same languages as me, aside from Scandinavian!

Duolingo is great to get your feet wet, but its teaching model doesn't scale past A2/B1 levels (and in speaking/listening even less so). This valuation is enormous for a company that's virtually been for 10 years in losses.

So far Duolingo has made the experience more painful to free users to push them to pay, and yet hasn't managed to get out of the red. I think the main that most learners are from developing countries learning English, so Duolingo Plus can be a hard sell.

I bet the money influx will help push whatever projects they have in mind, but while private, and I say this as a language learning ethusiast, their approaches have been completely misdirected. Personally I'd be wary to throw my money there, but will certainly reevaluate it next quarter.

I was a paid user for some time. It's inexpensive and fun. I mostly paid to encourage them, and to be able to use it offline in the plane (it's a fun game). However, as most people, I haven't flown in a long time, so I cancelled it.

I wonder what are the main types of paid users.

Otherwise, when not paying, I use the web version, and never noticed any advertising.

Last time I checked, the ads on the web were alright, but the experience on mobile was extremely hostile, with constant ads and deliberately sssssllllooooowwwllllyy aaanniimmmaaaattteeeeddd reminders to push you to pay for Duolingo Plus.

When reviewing lessons you're already familiar with, you tend to spend more time watching ads and Plus reminders than actually learning anything.

I've been learning Russian for a year (currently at around B1-B2). None of these new age language learning apps are actually useful, even to get your feet wet. The old is still gold when it comes to language learning. You think you're learning with these apps, but in my experience you're not. They just don't seem to put anything in long term memory well. There is spaced repetition in some of them, but not enough repetition.

Good old audio course Pimsleur is better than all of them combined. Cortina Method is best resource to learn grammar and the book is so old it looks like a smudged typewriter print. All old methods are based on learning and repeating sentences after sentences rather than learning individual words. You really end up learning like a child. Pattern recognition is where it's at.

I can't recall anything I studied on Duolingo for Russian. I can't forget anything I learned on Pimsleur. And I finished the last module in January.

> The old is still gold when it comes to language learning.

Absolutely. Maybe I'm just inclined to the grammar-translation model, but I've found the older editions of books like Teach Yourself so much more helpful to me. Couple that with self-created immersion and it goes a lot quicker.

Reading the comments here gives me the impression that Duolingo is more of a game than a language learning ressource. Interestingly Zynga, makers of Farmville, targeted a $7B valuation on the day of their IPO nearly 10 years ago [0], it quickly dropped after though [1].

[0] https://money.cnn.com/2011/12/14/technology/zynga_ipo_price/...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/16/zynga-ipo-...

Here is one thing that happened to me after using Duolingo every day, multiple times a day for more than a year. I became extremely good at it. Throw any language at me, I'll complete it in record time. Sometimes I played it without even the sound on.

Do I speak any of the languages in the game? Hardly. This realization came to me after I completed the Japanese class and my sister asked me to count to ten. I knew all the numbers, their symbols, and the placement in a sentence. But I could not count to ten.

Duolingo is a game before being a learning tool. It is fun to use and I'm almost jealous that they are going to IPO. But it's kinda like farmville. You become good at the game, but you probably won't become a farmer after playing.

Count me as severely skeptical. I don't exactly feel like digging through the entire prospectus since it's too late to matter, but a quick search seems to indicate their user and revenue growth was fairly flat for years until last year, which just happened to be the year everyone in the world was forced to stay home and find somewhat productive things to do. Investing in this doesn't feel any saner than investing in a startup for people making sourdough at home.

I can at least squint at something like Zoom and say sure, single-year growth like this is never going to happen again, but at least remote multimedia collaboration is probably here to stay, even though Zoom specifically isn't necessarily going to monopolize it just because they were first. But that has a clear business use case that isn't going anywhere. Duolingo is relying entirely on the whims of the general public.

The gamification part of the app works well, until you make a break. For me it was when I stopped using it because it basically felt like breaking off an addiction, and I didn't want to go back. So it kept me using it for a while, but ultimately it pushed me away from it. My motivation was a trip to a foreign country, and maybe I would've kept at it after it was over, but as it is, I didn't. From my experience then it seems their goal is less language learning, and more engagement in a typical social network kind of way.

I think the app is technically also really good, and in general pleasant to use. And I think it's not a bad way to learn because you can immerse yourself more than by going to a school where a teacher tries to explain things to you. Doing homework is really important, and Duolingo is basically all homework.

How much did I learn in about a month and a half of 30mins per day? Can't say after two years of not using the language at all, but at the time it was enough to get a sense of something if the menu was not in english etc. And when I was in the countryside (in Italy), I was looking for somebody and the mother of the person said just "ape", and I knew that they're taking care of the bees. And recently I walked next to a new Italian restaurant in town, and at the entrance it said "la nostra cucina ________ (forgot what)" and I was like, oh, I know what that means. So it's not much, but it's not nothing.

I can't believe there is so much money in this app, it's basically flashcards. There are so many mistakes in it when I was using it for Indonesian.

Something like HelloChinese is such a better app.

I think it is worse than flashcards because you usually use flashcards after a tutor who can give you some context around what you are learning. I found two big problems with Duo:

1) You are not given any input as to why or how e.g. German words are conjugated, not just verbs but adjectives as well, you are just expected to learn them. If you don't know what gender is, as an English speaker, then trying to learn der, das and die won't make any sense whereas if they said, "German uses different words for 'the' so make sure you learn the article with the word to remember which it is", it would be more useful.

2) The insistence on being text-based makes learning things like Japanese especially hard. Many people only want to speak and understand a language so forcing them to also learn an alphabet just makes it even harder, especially since in Japan, you won't see everything in Hirigana anyway! If you want to help with pronunciation then you could use a pinyin to do so.

I also thought it was quite funny that the premium version gave you tutoring, in which case, I might as well attend a college class?

I like HelloChinese (spent $100 on it and then forgot to unsub which cost another $100) but stopped using it after realizing that because they only go to HSK 4, I might as well stick to Anki so I can go HSK 6 & beyond. (I don't want to use 2 apps for my srs reviews everyday).

Also if you want to use SRS for any words you learn outside the app, you'll need to use another app anyways.

For me Duolingo is woefully ineffective. A far better method is Pimsleur plus Anki. Ankify the Pimsleur audio, make your own Anki cards with most of your vocabulary in cloze phrases. Ankify the audio on as many of those cloze phrases as you can using native speakers. Work at it daily. Use a textbook to learn the grammar. This is a system that works. It’s the fastest way I know of to begin understanding languages intuitively. No need for mental translation. No difference in how your mind responds to “What do you want to eat?” and “你要吃什么?”

Of course, Duolingo’s valuation isn’t connected to success in learning language. It’s connected to success in convincing people that they can and should learn a language.

If you want to learn a language you are supposed to feel emotions. I speak OK English now (not my mother tongue obv.) and I still remember the silly mistakes I made while I was playing online games 10-12 years ago and people made fun of me. Never made those mistakes again.

Now I am learning a 3rd language in a new country. I started with Duolingo and never believed in "Paid courses". I have used it close to a year with little impact on my skills. But I have made most of my progress when I actually talked to someone. There is a feeling of embarrassment and defenselessness when you put yourself in uncomfortable situations like that and that is what you need to make it stay.

If anyone's planning on learning Japanese with Duolingo: don't. Did that for a few weeks, basically learnt nothing. I soon found out from experienced learners that it was terrible [0]. I then discovered the AJATT/MIA[1] methods of learning Japanese, which prioritize immersion/sentence mining of the target language and learning vocab/kanji and sentence structure through Anki decks (you can use any SRS system but Anki is by far the best with a rich ecosystem of Japanese integrations such as the Yomichan dictionary).

I used the foss app Kakugo (available on Fdroid, not sure about the play store) to learn the hiragana and katakana writing scripts in 3 or 4 days, and have now moved on to reading Tae Kim's Grammar Guide[2] for learning grammar and using Refold JP1K[3][4] style anki decks to learn my first 1000 kanji.

However this method is more of a 'grind', you need to set aside at least 2 hours a day so that you can read Tae's textbook, learn new vocab and do your reviews through Anki. In your free time, once you have a decent amount of grammar understanding and vocab, you need to be immersing in Japanese, so anime, J-dramas, etc. (Jap music isn't very helpful here).

[0] Review of Duolingo Japanese course from a 2+ year user of Anki/immersion based learning: https://youtu.be/jf-SbSfiXn4 [1] The AJATT method has been around for a long time, it means All Japanese All The Time. It basically promoted SRS and immersion based learning. MIA is basically the same thing, mass immersion, started mainly by MattVsJapan. However I use the guides and tools created by AJATT-Tools, whos contributors focus on tools for Linux, such as MPV scripts for sentence mining (creating Anki cards with unknown vocabulary semi automatically while watching subtitled content, with audio and visual cues). Their guide builds on top of MIA and AJATT style methods: https://github.com/ajatt-tools [2] The defacto grammar guide for Japanese that isn't afraid to teach you Kanji from the start: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar [3] Explanation of the JP1K style Anki deck: https://youtu.be/53qKsYxVhoM [4] Deck system is created by https://refold.la, however I use AJATT-Tools's version of the deck because it includes example sentences (and Kanji have different meanings in context).

I did this for just about a year, and i can confirm this works if you put in the time. I'm at around 3000 recognizable kanji and can watch/read pretty much anything that's not particularly hard.

Duolingo story is fascinating. The guy created a software which then became Google Captcha.

He is a legend in crowdsourcing 2 startups. The best part about crowdsourced startups are they inherently create MOAT.

Of all the tools I've tried to begin learning a language, Pimsleur audio lessons have been the most effective.

They're entirely auditory. They teach you a relatively small vocabulary using spaced repetition, and if you do the lessons, you really learn that vocab well. They challenge you to speak (under time pressure) from the first lesson onwards, and because you're only learning words by ear, you can avoid pronunciation pitfalls that people who learn from written sources fall into.

You can't get to fluency with Pimsleur, but you can build a very good initial base.

I don't think Duolingo is really a very effective way to begin learning a language. In my opinion, early on, language learning should be intensely focused on auditory and speaking skills, and only later on branch out into writing, formal grammar, etc.

My biggest issue with apps like Duolingo is that they pretend learning a language is like a game. Effortless and easy. In reality you need to have quite some motivation to learn every day for a few hours. You need to learn words and grammar by writing them down. Lots of times. You need to talk with people at least a few times per week. You need to repeat a lot. It's very hard work. And even then it takes most regular people about 2 to 4 years to get yourself to a level like my English (not fluent, but enough)

A lot of my English I acquired reading Reddit. Sure, I did have a previous background at school, but I would say that it can be painless.

I'll add my (32/M/USA) perspective as someone who subscribed to duolingo plus last month. I'm learning Arabic ahead of a _potential_ move with my spouse to an Arabic speaking country.

First Duolingo is fun to use. I didn't enjoy classroom based learning in high school. Duo gamifies the process really well, it's on my schedule, and I have a concrete reason to want to learn. Duo has been reducing my time on social media as well, always a bonus when picking up a good habit.

The $7/month premium subscription was worth it. I'm investing 30 minutes a day in the app, and ad-free means I can get through more lessons. I have unlimited lives so my learning isn't interrupted if I struggle on a hard lesson.

I'm not expecting to become fluent on Duo alone. But I think I'll get a great handle on some basics. My wife is already fluent, so that's helped me speak and figure out some things I struggled with.

I also tried the Rosetta Stone app. I didn't think that one was fun, it throws you into hard content quickly, so I haven't been using it. If our move happens, I'll enroll in a more traditional environment, and I may take a second look at the Rosetta Stone app. For now I'm happy that I have something that's making me increasingly comfortable with the idea of speaking Arabic.

I'm using DuoLingo (unpaid) successfully to learn French. It is only good for building vocabulary. My advice:

a) Use the "tips" (not available for all languages) on the DuoLingo website client for every exercise. They are very well written and give you crucial insights.

b) Use Tandem every day to chat with/talk to native speakers as soon as you have some basic vocabulary. Spend some time to find people who are eager to learn. You can often spot them because they only want to learn one language and not seven...

c) Buy a grammar book with exercises. Learn conjugations. Learn the grammar to ask questions. Learn prepositions. DuoLingo will not teach you grammar.

I went from A1.1 to A2.3 in 6 months doing this and I'm super motivated to keep going.

Some of it’s statistics were pretty interesting, like the huge amount of Arabic speaking people that wanted to learn Swedish.

Driven by many refugees that sought asylum in Sweden, I believe.

https://blog.duolingo.com/our-commitments-to-helping-refugee...

Duolingo's loading screen regularly highlights that:

"Did you know that most people learning Swedish on Duolingo are in Sweden (refugees)?" (quote from memory)

I don't know how recent that statistic is, but the statistics Duolingo released a few years back were misleading. I believe Duolingo claimed, for example, that Swedish speakers were most interested in learning Arabic, but they left out the fact that they only offered one course for Swedish-speakers aside from Arabic.

It makes sense that fifteen minutes a day of Duolingo isn't as effective as spending two hours a day studying, going to meetups, traveling to a foreign country, etc.

I recall similar criticism for the "seven-minute workout" from people who pointed out that joining a gym and hiring a personal trainer is a more effective way of getting in shape.

But those are not very helpful. If I have fifteen minutes before the kids wake up my only decision is how to spend that time. Duolingo? Meditate? Pushups? Half an episode of something? Daydream?

I use Duolingo to learn Spanish and it's pretty good if you take it seriously and add on research outside of Duo (mostly on grammar). I'm hoping to reach a level where I can read things in the language which are interesting to me (with the aid of a dictionary of course), so I'll probably replace HN with some Spanish variant for example.

I've been using it on a daily basis for 2 years now and when I switched to 'completely type the answer' instead of 'clicking on words', it made a big difference in learning.

I think a big factor in its usefulness depends on the user. If you make it hard for yourself, you will get much more out of it.

First set of crowns on the phone, move fast. Second set on desktop, completely type the answer. Weave in stories once you feel like you have a foundation. Add immersion from live streams/Netflix. This takes you to at least B2.

There's an unsurprising amount of ignorant responses and strawmen in the thread, kind of sad.

Imagine the number and quality of textbooks you could commission from world experts in any and all languages for $300M, a single year at 20:1 price-to-earnings.

Is the app obviously better? More engaging, to some, perhaps. More profitable? I guess that remains to be seen.

They have a name recognition and that's about it. I really wonder what kind of people actually buy IPOs. Except PLTR I can't name one stock that went public in the last 2 years that didn't dip below their IPO.

Based on their IPO filing I would say their biggest asset is the number of users. Other than that their model still results in a net loss every year so if you are looking at it from a value investing standpoint I think it’s overvalued at least 5x.

I need to take exception with many of the comments here. Does Duolingo make you fluent in any language? No. But if that's what you're looking for (from any language learning tool), you need to readjust your expectations. The only thing that teaches you a language is immersion in a society that speaks it, in my experience. All language-learning exercises are just prep work for that. And on that front, Duolingo is exemplary.

I've been doing Spanish with it for the whole pandemic. I'm far from fluent but my retention is high and the learning process is easy and fun. Couldn't ask for more.

For any language learners out there, my method of learning to communicate quite freely in two foreign languages in adulthood has been going to bars, and asking tipsy strangers in very friendly ways about words, such as on the menu, or something you’re wondering about. Let them be the expert they are. You must enjoy learning and sounding like an idiot for a couple of years.

I’ve done courses, Duolingo etc, self study books, spaced repetition cards, and watched a lot of TV. But nothing has beat bars, or having roommates who don’t speak English (or my native language).

This is similar for me, though with language meetups or literally just paying someone to talk with me in the language I want to learn.

Nothing beats seeing the language used as a living thing, as a part of human behavior within a form of life. Immersion, in person, is also essential for understanding the ways that people speak in a language, all the different connotations and tricks to words. Also, jokes. Attempting to tell jokes in a 2nd language, and also getting a laugh out of people (perhaps at you, but same feeling) is really rewarding feeling. I often tell people to start trying to tell jokes in a 2nd language right away. It immediately gives you a sense of play in the language and jokes are often direct references to common human experience. In a way, a lot of jokes are universal.

I can see duo being worth something but since they don't really sell anything... I'm not knowledgeable about advertising to know whether the 6.5b makes sense or not

What is the big opportunity in Duolingo? Are there lots of people learning languages who haven't heard of it already? Is it so essential & useful to language learning that they have a lot of room for ARPU growth? Do they have some way of inspiring a lot more people to begin learning another language?

The most obvious answer would be that many people who can afford basic internet but cannot afford a college class can learn at least the basics of another language.

I guess they only need to upsell a small percentage to the premium version to get a large ROI.

I don't understand all these comments saying that Duolingo is useless? Maybe your brain is not very fit for acquiring a new language, but the app is nothing more than an easy way to do small exercises. That can be pretty useful by itself, if you really have the motivation to do it a lot.

Kind of tangential, but Paul at Langfocus has a potentially interesting video about his observations of Duolingo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbmXSR_QiP8

I remember hearing an academic rail and rant against Duolingo at a prominent global online learning conference a few year ago.

What struck me was the negativity in the face of a simple problem being solved - people want to learn to speak a language before they learn to read and write it for many valid reasons.

Conversational fluency is a thing that has existed for a very long time.

Duolingos superpower is that it can create beginners in languages new to them, at scale, something which most systems to date can’t do as well.

It’s true a phone might not give you a full education, but we do search for plenty of things every day to learn to use knowledge.

The esteemed academic did not present any alternatives to this desire among learners to start to learn a new language.. and instead went back to the theory of learning language through reading and writing first.

Because it hasn't been mentioned here, this is another incredible success story from Luis von Ahn. He is the first Guatemalan founder of a unicorn startup.

It hasn't been mentioned yet, but give Lingvist a try, they take a (much) more serious attitude towards the same material.

And still no traditional chinese characters which means you need a desktop extension and can't learn it on mobile.

Please try the clozemaster app

I found it much more useful and less playful

yeah and you don't got banned if you have done something wrong in a row. i hate this concept of duolingo and it doesn't help in any way but their income

Duolingo helped me to understand Kanji and Hiragana.

I would short this stock.

Reminder that Duolingo’s IPO is very accessible to the public via Robinhood. I am very surprised to see the high valuation for them but it may also be because an uneducated public is trying to get in on something they feel is attractive only because they recognize the name. They may be in for a shock if the stock plummets soon after, especially since there are disincentives for flipping the stock if you bought into the IPO.

> but it may also be because an uneducated public is trying to get in on something they feel is attractive only because they recognize the name.

That sounds like a form of FOMO and they always think of only one way of trading this stock and that is buying it and holding it. Especially at these prices on the day of IPO.

There are larger investors and VCs that have participated in funding rounds that have more than 10x'ed their fundraising round before the IPO. Somebody has got to sell and take profit at some point.

I won't be surprised to see a small push higher then followed by some selling from the larger investors to contribute to the selling pressure of this stock.

It's the larger early investors and VCs that have the advantage of manipulating this stock on day 1 of IPO day, not a group of retail traders and they will end up holding the bag at a high price.

I have tried Duolingo (Premium user), and I can say that it is not an effective app if you're going to learn a language effectively. Instead, it is better if you're going to have a bite-sized time to have some mini quiz or something like that. It is more of memorization, and there's no immersion or anything that makes you feel you're making significant progress

Reply on news.ycombinator.com