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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
I'm pretty sure that's not true.
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."
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 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
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]).
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>
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.
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.
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.
[1] Note: Personally, I find Chinese superior to romance languages in this regard - it was actually really refreshing as a learner.
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.
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.
I think that's a really good description of learning in general.
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.
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.
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...
Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not seeing ads.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I also found busuu and linq to be okay as well.
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.