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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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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.

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