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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school standard of “here’s a textbook, here’s an audio tape to play on loop”, it’s nowhere near the level of a private tutor.

I’m currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly gold-starred the German course as they add more content, and Duolingo isn’t the only app I’m using.

Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don’t conjugate even close to correctly, my grammar in general sucks, and I can only comprehend real-life spoken German if the speaker talks very slowly and clearly and uses a sufficiently short sentences — from experience, the sort of conversation you’d find in an interview in a general interest magazine in the waiting room of a Hausarzt.

I’m also trying to learn Arabic on Duolingo. Over a year into that course, I still can’t even read the entire Arabic alphabet.

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That may have to do with Duolingo optimizing for paying and returning customers instead of for fluency.

Their app has to be "fun" or in flow rather than in that difficult challenging place to actually help you grow.

In learning both German and Old Norse the most helpful thing for me was to translate texts, read them aloud to a fluent speaker and get feedback. Which is hard to scale.

Do you have any more detail to your approach? Do you use graded readers, or do you find that a dictionary and basic grasp on grammar is enough to struggle through pretty much anything?

... Do Old Norse graded readers exist?

I think the observation here is that not all "engagement" is equal. I really dislike Duo Lingo's pedagogy... For some reason they are opposed to actually telling you anything - grammar rules, definitions, etc - and leave you to (hopefully!) infer them one-by-one.

Have you checked out the "tips" section for each lesson? That usually has pretty good descriptions of things like grammar rules.

Also, when you make a common mistake during a lesson, Duo Lingo will often interrupt the lesson with an impromptu tip showing you what your mistake was, why it was a mistake (what grammatical rules it broke, etc), and how to avoid that mistake in the future. Those have been pretty helpful in my (admittedly limited) experience, though I suppose it's possible the prevalence of those tips depends on the course.

> I suppose it's possible the prevalence of those tips depends on the course

Unfortunately the interstitial hints do vary by course. Spanish course has stuff like that very frequently in the early lessons (I have not done the later Spanish lessons); the German course barely has them at all anywhere, possibly not at all (if I had perfect memory it would be much easier to learn the languages).

For what it's worth, I've also used an app called Lingvist, which tends to tell you the grammar rules more directly. You might like its approach a little better. (But also, you might consider getting an old-fashioned grammar book, with tables of declensions and tenses and such, and keeping it nearby while doing Duolinguo exercises.)

Sure, but it's also nowhere near the price of a private tutor. Regardless of subject, I don't think giving each student their own human private tutor is feasible. I've become convinced interactive, adaptive, software based learning is the next best thing, at least when done right.

For language specifically, the only way you're ever going to get anywhere close to the level of a native speaker is by actually conversing with native speakers. I'm still just starting out with Duolingo, but my plan is to finish the course I'm in (or at least get a decent way into it), then switch to Tandem or some other service that lets you trade lessons with native speakers of another language.

Isn't it time to start reading German books? Duolingo was never meant to be an all in one solution.

Already started, but the books at my German reading level (stuck in the annoying gap above tourist and below truly useful) are boring — my search results are either kids books or textbooks depending on if I search for stuff for native speakers or not.

If you can recommend any novels for mid-skill non-native speaking adults, I’d be interested.

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