Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc.

It was a little rough going at times but basically it brings you to the basic conversation level. That's all you can really expect from it because it's rather short (took me about 6 months to complete). Of course, I practised regularly outside of Duolingo especially with writing and looking stuff up on Wiktionary.

No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. But Duolingo will give you the starting point so that you'll know where to go next if you really complete all the lessons. After finishing Duolingo, if you spend another year studying, practising, and consuming material in that language, you should be able to get to a reasonable working level in it.

With the length of the Spanish course, I am guessing you can progress even further.

My German was probably pretty bad for a long time. It took a decade+ to get any kind of accent and comfort with the language (especially since I wasn't living there for most of that time). But I was up and running with the language, having conversations, reading the news, listening to podcasts, etc even if I wasn't "perfect." That, to my thinking, is at the core of what I need a language learning app to do - get me to the point where I'm making progress with it and forming my own thoughts and statements, don't hold me back because I mispronounced an accent or missed the gender on a word, etc.

My own experience with Duolingo is that it is ok as a way to memorize some grammar, but the lack of context is a problem. Random sentences just designed to mix in vocabulary don't seem to be as useful as contextualized learning, IE: at the train station, at the bank, etc.

I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going.

While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scores. While reading a very short story in Spanish, I had the experience of the first time, a second language making me laugh because what I was reading, was funny. Nothing during my five years of 8th-12th grade did that. Just sharing, it's not meant to mean anything.

My only issue with Duolingo is that I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules. Their inclusion currently is really poorly executed, haphazardly located in certain lessons as if random. I’d love if I could get specific lessons on demand for anything I am struggling with.

Also, it is really annoying how sometimes it gives you the translation after you are done and other times it just says “Great!” Or something similar, so if you are slightly unsure of something you don’t always get the actual translation to help clarify.

As to the context of article, I'm also in the group that thinks the latest Duolingo updates are the worst to come to the platform since it's inception. It's beyond awful and I honestly despise it. I frequently went back to areas I felt myself getting rusty at, and practiced those. The new "pathway" has broke that method completely. It's impossible to see previous course content clearly, essentially forcing you through poor UX design to take the next step on the pathway instead, like you're playing Candy Crush. The update spurned me to give up on my 500+ day streak and cancel my subscription over the Summer. I haven't used the app in the last 5 months.

I'm lucky enough to live in Oxford, which is renowned so having some great evening language classes. I've signed up to my first semester starting in January which I'm very much looking forward to. If it wasn't for Duolingo, any interest in furthering my language skills would not exist. I guess it's a silver lining that an awful update to my favorite app by incompetent product management and executive decisions forced me to finally peruse a formal education in Spanish. I just wish it was a amenable break-up.

Then I stumbled upon Michel Thomas. I listened to the basic course and 2 weeks later I was in Spain speaking to people - even managed to talk my way onto a bus when I got lost and had no ticket. It’s a completely different way of learning. Speaking sentences from the first 5 minutes. You’re learning grammar from the beginning and how to actually express yourself. It’s more like a conversion course from English to Spanish (but also there’s Portuguese, French, German, some others)

He’s such an interesting guy - emigrated to the USA after the war and set up his school. Invented a whole new way of teaching languages but wouldn’t let anyone know about it because he was so mistrusting (he was a nazi hunter in the war). Only when he was 70 something did someone convince him to record the language method. The tapes when you listen have a perfect learning curve - there’s always 2 students, one is good the other not so good so you feel better than them. I assumed he must have recorded many versions and then extensively edited - NOPE - they’re all recorded in a one time session. He was just that good.

BBC has made a documentary about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 6 worst pupils French in like 2 weeks.

He’s a genuine legend and the only reason I speak Spanish.

If you want to learn a language please try this out. It is just on a different level to anything else, especially the BS repetition of duolingo type sites - although they are useful later when you want to just learn vocabulary.

Anyway, as you may be able to tell, I am always very excited to pass on Michel Thomas. What a dude. RIP.

https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish

That doesn't mean Duolingo isn't useful, it's definitely helpful, even if you're living in a full immersion environment, but the map is not the territory. If you really want to learn to talk to people, you have to talk to real people. It is a completely different thing to just learning all the words and grammar, far more than I realised before seriously getting into languages.

Later I encountered a fellow who spoke English. He told me he's from Germany. Recalling that I have been studying German on Duolingo for over a year, I excitedly probed my memory for a few seconds, and finally came up with "sehr gut!" (very good), then "sorry, that's all the German I know"

Then I was at a pizza shop and realized the person at the counter only spoke Spanish. Recalling that I have been studying... finally she lost her patience and thrusted her phone at me, with Google Translate.

True story. I still use Duolingo everyday. But surely, it isn't enough to "know"

Another problem is that you just repeat without understanding why the words are arranged in a certain way. For adults it is probably more effective to study some grammer rules and to then apply these rules. Learning grammar is really a shortcut and Duolingo doesn't teach you anything about grammar rules. Also, at a certain age you just can't learn grammar by reading/listening and repeating. It takes kids years to learn, you don't have years. I have lived here for over 5 years, took well over 1000h of class in school and still make many grammer mistakes. Other mistakes continue to happen because nobody corrects me, usually we correct kids at least a little bit when they say something wrong.

Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly. I recently tried it again to pick up another language and they put so much monetization on it that it is now basically impossible to learn at your own pace - unless you pay.

I see it as a tool to learn vocabulary. This is very important in the beginning, once you learn 500-1000 words you can rapidly progress on your own. But honestly, to pound vocabulary into my brain, Memrise is a much better tool. I also used grammer tools like conjugator. Another good resource is the free Coffee Break podcast series, Spanish is probably their most complete course and it helped me a lot.

I have seen some good suggestions I didn't know about in this thread, I'll definitely try them when I try to pick up my next language.

A few years ago I got randomly interested in Danish, so I started Duolingo Danish. In a few weeks I was able to understand tweets from Danish newspapers. In 4 months I could read novels, slowly but well enough to enjoy them. Do I "know" Danish? Not really, I can't speak past a few sentences and have a hard time understanding it spoken (Danish is a particularly hard one at that). But my RoI for 20 minutes a day for a few months was great.

Then my daughter had a hard time with her school English. She knew nothing and could not even follow the glacial pace of her lessons. I bribed her into keeping a 200 day streak in Duolingo and she was suddenly acing her tests. Now she has some interests with English only sources, and that alone is enough to help her keep learning, but duo was a huge kickstarter.

My wife also had non existent English from years of classes and needed to at least understand emails at work instead of always passing them by me, and a 300 day Duolingo streak fixed that.

I don't doubt that there are very good teachers out there, and you need to complement Duolingo if you really want to learn thoroughly, but it really puts you on track for very little actual effort.

It’s incredible how quickly I started learning doing this every day for 6 straight months despite not having anyone to actually talk with or any media to consume in the new language.

Eventually, I started taking in person classes for the language, which has helped too, but after 3 courses, I still haven’t come close to the level I had learned via Language Transfer and regular self study. Language Transfer taught me quite advance concepts much quicker than traditional classes did.

I would say I learned more studying Greek in 6 months via that method than I did in 5 years learning Spanish via traditional classes. After an additional 5 years (10 years total) studying Spanish, I’ve become highly proficient. It blows my mind how quickly I’ve been able to learn Greek. The way the language is taught in Language Transfer is so intuitive. I wish it had been around when I learned Spanish.

My experience with Duolingo over the years is learning a pretty minimal amount. It’s like a worse version of Anki. It’s mostly fluff. The gamified concept is clever, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. If you enjoy doing it in addition to the methods I listed above, then I’m sure that can’t hurt. However, I’d recommend avoiding it and using your valuable time on the methods above. I can’t emphasize enough how remarkable my learning path for Greek has been.

P.S. If you’re really craving a gamified learning supplement, try Clozemaster once you’re at a high enough level of proficiency.

Languages aren't something you learn, they are something you join.

With Duolingo, take a second language along with the primary one. No, not German or French. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and select Latin, or Klingon, or Dothraki, something really short and just for kicks. That way when you are stuck in your primary language, you can switch to the fun language and keep up the habit. Duolingo is all about keeping up that habit. Also, you get to learn another 'language' and checking that off feels good and makes it so that you want to be a polyglot.

My first reaction was that there was no way for someone to learn Spanish just by using Duolingo, as there wasn't enough 'teaching' happening. But then I realized that there is some scaffolding in the app, but you have to go search it out. This could work for a motivated adult (or older student who has some existing language knowledge). But I wouldn't recommend it for a younger student starting out.

I might venture a basic spoken question or statement (e.g. ordering a coffee, asking where check-in is etc), but not much else.

For me that is amazing. I've gone from nothing to basic toddler-level language skills just for messing about in the app a bit (and tantalisingly there was one or two moments where I caught myself thinking in Spanish too). That is valuable I think. I don't want to be fluent enough to be able to "chat with my Spanish friends" or whatever, just know enough to get by when on a vacation (which worked a treat when I spent a month in South America which was the main reason I learnt any at all - I didn't want to be utterly helpless)

I moved to Spain a few years ago and Duo Lingo had me thinking I understood loads of things when I really didn't. Not in a real life setting. It is good as a side lesson but not great otherwise at least from my perspective.

Then I realized, I had got to the point where I was good at answering what duo wanted to get the daily requirements rather than learning.

One day I just stopped and let it go

When I did 30-60 minutes a day for a few months (I did Spanish, then Portuguese, then switched to Memrise because it had European Portuguese), that seemed to lay a decent foundation. Conversationally, I was hopeless for a few days, but I learned quickly (unlike when I went to Mexico without having done Duo). I don’t think there’s any substitute for being thrown a curveball or two by a real person and having to muddle through.

Meanwhile, here are CIA estimates for time to reach professional working proficiency. 600 hours for Spanish or French, up to 2200 for Japanese or Arabic. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/. Just gotta wait for that 3000 day streak!

I do think Duolingo has great value but I do think the second group I described is seriously wasting their time. I get it’s fun as a game but I figure you really might as well go all in with the amount of time a 1000+ day streak entails

Looks kinda bad in an article about language learning in a serious newspaper like Bloomberg... unless it's also mistranslated in duolingo in which case I think it should have been explained...

It's no substitute for immersion, but I do think any time you spend on the app is worthwhile imo. The UI is great and it makes it easy to form a daily habit.

I believe it was developed for the US Department of State to crash train people who were going to work overseas. It isn't silly vocab drills. It has you reading entire literary passages and holding minutes-long conversations also immediately. None of the "get it right before you move on" stuff, either. You're absolutely going to fail, just like if you were really in the other country trying to talk and listen and not getting anything, but keep at it, and you will eventually get it. You can't get true immersion from an app, but this is as close as you'll get.

It's not freemium, though. You have to pay.

I went on the trip and while it helped a little, in conversation it was practically useless outside of the very basics.

I dropped Duolingo and took an intensive 3 month course of Spanish with a minimum courseload minimum 2-3 hours a day because there was nothing else to do. I changed all media I consume to Spanish (music, news, shows, books, etc) I learned more in those 3 months than all of my high school classes and any amount of Duolingo could have helped me.

Now it's 3 years later and I have spent a cumulative 1.5 years of time as a digital nomad in Spanish speaking countries and most consider my Spanish to not necessarily be native fluent, but conversationally fluent in that I can understand jokes, ask for whatever I need, etc.

I'd personally only recommend Duolingo for maybe vocabulary, but if you really want to learn you need to immerse and actually talk with people frequently, as in basically daily.

You need to make those stupid mistakes that native speakers may giggle at and then correct you.

Don’t try to get natives to tell you the english either - it’s much more confusing than you probably realize!^ Instead, if you aren’t sure you can repeat back the number you think you heard digit by digit and people will generally get what you’re going for (or “lo siento no entiendo, puedes decir cada digito por favor?”). Writing it out is a decent last resort, helps that there’s dirt everywhere.

^ “three fifty” is 2 numbers, 2 orders of magnitude apart. “thirty five” is one number, in between them. “three hundred fifty” is the same as the second “three fifty”. “thirty five hundred” is a totally different number entirely, but the same as “three thousand five hundred”. etc.

The best aspect was that you can learn any time you have 5-10 min spare. At the bus stop, a coffee break etc.

But it can only get you so far.

After finishing Duolingo French course I took to Memrise to build the vocabulary: 500 verbs, 500 adjectives etc.

In parallel, I'd read local newspapers online, and Google Translate any word I didn't understand.

This gave me a reading comprehension but talking was still difficult.

I only learnt talking proficiency by joining a French company where everyone would talk French at lunch breaks. (First one was more international with many non-speaker fresh grads, talking English).

After that, watching a lot of TV with subtitles to improve listening.

Where does it not work as well? speaking. I have a terrible accent. Listening comprehension isn't that great either, because the text is almost always there to prompt you. this means that out in the wild, I need people to speak slower than if I had been taught in a traditional lesson.

but I would not have a second language if I had not been doing duolingo.

The new scheme was a bit shit to start with, but it gives you a much wider vocab lesson than before. For non spanish languages there are much less explanations of grammar and syntax, so you just have to learn by reinforcement, which can be frustrating.

[0]Not sure if I’m using the right tense here I’ve got a feeling it’s present where we would use past continuous? Expect there’s lots of other mistakes I don’t know about.

I've basically only used Duolingo for learning a particular new language. I started from nothing, and just did a little every day during the pandemic. Then I travelled to the country in question, and was able to tell stories in the language.

Not easily, and with bad grammar and my vocabulary sucked, but this is more than being able to order at a restaurant. My stories could be understood, and if they spoke slowly and gave me time to think then I could mostly understand them too.

But surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand", and instead will go maybe even faster. Like… do you think this will help us communicate?

Also since it's Hindi I'm learning rather than Spanish, it's great for learning the script - no better way than flashcards to memorise/remind each character really.

But it's absolutely not the only tool you should use, you at least need a book, and someone to speak to.

I tried to start Korean, and was getting so many "fake cognates" (silver is 은 "eun" but it gives 실버 "silbeo") that I had to quit. At least in the "learn the alphabet" stage, it's not teaching Korean, it's teaching "fake Korean using English words transliterated".

I learned Spanish on Duolingo and used it to travel through Cuba (where very few people speak English).

It worked well enough, I was able to communicate. Not knowing Spanish would make things much more difficult.

Of course I have by now mostly forgotten it, a language that isn't used frequently (best via immersion, living where it's spoken by plenty of people) will atrophy...

It's great to learn words, phrases and so on in isolation but actual conversations in a new language are where the real learning happens. You've got to be on the ball

I have a grip about a tiny part of the article, when it mentions Ibo, a Nigerian tribal language. Leave the "tribal" bit out - we're not living in the 20th century any more.

https://lee-phillips.org/whyDuoLingoWhy/