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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the next step or lesson. They want you to absolutely get it right or else you find yourself in a cycle of trying again, to the point of frustration.

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.

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I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pretty good, and definitely not American-sounding. To me, being able to get by speaking while traveling is my main purpose in learning a language so I'm not taking it as seriously or studying as long as someone who wants full fluency. But for a really rapid 2- or 3-week launch point into a language you don't speak at all, Pimsleur is really impressive.

Pimsleur has been my goto for over 20 years now also. It's good enough to spur my memory on stuff I know, and get me base functional in something new if I'm travelling. I had a real cool moment when due to Pimsleur I picked up on Egyptian Arabic being spoken in a place that was mostly Levantine. Next on my todo is Hindi. (I also tend to do sticker books all over common items as an assist)

Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!

I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation.

The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.

Oh man good luck learning to write french! I had lots of success with pimsleur for Spanish (but I'm already a basic competency french speaker so most of the concepts and grammar are familiar to me). Duolingo did not really do it for me. Luckily, Spanish orthography is pretty regular as long as you stay within the same regional pronunciation group.

Yep. I’ve been learning Spanish off-and-on since high school. The biggest step I took toward some amount of mastery and ability to speak rudimentary Spanish in conversation was with doing Pimsluer tapes. Repeating “un vaso de leche. Un gran vaso” and things like that over and over again just made it sink in.

I’m doing Duolingo Spanish now, every day for over a year and a half. It’s a reasonably entertaining way to practice and pick up vocab, but I don’t know how much proficiency I’m achieving.

I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right.

This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time.

This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.

I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this.

I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.

Flip side of this--many years ago, internet cafe in Shanghai.

Turns out the clerk did know some English--but her pronunciation was so bad that I couldn't understand her even when I knew what she was saying. I never saw a spelling mistake, though.

I liked the ruthless correction because it meant that I didn’t get into the habit of pronouncing things poorly.

I also play piano, and if you make a mistake when practicing a piece, it’s easy to just keep making the same mistake over and over. The more you practice making a mistake, the harder it is to fix.

>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly

Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.

Oh, for sure. The apps don't provide good guidance for how to get you past the block.

In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.

Around five years ago, I had to learn a new language because I moved country. I've learned several languages before and so I got good at it quite quickly, and I think my pronunciation in general is quite decent, but you can notice the words I learned very early, because I have a habit of pronouncing them with the wrong stress or vowel quality. It's hard to break those habits once you've formed them.

I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have?

But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.

Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.

> But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.

That's pretty clever.

And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to understand any word with a rolled “r”.

Right now, I’m on lesson 29 in Spanish and trying to pronounce “pruebo” - “I taste” (also can translate to “I try”). It keeps thinking I’m trying to say “huevo” - egg.

Voice dictation works almost perfectly in English for me, so I’m assuming it’s my own mispronunciation

> use iOS’s built in Translate app

Thank you so much for this tip, it is honestly astounding how well this works and I can instantly see how useful it's going to be!

> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough.

I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).

Interestingly, the loo is a Water Closet.

Are you correcting GP's 'bathroom'? Americans call the public facilities (e.g. in a restaurant) that or 'washroom', despite there (typically!) being no bathing or washing devices.

Fwiw, like 'toilet', 'loo' can be either the room/facility or the... 'appliance' itself.

I think they mean that in French, they call the bathroom WC.

Are you joking? I've seen the abbreviation in France, de temps en temps, but never spelt out, it being obviously not French. WC is an English term.

No, I meant etymologically. l'eau is apparently a real hypothesis for the loo. I shouldn't expect anyone to figure out word origin on the spot in a restaurant situation, especially if it's less likely than other hypotheses. But I encourage you to integrate etymology as a method in language learning and as its own effort.

My Spanish teacher told once me that when she was working in a hotel in London someone asked her where the 'ladies' were.

She took it upon herself to walk through the hotel bar & restaurant searching out a group of mature, well-spoken women.

Technically what you want is a bouteille d'eau. If you're asking for l'eau, you're asking for all of the water, not some of it. Depending on how accommodating the French speaker is, you may just get stonewalled for butchering the language.

Lest anybody accuse me of trafficking in stereotypes about the French, this is a real example from my life.

I actually said "je voudrais acheter une bouteille de l'eau", but pronounced so badly they thought I wanted the loo.

It took a second person demonstrating the proper pronunciation of "bouteille d'eau" for me to actually get said bottle of water, despite much pointing at the object in question.

Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.

Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.

I see your point but people still like to interact with people in other languages in person. Babelfish isn't there yet.

For talking to actual people, you know...

Might as well ask "Why cook when there's delivery?"

Well, for one, learning languages is often just about fulfilling an interest rather than actually needing it.

Learning another language can also teach another way of thinking about things. There are also nuances that AI isn't going to help you with.

For instance, 'How's your father?' in Spanish means 'What is your father like?' In English it means 'How is your father's health?' - or it could also mean 'sexual intercourse'.

There will be better examples, obviously...

I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game..

I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good:

What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake."

>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake."

What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years."

>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016."

This also works: Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.

I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly.

Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word transliterations from English which are not native Chinese) and occasionally just regurgitate nonsense. It’s not something that I would freely unleash on the end user but there is definitely a place for it somewhere in the pipeline in future.

[0] https://polyvox.app

Even if you just had a set of lessons to run through, that'd be a lot of fun. Prompts that make it the counter party in text book dialogues. Character, pinyin, and translation shown.

The email sign up didn't seem to work on your page.

That's basically the idea! Thanks for the note on the email signup, I'll have a look - I threw it together very quickly just before I went on a plane a few weeks ago so it's very fragile.

I've been looking for ages for a way to learn chinese with pinyin (or just audio, no chinese characters), please don't give up.

Thanks! I agree, I'll stay away from characters, at least at an early/beginner level (although I am including them mostly for aesthetic purposes). It's a huge hurdle that lots of people don't necessarily need/want to overcome.

Figured I'd add a screenshot of my pinyin test with ChatGPT:

https://twitter.com/NickFisherAU/status/1598621215056625664?...

If you wanted pinyin output, you could use a library like pypinyin? (we use it, no complaints). I assumed GPT models performed best in English, you could machine translate the input/output. MT is pretty fantastic these days, although, you introduce fidelity issues, and an API adds to cost and latency.

I didn't actually need the pinyin conversion (I implement that myself), it was just a test to see how well LLMs* were progressing at "out-of-domain" tasks. I always used recent newspaper headlines, so the possibility of finding matching character/pinyin pairs somewhere in the huge training set was negligible.

For this specific task, Chat-GPT is the first model I've come across that actually shows some ability to chain together concrete steps to form a task (i.e. look up character, fetch pinyin), rather than the simplistic "predict the next word in the sequence" in pure language models.

* Large Language Model - I know ChatGPT isn't a pure language model (which probably explains why it performs so much better), but I don't know what we're calling these models now so I'm sticking with LLM for now.

I agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff.

I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.

A lot of the language learning methods out there really are built to be graded/measured. Books, courses, duolingo, anki - they all kind of seek to answer this question ‘how can we measure your language and make sure you’re progressing through it’.

There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products.

I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like

I worked on a product for nearly 4 years that seems very similar to what you're describing. I would love to tell you all about it and what we could have done better, worse, etc... How can I get in touch?

Emailed :)

Also added contact details to my about page here in case that didn't go through / got sent to spam

I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed.

Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:

1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].

2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.

3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.

Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.

Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.

(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)

To be honest, if you don't get the agreement right I simply won't bother listening to you, unless in a good mood.

This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and phonemes which are unknown to the recipient.

Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany, and I don't believe the blame lies with the Turks, let's put it that way.

There was an article in the Economist 10-15 years ago about the prevalence of English throughout the world and the typical explanations for it were listed: the British Empire followed by post WWII American economic and entertainment hegemony.

But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

>But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

Surely this is just a consequence of that fact that the majority of the world's English speakers speak English as a second language. As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized.

Not only bad English, but regional varieties that I as ESL have trouble understanding, which might formally count as own languages if held against linguistic standards. I just broswed Green's dictionary of slang so I feel I know what I'm talking about.

> As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized

Reading middle and old English, I feel the onus is on you because it changed so much :')

No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.

I think there's much more of a pattern of seeing such mistakes + an accent as evidence that English isn't their native language rather than evidence of stupidity. We see so many more non-native speakers.

Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.

And no we really don't care, or at least I don't. I am a native English speaker who goes months at a time without speaking to another native English speaker. I would never judge someone for it. I would be ashamed of myself to just stop listening to someone for mixing up word order slightly or dropping a preposition or picking the wrong conjugated form of a verb. If I understand them, then it's fine. If I can help them improve their English, by pointing something out, I will. It's because I'm not an arsehole. Ignoring someone as soon as they mess up a verb conjugation is honestly detestable.

We are talking here about using wrong grammatical gender throughout your speech. That is a bunch of very noticeable mistakes that affect multiple words in the sentence. Just because English does not have grammatical gender does not mean it does not matter in German.

The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affects other words.

I know it's not a gender mistake, but a mistake in the case is generally more meaningful than a mistake in the gender. A mistake in gender is even less important. I agree one should try. I certainly try. I can often look at a word I've never seen before and "somehow" know the gender, but it is ridiculous to just ignore someone who makes mistakes. And it makes no difference what the nature of the mistake is, grammatical gender isn't special, it's not acceptable in English to treat someone like shit because they used the wrong conjugated form of "to be", it shouldn't be acceptable to treat someone like shit for using the wrong gender in German.

English doesn't have gender or anything but a vestige of a case system, but it's still just as complex a language as German. Your comment that you wrote right there is simply incorrect English at worst and unidiomatic at best, and you made a number of grammatical mistakes, but I wouldn't think to ignore you for it, because that would be completely ludicrous. In fact I'm only even mentioning it because of the conversation topic at hand. And if you're making so many mistakes whilst writing English then I'm certain you're making loads whilst speaking it. Still wouldn't ignore you or discount what you're saying because of it. In fact I wouldn't care at all because I understand that learning a language is not easy.

> Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in German

No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.

> I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany

Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.

>No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.

No it's not the same. My German girlfriend is consistently asked in Germany where she's "really from" despite being born there and living there her whole life (and her parents too!). That would be scandalous in my country, and the US too. The intolerance of imperfect grammar that can realistically only be attained by natives is adjacent to this issue. It's naive and simplistic to just state all Western countries are the same in terms of social progress. The English-speaking and German-speaking worlds are not the same.

>Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.

For sure. German culture will either change of I am sure that these waves of immigrants will not integrate properly and there will be strife. One of the benefits of immigration I hope is that Germany will change and become a friendlier and less inward looking society.

Getting gender right is something any competent in person course will force you from the start. Having American accent is something to be expected and fine. Using wrong gender causes pain in listener. It really pops up great time.

Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)

> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)

For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack.

In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very good, but he still he messed some things -including genre- and nobdy cared. He was a comentator for many years and people liked him a lot.

In the US you have other examples of the same things. For instance I can think of Sofia Vergara and Charo to name the first that come to my mind. Both quite popular and I can spot their accent and some mistakes instantly and I'm not even a native speaker.

Also I mess gender a lot myself when I speak English and people don't seem to care.

In the case of Charo and Sofia Vergara, the accent and grammar mistakes are a cultivated part of the brand.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a dialect coach: his Austrian German accent has faded through years of living in the US, but it’s what his audience expects so he trains himself in it before each new movie.

It really does matter for spoken language as much as for written. Yes people will be able to understand meaning most of the time, but no, you will sound as bad as if we're writing.

It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way.

Accent and ignoring genders or suffixes are different things. You really can't equate them.

Note that if you're coming from a non-gendered language you'll mess it up frequently even if you care. There's a reason Chinese people are notorious for getting gender wrong!

You will mess it up even if coming from other gendered language, because the genders will he different.

But it is one of things you do end up memorizing the same way you memorize the word itself or its conjugations. It just does not make sense to go "I don't care about this stuff and won't learn it" and then demand language app will accommodate your refusal to learn gender.

What you just wrote had a few mistakes on the order of a gender error, and several worse, but I understood you just fine. What matters is that you were able to communicate with me, in my native language; and I'm grateful to you for making the effort. There was no pain involved on my part.

This is my wife's main beef with the owl.

She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.

If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)

Indeed, years ago now, I tried to brush up on my French which I had learned in school. Duolingo did not like my pronunciation (probably fair), and kept me stuck on very basic French that I knew well rather than actually getting to the point where it was challenging me and helping me improve. There may also have been an element of Canadian pronunciation versus France pronunciation. Anyway, it was annoying, and I quickly gave up. Also, there was at least one time where it would not accept my correct answer and insisted on a (IMHO) worse answer.

Not only do your answer's need to be perfect in order to progress but you can also answer correctly without knowing why you are correct.

Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly.

Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.

spelling too... like the 10th thing I care about is how to spell in a new language...

Exactly. Wasn't sure if I was fully conveying my meaning, but yes - spelling can be learned along the way and is a real barrier in these apps.

And no typos allowed or you start from zero!

Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos

I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is yourself.

I don't know Tsurukame but iKnow.jp had the same functionality and it was game changing for me! Immediately any SRS without became unusable

Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour and you never know if something will be detected as a typo.

While I don't know the innards of it I suspect the typos are preprogrammed. Note what frequently gets marked wrong and have a human decide if it's a wrong word or a typo. You could also do a string distance comparison--if it's distance from the right answer is 1 but it's at least two from any wrong answer it's probably a typo.

duolingo is fairly permissive with typos

It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.

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