Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

The Spanish course is one of the best courses on Duolingo.

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.

I had a similar experience, although it's going back a few years now. I'd always wanted to learn Spanish and one year my wife and I were going to Spain in the fall, and then three or four months later we were going to a country in Latin America, and I decided that was the year I'd do it. I started with Duolingo and did it for three or four months before my trip to Spain, and after successfully managing a few basic interactions in Spanish and also being able to easily read signage and simple phrases, I was hooked.

When we got back I continued with Duolingo but also got an online teacher and did a pile of other stuff and by the time we went south I was somewhat conversational. You can't truly learn a language with Duolingo (you especially need practice speaking with someone) but it gave me a great start.

I've had a similar experience with Spanish. But I learned another language, Mandarin, in a more formal way, so I alread had experience throwing myself out there and immersing without fear for years. That experience made it much easier to try speaking broken Spanish without hesitation when I finally had the opportunity. In other words, if you already know how to learn languages, Duolingo is a great way to build grammar, vocab, and pronunciation for when you do get a chance to practice, but may not be great for first timers.

If I was younger and without a family I'd still consider in-person courses full time instead though.

> No online course can ever teach you to become fluent.

I get your point, but with the pace of AI, there's a good chance this statement is not true in 5 years!

I don’t think so. Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I don’t really know how AI could solve this, unless you mean that the AI can ferret out your gaps and tune the program to your learning needs. Isn’t this what Duolingo tries to do? Genuinely asking. I pay for the “super” Duolingo for no ads and unlimited learning because I’m kind of addicted to it, but I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.

I'm guessing he's suggesting the AI can be a conversation buddy anytime you want, and also point out your mistakes so you can learn from them.

imo this would be awesome and a game changer

Ah, okay yeah that would be really good. It’s hard to find time to hang out with a native speaker if you aren’t already in that country. Maybe this is already possible with ChatGPT?

spell checkers cant even get things right half of the time, not too confident AI will be able to change that

> I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.

That's not necessarily true, unless consuming lots of media in the target language counts as immersion. I became fluent in English without ever traveling to an English speaking country.

What is your native language?

Consuming a lot of media do count as immersion.

Here's an idea, but it is going to be really difficult to implement. You have lessons but at a certain point you get a chat "buddy" that only uses slightly more vocab than you know to naturally expand your knowledge. This replicates the teacher student in person discussions. You can then analyze the voice and ensure that someone has the right accent and pronunciation. Then use optimization to determine your faults and what you need to practice, optimizing memory. It isn't much different from what a human teacher would do. But I'm not aware of any of these subsystems being relatively close to human level but also not aware of much research in any of these directions. I've seen a few people try and they are just terrible.

> Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t.

I’d push back on this idea, and instead say that some people learn really well from the current tools, and some people can’t.

99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else. Naturally there are differences in the population, but I would posit that if you learned a language once (or twice or three times - I know trilingual people who insist they can’t learn a foreign language because they failed Duolingo Spanish) you can learn a language again.

My bias is that I’m working on an alternative language learning tool now - one aimed at ‘language acquisition’ over ‘language learning’, or basically how can you learn a language by just talking/listening to native speakers. Aimed at those who have finished traditional courses and want to master a language, or those who have tried traditional courses and find it didn’t mentally agree with them.

> 99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else.

They have - over the course of many years, completely submerged in the environment of their mother tongue, when they had an abundance of leisure time.

Not to mention their brains had more plasticity than an adult's.

The ability to learn languages is measurable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Batt...

Imagine ChatGPT but it uses speech-to-text to understand your speech and then it uses text-to-speech to talk back to you. Now you’re getting infinite personalized conversation practice. If you ever don’t understand what it said, hold spacebar to see the phrase in both English and Spanish with each word mapped to its translation, or just say “que?” and it’ll explain the sentence in English and/or Spanish. This seems pretty much doable today. If the speech-to-text fails to understand you, that’s immediate pronunciation feedback. May as well make it one of those boy/girlfriend chatbots too, to encourage participation and make studying more effortless.

Pls go build this, thx.

Couldn't ChatGPT? As-is, this seems almost a good prompt...

You could use it to practice already:

  1. Ask GPT for a list of 20 A1-level sentences in English.
  2. Save them.
  3. Try to translate them to Spanish.
  4. If you can't use a translation service.
  5. Try again the next day.

The only problem is making sure that the AI generates sentences that use the vocab that you don't know, so that you keep expanding it. Not sure how to solve that.

For pronunciation, record yourself repeating after a natie speaker recording, play back and analyze. Make use of phonetic transcription in dictionaries.

Instead of GPT, you can take sentences from Tatoeba, and analyse and index by vocabulary. 'PhrasePump' does this already. We glued together an NLP pipeline (Stanza etc.) to capture the lemmas in sentences.

https://www.languagereactor.com/phrasepump

Or use clozemaster since it’s a fully realized app that does all the work for you.

This is excellent and I love it :)

I don’t think that will ever be a replacement for living somewhere the language is spoken. I believe true fluency requires that (unless you’re some kind of savant) and I don’t think AI can replace the experience of walking into a shop, reading all the signs and labels in the language, making small talk with others in there, talking to the cashier. It’s that kind of immersion in a language that combines not only practice reading, writing, and speaking the language, but also all the other sensory experiences that reinforce what you’ve learned and forms associations that deepens your understanding.

Riffing on nearby comments: (2022+n): I don't think living somewhere a language was spoken could ever have been a replacement for living _in_ the language. Contrast the oh so limited and scattered signage of legacy RL, versus the ubiquitous object tagging, with text and audio and interactives, of Apple's newest glasses. The moment-by-moment narrated-life apps. The chatbot making up funny stories and cartoons about things you see, and bantering variations with you. Teaming, both meetups and improv - versus what, constantly starting new conversations with people walking near you?? And I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me, learning pronunciation without echo would be like, like learning dance steps without overlays, with just a metal mirror or someone's kibitzing. Living learning versus a legacy call-and-response classroom or paper book - yuck. There's a reason kids historically took so many years to learn language, and so poorly, even with adult focus and peer support. Immersion is just really really essential for learning well. And unaugmented RL doesn't support it.

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