Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

IIRC Duolingo only claims to get to even B1 level for a couple of their most robust language courses. Not sure what you view as sufficient for real world but B1 is about where I'd personally draw the line.

All that said, it was actually a really great introductory program that made language learning more approchable. As an early intro and vocabulary supplement it is great. After that you will want to seek greater depths of learning and get immersed in content of the target language.

For what purpose? You either subscribe or you don’t, and once you subscribe you’d think they would want to show you real results so you continue to subscribe. If it was just shallow learning then they would lose subscribers over time once people wised up to this, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. It seems incentives are aligned to actually learn! How do you monetize what you are saying?

So I guess I agree that while Duolingo alone isn't enough to get good at a language I have been frequently amazed by how it "gets" where I'm at on my learning journey.

Especially recently I've started taking the occasional tests it provides and that seems to change my learning journey in a convincing way.

I disagree that this is (only) about keeping you using the app. When I studied piano, it was critical to work through pieces slowly and in small snippets that you could play. If that meant a quarter the speed marked, so be it (if slower than that, you'd bitten off more than you could chew). Otherwise, you weren't practicing the music, you were practicing your own mistakes. So a 95+ success is really about practicing reading and producing the language correctly as it is about playing games (the games may help ease the conscious boredom of the same thing over and over while the reflexes build).

Also, something like 'the owl' and 'the mouse' may seem trivial and logo-ed, but the language angle is 'le hibou' vs 'la souris' (masculine vs feminine gender) and these don't follow across different languages ('die Eule, die Maus' - both feminine) so repeating this along with exercises that flesh this out has value. I do think that the exercises don't often enough provide the opportunity to get it wrong, but that may be the 95% thing.

I feel the same (approx 205 days of French). While the multi-modal aspect(text&audio) was helpful especially at the beginning of the course, I feel like text now is a crutch at times. I wish some of the tasks were audio only and required either answering from among text responses, or single word speech responses.

Because of this crutch, I feel well equipped to approach written French in my day-to-day life, but freeze up at even simple questions like "Parles-tu français ?" I feel like I would freeze less if I could practice these types of exchanges in app, but part of me also knows that the best solution to this problem is simply getting over it with a language partner or teacher.

I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.

For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.

I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.

But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.

What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.

I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.

Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)

Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)

Through italki (spanish) I make tu/usted (informal/formal) mistakes, I make plural mistakes, and I make gender mistakes. My italki instructor still understands me and we can focus on other things.

This might be a newer feature and perhaps only on the browser version, as I don't use the app. But you can configure Duolingo to make you type in all the words freeform instead of suggesting words for you. This helps get rid of the little cheat you mention above.

How far did you go in Duolingo? I have been working away at it for 10-30 min/day for around 18 months and am around halfway through Intermediate 2. I find I can read and write quite well but my speaking has a lot of room for improvement. I feel like if I fully immersed myself in the language, the base I’ve built would allow me to get to oral fluency quite quickly.

Complaining directly is useless in the face of a rigid data driven approach (assuming the correct data is even being gathered), so I've decided to vote with my feet and hit em in the OKRs by switching to another app. I've been using Lingodeer

Learning languages is fun, and the people you can meet (which you wouldn't otherwise) and things you learn about your own native languages is worth it to me.

I think anything that allows other people to get outside their box and learn more about (and from!) people who don't share the same cultural background is a positive for the world.

What if what humanity needs is to realize that you don't have to scale to the limits of the planet for something to be worth while.

Maybe the "time better spent elsewhere" should be spent learning that we are all humans with amazing cultural backgrounds, and what could be a better way to engage with others than through language?

I've just been reading way to much history of South America recently to accept this idea, but let's be honest, the entire world is based on this concept. Every time somebody tries to setup a "Planetary Language/Religion/Culture" it comes at the expense of "the others". Fuck this idea.

All this is lost if we all switched to Esperanto tomorrow.