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Comment by syrrim | Hacker News Reader

The article reads like ad copy. Not surprising given the author. My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally. It attempts to make you feel like you're adept at the language to keep you motivated. This is accomplished by teaching you a restricted subset of the language that you can become skilled at, but isn't necessarily sufficient in real world usage. It also contains a number of guardrails meant to prevent you from making any mistakes except by choice. This leads you to learn the language to an extremely shallow depth. Importantly, you forget how much you are relying on these guardrails, and hence think you have a deeper understanding than you really do. Hopefully duo's expansion into teaching other subjects doesn't maintain these flaws.

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Duolingo can get you surprisingly far for vocabulary and alphabet memorization, but it will not bring you to functional fluency since it simply doesn't have any practice for that in it. They have tried to correct this for some languages, adding in 'stories'.

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.

> functional fluency

Defined as verbal communication only? It has got me far enough so far that I can read certain newspapers with good comprehension. (I am at Intermediate 2 on Duo, so I suspect this will improve further)

Basic fluency is usually considered to be at the B2 level. Duolingo is generally viewed as topping people out around the A2/B1 range, depending on the language. I've seen them claim that their more thorough classes can get you to B2 but that would definitely not be the case halfway through their course material.

New with Duolingo, agreed that it tends to keep you at a high level of success.

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.

> but isn't necessarily sufficient in real world usage

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.

> My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally.

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?

Total anecdata but with a combination of Duolingo and a French wife I've learned conversational French much faster (3.5 years) than I learned conversational Dutch with Dutch friends and books (5+ years).

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.

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