Agree
> It used to be a great app for learning a language.
Disagree. I was a very early user and big participant in the forums and in providing error correction on the courses. I watched it start to degrade and was emotionally invested in that decline for a while. But I walked away completely and now, looking back, I think I was always wasting my time on the site. I don't think it was ever a 'great app' and I think it was always the wrong approach to language learning. It's a way of sucking in ppl who have a desire to learn a language and to fool themselves that they are actually working productively towards that goal by using duolingo when instead, they're essentially procrastinating.
In reality, going from duolingo to reading anything more complex than a childrens book and holding a conversation more complex than ordering a coffee is only marginally easier than just trying to learn that directly.
It allows you to postpone the difficult parts of learning a language indefinitely while making it feel like steady progress. And our brains absolutely love that.
I'd at the least throw away apps and learning games, in favour of books (especially those with audio samples available).
If the Duolingo Japanese course is anything like the Duolingo Russian course I did, there's no explanation for anything and they just throw sentences at you to translate. I think they only give actual information to the French/Spanish courses as that's what most users are looking for.
Duolingo isn't optimized for Japanese and it shows some major pain points especially around kanji and Japanese grammar.
There are a lot of more specialized Japanese learning apps if you need an app, and also many good textbooks and video lessons that are probably better than most apps.
Stay away from Duo. There's no structure to its teaching of Japanese, and it's not set up to let you intuit the grammar or structure either.
There are several ways of learning Kanji, each with their benefits and drawbacks, such as WaniKani, Remembering the Kanji, Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, etc. Ultimately, Kanji are painful and time-intensive to learn, so none of these will be perfect, but you can maybe spend some initial time trying to find out which works best for you and then just stick with it.
Well you see the exact issue with Duolinguo as pointed by others is that you feel you progressed for some months while in reality you didn't. If by the "characters" you mean hiragana and katakana both set can be learn to basic proficiency in a week (actually over a weekend for motivated people). If you mean kanji, the first set of 80 can be done quietly in a month (3 weeks in my case, when I was in high school, no tutor, no class, wikipedia only).
Duolingo can help you with the absolute start, dipping the toes. But it won't teach you a language on even a basic level. It can work as a tool to exercise basic vocabulary, but that's not a language.
I've had success with learning a language passively just by reading books (there are easier ones for learners) and watching TV shows (with subtitles) / listening to podcasts. It takes time and can be sometimes frustrating, but can be down on your own.
Learning to speak and write is a different matter, and basically you need a tutor for that and a lot of practice.
Frankly, there are 3 things that I find annoying / frustrating:
- Pronunciation: Sometimes the recorded audio is in so bad quality or spoken in robotic way, that is very hard to repeat it.
- Gamification: After reaching 1st place in the Diamond League, I found the constant nagging about my ranking annoying. However, some users I follow have found it fun and have been in the Diamond League for over 70 weeks. I have also noticed that some players like to compete with others, it sometimes leads to visible competition for the top 3 places (especially in the Obsidian League), which is really fun.
- Catchy answers: It is not a problem to spend a whole day with Duolingo, but after 15 minutes you need to take a short break. Otherwise you lose your focus and may find that the answer you have entered is not one that Duolingo would accept. This is because many answers look good enough, but in reality the other one is correct. Personally, I have had to click on the icon several times to open a forum to find an explanation of the error.
Disclaimer: I am paying Duolingo user with 340+ day streak trying to learn French. I have never had a French classes, but recently I had no problem to chat with other real person in French.
Even worse, sometimes it's just plain wrong. I tried Duolingo for a few months at the end of 2021 to augment my Japanese lessons. At some point, there was a content update introducing a few additional voices. But the new voices were so buggy that they would sometimes read certain characters in a completely wrong way, i.e. they were using kun'yomi readings where it should be on'yomi and the other way around. (I don't remember the concrete example, but imagine something like 先に being read as "sen'ni" instead of "sakini". That's a mistake that a native speaker would never ever make.)
^This. Spot on. I was fooled by Duolingo and wasted way too much time on it before I caught on and deleted everything Duolingo from all my devices. Now I'm finally making actual progress in my language learning. I never used Duolingo alone, of course, but the effort I spent there impacted my learning negatively and made everything ineffective.
Stay away from Duolingo. It's fool's gold.
And for myself too. I did had improvements I never got with self learning before. For me the gamification is the big thing that actually helps to keep on doing. One large reason for why I would not be to improve in language without duolingo is that makes the boring parts actually fun and keeps you engage to keep going. It wont make you fluent on itself, but it makes learning language feel less like horrible chore.
People who think they're learning a language from it are fooling themselves. They may learn some things, but the time would be much better invested in language exchange (after all, what better way to learn a language than to use it with somebody who speaks it natively) and books when that's not possible.
Saw the writing on the wall when they began adding "Leaderboards", and the Reddit / Duolingo forums (since shut down) would fill with complaints about people "cheating" to get "XP" for winning the leaderboards each week.
For me, the biggest clue an app isn't really that effective is when they add "streaks" for using the app. They're trying to lock you into something, under the guise of "being consistent". I'm pretty sure anybody with a high streak just turns the app on and runs the first lesson (Hello, hi, how are you) to keep it going.
Both requires pre-existing knowledge of a language. If you are starting these from zero, you get nowhere. If you are starting these too soon, it is going to be deadly boring.
In my opinion, the tool only makes sense if you have a keyboard. Just choosing the right words on an app does not work well to remobilize knowledge. I learned typing just to be able to do my daily exercises faster.
The overgamification is also a pain. The only that ever mattered was your streak.
Now that you mention it, I've seen ads for apps to "beat procrastination" and "quit drinking" and all sorts of nonsense on my feeds that all have similar marketing that goes something like:
"Are you tired of trying to reach [goal] but failing? Our new science based app uses techniques proven to help you finally reach your goal"
Thanks for saying it that clearly, this is exactly what I think of it too. I try to explain that sometime to people (irl), but despite my own achievements regarding language learning that should back my advises the truth is too hard to handle for most.
If you make the learning process too boring or difficult then casual learners won't even get started. The techniques won't get you far but they'll get you far enough to the point that you can start learning on your own once you're more disciplined. I wonder how Khan Academy solves this and if Duolingo can (or even wants to) learn from it.
The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period. Even when "forced" to. I somehow managed to take 3 years of Spanish in school - and maintained a 4.0 in it. I can count to ten, ask you your name, and say a bunch of bad words. Woot for a smart kid gaming education that wants to be gamed anyhow so they can report happy figures to the government. I pretend to learn, they pretend to teach, and the government pretends to care. We all win! Unless the goal is to actually have people able to communicate in Spanish.
I suspect that's a big part of the reason Duolingo can credibly claim that 'x' hours of Duolingo is equivalent to 2 college semesters. Those people in college are disproportionately doing it to fill out a language requirement for graduation, not because they want to. By contrast everybody on Duolingo is there exclusively because they want to be.
Rants aside, the point is that it makes much more sense to focus on the users who actively want to learn than trying to lure in those that don't and somehow hoping to convert them. And I think this is the exact path Khan Academy takes, which is why people still rave about Khan Academy while Duolingo, especially in its current state, is something relatively few are going to have especially glowing things to say about.
The result was, after 2 months, that I could spell nothing and knew almost no words. With the prompting from the word bubbles, it's far too easy to click on words and think you're learning. They don't even do a good job of providing high-likelihood alternatives in the word bubbles. Is it тут там or теш? Well, when you're "writing" a sentence with word bubbles, there's only one 3-letter word that starts with a T, so that's the one.
I finally learned to type Cyrillic and was embarrassed and very annoyed to realize that I actually knew virtually no words once I had to type them out.
I think it's exactly as you said: Duolingo pretends to teach, and users pretend to learn.
Not only do they not really teach you the Cyrillic language foundation, but they don't teach cases and tenses. The whole course is trial and error until you learn the handful of phrases they added in.
I think French and Spanish are the only courses on Duolingo that even give proper teaching, probably because they cover most people (Spanish for US citizens, and match up with US/UK school language curriculums). The rest of the languages have much shorter courses, with less content, no teaching, and poorly structured courses, mispronunciations.
My Russian other half forbade me from learning her language with Duolingo.
With languages, passive understanding comes first, always. The active one is different and harder skill.
This is not true tho. I never ever had intrinsic motivation for languages. I never liked learning them. Even as I knew my future literally depends on me learning good English, I just kept doing bare minimum I could get away with. Fact is, I knew 2 foreign langues very well - I was fluent in both.
And now, my kids do not like learning foreign languages. But they have them in school and do duoling. While they dont like classes much, they are actually progressing and one of them is already capable to follow netflix series in English.
The endless gamification, nagging, and destruction of useful features would have driven me from the site. But because I'm a technically inclined, instead they drove me to sideload an "outdated" version of the app. Amusingly it still uses the same API, so you get all the core features and then some (turns out premium or not is a client side check lol) without any of the increasingly intolerable junk of the new app.
But what I have also noted is that the activity of users seems to have fallen off a cliff, which I'd tend to assume is because the number of users has fallen off a cliff. I went from a high activity user to a near zero activity user (Memrize is a much better primary tool for learning languages now IMO) yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left.
If anything Duolingo seems to be a warning about the dangers of pursuing the maximization of metrics at any cost. Work on making a better product and utilize metrics to see how you're doing. Work on mindlessly maximizing those metrics instead and you risk not only destroying your product, but also destroying your ability to measure the damage you're causing.
Personally I have found no joy in duolingo now that they forced a completely linear path in the tracks. I abhor it so much that I am against using it. i had like a 1000 day streak and they took that away from me through a technical issue but that's not even something i really care about... the lack of options in what i choose to and want to learn next is 1000% a worse product ux choice.
In my experience, Duolingo puts you with other folks who had a similar score to you in the previous league. I at one point was learning Italian aggressively, getting multiple thousands of points a week. I then had a week of vacation where I only did one lesson a day (totaled ~100 points that week) and was demoted. The next week, everyone I was paired with had faaaar fewer points than 'usual'.
There's no particular reason to believe that the other users and scores in the league you're in represent other real-world humans, and could simply be generated algorithmically to put you at a specific point in a score distribution based on A/B testing for what works the best to keep people engaged. And if they do pull real human scores into that list, they don't necessarily need to make that list consistent between users; so if you get second place, the real human whose score is shown in fourth place could be looking at their own wholly separate list in which they were second (with a userbase as large as Duolingo, I think of these two things as largely isomorphic). As far as I know, Duolingo doesn't document or discuss the mechanics of league formation, so even if they were manipulating outcomes like this it wouldn't be outright lying.
My experience doing Duolingo regularly was that my own score would vary significantly week-over-week based on my time and effort, and I would always land somewhere in the top four-ish spots in the "league" I was in regardless. If I were really being put together with a set of humans at the beginning of the league and the scores just played out organically, I would expect to occasionally win big or get demolished, but that never happened to me.
And my guess is that being competitive towards the top of the league but not consistently winning is the best for user engagement, so they'd have every reason to fake/engineer that outcome.
“From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.”
Each individual team is incentivized to drive their metric forward.
Done together as a whole company, this leads to all metrics dropping.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I spent 6 months or so doing the Finnish language (to completion) on Duolingo, and although it was good for practicing Finnish verb conjugations - the lack of a decent grammar tutorial means that you have to learn that elsewhere, which all start from scratch.
A decent set of books (Suomen Mestari in my case) and Anki are far more powerful for learning.
The whole platform is no longer about language learning, it's just streaks and leagues (which in order to disable you need to disable the whole friends feature). They managed to make everything so frustrating by basically punishing you for mistakes and forcing you to unlock and purchase lives (even if you are a Plus user) that by the end, for me it was one of the most frustrating experiences that I had while trying to learn a new language.
It's okay to say Duo is sad [you haven't practiced] but blaming a user for making It sad? That.. that takes some gall. It's off-putting and a questionable tactic.
If people are positive about something there usually isn't much to be said.
I see a lot of positive comments when good things come out, for example.
Setting aside the usual “do we really need to talk about every rust conversion” comments, nearly every rust article is followed by praising the language.
Or when there’s a new software people might enjoy using.
Many of the newer startups also get very positive comments.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287212 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287573
See also, my all time favorite; this comment about Dropbox from 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
> "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
Quite trivial indeed.
It was one users comment on how they felt about the app. I doubt it becoming popular changed it for them.
1. The comment categorically dismisses the entire product idea
2. As evidence for (1), the comment cites a rather complicated method that would arguably be out of reach for most users
3. The comment describes the method from (2) as "trivial"
So even if Dropbox had failed, the comment would still be entertaining, IMO.
Yes, the reddit is full of kvetches, but there are a lot of very valid complaints as Duolingo removes major features (like stories) while people are learning from them or removes lesson choice and suddenly just drops you on "the path". And... there are the bugs. So many bugs. Things just don't work (literally UI buttons just DONT), answers are wrong, you get booted out of the app while running and have to restart. Feel free to file a bug nothing changes.
I won't go into the fact that they support a desktop, android, and iPhone other than to say (since I use all of them) that they are all VERY different, and only somewhat linked (as in they can become out of sync). I suspect that's part of both due to their subscriber growth method and technical debt. Probably, they're trying to rationalize things behind the scenes, but as they do everyone who had learned how to use it on each platform suddenly loses things/options/tools they had before to that common denominator. They're not giving you a configurable superset!
I get it, it's a hard problem, but don't be surprised when your rapid growth becomes unsustainable.
No estas beuno. That... is probably wrong. You know why? Because Duolingo actually sucks. And so does this teletubby attitude. Le da una siesta.
There are 0 mentions about language learning or course quality in a blog post about how to grow a language learning app. Instead, the discussion turns on the way you give gems to users, late-night notifications, and the maximum amount of emails you can send per day before people start unsubscribing.
I get that this is a blog post about growth, but it says nothing about the product and you could :s/Duolingo/Candy Crush/ and the text would be equally valid. This looks like a fake blog post from Hooli in Silicon Valley.
I’ve learned more Greek in 2 years now with that combo as an adult than I did in a decade learning Spanish as a child by only taking classes. The only thing more effective was living in a city that only spoke the language I was learning after I had achieved a certain level of proficiency.
Duolingo made me feel like I was learning a language and having fun while doing it, but every time I looked back on using it, I observed I really wasn’t learning very effectively with it. It’s far too robotic and impractical in my experience.
It seems like they have a cohort of developers who need to justify their existence by adding animation and gamification features at every opportunity.
A back to basics approach would be a good move but I doubt it will happen.
With that said.... They keep me using it daily for almost 3000 consecutive days so must be doing something right:
- Awful as it may be, it's the least bad option I found - although I haven't looked at alternatives too recently. - The leagues system is actually fun and engaging, and it's having me rack up easily 400-500 points per week to avoid dropping in a lower league (or 600-800 if I end up in a very competitive group of people). Before that, I'd rarely go over 100.
I found the push notifications extremely irritating, especially the inability to deselect all of them except for the daily lesson reminder, there are quite a few nags always active - by design I'm sure. So my only alternative was to take away its notification permissions entirely from the iOS privacy settings, now I have to endure further in-app prompts inviting to enable them back. I think this will be what finally pushes me to leave the app entirely, especially if my search is fruitful - or maybe I'll revert to an old/cracked app given that most of the crap is local as I've read in the thread.
Trouble is, I meanwhile live in Germany and wouldn't be able to assign an exact figure to how much of my fluency is thanks to Duolingo, and how much is due to being exposed to the language in my daily life (comparatively little actually, as my job is in English, but far from zero).
Nobody has proffered a better alternative. There’s just a lot of complaining.
It’s pretty clearly implied by the nature of the complaints that Duolingo is one of, if not the, best way to develop a foundation for a new language. Being able to slowly develop correct pronunciation and the skills to read a new alphabet is nice. It feels effortless with Duolingo. Moving past basic grammar will take additional work outside of the app, but I would posit that it’s the early stages that are more likely to stop someone from learning a language. That’s where Duolingo excels. Language learning is extremely difficult, especially later in life, and Duolingo makes the most intimidating parts easy.
Personally I’m looking forward to language-learning conversationalists based on ChatGPT for conversation practice.
I found myself more engaged after change to path.
It's language skills are crazy impressive. I've found there's no reason to not interact with it in my native language, it speaks and understands it just as well as English - and that was definitively not the case with earlier incarnations of GPT that I have tried.
I hadn’t considered textual conversations. That’s a good idea.
Personally I’m learning a couple of languages with foreign alphabets, so I’m really still in the stages of just learning the alphabets. (And Duolingo makes it possible by being casual and convenient.)
Buy a textbook and get a teacher/tutor. Study vocab with an SRS (such as Anki or many others). Watch movies and TV shows, read books (for beginners at first). Listen to dialogues and shadow them for better pronunciation and fluidity. And so on. Even most alternatives in the app space (Babbel, Rosetta Stone, etc.) are arguably better than Duolingo.
Duolingo is successful because there's more people who like the idea of speaking another language than people who actually like the process of learning a language.
Equating a casual/convenient 10 Duolingo minutes a day with studying a textbook and paying for a teacher is absurd.
Your statement of why Duolingo is successful would equally apply to Rosetta Stone and Babbel, thus it doesn’t address the question.
I would never say you could achieve fluency with Duolingo. It’s just a good, fun, way to get the foundation that gives you the confidence to work with a textbook and tutor. Your suggestions are a terrible first step, and nobody has proffered better than Duolingo.
Exactly.
You don't learn a language by doing 10 minutes a day.
> Your statement of why Duolingo is successful would equally apply to Rosetta Stone and Babbel, thus it doesn’t address the question.
Those services have their problem too and will probably not replace a proper textbooks, but at least Babbel offers proper courses created by actual language teachers that include actual instruction in the grammar of the language. It's more of a virtual textbook than the gamified hellhole that is Duolingo which, incidentally, is why the latter is so much more popular.
> Your suggestions are a terrible first step
I guess that's just your opinion then. I don't understand why you need to build "confidence" to work with a textbook and a tutor, and I don't even think that Duolingo gives you "confidence".
Confidence, fun, easy, whatever you want to call it: casually learning a new language when you have no pressing reason to do so is where Duolingo shines. The gamified part is an annoyance to me, and definitely doesn’t make it a hellhole. I have to click through a few different activity-screens with some “gem” currency popping up. So what? I don’t know what they’re about, and it doesn’t affect my learning.
I’m grateful that someone has supplied me with a structured and organized order in which to learn the basics. All I have to do is sit on my ass for a short period of time a day to make sure I get the active recall that’s most pertinent to my learning. It’s designed from the ground up for mobile, and that’s a perfect medium for my use case.
You certainly can learn a language in 10 minutes a day; it just may take 5 years to be fluent enough for a basic/casual conversation. I’m in no rush. Personally I end up spending an hour some days. The rate at which you can learn grows exponentially as you understand more and the process becomes more fun. It’s the beginning where ease/effort of learning are important
I can reflect on the past few months I’ve spent learning Hebrew. It was particularly intimidating for me because the alphabet/script is very different. At this point, I can read and confidently pronounce 80% of the words in the language. This has been effortless where other approaches (like the ones you suggested) completely failed. They failed because I’m too lazy to deal with the logistics, but that highlights the success of Duolingo. Most importantly, the speed at which I’m learning relative to the effort I’m putting in is enjoyable to me.
And further, an IRL textbook alone is scientifically a terrible idea. Ingraining poor pronunciation (which will necessarily happen without audio) is crippling in the long term.
As for the rest of your comment: if Duolingo works for you and your goals, OK. I still would never recommend it to anyone for learning any language and many people in this comment section (as well as on many language forums etc.) agree. People who have been around language learning communities have seen many, many people coming from Duolingo with a totally warped understanding of the language and essentially no progress. Maybe you're an exception or maybe the Hebrew course is particularly good, idk.
The idea of 'convenient 10 minutes a day' will get you nowhere. People who seriously want to learn a language know it takes 1-2-3 hours of daily immersion. The only way '10 minutes a day' would work is if you lived in a country, were surrounded by the language and only counted 10 minutes you spend reviewing a grammar book.
What all those tools want are users who pay regularly. So if they taught you a language well you'd be gone in a year or two. Duolingo can is great at teaching you a language if you then had to use that language in Duolingo.
Getting to the point that you can consume media and actually learn a language is the hard part. That’s where Duolingo excels. Obviously fluency takes additional work.
Duolingo’s lessons for foreign alphabets are perfect examples. Some are better than others, but they all teach you how to read the script in a fun and time-manageable way. This aspect of Duolingo is free, fun, and it works.
I’ve made multiple attempts to learn languages with foreign alphabets before, and they’ve failed because of the logistics of studying the basics. Practicing and consuming content once you can function in the language is different, and it requires a different kind of motivation. I’ve never struggled with picking up additional vocab or grammar once the initial hurdles were overcome.
That's how I started with language learning. There are channels that are dedicated to native content that's easy to understand. For example: Dreaming Spanish. You listen to content in you target language and learn sentence structure and vocabulary.
You asked 'is there alternative to Duolingo' and I gave you one. In return I got abuse. Not sure this was worth it.
Dreaming Spanish is literally alternative structured course. It is not nearly the same as starting by consuming media outside of structured course.
The way I see Dreaming Spanish is an adult version of kids shows where they point at things and explain things in simple terms. If kids shows were more interesting to adults I'd happily watch them over Dreaming Spanish. And there are shows like Bingo that are easy to understand, short and engaging enough for adults (or at least engaging enough for me).
And also, undestading shows like bingo or kids shows requires already existing knowledge of words. You will not figure out meaning of words purely based on watching them.
The videos are not connected in any way, I can watch them in any order. Most of the creators aren't teachers, they don't talk in a way that a usual structured course would: 'here's a list of 10 animals: dog, cat, fox' asking you to repeat after them.
A lot of the videos are pretty much 'day in life', 'my thoughts on', 'something interesting about..' - I could see them as early 2000s youtube videos where everyone had a vlog.
I wouldn't call it a structured course. I see it as a great contributor to a learning system that's comprehensible input - but there are many other creators that contribute to it. But if you see it as structured course, ok :)
I’m not talking about Duolingo’s Spanish course. I have no experience with that. I actually speak decent Spanish learned from much more traditional means including textbooks, teachers, and then native speakers who enjoyed conversing with me once I was good enough.
I’m having great experience with Duolingo as the very first step of a much different language. (It’s the first thing that’s ever worked for me in this space, and at least my third try.) Your original comment suggested native content as a way to learn a language. This is ridiculous if you don’t even understand the alphabet. A children’s show specifically made for native children doesn’t work if you don’t have the very bare foundation. I can’t say I’ve tried your suggestions for these first steps because they are absurd.
Duolingo, on the other hand, makes these first steps particularly easy. It’s a free, structured, mobile-first, SRS-aware, active recall for alphabets and basic grammar where no decent comparable alternative exists.
Moving beyond the alphabets, basic grammar, and basic vocab: sure, consume native content. Personally I’m planning Pimsluer as my next step with my current undertaking as it’s SRS-aware and focuses on native media.
I believe there's been more research done to the method I recommend than to Duolingo - that's why I thought it's worth mentioning it. But if it doesn't work for you, don't use it. If you want to study 5min a day - do it. My comment was recommending a specific approach that I (and the community I'm a part of) use and believe it works.
But if you look at 'content' kids experience first it's words and sentences used in specific situations. Only later having this knowledge they learn the alphabet, numbers, grammar. I know more English grammar than I do of my own native language - I'm pretty sure I know more English grammar rules than an average native English speaker (at least looking at my group of friends). It makes me better at taking a test or writing a very detailed and technical article (which currently I do none of) but won't help much in normal conversations.
Sure, learn the alphabet, learn the most common words but that can also be achieved with free online content. I wasn't saying you shouldn't be doing it. I was only answering your first comment where you said everyone complains on Duolingo but no one has an alternative. I provided you with one that I know others (like myself) use.
I have tried Duolingo in the past and the only dangerous thing is that it was a great experience. Did it teach me anything other than hello/bye/boy eats bread? Not really. I also can compare my experience of focusing on consuming content to Duolingo because one of my mates did Duolingo for a long time. After about 6 months he looked at content I watch - in this case it was Dreaming Spanish. I was at a point of watching Intermediate videos (short ones because they required a lot of focus), he couldn't understand any of it. I'm not saying that's the case for all users, this is just me comparing 2 users of different systems.
"Moving beyond the alphabets, basic grammar, and basic vocab: sure, consume native content." - that's my worry with Duolingo. People get so used to the little level ups and 'X day streak' that they continue doing it feeling like they're progressing. Which they probably are but very slowly as it doesn't teach conversational language. The only part of Duolingo I felt like I enjoyed were the stories (the old version of them) or the conversations. But all the animations and videos around them made it so difficult to focus on learning that I gave up.
Dreaming Spanish sounds nice. Now that I see this is what you were talking about when you said “native content”, I see the breakdown in our conversation. Typical wisdom for enhancing fluency is to find random/varied media to consume. This is what I was calling absurd for building a foundation. Dreaming Spanish, on the other hand, is literally advertised as a language learning tool. And it does seem like a very modern evidence-based approach.
Were there a Hebrew version of Dreaming Spanish, I would likely supplement my learning with it after finishing some basic courses in Duolingo. Mostly, in the case of Duolingo Hebrew, I’ve been greatly enjoying how well their alphabet course is made the last few months. Currently my next plan is Pimsleur because they have a nice mobile app.
That is considerable amount of effort that will definitely get you far. However, I know many people who did learned foreign language and the amount of concentrated effort you write about would be unusual for them. Sure, it took years, but no, full hour of daily immersion on regular would be exceptional.
And yeah, you don't need to invest several hours each day - that's unrealistic for most people. But I also think you get nowhere by doing just 10 minutes a day, even if you do it every day for years. You need to set aside time for conscious learning, e.g. on weekends. Then you could e.g. do the 10 minutes a day during the weeks for reviewing vocab, or reading short texts, or whatever.
I don't think you can do it without the occasional "crunch time".
(There's also the fact, of course, that the better you get at your target language the less will consuming content feel like a chore to you and so you can tolerate more of it, and even enjoy it.)
10 minutes a day, whether duolingo or not, will get you further then 70 minutes once a week in a crunch mode. That holds for language, playing musical instrument, sport, whatever. The hardest part in those is to keep interest and touch with activity over the long time it requires. And the big enemy are months when you pause the activity entirely.
Obviously you have to mix the learning modes. And obviously the more time you put into it the better.
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I also think that people get naive about amount of time people actually spend learning when going to classes in school or after school club. Typically, get 1-2 lessons a week plus some homework. Sometimes you get 3, but any more then that is unusually intensive. The typical expectation when going to in-person classes is that yes, it will take years till you are anywhere near good command of the language. That a year after, you can survive your way, but still cant consume most of normal media without subtitles. Those are reasonable expectations.
My point is that you need both. Reviewing vocab etc. can be done as part of the "daily 10 minutes" (although it usually takes me longer). But learning about new grammar etc. usually takes longer than just 10 minutes. And once in a while you just have to sit down and read a more complicated text, looking up vocab, etc.
Again, it pretty much also depends on the language. For Japanese, I think it's impossible to get anywhere with just 10 minutes a day, I think.
I'm currently averaging 1.5h of video/audio a day and sure, some days it feels like a lot - work is busy, I have to go to the office, gym, and all.
But I'm trying to cross the line of 'I can understand without having to focus really hard' as quickly as I can because then immersion is so much easier. TV, books, podcasts - what I do on a daily basis will all count towards my immersion.
I am not native English speaker. I did learned 2 foreign languages. One of them was through very intensive program, the other one without that. It consistently seem to be that these advices are skipping the beginning and also do not conform to either my personal experience or what I observed in others.
Like, obviously you learn faster if you go in super intensive. No question about that. And your interest will fluctuate.
I don't suggest watching shows from day 1. It did take me some time to build up to being able to sit through a 20/30/40 minute TV show and actually be able to follow the story. I wouldn't recommend it to people who are just starting out though. It's best they start with very short and very simple content that's fully in their target language but is created by people who know their audience is learning.
1. The gamification was too cutesy and annoying. And gamification works on me - I'm currently being held prisoner by my streak on another platform.
2. I didn't feel it was actually teaching me. I was being tested on words that hadn't been introduced. Trial and error is not a fun way to learn.
The only time words are not clickable is during the legenrday challenges. I guess this is where you are seeing them.
And here is the main driving cause of the change as stated by the author: "By mid-2018, daily active users (DAU) were growing at a single-digit rate year-over-year, which was troubling, given the explosive growth the company had seen in the past. This was a problem for a startup with investors anxious to see fast monetization growth."
Amazing progress.
The first thing I tell people is to ditch it if they’re serious about learning a second language, and go pay $20/month for Pimsleur.
I was one of the early beta users and joined Duolingo in June 2012 before it was publicly available, and was a huge fan in the early days. At one point I had a streak of 1,000+ consecutive days, and even applied to work there.[0]
Back then, Duolingo used the SRS algorithm[1] and it was very helpful in keeping me on track with my learning.
The original business model was to make money from community translations.[2] I think they soon discovered that this market wasn’t nearly big enough to sustain Duolingo as a going concern, so they pivoted to an advertising-based business model.
However, the software supporting the original “translations” business model is still in place, so the way they teach you new words is prompting you with sentence pairs to translate. For example, they’ll give you an English sentence and ask you to translate it into Spanish. I find this isn’t an effective way to learn a new language because you’re not learning to think in your target language, you’re learning how to match words between your native language and the target language, which is not the same thing.
Sentence matching is unnatural and requires neural pathways that are never used by native speakers; native speakers don’t think in English and then translate into Spanish when speaking. To be able to fluently speak the language, I found that a “call and response” model is the best way to learn. For example, given a question that a real person would ask (“What do you like about your job?”), you have to creatively formulate a natural answer (“I have a lot of intellectual freedom”) without any “guardrails” of a scripted English sentence provided by the app.
“Call and response” more accurately models how people actually speak in real conversations—you take turns talking like a normal human being. It is also more difficult and requires effortful assimilation of concepts instead of just words. To learn, you must make mistakes, so the most effective learning techniques are also the most frustrating. Coming up with novel responses forces you to fully engage in the dialogue, which efficiently helps you to lay down neural pathways that you will use in a real conversation.
Duolingo is optimized for ad revenue, so they can’t give you difficult challenges because you’ll just give up. Instead, they must spoon-feed you 1:1 sentence translations or “fill in the blank” type challenges because this rewards you with a dopamine rush from their slot-machine-like “ding!” sounds and green checkmarks that pop up when you successfully fill in the blanks. Instead of encouraging you to make mistakes, Duolingo will penalize you by forcing you to redo entire lessons (instead of targeting practice towards your weaker words), sweep mistakes under the rug, or making you pay money for gems. While the paid version removes the ads, it doesn't remove the algorithm that serves lessons optimized for ad-interrupted learning.
Duolingo touts their effectiveness study[3] as evidence that its methods are scientifically supported with a claim that “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education”. However, this study was conducted in 2012 under Duolingo’s old SRS algorithm before they changed their teaching model to matching-based problem sets, got rid of their call and response questions, and implemented hearts, gems, and lingots that penalize mistakes, so I don't think this evidence applies to the current app anymore.
Unfortunately, due to these changes I now disrecommend Duolingo for folks wanting to learn a new language, even though it was a pivotal and cherished part of my language learning journey back in the day.
[0] https://billmei.net/blog/silicon-valley-job-search#duolingo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-expands-inte...
[3] https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-papers/other/vesselinov-gr...
What App would you recommend now?
Assimil are normally a good bet in my experience.
Apps and games only go so far.
All apps start off good, because they actually have to deliver value to the end-user. Once there are enough end-users, it's time for investors to take some (if not all) of that value. Suddenly you'll need a larger base of users, on the app for longer amounts of time. It's not enough for them to learn, they also have to start buying things in the app.
Every B2C mobile app faces this exact dead end.
Seems as if Duolingo had been more conservative with its fundraising, it wouldn't have needed to resort to actions that might take it further away its goal of teaching a language? Do you really need almost $200M to build a business like Duolingo?
I wanted to learn how to buy a woman a drink at a locals bar
Hence there was no need to crash course duolingo on the flight over, but instead learn a few select things and concepts
I (tried to) use it to learn Asian languages, for what it's worth.