Comment by Artgor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Artgor | Hacker News Reader

As a user, I feel that Duolingo is a great tool for developing language learning habits and allowing people to "play", but it may only take people up to B1 level, not higher.

I would love for Duolingo to focus more on content, and not just on gamification. Right now, the main courses (such as Spanish and German) are great, but many courses are short, lack grammar tips, and have mistakes.

Even the Spanish course has problems: I am currently on unit 175 out of 211, and I have noticed that the lessons gradually have more and more problems. Some phrases are stiff, some are completely unnatural (and people complain in the comments), sometimes there are only a handful of accepted translations and we are forced to guess, and sometimes translations are inconsistent - even though several questions have a similar structure, the accepted answers are different.

Another point is the recent redesign. Personally, I'm okay with it and I have no problem with changing the tree into the path. What I didn't like is that the course was artificially inflated, and now we have to repeat the same things many times. One could argue that repetition is key to learning a language, but it can get tedious when you have to answer the same question multiple times without making any mistakes. Furthermore, the exercises themselves are becoming easier - previously there were more questions where it was necessary to type in the full translation, but now in most exercises we only need to input a single word or rearrange the word cards.

Lastly, many people who seriously participate in the leaderboard ranking don't actually learn the language, they simply farm experience. Their usual approach is to rack up XP bonuses and redo a single exercise dozens and even hundreds of times in a row. It's sad that this behavior is encouraged.

As for myself, I use Duolingo simply as an additional practice tool. I use many other resources for actual language learning. I recently reached Spanish B2 level, and many years ago, I reached German B2 and Japanese N3.

> previously there were more questions where it was necessary to type in the full translation, but now in most exercises we only need to input a single word or rearrange the word cards.

This is a complaint I keep seeing regarding the new layout, but it seems disingenuous to me, as every one who notes it also skips over the fact that the linear lessons now also have large yet optional testing components at the end of every section. If you choose to skip these, yes, you are going to see many easier questions, as the nodes on the track are lessons. The tests are almost exclusively long form written questions, not the easy format you describe.

For all of the gripes of the new linear path format, this choice in how you learn is never put forward.

Before the format change, this separation of easy vs hard didn't really exist, not even on L5 for the nodes that made them finish and go purple.

In my experience, this has allowed me to focus in the end of section tests, where I still regular fail to pass due to the 3 lives provided. This forced use of long form + no mistakes has really forced me to understand and parse my errors. For all the complaining that I've seen in the in-app comments for certain translations being incorrectly rejected, I've yet to come across one myself. Instead, it's always something else that I got just almost right, but still wrong. A bad gender, missing/wrong participle, pronoun in wrong place, typo etc. It's really hard to spot your own errors especially when it will only give you a single correct answer back when you got it wrong (despite many other valid translations are accepted and understand too). Being able to spot your own errors though has been invaluable as I feel I've gotten a lot better at it since the format change.

If I weren't doing the tests, it definitely would feel much easier.

> the fact that the linear lessons now also have large yet optional testing components at the end of every section.

If you're referring to the legendary lessons, then yes, I complete them as well and find them to be very useful. However, many people don't mention them because they cost a lot of gems for non-premium users (I use Duolingo Super), so they can't consistently complete these lessons. Sentence translation is an important part of language learning, yet it's kept behind a paywall. While I understand that the company needs to earn money, for non-paying users these lessons essentially don't exist.

> For all the complaining that I've seen in the in-app comments for certain translations being incorrectly rejected, I've yet to come across one myself. Unfortunately, this has become a serious problem for me. I didn't encounter such situations at the beginning of the course either, but the further I progress, the more frequently I come across them. It's to be expected, as the content is mostly created by crowdsourcing, and later lessons have fewer people studying them, so not as many people check them. Despite reporting dozens of such cases on Duolingo in the past year, I have yet to receive a single response.

I'm doing them non-paying. Its particularly costly when I make mistakes, but I've made it work by re-doing previous lessons for practice and gems. Between that and the monthly badge thing I've been able to motivate enough to keep my gem wallet stable.

Duolingo has 500+ employees, surely they can afford a 5 person Spanish team to actually write content for their most popular language?

I agree with your assessment that lessons have been watered down. I’ve been taking the Japanese course and it’s endless variations of “Rice and water please” continuing for multiple lessons, with nary a new word or two thrown in from time to time.

Hmm, I’ve been studying Japanese on Duolingo for a few weeks now, and that doesn’t match my experience at all -- plenty of rice and water, yes, but also fairly complex (though formulaic) sentences like “it’s 10:30 right now”, “how many windows are in the room?”, “she has three older sisters”, early in the second lesson block. The gamification is incredibly heavy-handed but I must admit it’s succeeding in getting me to use it a couple of times a day.

Edit to add: there’s a ton of repetition, if that’s what you mean, but that’s how you learn! Spaced repetition.

My main complaint is that it doesn’t seem to take complexity into account at all in the timed review sessions. You’ll get exactly the same amount of time for basic words like “dog”, “cat”, “red”, “blue” as for long sentences like “Professor Tanaka speaks English and Japanese”.

Interesting, what level are you currently at and what’s the Japanese proficiency you selected when signing up? I’m currently at Intro to Japanese, unit 3 and even though it’s titled “talk about countries and ask for directions” I still mostly get “rice and water please” most of the time.

I’ve finished “Intro to Japanese” (8 units) and started “Japanese Foundations I” (unit 1/20), since joining at the start of the year. I didn’t know any Japanese beyond a few words in Romaji (types of sushi, etc).

It sounds like their app is different on each OS for historical reasons. On iOS at least, some very important content is oddly hidden away. The overview sections in each lesson block are well worth reading, and hiragana and katakana are on another tab so it’s easy to forget about them.

Would you care to share the other resources that you use?

I hope it is allowed to share links here. https://andlukyane.com/blog/studying-foreign-languages - I wrote a detailed blogpost about my experience of learning languages, including the resources that I used (not promoting anything).

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