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Comment by oska | Hacker News Reader

I really, really hate what Duolingo has become.

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.

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Completely agree. Duolingos user interface and gamification might have become more annoying, but the real problem is that this approach to language learning is incredibly inefficient at best and probably does not work at all. It just feels productive.

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 think the basic problem with Duolingo is that it sells a lie - that learning a language can be easy. It's not.

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.

I somewhat disagree. This application is not meant to "teach" you a foreign language but "help" you with a grammar and commonly used sentence, so it can be used only as a companion and not the only source to learn. Similar as in the story previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30467597 / https://runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html

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.

> Pronunciation: Sometimes the recorded audio is in so bad quality or spoken in robotic way, that is very hard to repeat it.

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.)

"Duolingos user interface and gamification might have become more annoying, but the real problem is that this approach to language learning is incredibly inefficient at best and probably does not work at all. It just feels productive."

^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.

I'm genuinely curious, is there other ressources you would recommend to use? I've been learning Japanese for 2-3 months on Duolingo, and I do feel I'm getting more and more comfortable with the characters. I will start taking lessons with a teacher in April when i move there, but I wanted to arrive with some base.

If you find the right teacher, you shouldn't need a base, as such. If you really want a head start you could use books, but honestly language exchange / tutoring is the best way to go for starting any new language. Don't worry about trying to impress a teacher from scratch.

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.

> I've been learning Japanese for 2-3 months on Duolingo, and I do feel I'm getting more and more comfortable with the characters.

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).

I you want to get a head start on something, Kanji is probably a good idea - there are about 2000 of them in common use (more, if you read more advanced stuff or in names), and teachers probably won't have a lot of time going over them. Plus, you essentially just have to memorise them, something you can only do on your own.

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.

If you want to learn the basics of Japanese in a reasonably effective manner, you could try Human Japanese, you can use the 'light' version (free) first (on e.g. Android), it'll give you the first 7 chapters I think, and if that works for you then buy the full version for just a few dollars. It definitely worked for me and had the right progression, and teaches the very basics quite well. It even understands and explains how the は particle is never a subject particle.. unlike so many other tools out there.

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.

Japanese on Duolingo honestly sucks in my opinion, even just compared to other Duolingo programs.

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.

For learning Kanji, I wholeheartedly recommend WaniKani (https://wanikani.com). Not saying that you should stop Duolingo if it works for you, but you'll likely get much more out of 30 minutes spent on WaniKani than 30 minutes spent on Duolingo.

https://cijapanese.com/ Comprehensible Japanese

I think I had actually good results with it. Both with my kids who did improved a lot after starting to use it - their grades from language in school were going down before it.

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.

There are some inherently dull and hard part of begging a new language. Duolingos gamification make learning things like the Korean characters or the basics of pronunciation a bit easier. But unless you’re making an additional effort to do language learning activities on your own over and above the app it’s probably not going be so useful. For instance try to recall all the content you’ve covered in a unit on your own and see if you can write it down. Or try and used some of the phrases to have a conversation with another learner etc..

I was a heavy user of the website and quite happy with it as a complementary tool. It did what no other resource did : Have me have a go at it every day ad remobilize knowledge. Grammar lessons and concepts are otherwise easily found online. In tandem, it worked wonders.

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.

Duolingo was always, at most, a game which could potentially reinforce language learning.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Or maybe you’re wrong. I think everyone here is missing the point. If the choice is between 5 minutes a day of Duolingo and _no_ language learning at all, Duolingo absolutely wins. And, empirically, it does work for some of us, in some languages.

I think the difference is between 5 minutes a day, checking the box that you’re “learning” vs admitting that you’d be better off using an effective structured program (tutor, live language partner, etc.). I think the critique is Duolingo is treated as a substitute when it’s a complement.

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

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"

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