How much can Duolingo teach us? | Hacker News Reader

How much can Duolingo teach us?

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192 pointsherbertl331 comments

I speak English natively, and have learned French, German, Sesotho and Japanese with a mixture of books and immersion. Obviously immersion is the best way.

I used Duolingo to help me learn Spanish, and I was struck by how artificial it is. It may teach you to understand a language, but not to speak it.

Far superior, in my experience, is https://www.languagetransfer.org, which has free audio lessons to learn French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and Swahili (and English for Spanish speakers). This is the most natural method short of immersion I have ever experienced, and very effective. Amazingly, it is all done by one man, and runs on donations.

There is an app, which is delightfully clean and usable.

Mihalis also has an introduction to music theory, which gets excellent reviews!

Thanks for the pointer!

FWIW, it looks like it also teaches German.

EDIT: I just noticed this comment: "Please note: Complete German remains unfinished. The course will be either continued or remade by a new teacher directed by Mihalis."

Thanks for recommending Language Transfer. I browsed the site a bit (I'm on mobile, at an airport) but can't quite figure out in what way it's different to other methods. If you could say a few words about your experience using it, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Thanks!

Maybe easiest to compare: it is purely audio and relies on you playing along with the lesson you listen to. So somewhat similar to Michel Thomas but more modern. His main effort is to make connections between material that you already know and new material, this reinforcing both and building a network in your mind.

I did the first 30+ Greek lessons (each a ~10 minute audio which takes 15-20 minutes to complete as you pause to think and complete the answer). Then was forced to take a short break. l and struggle to get back in so I will restart a few lessons back.

I have to say that I've never had so many "whoa, cool I figured this out" moments in a language course.

Modernized learning a language with books on tape.

So I've been using Language Transfer English to Spanish.

The method uses your native language to scaffold the target language using patterns and rules. They constantly discourage you from trying to memorize or remember the word and instead encourage you to use your principles to "find it" or "think your way there".

For example, they teach you that virtually any English word that end in 'ation' will correspond to a Spanish word that sounds virtually the same, so for example:

- salvation = salvacíon

And the Spanish verb will be the Spanish word minus the "acíon" plus "ar". Since this almost always works, you can often use this principle to find a lot of common verbs you need. So if, for example, you want to say "save", think of the english "ation" word that is related to saving, so "salvation", Spanish "salvacíon", which gives us the Spanish verb "salvar".

So with that rule, and some rules for present tense conjugation and word order, you can soon you can say a surprising amount very quickly by "thinking through it" rather than memorization. So they "build up" your Spanish from these sorts of building blocks, and there are a surprisingly large number of them. "Don't remember it, find it" is the guiding mantra. And it really works well. Even as my Spanish advances, learning new principles continues to be helpful and kind of magical.

> Obviously immersion is the best way.

I disagree with this dogma. I, like many, have heard this for years and took it as gospel. I tried it and didn't get great results. At the time I questioned where I had failed with a method so successful.

But the thing is, immersion only works if you're a relatively extroverted person (IMHO). Immersion turns language learning into a social activity. If you're more introverted, you won't get that social exposure. Worse, you may avoid that social exposure because way more because you have such difficulty communicating.

Immersion is not strictly the best way.

Immersion is an important step that is often a "must do" in the process of acquisition.

It is not always necessary, but: are you planning to visit the country where this language is spoken? Immersion exercises may signal to you whether you are capable of making that leap.

I've been bilingual in Spanish since high school, but not until 2008 did I encounter a situation of immersion. I've worked in a bilingual office setting, and I found that it was often easy to communicate face-to-face with Spanish speakers, because I could lip-read, and make gestures, and fall back on occasional English expressions that they are capable of knowing.

But when I traveled to Catalonia and we went off the widely-travelled tourist areas, I was required to know Spanish, and even Catalan, for the road signs, businesses, menus, etc. So it was as much immersion as I could get, and even then, I had a native for my guide, and she was an English teacher, and so she was very good at whispering in my ear about when waiters were simply being rude or prejudiced about my silly Mexican dialect.

So yes, it depends on your use cases, and I can see why it would depend on introverted/extroverted personality whether you can handle it, but when learning foreign languages, consider whether immersion will be a foreseeable situation, and try to experience it beforehand, because it can be diagnostic, if not helpful.

As a catalan waiter with a silly mexican accent, I do want to apologise for my homeland rudeness

Catalan independence is a bit of a ongoing issue there, and some rural areas might frown upon spanish (mexican or not), or whatever!

Hope it didn't make you don't want to comeback

No no, it did not bother me, and I had been extensively briefed on the differences and issues with Franco and beyond. My fiancée was a supporter of Catalan Independence. BUT, as I met her family, they were kind enough to speak Spanish in my presence so that I could understand better. I had briefly studied a phrasebook of Catalan to get down the standard pleasantries, but I figured I would get by in Spanish easily enough.

I believe that mostly, the prejudice was from me being American, or accompanying a beautiful native woman. I also got dirty looks because of the prepaid debit card I was using for everything.

The rude waiter was in a little restaurant in Manresa, and not in Barcelona proper. So, definitely off the beaten path of tourism.

And as far as returning, I would definitely love to; I loved the Sagrada Família and other such shrines; the scenery was gorgeous, and I was struck by how much older it all was in comparison to American structures and institutions. Yet, it was high technology (I had always had this mistaken belief that Europe was behind the U.S. in computers and electronics) and I amazed my fiancée by photographing the back of the TV, the circuit breaker box, things like that.

I would definitely return to Europe, but outside the influence of my ex-fiancée, I am unlikely to return to Catalonia; I'd love to see Italy, the Holy Land, more of England, but especially Ireland. It's all on my "bucket list"!

Sagrada familia ,is modern in every way. In fact almost the entire city is. They choose to build different, but Barcelona had a tiny population and size in 1900.

A factoid that was once uncited in Wikipedia claims that the main buildings in Manresa are all built from rubble, the reason being that Napoleon and his troops demolished and burned the city as they retreated, and so it was literally rebuilt in place from the remnants. I could definitely see that was a plausible story, too.

In the Southwestern United States, we don't have any buildings that were built, let alone demolished, in the early 19th century.

Most of Barcelona dates from long after Napoleon. There are some really old buildings, but the city exploded after 1900. Most of what tourists go to see is Gaudi who worked after that.

Not long ago I was living proof that you could live in Mexico for 5 years, be fluent in reading/writing Spanish, yet be unable to understand native speakers.

I could understand deliberately slow Spanish like "Español con Juan" (https://www.youtube.com/@espanolconjuan) but immersion did nothing for me because I just don't have the personality to make it matter. I would have done better using Italki or whatever from anywhere in the world.

Even my Mexican friends and Mexican girlfriends spoke English because, well, that's how I met them. Speaking in Spanish would last about 1 minute until we transitioned back to English because it was more effective.

Finally, I don't get the problem with Duolingo not teaching you how to speak. I learned how to read and write with Duolingo which is useful on its own. Now you can read articles and books in Spanish and at least partake in the culture. Duolingo just doesn't compete with, say, Zoom conversations because the latter is 1000x the effort.

Yet on HN people talk about Duolingo as if people would be spending their Duolingo time chatting to Spanish speakers if Duolingo didn't exist. Nah, they'd be doom scrolling.

>Not long ago I was living proof that you could live in Mexico for 5 years, be fluent in reading/writing Spanish, yet be unable to understand native speakers.

Same here. I've spent years in school learning Spanish, a semester in Spain, a decade of passive learning with audio books and reading novels, and dozens of trips to Latin America.

I can read an adult novel in Spanish fine. I can speak well enough to accomplish any basic task. I can understand the news and very slow Spanish e.g. the link above.

But no matter how much I practice, my brain will not process regularly spoken Spanish well enough to understand it with more than 25% accuracy.

I used to think I needed more immersion. Maybe, but not likely as I don't think it's possible as an adult to teach my brain the "rhythm" of Spanish language.

I also lived in Germany for a year. And with no prior German lang. experience, I was able to understand spoken German after that year better than I can Spanish after 20 years of learning. The German language seems to flow in my brain the same as English, but Spanish is just on a different frequency.

> Yet on HN people talk about Duolingo as if people would be spending their Duolingo time chatting to Spanish speakers if Duolingo didn't exist. Nah, they'd be doom scrolling.

This observation might be good for Duolingo's stock price, but it doesn't fit reality. Duolingo is not the only way to learn languages online, nor is it known for being effective.

For example, to me Memrise was far superior to Duolingo to expand vocabulary, and pretty much any YouTube series on learning language X is far better than Duolingo. Even browsing newspapers in language X paired with Google Translate is a far more productive experience than grinding on Duolingo.

The only selling point of Duolingo is that it sells you a false sense of progress and provides you a positive feedback loop that keeps you optimizing on local optima that are awfully unproductive.

Just sounds like opinion slated as something more. Duolingo was superior to Memrise for me. Memrise moved too slowly with no options to jump ahead back when I used it. At best, it's the same app.

> pretty much any YouTube series on learning language X is far better than Duolingo. Even browsing newspapers in language X paired with Google Translate is a far more productive experience than grinding on Duolingo.

How do apps like Memrise/Duolingo compete with things that require far more effort like reading articles? How many people using Duolingo while they poop were ever going to open up BBC Mundo and look up every 3 words with Google Translate?

I don't see how that makes sense. It's like saying Duolingo is worse than enrolling in a 6-week immersion program. Okay.

> Speaking in Spanish would last about 1 minute until we transitioned back to English because it was more effective.

That's not immersion then.

Not that convo, sure. But speaking English to some of my friends in Mexico (or my mother on Skype) doesn't mean I wasn't otherwise immersed, either. The point is the challenge of immersion and how immersion tends to be codeword for a very specific type of person + experience.

Speaking in Spanish would last about 1 minute until we transitioned back to English because it was more effective.

"You need better friends, man".

Actually, what you need (for immersion to work) is friends who will meet you halfway. That is, who won't mind slowing down a bit and coaching you occasionally so that you can at least stretch 1 minute into 5 or 10.

That - and one simply needs to try harder to make it through at least normal everyday interactions (at a cafe, while shopping, etc). You definitely do not learn anything significant from a purely passive approach to immersion. You need to take literally everyday as a learning opportunity - and prep accordingly.

Nah, they'd be doom scrolling.

Agreed, that seems to be the market DL was designed to serve.

And hence, is about as useful as one would expect.

I got good enough to read Harry Potter from Duolingo, so Duolingo seems pretty helpful to those who stick with it. I've watched plenty of friends over my time in Mexico do nothing but Duolingo until they were good enough to be entertained by Youtube videos.

Just like any other prong of a language learning strategy, only a fraction of people are going to stick with it. Else language learning would be easy. I doubt people who couldn't stick to Duolingo would have stuck to the boring advice HNers have like reading grammar books and watching in-depth Youtube videos that require much more attention.

> "You need better friends, man".

Well, it depends on the friendship. Some if not most people want to be your friend and communicate with you, not be your error-correcting language teacher. You have to be pretty good at the language to be fun to talk to.

Until you're good enough to not be a burden, I think it's far better to pay for immersion than expect it from friends.

Fwiw, I am fluent in Spanish these days.

I doubt people who couldn't stick to Duolingo would have stuck to the boring advice HNers have like reading grammar books and watching in-depth Youtube videos that require much more attention.

It seems that people just like ... different things. Some people actually look forward to curling up with a hot, meaty grammar book, for hours on end. And find that both apps and videos (unless done very, very well) just drain their batteries.

I feel like to be immersed you must be living in a household speaking that language otherwise your concern is rather valid but, is that immersive?

If you struggle socially, try language speaking clubs that use a structured approach to partners and topics to encourage more equal participation. 2-4 hours a week in that environment, perhaps.

You may call it dogma, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t want to practice a high quantity of the language in a somewhat unpredictable setting and to be exposed to idioms you want to speak yourself. Whatever you can do to make yourself ready to take that step will help.

Language is an intrinsically social tool. If you’ve decided that you’re incapable of socialising properly, then you’re not going to succeed at learning a new one. The real barrier isn’t introversion, but pride. If you want to learn a new language, you have to be willing to routinely make yourselves look foolish while you constantly make mistakes and ask others for help understanding things. All you really need is humility.

> Immersion turns language learning into a social activity

Not necessarily - it's the bombardment of the language on billboards, radio, television, the labels on products in shelves, about asking for a coffee or what time the bus leaves, that helps. You can still socialize or talk to your family or colleagues in your native language.

> immersion only works if you're a relatively extroverted person (IMHO). Immersion turns language learning into a social activity. If you're more introverted, you won't get that social exposure

I'm a native English speaker, but I live in a country where the native language isn't English. This means I have to speak that other language every single day, not because I'm an extrovert, but because I have to if I want people to understand me.

To me, that's the incentive you're looking for.

That's exactly true. In Sweden, because everyone speaks English and will switch to English at the first sign you're having trouble with the Swedish language, it's nearly impossible to learn even after many years here. If your job forces you to speak the native language, you will eventually learn, but many jobs, like mine, are fulltime in English.

Right, my advice to implants here in Norway is to enroll into communal language courses. It's endemic among the tech folk to assume they'll ace it by osmosis. Years later all they can do is to smile at social functions.

Not impossible. You just need to be a bit cocky.

And start shutting them down when they start switching to English on you -- by switching seamlessly back to your hobbled Swedish, no matter how bad it is.

>I'm a native English speaker, but I live in a country where the native language isn't English.

Emigration is not an option on most people's plate, specially when discussing topics such as learning a new language. Also, some people try to pick up languages for fun, which would be ridiculous to format your whole life around.

I might disagree. Though I am very introverted I experienced how much Chinese I could learn and have as actively known vocabulary in just 3 weeks being in China travelling. Simply because I needed it. And I did have to force myself to speak in some situations to immerse myself. You could for example go into a modern shop and buy food silently, or you could get something great from a streetfood vendor, asking prices, understanding answers, telling them what you want to buy, possibly negotiating the price a little. Or you could walk around for an hour trying to find a place, or ask a local and get there in a few minutes.

You have to take classes while you are immersed. You can't just be immersed.

Living in a place where the locals don't speak English you only have two options: 1) gesticulate and talk in English, 2) make loads of mistakes while trying to learn the language. I guess you chose option 1.

To me, your literal argument doesn't make sense. It's like saying "ThrustSCC isn't the fastest car, because I can't use it as I don't have one." Immersion might not be a method that you want to use, but I bet that also introverts learn faster when they (accidentally) end up immersed than by any other method. Plus, there are schools that use this method, so you could avoid social interaction except with a handful of teachers. Pretty expensive, though.

However, immersion is often not available. When you want to study a language before going on a trip, you often can't find a suitable class, let alone a socio-cultural environment for that language. It might also be financially prohitive. Then you move on to the next best method.

I am just about to return to the US after 4 months in Buenos Aires. I lived in Peru for a year and a half leading up to April 2022. I'm probably approaching a B2 level of Spanish right now (based on my experience attaining a B2 and then C1 level of French once upon a time).

Interestingly, when I was starting out, I was in Peru with a Spanish speaking significant other, and using Duolingo as well as taking private lessons. I found as a few others have mentioned that Duolingo actually got in the way. I liked the gamification. It helped me practice, but there were so many exercises for each set of vocabulary. Due to the way their system worked, I had to go through a lot of exercises that weren't useful for me because I had picked up the content with other learning methods. You can test out of things, but if I wasn't ready to test out of the whole block I still had to go through a lot of material that wasn't useful (i.e., even testing out skill by skill, was tedious and time-consuming and counter-productive).

So as discussed in the article and here, Duolingo can't get you even to a low intermediate level, just the basics. And I found that it doesn't pair well with more intensive learning. Maybe other people have had a different experience, but I think it's good for the light hobbyist until they are ready to move on to something more serious, but that's about it.

I also worry that it's promises and gamification trap and frustrate people who could have done more. Maybe it makes up for that by getting a large number of people started who then go on. Maybe.

I couldn’t select a language on iPhone from the scrolling icons.

How did you learn Japanese? And does this overlap with living/work, or do you learn languages as a hobby? I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I don’t have the time to learn Japanese while also pursuing an unrelated career and another serious hobby.

Give Duolingo a try. Even if it doesn't work out in the end, it will at least get you started. The hiragana and katakana practice is nice.

I wouldn't recommend this advice. I learned Japanese before trying Duolingo and thought, 'how does someone learn from this?"

Good for rote memory training though

> how does someone learn from this?

Duolingo has brief explanations of the grammar for each unit. It's not even close to a textbook by any means but it's not impossible to learn. Now that I think about it, my mental algorithm works like this:

  1. Observe the words
  2. Observe the order they were used in
  3. Have their meanings in english as reference
  4. Use this information to puzzle out the meaning of the sentence

This is pretty much the same process I used to learn english when I was a kid. Only I used video games and natives on forums instead of an english course.

I’ve been using Duolingo for Japanese and at the level I’m at it’s not even providing any more explanations. It’s just “here’s some phrases, remember them”. The now locked comments sections (which is where the real learning seems to happen making it all the more frustrating that they disabled this functionality) is filled with complaints about the same.

It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

It was fun to start but now it’s become increasingly frustrating with its focus on remembering things without understanding them. I definitely don’t see myself renewing my subscription when it runs out later this year.

I agree. It's probably better to switch to more complete material once you're advanced enough. What unit are you at? I'm at unit 19. Just want to get an idea of when that transition is gonna happen.

> It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

I agree with you there. I suppose that's a problem inherent to any "translation based" learning?

In any case I do make an effort to avoid that problem. I try to understand sentences mentally without translating them at all. I look up the words and kanji and study their etymology. I even tried to study the individual components of each kanji, figuring that there was some logic to them, but I'm told that's a dead end more often than not.

> Duolingo has brief explanations of the grammar for each unit.

Last time I checked, those were only available through their website, not on mobile.

They're definitely available on mobile. There's a textbook icon next to each unit. I just opened my course, I'm at unit 19. The guidebook explains how to ask someone not to do something in japanese: verb nai de kudasai. There's also key phrases for shopping at convenience stores and talking about classes.

With Ukrainian and cyrilics, I did learned tho.

> Give Duolingo a try. Even if it doesn't work out in the end, it will at least get you started.

I don't think this is good advice. There are myriads of ways to get you started, so Duolingo doesn't provide additional value in that regard.

The question is: why use Duolingo at all instead of any conceivable alternative out there? What's the upside to Duolingo? Is there any, whatsoever?

> What's the upside to Duolingo? Is there any, whatsoever?

Uh, it's easy? You install the app, select the course and just start learning pretty much immediately. It got me from "I want to learn japanese one day" to actually learning japanese.

I really have no idea why people are so skeptical about duolingo. Nobody's claiming it should be the only resource but claiming it provides no value whatsoever is just false.

The experience of writing Japanese characters by hand was magical for me.

I learned Japanese by going there to work as an English teacher in 1993. I learned Sesotho by going there (Lesotho) to work as a volunteer teacher in 1988. I learned French in school and doing French immersion courses in Quebec in 1980/81 (free to any Canadian students, and still available!).

I have a chemical engineering degree, but have worked as a software developer for the past 25 years. Yes, learning another language does take time and dedication, no way around that.

If you learn Japanese, forget about learning to read or write (except katakana and hiragana, which you can learn in a week) and concentrate on spoken language, which is not that difficult to get to a basic fluency in.

Reminds me of the Michael Thomas method.

Language transfer is great, but it is 80 9 minutes long videos. That alone is NOT enough to learn and practice language, not even close. You get walkthrough grammar, sentence structure and smallest vocabulary needed for that.

You don't get nearly enough practice or anything that. Nor enough of vocabulary. Like, it is great, but not replacement in any way and just like with duolingo, you need to supplement it with other resources.

> used Duolingo to help me learn Spanish, and I was struck by how artificial it is.

I've had the same experience with Duolingo and long story short decided to experiment with what would be the best way to learn the language if you're not advanced enough to consume content for natives. I wanted to created something that would have the same value as content for natives (interesting and real), but would be comprehensible to non-advanced learners.

Just last week I opened up access to my app (with over 50 videos) to Beta testers. If anyone is learning Spanish and would like to try it out and give me feedback, I would appreciate it.

Obstino U is an app that mimics a real university where you take classes about the things you are interested in like climate change, the history of china, cognitive biases, diets, investing, etc, but you do it in the language you want to learn.

Simply put, you learn things you are interested in and in the process, you learn language mostly subconsciously.

We use simplified language, gesticulation, and drawings to convey powerful and rich stories so that even beginner students can understand them.

https://www.obstino.com

EDIT: This is an iOS app only for now.

EDIT 2: I just added a sample video we make on YouTube in case you don't want to install the app but want to take a look: https://youtu.be/N2fiVLUJGvM

Why is this an app at all as opposed to a website?

Why should it be a website as opposed to an app?

Making it a website would allow people to use it on platforms other than iOS.

In short, Develop once, use by everybody everywhere.

It's not everybody's first thought. My sister was working with local university to build content to support access and awareness of accessibility resources (mostly for parents of disabled children) . She couldn't even parse the notion of making a website as opposed to an app. Who doesn't use an iPhone these days?? Who uses a computer to do stuff??? Ironically, it kills so many screen readers too. Plus you need specifically iOS developers instead of generic web developers. And redevelop multiple times if you want multiple platforms. Plus some people are wary of installing apps so there's an overhead loss there.

Just... A massive amount of unnecessary constraints if your goal is simply to get information out there. But apps are many people's default way of thinking, and certainly many companies are pushing it due to lock in benefits.

Edit : the original post now has a "here's a YouTube video if you can't / won't install an app", which, y'know, exemplifies it perfectly :).

Now, this looks like a labour of love so more power to author to use whatever method of getting it out there that they are comfortable with. But app has drawbacks over a website as well as benefits, is all :)

> Why should it be a website as opposed to an app?

Is this a serious question at all?

For starters, websites provide the lowest barriers to entry, and don't expect users to grant intrusive access to their personal systems.

I use very few apps, even on my phone. For most things I prefer the website. And most apps aren't substantively different than the website version anyways, in which case I will never use the app.

Man I wish I could automurder every single website dialog that tries to get me to use their shitty app for "the best experience"

Not the creator, but I did download it to try it. One feature it has is a custom video player that displays Spanish subtitles and you can tap on any word in the subtitles show the English translation of the word. I’ve never seen anything like this before and there’s probably no web standard for this. Complex touch interactions might be easier to add to an app.

Also, I’m not sure if this app has notifications yet, but notifications and badges are a good way to get people to come back to your app every day. I think websites can do push notifications now, but not badges.

This website does something similar

https://3ears.com/

Also, Duolingos useless and constant notifications made the app worse then it already was.

Also, how can a website not have badges? It's just a table that gets updated with pictures when a user performs a task.

This gamification stuff is rather annoying because it seems to forget that the user has to want to learn the thing they want to learn.

I was excited to try this out, but the pace of the videos are way too slow for me.

This is probably good for first time learners, but for me, it was painful

Maybe there could be a speed control? Of course it changes pitch of the sound, but aren’t we already used to listening podcasts on 2x speed anyway

Yes, so far we’ve made videos for beginner and intermediate students. None for advanced.

It sounds like you would be a good fit for advanced videos or perhaps you should start watching content made for natives (real podcasts, Netflix etc)?

Speed controls don't normally change the pitch of the sound, eg https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl...

I don't understand why people speed up podcasts.

"Consume more, faster!" - yeah, screw that. If I'm listening to something, it has my full and undivided attention, and I want to experience it at the pace it was created for.

I listen to them sped up because my comprehension is the same if not better. A lot of content is paced very slowly which is distracting/frustrating.

That's fine for you. I do not have the same experience.

Right.

So that's precisely why variable speed is important - otherwise a recorded lessons will work for one type of learner only. It's crucial to recognize exactly what you mention - different people's experience and preferences differ :). Ability to vary speed doesn't remove your option to listen at default speed, all it does is provide options for others who may have different preferences and different natural pace of speech or listening :).

>>"I don't understand why people speed up podcasts."

If your goal is to actually understand others, then fwiw, my own thoughts: I personally normally far far prefer articles to podcasts. I can go at my own speed and enjoy the way I want to. If a video or podcast is the only way for me to learn something or experience something, variable speed is the price of entry for me. Podcast or video is NOT a quiet relaxing interesting night with friends, (and most of them are not precisely planned artistic endeavours whose brilliance will be missed at different pace:) . I don't get a say, I don't get to ask questions, to interrupt, to change topic, to go on a tangent. The very basic agency affordance therefore is speed - whether slower or faster. It's not about "consume more faster". It's about pace that works for me the consumer

For lessons specifically, typically they are recorded far slower than holds my attention. Think of all the udemy classes - at recorded pace, I mentally check out after 3 minutes on average :( . So for recorded lessons, if I don't have control over speed, I'm extremely unlikely to make it.

Because most content has people speaking way too slow and it is boring, leads to distraction and hurts comprehension. It costs significant effort to concentrate on something that is too slow, which can easily be avoided by speeding it up. It's not about consuming more, it's about matching my comprehension speed and avoiding distraction.

Thanks for sharing, I’m going to give this a try!

Thanks! It feels a lot like the Michel Thomas method from the quick look

The answer is not much. And I'm confused why this is the case.

Duolingo treats humans like supervised large language models and only does the babbler stage. That is: they show you a bunch of data and labels and then do a loss function on that.

The problem is that humans aren't machine learning algorithms. Because of this, we need more. If you're an Latin based speaker, try Chinese, Japanese, or even Korean (especially Korean). If you haven't grown up around these characters you're going to really struggle with the introductory lessons. How do you resolve this? You get a book. ̶O̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶a̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶(̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶D̶u̶o̶l̶i̶n̶g̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶)̶.̶(see edit) The same is for grammar and even words.

It's amazing to me that in all this time Duolingo hasn't added a "supplementary materials" section. This is included in almost every single other app that's directed at these languages. I know they want to upset the market and do things differently, but that doesn't mean to throw the baby out too.

Duolingo is great for practicing and keeping motivated. It has successfully gamifyed language learning, getting users to practice frequently. I just wish they would put more focus on language learning, because it's common knowledge that Duolingo can't get you to even a conversational level. A years worth of studying shouldn't have that poor of a result.

Edit: it was wrong to claim that there isn't a letter learning lesson. There is a different tab for it and I made this claim off of prior experience. But the app drops you right into words without even knowing how words are constructed, and I think this is a grave mistake (I'm sure they have data that could test this: if there is a higher rate of struggling/dropouts when a new character system is introduced). I do not think this changes my thesis, but I want to call out my mistake. I'll have a followup comment in the replies.

> It's amazing to me that in all this time Duolingo hasn't added a "supplementary materials" section.

They have(had?) one on the web version, but I think they cut it.

On the mobile apps at least (but I also believe they exist on the web app as well) there is a supplementary materials button on most lessons. They are also lessons for learning the individual characters of languages in non-latin alphabets. The comment is wrong about both of these things.

I just checked, I wouldn't equate the end of lesson material with what I'm asking for. I checked both Korean and Spanish. Spanish had more. Both had a few example sentences. Spanish has a few "tips" like "you also use esta when you're talking about something that's only temporarily true." This gets slightly better for Spanish as near the end it includes some conjugation (part of what I'm asking for) but Korean never has more than a few examples.

I'll admit that I was a bit too critical on the Korean about letters. There is an existence of a specification of learning characters. It did explain the consonant-vowel relationship, but once through I don't see how to access these slide again. Humans are far from one-shot learners. It is good practice, but it seems like a weird way to start, especially given that Hangul can be picked up pretty quickly (part of why it is interesting linguistically). This makes Duolingo a good side app, but I still maintain the position that it is poor for learning and that there are clear additions that could greatly improve its utility. That's my main argument: Duolingo could do more and a small amount of effort would greatly increase the utility.

I agree that the fact it only asks you to draw the character once isn’t great. At the same time, I do wonder how much drawing with your finger is going to translate into remembering how to do the same thing when you’re holding a pen (although I suppose you could do the same thing using a pen if you were on iPad or an Android device).

As for the learning notes, they are more thorough on French and Spanish and they could definitely be better. I believe the other languages are still using the original crowdsourced content and that is a major limitation to the app that I have a tendency to forget about (I’m leaning Spanish). I wouldn’t recommend the app for more than the very basics if you’re learning something other than French, Spanish or German.

My hunch from reading the blog posts they put out is that they’re using Spanish and French to try things out and perfect the course structure and content and once they’ve got something locked in they will then replicate that across the other less popular languages. They’ve moved the French and Spanish courses so that they’re now in line with the official EU educational framework guidelines and I reckon their long term strategy will be to offer an official certification on completing a course which holds equal value to one acquired a traditional college or university. They’ve already taken steps in this direction in that non English speakers can take the Duolingo English test and use it as an official qualification to study at English language universities.

> I do wonder how much drawing with your finger is going to translate into remembering how to do the same thing when you’re holding a pen

Having done it for both Chinese and now Korean, I can say pretty well. I mean you'll have messy penmanship but it does translate. But I think the more important part is that it is forcing you to pay attention to the actual construction of the letters and believe that this is the main motivation for this practice. Similar to how it is good to take notes in a class even if you never reference them.

> My hunch from reading the blog posts they put out is that they’re using Spanish and French to try things out and perfect the course structure and content and once they’ve got something locked in they will then replicate that across the other less popular languages.

They have had a series H, ~200M in funding (over 12 years), a multi-billion dollar evaluation, over 500 employees, and over 10 years of experience. I think this argument would make sense in the first 5 years but past the 10 year mark things need to be better. Honestly, the app does not seem significantly better than when I first used it in 2013/2014.

At this point there isn't an excuse to hire top tier language teachers and have them generate material for the app. They ask for $7/mo and I'll admit I'm impressed that 25% of their daily active users (6.5% of monthly) subscribe when the main selling point is no ads. I'd put money down betting that there's a low renewal rate in subscriptions (probably why the ads have become so much more annoying). Annoying your users with ads is not a successful business model (disclaimer: I haven't started a company and am not a successful entrepreneur while the Duolingo founders are billionaires. So I could be way off base). I've paid for other learning apps, such as Hello Chinese, because those give you more tools and resources. Apps I have paid give you more material (and remove ads) for the service and I'm even willing to pay more for this. I think there's very good reasons why apps like Hello Chinese are more well loved than Duolingo. In comparison, look at Scritter[0]. This is the go to app for Chinese and Japanese, costs $100/yr ($14/mo; frequent discounts of 50% fwiw) and has significantly better learning outcomes while having under 10 employees. There's flashcards, lessons, videos, and lots of reading material. Like I said before, I'm not a successful founder (or even a founder) nor a VC, but I cannot understand how any rational person would continue to give Duolingo money as everything just screams extra fat to me. I can only assume that Goodhart's Law is going strong and there's a huge focus on DAU (something I think apps like Scritter could get were they to have half the marketing department). Forgive me, but I just don't get it (I'm known to be pretty dumb though)

Edit: also surprising to me is that there are things like Duolingo podcast, but that this is not accessible in-app. This is a phone app focused product, so why make your users use spotify to use a different part of your product? I clearly don't get businesses. Never make me a CEO.

[0] https://skritter.com/

> Honestly, the app does not seem significantly better than when I first used it in 2013/2014.

I disagree with this. I have also been using it since this time frame and believe it is significantly better than it used to be, at least in Spanish and French. I do agree however that I think they should have covered more ground in ten years than what they have done and that they should have better coverage for other languages.

> I think there's very good reasons why apps like Hello Chinese are more well loved than Duolingo. In comparison, look at Scritter[0]. This is the go to app for Chinese and Japanese, costs $100/yr ($14/mo; frequent discounts of 50% fwiw) and has significantly better learning outcomes while having under 10 employees.

Do you have resources to back these claims up because they’re pretty bold. I imagine that if they are dedicated solely to Japanese and Chinese then they probably are more successful than Duolingo’s Chinese and Japanese courses but I think you’d still need to provide data to both confirm and you definitely need data if you’re going to say they’re more “well loved”.

> I cannot understand how any rational person would continue to give Duolingo money as everything just screams extra fat to me.

Well as someone who has given Duolingo money for two consecutive years, I am doing it because I have been seeing results, it has proven to be a sustainable long term practice (nearly 1000 day streak) and I enjoy the content. None of this seems particularly irrational to me.

I 100% agree that the podcast should be in the app along with dual language subtitles and it’s absurd that it isn’t. It used to be in the app although it didn’t have the transcriptions which are available online.

I travel to Latin America as often as I can manage, so I have been studying Spanish. The approach learned from Duolingo does not train your ear to listen to spoken language well. If you want to actually speak a language with other language speakers, listening comprehension is crucial. I moved to using immersive language learning, listening to Spanish media (mostly on Youtube, but also listening to es localizations of movies/TV). The language basics Duolingo teaches are still useful, and I have a 1100+ day streak, but just doing Duolingo still left me flat-footed on the ground trying to use the language.

If you pay for premium, there is a dedicated listening exercise option that will give you nothing but listening exercises.

>also surprising to me is that there are things like Duolingo podcast, but that this is not accessible in-app

It's worse. It used to be that the iOS app, at least, had podcasts in it, and you could listen to them to get points. It was great, though they only added a limited number, and eventually just dropped it. I'm a fan of immersive learning, and they _removed_ out an immersive learning tool that was actually pretty effective.

> Spanish has a few "tips" like "you also use esta when you're talking about something that's only temporarily true." This gets slightly better for Spanish as near the end it includes some conjugation (part of what I'm asking for) but Korean never has more than a few examples.

Japanese used to have stuff like this, but they removed almost all of it when they redid the app to be more linear sometime within the past year (forget when exactly they did it).

> Duolingo is great for practicing and keeping motivated. It has successfully gamifyed language learning, getting users to practice frequently.

I used it for 8 months or so, and came to the conclusion that the gamification was completely counter-productive.

One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation". There have been studies that show that kids who already enjoyed drawing, when given a reward for doing drawing, found drawing by itself less enjoyable afterwards.

Duolingo is all about external rewards: And the reward isn't for learning the language, but for completing lessons. I found myself always trying to race through as many lessons as possible; stopping to investigate a word or phrase, which should be rewarded, was actually discouraged by their system.

> One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation"

I think this is a bit more complicated and what works for some doesn't work for others. But I think to be a successful language learning app (as in successfully teaching language) then they can't just rely on this "immersion" approach. There needs to be study tools too.

> Duolingo is all about external rewards

I definitely agree with this. It seems like a big alignment problem. But I think they could make more money if they better aligned their app with user goals. It could reduce attrition rate, get more paid signups, and more active users. They have "first mover" advantage, but the hype phase is over, there are more competitors in the space, and they need to adapt or fail. Momentum is a pain. It is the reason for a lot of companies' success but also the reason for many (including the same) companies' quick and "unexpected" decline. Hacking is a good early strategy. It can get you to the moon, but it won't keep you there.

I think the issue is that your average Duolingo user doesn't have an intrinsic reason for learning a language -- anecdotally it seems many are just trying to fill their time in a way that's marginally more productive than playing a mobile game or scrolling social media.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

No, Duolingo is not "marginally more productive" than playing mobile games. It's way better. You're learning something useful, albeit very sloely, instead of wasting your time.

I don't want to bash Duolingo like this, but I can tell you why it's like that.

Because a learning app's KPI is not how much the user actually learned. It's how much the user feels they learned.

Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.

> It's how much the user feels they learned.

> Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.

The distinction between "learned" in the first paragraph and "earned" in the second is, IMO, crucial. At some point it becomes more about maintaining steaks and suchlike rather than actually learning a language. (Speaking as some who spent a lot of time on Duolingo.)

> came to the conclusion that the gamification was completely counter-productive.

Something that boggles my mind when I look at spots like /r/duolingo are the people who care more about the gamification than actually learning. You'll see people talk about their 2 year streak, but they got there by doing the minimum amount of material per day plus many, many streak freezes.

But hey, congrats to them for winning some fake awards.

It's kinda weird to realize how motivated people are by updating a spreadsheet in a complicated way.

I think what you're missing here is that some people do not have the discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this.

So I think for them it's great, they do learn something instead of nothing at all.

> I think what you're missing here is that some people do not have the discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this.

It sounds like you're the one missing the whole point.

The goal of learning a language is not grinding on an app, but to have progress. Duolingo's gamification pushes grinding behavior, and not actual progress. Duolingo does not reinforce pushing forward, but does prompt you repeatedly on how to say "I drink milk" regardless whether you're on the app for two weeks or two years. You can be on Duolingo for two years grinding stuff daily and still have nothing to show for. You are prompted to keep your streak up of answering things like "I eat bread" over and over again regardless of language, and if you fail to keep your steak up you're prompted to pay for something to artificially keep it up.

This is not educational. It's a waste of time.

Let me repeat: some people cannot learn faster than this, they need gamification. Hence my statement: Duolingo is better than nothing for these.

> Let me repeat: some people cannot learn faster than this,

You missed the whole point: people do not learn with this approach, regardless of speed.

The only benefit is keeping people engaged in a skinner box while watching ads, and selling them ways around keeping their track record engaged with said skinner box unbroken.

It works for some people, clearly, as stated by some on this very thread. I hope you will not move from "Duolingo is useless for everyone on this earth" to "anyone saying Duolingo is useful for her/him is in denial"...

The issue here is that what you wrote is just not true. I did Ukrainian for a year. I started to be able to understand some of the content around a year in. I started to be able to parse Cyrillic.

I did tried other apps here and there, but none of them stuck for more them two days. Overwhelming majority, like almost all of what I learned is from Duolingo.

The progress was actually very real, painless and fine. I did not expected to be fluent. I improved more then would be possible without it.

I mean, what you wrote is just not true. Even if you play for getting XP, you are forced to progress.

> discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this

I get that, but I'm talking about a more extreme behavior. There exist people who appear to be in it for *only* the game. My eyes were opened when I saw someone on Reddit bragging about the length of their streak, but they'd done fewer lessons over 2 years than I had done in a month or so. And I'm not exactly speed running. In other words, they're going out of their way to *not* do any Dueling in the name of earning fake gold stars.

That said, I also agree that what you say is a thing. However I don't understand those people. Why anyone would care about earning a badge on a site is beyond me. If it works to get them to do something useful, great. But I still don't understand those people.

I agree it's not great. But assuming they are very bad at learning, then Duolingo make them learn something , kind of by accident. I cannot see this as a negative.

Obviously, for anyone who can learn faster, it's a lot of energy and time wasted, I agree.

I think the gamification was a bit part of why I stopped using it. It made it feel more like a chore than something I enjoyed doing.

I also realized that while it wasn't bad for teaching some basic vocabulary it was terrible for grammar and completely fell apart when it started to get into some more complex sentence construction (in Spanish, in my case).

The amount of people that find learning languages fun on itself is miniscule. Intrinsic motivation only gets so far ... and for most of us it means "no learning at all" or "two monts of learning and then giving up".

I don’t know, it makes me get on everyday and do something - and they are pretty forgiving with the streak piece of the app. I’d rather learn a little everyday than look at one of the overly pedantic texts that the super geniuses of Hacker News will recommend that only work for them and that I’ll close and never look at after day 3.

>> The problem is that humans aren't machine learning algorithms.

Agreed, and I'd also add that unfortunately many, if not all, in-person language courses also focus on the babbler stage. My personal preference would be to learn all of the grammar rules with some common vocabulary first.

Research says that grammar should come later. Grammar is easy to teach and grade though, while more effective learning methods don't show any results as fast, but in the long run do better.

Comprehensible input is key to learning a language. Grammar is helpful only after you are getting to where you could almost guess those rules.

I can see that being the case for learning how to speak a language, but I'd rather first learn how to read and write the language. And mapping the foreign language's rules of grammar to those of my native language feels like the best way to start that.

“Mapping grammar” is inapplicable in many language pairs. Especially English which is so simple.

How will you map t-v distinction in romance and Slavic languages to English? Or Russian and German cases? Or French’s plus-que-parfait? Or English’s question order to Russian’s flexibility in word order?

This is without even getting into the more removed languages…

Noun signal, adverb, adverb, verb, verb, verb, plural noun, sentence end signal. Personal noun, verb contraction, verb, noun signal, noun, verb, personal noun, verb, compound noun, join signal, join signal, verb, personal noun, verb, verb, verb, noun, verb, noun.

I'll bet you didn't catch a thing from that. Now granted I haven't done this since in decades so I probably got a lot wrong, but even if someone corrects it you wouldn't understand anything.

Here is what I wrote: 'The best way is to map words. You don't need the grammar until you understand something, and then you will figure out grammar from context.'

Research and people who actually learn languages both agree that you need lots of input to understand the language. Grammar is useful, but only as a small percent of study.

Well, I was expecting that mapping the rules of grammar would comprise more than just assigning part of speech tags.

Yeah. If you want to learn a language with a different character set than the one you grew up with then you need to practice writing the characters. I studied Chinese for a year on Duolingo and now I can barely recognize a few characters. Without practice writing the characters by hand you’ll have a really hard time remembering them!

> Without practice writing the characters by hand you’ll have a really hard time remembering them!

Without practice writing them by hand you'll have a hard time remembering how to write them. Reading them is a separate skill; a lack of ability to write the characters will not impede you from reading them.

No. What the parent said. Learning how to write them puts knowledge of the glyphs' shapes in your body not just your memory. You will read them better too.

That just isn't the case.

Any evidence or references from either side to back things up here? I could really see this going either way.

It probably depends on the person. There are controversial debates on this topic all the time on r/learnjapanese.

In my experience, stopping writing practice has made me progress faster with Japanese, since I can now use the time for other things.

I do think that learning to write the first 400 or so did help with drilling down the basic shapes and developing an eye for the characters.

It still takes a lot of (just visual) repetition with Anki though to really remember new ones.

I've heard from people who have great difficulty learning the characters this way, and maybe for them practicing writing could be helpful.

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia, the phenomenon of native Chinese and Japanese speakers forgetting how to write. Nobody forgets how to read.

If you're interested in my abilities in Chinese:

- I have been certified HSK4, which isn't much. That was a long time ago; I haven't tried to get a higher level of certification.

- I regularly correspond with Chinese people in Mandarin.

- I can communicate orally at a rudimentary level. I have managed tasks such as renting an apartment and negotiating the purchase of an empty box from a bakery.

- Several people have expressed shock, on meeting me in person, at my inability to speak fluently. (One person went the other way, meeting me in person first, observing that I couldn't really speak Chinese, and going out of her way to write to me in English, which she wasn't really comfortable in. She seemed fairly outraged when she saw that I wrote to other Chinese people in Chinese.)

- I can read material of the kind that regularly comes up in my conversations without problems. For other material, I need a dictionary. This means that my vocabulary is a mixture of quite a bit of basic daily-use stuff, some specialized terminology that no one (including native speakers) would really be expected to know, and some gaping holes that no native speaker would have.

- I like to watch Chinese karaoke videos. I am mostly unable to understand the lyrics by ear, except for particularly simple lyrics. But I can often get a good idea of the lyrics by watching them show up (as karaoke prompts) in real time.

- I can write maybe on the order of 20-50 characters. When I corresponded in handwriting, I would have to look up how to write more than 90% of what I wanted to write.

You have the skills you use. If you need to read, then you can read. If you don't need to write, you probably can't write. Character amnesia arises for the obvious reason that reading is an important skill in Japan and China, but writing isn't and therefore many people are unable to write common words.

I have no idea what twangist is thinking, but it's certainly not connected to reality. The two possibilities I see are

(1) He is a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, and "reading" means something very different to him than it does to a foreign speaker.

(2) He is not a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, he's barely able to read in one of those languages, and he is not aware that he'd learn to read more effectively by reading than he can by writing.

> I studied Chinese for a year on Duolingo and now I can barely recognize a few characters

That is a terrible learning outcome. I guarentee you that if you spent the same time with Remembering {Traditional,Simplified} Hanzi [0,1] you would be able to read more than a handful of characters. You'd also have intuition for novel (zero-shot) characters.

But I do agree you should practice writing, though -- as I argued in another comment -- I think the finger tracing is more about learning character shape rather than focused on teaching to write. That part is even important for reading. Though I do think Scritter, which uses fingers, will result in decent writing skills.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-...

Duolingo is a low-density learning experience. Some of the drills are good, but there's a lot that are counter productive. The ones that ask you to translate a phrase back to your native language are the biggest time wasters.

The focus should be on developing an intuitive understanding of your target language. Besides making you think in your native language again, the translation drills become a frustrating game of guessing the correct phrasing Duolingo is looking for.

Reading, listening and having conversations with native speakers is how you learn. The language learning platform should be there to help you do that.

I'm the pro Duolingo user. I used to pick up new languages just for fun. It did help me a bit when conversing with uber drivers in Spanish, but I was stumped when i completed the Japanese course.

I could quickly, and effectively go through the course with no hurdles. But then my sister asked me to count to ten in Japanese. I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese. Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.

I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue. It's still up if you can find it.

There’s also the other side of the coin. I can count to 10 (or 10000) in Japanese, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish the Japanese course of Duolingo.

I have a developer friend who failed tried to start an app/service to really teach you a foreign language as he was so frustrated with Duolingo and similar which are almost more like a "Wordle" type game for fun than actual language learning.

I'm re-learning Spanish after having been vaguely conversant from taking four years of it in high school. Duolingo is only half of the puzzle; talking to friends/ChatGPT and watching Seinfeld in Spanish has been helping to close the gap.

I'm gonna go ahead and just throw this out there:

the principle of specificity.

Like, if you wanna get good at cycling, running will help an aerobic base, but will not help in terms of generative force (vs load bearing), handles, situational awareness with traffic and fellow riders and learning to pick lines, balance and weight distribution on a bike, pedaling techniques for various pitches, etc.

Shoot, not even running, but Zwift vs actual cycling on the roads very much demonstrates the principle of specificity to the T.

Just makes me think, if you wanna get good at a language, you gotta use it in actual real-life situations with weight and stakes, as opposed to a game where you learn incidental stuff that may or may not have bearing in the real world.

This is absolutely true but also applies in reverse. There’s many people who can speak languages conversationally but if they have to read in that language they become lost because all their experience is in conversation. If you’re very unlucky, in some languages (Arabic, Chinese, English) the written language has little resemblance to the spoken language, most languages are more forgiving.

Speaking/listening and reading/writing have overlap but if you want to master a language you also have to be doing exercises with text and reading text. After you reach a certain level of proficiency you need to start reading books (start with children’s books)

As far as Duolingo goes I don’t think it’s particularly good, except as a 101 introduction to a language.

In my experience living abroad in a country where English is well spoken, text is practically far more important. You can always work an understanding out with a human, but you can't ask a signpost to repeat itself or a letter to explain something in English.

> I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue.

From who, Duolingo? Why do they care that much about one person's opinion?

> I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese.

How is this possible? You know the words but you can't use them? This hasn't been my experience at all. I think I'm learning a lot from Duolingo. I still need a bit of time to parse big numbers especially when listening but I can recognize and understand countdowns when they show up in anime.

I've been sort of tracking my progress by watching japanese content and it's been extremely motivating. It's like wow, they really do use those words I learned about.

> How is this possible?

Setting and context is really important in language learning. If you're only used to practicing in a very specific and limited setting then you're only going to be able to recall under those conditions. Some apps try to resolve this by using video conversations, allowing you to chat with other users of similar levels (extremely useful!) and canned conversations (Duolingo has this one). All these are important but you also need to practice "offline." It is also important to watch and listen to content (like you're doing), even if it is far above your level. You'll probably notice in your Japanese adventure that a big thing is that you're probably way better at parsing words and sounds (e.g. hearing differences in tones for Chinese) than when you first started. Even learning to parse words is a big step, but only unfortunately comes from exposure of longer form content, something Duolingo-like apps (not all apps) don't provide.

Comic books is what really worked for me. I'm lucky that I was learning Dutch and the Belgians are great at comic writing. When you don't quite have the vocabulary you can use the pictures for enough context clues to decipher it.

When I started it took me a week to read one story. Got that down to an evening, then one hour. Now I can read them as quickly as English unless there's something very unusual happening.

> allowing you to chat with other users of similar levels (extremely useful!)

Agreed. I lurk in libera's japanese language channel in order to read the messages. It's been a big help.

> You'll probably notice in your Japanese adventure that a big thing is that you're probably way better at parsing words and sounds

Absolutely. I'm getting a lot better at parsing out the components of sentences, especially the particles, even in fast speech. My understanding is still pretty basic but this skill allows me to at least try to infer information from context. It's a great way to puzzle out meaning and it's amazing when I get it right.

> exposure of longer form content, something Duolingo-like apps (not all apps) don't provide

That's partially true. Duolingo has stories but I think they're somewhat basic. It's just not the same as really immersing oneself in another culture. I'm not supplementing Duolingo with japanese books or anything but I enjoy watching japanese stuff so I have at least some exposure.

The most important thing about Duolingo is it got me started. I've been progressing over 2 years now. Almost 1000 days.

The stories were something I really liked and they were a great break from the monotony of the usual lessons and a nice diversion. With the latest updates, you don’t get a single story (at least in Japanese) until you’re like at level 37. That’s a gigantic amount of effort to get to. It’s not like before where you had many stories relatively early on.

Yeah I really hated how the update just got rid of them. Why gate them at level 37? I'm at level 19 and I was able to understand many of those stories.

There's plenty of people that can read and not write.

Other than those with dysgraphia obvious disabilities, who are you thinking of primarily?

I also don't understand this. If you know the numbers 1-10, why can you not recite them in the real world? It's simple recitation.

Perhaps OP didn't know the suffixes necessary for counting different types of objects, or didn't know when to use which of the different Japanese counting systems. But if so, none of that is clear from what was written.

Perhaps the toxic crowd with pitchforks was made up of people who couldn't understand your points, leading up to a controversial conclusion that they disagreed with.

> It's simple recitation.

It should be more than that. There needs to be a connection between each word and the actual abstract concept they represent. Otherwise we're memorizing the act of counting itself without actually knowing the numbers.

> the suffixes necessary for counting different types of objects

I thought it might be that too but OP specifically said counting from 1 to 10 so it's just the numbers. Ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyuu, juu. I just don't know how it's possible to finish duolingo's japanese course without being able to say those words. It's not like the course is easy.

I mean there's some complexity and inconsistency. Words seem to randomly use different pronunciations of the kanji like 17 which is juushichi instead of juunana. Makes no sense to me but I simply got used to it quickly after hearing it enough. Days of the month were the hardest numbers for me because of all the inconsistencies. The general pattern is simple enough: number + "nichi" (日) but unfortunately a third of the numbers are special cases which must be memorized. I hate memorizing special cases. None of this applies to counting from 1 to 10 though...

For one thing it's possible you've only seen lessons in which you're choosing the right answer from a list. If all you can do is that, you almost certainly won't recall them all without that assistance.

> choosing the right answer from a list

Unfortunately this is almost always the case in duolingo's japanese lessons due to the characters. It's less of a problem in other languages.

I installed japanese input methods on my phone so I could practice writing and it's still really hard.

I have had a similar experience, not with Duolinguo but taking Chinese classes IRL. It's easy to write up the brain as some sort of computer, but I do think that with language acquisition "recall words from memory"[0] is _much harder_ than "do a thing you have already done" (which you get through a lot of actual practice).

This is why I really think shadowing is so important with language learning, because it trains you to actually put words next to another. Just sitting down learning vocabulary is of course better than nothing, but having set phrases where you use that vocab ends up actually giving you at least _some_ scenarios where you can use them.

And of course "recognize countdowns when they show up in anime" and "do the counting up to 10 yourself" is extremely different. It's so much easier to understand something than to say it yourself! Understanding is of course super satisfying, and a good target in itself, but self-production is pretty important in my opinion.

[0]: a fun exercise for people is to try and name 40 states, or 80 pokemon. Turns out that a lot of info is locked in our brains but is not easily accessible in a context-free environment

> having set phrases where you use that vocab ends up actually giving you at least _some_ scenarios where you can use them.

Duolingo does exactly that though. It introduces vocabulary first, then introduces complete sentences using the words and the complexity keeps ramping up from there. As I progress through the japanese course it's becoming increasingly difficult to remember all the kanji but it still surprises me that I can figure out the long sentences it throws at me, sometimes without even thinking.

> It's so much easier to understand something than to say it yourself!

I guess. I think I can confidently count to 20 in japanese though. No one's evaluating me on my pronunciation so I don't know how good it is. I like to imagine it's at least ok since japanese phonetics are close to portuguese.

I've experienced something similar in Finnish. The best I can come up with is the memories are connected with the app. Without the app the association with the learned content is lost. Well, it's just a theory.

That actually makes sense to me. Duolingo is "gamefied" which is code for "works just like an addictive drug". It's designed to be habit forming by providing scheduled rewards. I'm not sure if it's actually the case but it wouldn't surprise me at all if this strongly associated the learned information with the app itself.

I really hate that part of Duolingo.

All games are not addictive drugs. Some are similar to it, some not at all.

And what makes them similar to drugs is scheduled rewards. If you see a timer anywhere, it's drug-based design.

Duolingo is absolutely habit forming. It's got positive and negative reinforcements timed at many frequencies: days, weeks, months and years. It's got all sorts of rewards: XP, badges, gems, daily tasks, weekly leaderboards, yearly progress reports. It's got all sorts of punishments: loss of streak, permanent loss of monthly badge, loss of position in leaderboars.

The only thing that excuses all this is the fact it's trying to instill a healthy learning habit which leads to positive results for the user. Unlike the many Skinner's box simulators out there with the reward buttons wired to the player's credit card.

I think you kind of answered your own question. You have to have outside experience of the words to really have them click. We all have extremely strong associative memories. And you risk associating those words with the games/sentences on Duolingo, instead of the thing they actually represent. This is why watching movies, reading books, listening to music, etc in the target language is so important.

Duolingo lessons generally fail to build up on each other sufficiently. Lesson 10 should regularly reuse the vocabulary of 1-9 (to help 'widen' the association). Instead, it tends to be lesson 10 vocabulary paired with extremely simple words to form grammatically correct sentences and learn the vocabulary of lesson 10, which is then almost entirely discarded in the lessons that follow.

> You have to have outside experience of the words to really have them click.

I always thought this was a given though. I don't think it's possible to learn a language in a vacuum. Languages are also people and culture.

> Duolingo lessons generally fail to build up on each other sufficiently.

Agreed. There's plenty of lessons that don't seem to be getting reused later, like they're leaves in the tree of knowledge. Those are the ones I have the most difficulty with when reviewing past lessons.

Back in the old days I used physical flash cards I made myself. I was surprised to find that I couldn’t remember a word I was studying, until I saw a stain in the card, and recalled which answer was on the stained card. I think this is why these games don’t really work, they’re scared to have you get wrong answers, so they use the context to help. But as a result your knowledge is too superficial to be practical

Duolingo actually has little characters who sort of act out the sentence you're studying to create a kind of visual association with the words.

As an isolated counter point, in high school I went to a summer program (aka “nerd camp”) where we had Japanese drilled into us from 8am - 9am every day for 5 weeks by native Japanese speakers. I can still count to 10 today 20+ years later.

I noticed the exact same thing myself. I can't remember any of the words outside of the game. Once I'm in the game though they all come back to me. I've been trying to talk with my wife every time I learn a word now to help me cement it in my mind but it's very frustrating.

I can count to ten in Japanese in my sleep because that's how we drilled when I was a child learning judo, but were you ask me to say "six" in Japanese, I'd have to start counting.

To learn a language, I think you really have to create a simulacrum of lived experience in that target language culture. Drilling morphology and vocabulary will never hurt, but it is not sufficient.

> Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.

Agree to a point. I used Duolingo as a stepping stone to studying Mandarin, up until I got bored and switched to YouTube videos. I got bored mainly due to repetition and not much new words per level.

Apparently in order to get me back, Duolingo kept on giving me push notifications about how I'm gonna lose my streak, or how I'm gonna fall behind in the leaderboard. No, Duolingo. I do not care about those.

I'd say like with most things, simply going through the material is not enough. You need to follow the tips like reading the script out loud. This has had major impact on my ability to learn and furthermore speak the language.

I've been using Duolingo daily for soon 3 years (pro user), approx. 30 min, learning Japanese. Although I also use other apps for deeper knowledge and understanding of the grammar, I would be lying if I said duo didn't work for me. I understand most of what I've learned so far although reading is still a challenge, especially text with more complex kanji in it.

You say you've gone through the course but is that still true? at least today there are 810 quests, each with a meter for you to fill up.

Id be shocked if you got through all that and still didn't know how to count to ten.

Duolingo is no silver bullet. You still need to be really interested in learning, practice as much as possible and last but not least, investigate and deep dive into the grammar.

In case you're interested, here are the other apps I use for learning Japanese. - KanjiGarden, for memorizing kanji - Takoboto, my favorite dictionary - Renshuu, good for deeper explanation of grammar

I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue.

Fascinating. You might consider publishing those emails (with sender info redacted, perhaps).

Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.

This seems to nail it. And is exactly what repulsed me from the very start.

This was the most insightful snippet in the article for me:

> Like all the teachers I spoke to, Zimotti sees Duolingo as supplemental to the kind of deep immersion that language learning requires. But, in his opinion, the time most people spend on Duolingo is time they would otherwise spend on TikTok or watching television, not learning a second language in some more optimal way.

Unfortunately, Duolingo doesn't market itself that way, preferring nonsense like "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language". Of course there are many more customers who can spend fifteen minutes a day on it than hours at a time in an immersive context, topped up with fifteen minutes of Duolingo.

I think it's perfectly adequate to learn A1 level of a new language. I actually did it with German and started in-person classes from level A2.

Agreed. Duolingo is great for first exposure. I learned how to read pinyin, ask short questions (e.g. where's the bathroom), make simple purchases, etc.

Beyond that, I find it almost useless for learning grammar and vocabulary. But this is still an important niche, and Duolingo owns it completely.

I got my A2 German from Duolingo and dubbed Netflix shows (German audio, English subtitles). Gonna start B1 in person in a couple of months.

But while it felt like I was starting from scratch, I didn't. I had 4 years of German in middle school. I can't tell if I just "unlocked" that part of my brain, but what I can comfortably say is that ~1 year of Duolingo+Netflix made me feel much more comfortable than a more formal learning method throughout middle school.

Fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language. In another comment on here, I mention that the FSI estimate that a group one language takes 480 hours to learn. If you study for fifteen minutes a day, that means you will need to study for 5 and 1/4 years to master your language. Duolingo’s marketing is not the issue - the issue is the majority have unrealistic expectations regarding the effort and time involved, get frustrated and then give up.

This assumes there's no economy of scale to study time, and I'm just not sure that's true. It's not indefinite, because people tire out, but I'm pretty sure an hour long study session is more than 4x as effective as a 15 minute session.

It’s normally in the pop science articles that concentration starts bonking out around 40mins so I assume there are some studies backing that up. Personally I would take 7 x 15 minute sessions per week over a single 1hr 45 minute session or an hour session and a separate 45 minute session.

The down-time lets you absorb that knowledge

Commonly repeated misconception. There is no way in h anyone learns Spanish in 480 hours. The number you are looking for is 575-600 class room hours which conveniently ignores this is 24 weeks with 7 hours of homework per week. Under nearly ideal circumstances where one's life is dedicated to the task. So starting point for consideration with self study is over 768 hours to reach a Spanish level you'll be moderately pleased with.

My view is that 800ish hours is the first point where you start to get a bit of reward for having studied the language & likely can keep your ability long term without forgetting it all. But it is more of a starting point for study if trying to get fluent/highly functional/professional.

Your numbers are not true. Or, are true only if you demand some very high level of knowledge.

I sux at learning foreign languages and did learned enough to converse and communicate everything needed with less then 480hours of learning. That was years ago, before Neflix and internet were available. And the other kids in the same school learned more then I did.

Moreover, English is quite close to Spanish, so any English speaker should learn much much faster. Many words are for free.

> Under nearly ideal circumstances where one's life is dedicated to the task.

It definitely was not and I would not even consider it ideal.

> So starting point for consideration with self study is over 768 hours to reach a Spanish level you'll be moderately pleased with.

Only if you have some kind of super great expectation.

To make sure we're on the same page, at the level you describe, were you able to confidently watch YouTube videos on non-fiction topics like documentaries and generally always understand? Or for example dramas? Just checking because being able to produce language without matching listening skills to understand everything they say back is a kind of popular YouTube fake polyglot thing these days sadly, and listening is the most unfakeable skill of them all. No technique on earth can shortcut building the robust neural connections needed to instantaneous interpret unmodified native speech.

Documentaries yes, those are the easiest content to watch. Youtube did not existed and in general getting your hands on videos was hard.

I was able to communicate with French tho. We traveled there and everyone lived in host family for over a week. There was no issue communicating with French, whether adults or peers. Most books were unpleasant to read, but I generally understood most of the normal ones. It just took too much effort and there were some paragraphs I did not understood here or there.

Also, movies are much harder to understand then real people. I did not had any issue conversing with Americans for literally years and still can't understand movies fully. Maybe if you learn from movies entirely and watch them all the time it is different, but if the goal is actual communication it is not necessary benchmark.

The issue here is that you or many people put absurdly high requirements as a benchmark for "knowing language" or "knowing enough to be useful" for the sake of an argument. Like dramas - they use weird vocabulary, phrasing and sentence structure. You can literally discuss philosophy in a language and still not understand that.

From the wikipedia on the Foreign Service Institute:

FSI provides more than 800 courses—including up to 70 foreign languages—to more than 225,000 enrollees a year from the U.S. Department of State and more than 50 other government agencies and the military service branches.[3]

I think I'm going to take their estimate over yours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Service_Institute

The FSI estimate is still just classroom hours. They say this.

I love duolingo, but you wont master language with duolingo alone no matter for how long. There is a ceiling of how much it teaches. And to their credit, their own claim is that they teach up to B2 level in reading and listening.

Duolingo’s marketing is not the issue - the issue is the majority have unrealistic expectations regarding the effort and time involved, get frustrated and then give up.

Yet if DL maintains that "Fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language" (in addition to being "The world's best way to learn a language") -- then it would seem that its marketing quite definitely is at fault.

Being as it is (in part) from ad copy like this where these misconceptions originate.

> Unfortunately, Duolingo doesn't market itself that way, preferring nonsense like "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language"

tbf, the ad says "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language, what can fifteen minutes of social media do?"

Help you keep in touch with friends? You may even have some of those yourself. The 1-to-many nature of the medium may be more efficient, and allowing for pictures (which are worth a thousand words) is also helpful.

4 hours of social media a day, on the other hand, might be excessive.

What I learned in a year on Duolingo I picked up in a month of in-person non-native tutor sessions. What I learned in a year of non-native tutor sessions I picked up in a month of conversations with natives through apps like preply/italki. I wish I would've just started with preply/italki and been thrown to the wolves. Likely would've been speaking (not fluently) the languages I've learned in months instead of years.

Question: would you have learned from a non-native tutor as fast without Duolingo? Would you have been able to even get started with preply/italki without a baseline?

All evidence I’ve seen says it is incredibly difficult to pick up a language from scratch. Anthropologists have entire protocols developed for learning languages from native speakers with no shared language and it takes years. Sounds grueling too.

Meanwhile farting around with Duolingo got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion.

But I don’t think a few months of immersion would get me far with zero baseline. Just lots of frustration.

> got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion.

Keep in mind about a third of the English language comes from Latin (the precursor to French) and another third from French itself (thanks to the Normans). See Anglish [0]

[0] https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish

> Keep in mind about a third of the English language comes from Latin (the precursor to French) and another third from French itself (thanks to the Normans).

This isn't a defensible set of claims. If the French spoken by Norman vikings one thousand years ago counts as "French itself", it has an equally good claim to count as "Latin", the form of French spoken two thousand years ago.

It's not really about who spoke it.

English contains many words which roots come from french

There is as much separation between the language of Alexandre Dumas and the language of William the Conqueror as there is between the language of William the Conqueror and the language of Theodosius, Emperor of Rome.

But you'd like to say that William the Conqueror was speaking French and not speaking Latin. Why?

The real question is: Given a text by William the Conqueror and Theodosius, how many words could a French or English speaker identify based on similarities with words he/she commonly uses?

That probably isn't the question you wanted to ask. But in case it is, you can see a book compiled by order of William the Conqueror here: https://opendomesday.org/book/bedfordshire/01/

High-resolution image of the same page: https://opendomesday.org/media/images/bdf/01.png

Why do linguists consider French and Norman to be mutually intelligible?

Do they? I don't think there are good records of 11th-century Norman French. But Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in 14th-century English and he is not intelligible to a modern English speaker.

(More accurately, he is intelligible in large part! But if you try reading one page of his work, you'll notice some serious problems.

http://www.sd-editions.com/CantApp/GP/ will even read it to you in reconstructed pronunciation.)

For a lot of latin languages, since the grammar is mostly the same, that would probably be enough.

Sorry didn't see this reply or would've commented sooner. So you certainly would need some sort of structured instructions. And there are specific methods for teaching specific languages to people from certain languages. Where the rapid compounding happens is in listening to the native tutor speak. The speaking/listening comprehension portion of language learning is the hardest. When you do pattern matching with Duolingo you're missing out on some of that vital ear training that happens listening to native speakers -- that's why immersion works so well.

So I find it's still best to find someone who is a native speaker, has a language teaching certificate/degree, and to go from there. They'll spot your weaknesses and help you navigate them all while providing a customized ramp, for your learning speed, of all the language's components. Duolingo might spend two weeks on a verb tense that you understood right away or fly over some pronouns that you struggled integrating. This whole time you'll be picking up word choice, intonation, rhythm of speaking from the native tutor that will expedite your usage of the language conversationally.

One thing to consider is that it’s a lot easier to assemble things once you have the basics. It takes children months/years to learn counting and addition, but it takes college students minutes to learn the operations to calculate graham’s number.

It might be the case that you pick things up quicker in tutoring because you have wide exposure from duolingo

I really don’t understand the criticism of duolingo. No one who uses it thinks of it as teaching fluency but the criticisms always seems to frame it that way. It’s an enjoyable app to help you get the basics of a new language. I’ve seen it work with my partner. We don’t have to compare it to full immersion to think of it as useful

I agree, as a passive thing it's definitely better than nothing.

Duolingo doesn't force people to move on soon enough. If your goal is learn the language instead of playing a game it just isn't a good system.

How would 'forcing' you actually work? Lock you out of the app until you've conversed with a native speaker?

If you are committed to learning a language you will naturally seek out the occasions to practice it outside the app. Duolingo doesn't need to 'force' you to do anything. It's not a parent, it's a helping tool. It seems that most critics of Duolingo have unrealistic expectations.

To really learn you gotta use it and immerse yourself in it. Duolingo taught me enough Dutch that I could start picking out the stories in comic books. That started to teach me enough phrases and idioms and grammar that I could start basic conversations. Once I could do that the rest all fell into place.

Got to the level in Dutch in 4 years that I was able to begin working fulltime using no English. I never thought I'd be able to really speak a second language. I'm nowhere near native level, feel like I'm still learning every day, but I can speak it, I can carry out my daily life in work and socially. Duolingo really got me started.

I'm not a fan of the gaimification but that's the way of the world. I'm not a fan of a lot of technology but it is certainly very helpful sometimes.

Everyone slags off Duolingo on here but I highly doubt many have put in the time necessary for a fair evaluation. A quick google search will show you that the US Foreign Service Institute (e.g overseas diplomats who probably know a thing or two about this) say it takes 480 hours to learn a group 1 language which are the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. To put that in context, doing three lessons of Duolingo a day for a week will put you somewhere in the 60 - 80 minute region. Let’s say it’s the former because you had a few days where you only did one or two lessons. That means it will take you 9.2 years to become proficient in your chosen language.

Duolingo is good, but it is not a fucking miracle worker. If you’re going in expecting to put in two or three lessons a day and then are disappointed that after a year you don’t speak Spanish, you’re completely fucking deluded and it is not Duolingo’s fault. It takes a lot of fucking effort to learn a language and you get what you put into it. I have been using Duolingo for two years to learn Spanish now, and the results have been wonderful. I can read a lot of Spanish texts, I can pick up on a lot of dialogue in tv and movies and I can express quite a few thoughts in Spanish. Am I completely proficient? Probably not - but if I lived in a Spanish speaking country for a few months I think I’d get pretty competent pretty quickly. And the learning I got has cost me a grand total of about £140. I can guarantee that as far as value for money goes, I have gotten way more learning for the money through Duolingo than if I’d have spent the equivalent on human one to one lessons (how many would I have been able to get realistically for the same amount of money - between five to ten 1 hour lessons?) and definitely better value for money than what I would get through my local college.

Agreed, and more solutions should try solving a problem shots way.

It’s a pretty simple formula.

They work to understand something and then experience it repeatedly by reviewing it to move it long term memory.

Maybe this approach lays bare and trivializes some plain truths about learning which some academia would prefer to keep as a mystery of butts in seats for hours to measure competency.

Skills based and competency based learning is not always a strength of many of the naysayers I’m against Duolingo type tools (mobile learning apps).

The proof is in the pudding when it comes to usage. An app doesn’t have to be the best or most efficient or most effective. But if it meets the more in their hand than anything else, it can trend to a large advantage over time. Asking if people can pick something up, keep it up long enough on average to make it stick be a threat to the building of physical campuses.

Self-directed learning is also different to learning the theory of language learning vs the practical learning to swim by learning not to drown, then float, then move.

> Agreed, and more solutions should try solving a problem shots way. It’s a pretty simple formula. They work to understand something and then experience it repeatedly by reviewing it to move it long term memory.

Coincidentally, this is also a major reason why Duolingo switched to “the path” (something else that gets flak on here). Spaced repetition is now built in by default. With the old layout a lot of users would complete a level and move on in an effort to complete the tree, rather than levelling up each level in a section before moving on.

The problem is that's how Duolingo sells itself: "learn a language in 15 min"

With Duolingo I can do half an hour in transit, but the remembrance is not great.

I do think there are more effective ways of learning a language. Probably the most effective and not so well known is Pimsleur.

Half an hour of Pimsleur asks so much focus of me, and im tired after, but I learn quickly.

It's an audio class that has a very smart way of repeating and reproducing conversations. The repetition is done in a way that it advances the conversation and slightly alters the repetition so it forces you to use your active focus & memory.

(no affiliation)

15 minutes a day gets you your 480 hours in 5.2 years. The problem is not the marketing line, the problem is people expecting to learn a language in 1 year with only 15 minutes a day practice. There is a reason why a full time university course in a foreign language is typically 3 to 4 years long including one year spent abroad.

In your defence, the 480 hours is also only for group 1 languages. If you are learning a harder language it may take many more hours than this. Category 5 languages take 2200 hours. 15 minutes a day is totally reasonable for a category 1 language. For a category 5 language, not so much as it’s going to take you about 20 years. But I strongly suspect that the main problem is not the “15 minutes a day” but the fact that people are not expecting (or willing) to do it for years.

The marketing line speaks of learning a language with little effort. So it's setting an expectation.

And it meets expectations! That’s the point of the person you’re arguing with.

The “low effort” is made possible by Duolingo segmenting lessons into tiny chunks.

It doesn’t lower the total hours necessary because that would be witchcraft.

But it definitely lulls people into a false sense of security. The ads make it seem like the language just seeps into your brain because of 15 min on the app a day. When in reality you learn very little.

Your viewpoint definitely agrees with the majority of commenters here, but if you read the immediately surrounding context you’ll see that there is strong opposition.

The takeaway is that Duolingo has definitely made learning the basics possible where every other popular alternative has failed for many people.

I have my own anecdotal evidence, which is that a large quantity of people use this because they really do think they can use it and only it to learn a language, and don't really grasp how much of it is just a game.

But I'm not disputing that Duolingo has uses and that its helped a lot of people.

Your “anecdotal” snark is unwelcome.

What’s your purpose here?

It’s been communicated that Duolingo is the only thing that works for me and others, and you continue to make time to berate the tool. It comes across that you’re a language learning snob, a gatekeeper, or both.

Kindly let me enjoy myself in peace.

Im saying it (meaning "Duolingo's marketing") lulls a lot of people into a false sense of security, as witnessed by myself. It doesn't mean the app doesn't work for others in various ways.

The proposition that people think Duolingo is the only option is absurd.

Duolingo is slower than other methods, and it only progresses through the basics of any language. It only covers the fundamentals of some languages. Fluency necessitates other mediums, and this is obvious to any user. Nobody thinks they’re fluent after Duolingo. Duolingo covers the hardest part, the beginning, of learning a language.

If at this point you say that you have met Duolingo-ers who claim fluency (but lack it) then we circle back around to the top-level comment. It’s your word against mine, and I say there’s no way you know many people who have spent the hundreds of hours required to learn a language. 10 years of daily lessons for an English speaker just to learn Spanish. (Spanish is the only Duolingo course that holds a candle for any level of fluency.)

The point is that nobody would adopt Duolingo when they needed to speak well quickly. Its target audience is people who casually want to learn a language and don’t have the motivation to use better tools. These people effectively have no other option, and shitting on the only thing that works for them makes you a gatekeeper and a snob.

Why do you think no one would adopt Duolingo to speak well quickly? Because that's definitely not the case.

I am telling you that I personally know many people (10+), who said "I saw that you can use this Duolingo app to become fluent in French/Spanish/Japanese, and all it takes is 15 minutes a day! That's perfect!" Because they saw it in the advertising. They did not look up how many years that would take, they did not grasp the fact that they are being gamified, they did not grasp the fact that they were learning in a slow and inefficient way, and they were 100% excited to learn a language quickly and painlessly entirely because of Duolingo's promises. And cost ("why would i pay hundreds of dollars for a course when Duolingo is free!").

So yeah, Duolingo's marketing definitely makes it seem like becoming fluent is "easy" if you use their app. And it isn't. That doesn't make it useless, that doesn't mean it's a waste of time if it helps you learn things about the language or move on to a different program.

I am not "shitting" on anyone, I'm pointing out a pretty obvious marketing angle by Duolingo that does dupe people, and I really don't see how that's gatekeeping.

I meant that someone moving to another country, for example, would be motivated enough to take a more efficient route. Nobody who needs to learn another language for work or life considers Duolingo to be the best option.

You can’t seriously blame Duolingo for portraying itself positively in light of the difficulty of language learning. With 15 minutes a day, you can make progress. That’s not wrong. “Hey you lazy piece of shit who isn’t willing to buy a Spanish textbook, we have an app for you to learn to count to three in Spanish” wouldn’t do very well.

You use the word “dupe” as if the point of advertising isn’t to portray the most positive technically correct aspects of a product. People settle on Duolingo because becoming fluent is easy. It’s that simple. It’s the easiest path to fluency. Duolingo won’t get you all the way there (and it may even give you some bad habits), but it’s the lowest effort route through the hardest part. It’s a slow route, but it’s the only route if you’re too low-motivation to take a harder route.

You’ve clearly learned a language through better means, and you’re shitting on a tool that others use. Not only that, it’s the tool with the lowest barrier to entry. You’re the definition of a gatekeeper.

I can blame Duolingo for making outsized promises in their marketing.

You're making a lot of assumptions about other people. Not everyone is as savvy as you. I know people who used Duolingo to learn French so they could move to Montreal. It didn't work. They can't have conversations and they can't remember vocabulary or syntax outside of specific cues. Is that "Duolingo's fault?" not entirely, but they definitely were under the impression that "15 minutes is all I need!"

Duolingo is great at getting you to use the app. That's fantastic. Use it if you find it helps. Just don't expect it to make you fluent by itself.

And I can point out that your accusation is completely unfounded. Every single commercial language learning tool is marketed similarly. Duolingo is just the most popular/successful, so people hear about it.

Terrible planning on the part of said Montreal people has nothing to do with Duolingo. I’m sorry that their plan didn’t work out. Ironically, their forced immersion has probably done wonders for their French.

Sorry you caught the brunt of my frustration. You seem reasonable. Duolingo’s great lol.

I'm not saying that its proof Duolingos a bad app, im saying that its not true that people dont see the claims and think that they can quickly become fluent with Duolingo. Ive seen people do it!

Well you're definitely passionate about Duolingo so you must be happy with the results!

I wholeheartedly agree. I wish this was the top comment. I got so frustrated with the HN language-learning gatekeeping on another Duolingo thread that my comment got flagged and I received a nice message from dang (luckily no ban because I’m normally not a lunatic).

Duolingo is awesome. It’s made language learning possible for me where it used to be impossible. I wanted to pick another language up so casually that I wasn’t willing to put in the effort that other tools require, and Duolingo gives me a way to pick up the basics. I’m confident that in a couple of years I’ll be able to progress to more serious methods for developing conversational skills.

And it would never have been possible if I wasn’t able to use Duolingo to slowly but surely learn a new alphabet and basic present tense grammar.

I think the issue is the target audience. HN has a lot of educated global folk that have had to learn other languages. Duolingo is not the ticket when you need to learn a new language. It shines specifically when the language learning is not a requirement.

> doing three lessons of Duolingo a day for a week will put you somewhere in the 60 - 80 minute region [...] That means it will take you 9.2 years to become proficient in your chosen language.

This makes several assumptions, namely:

1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics.

2. That an hour of Duolingo is equivalent to an hour of US Foreign Service Institute tuition. I don't have first-hand experience of the FSI. However, I have recent experience of learning a language (German) outside Duolingo. After watching ~40 short grammar videos and taking 65 hours of 1:1 tuition, my command of the language is WAY further along than that entire Duolingo French tree from a while back, which took many more hours.

Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

> 1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that.

My point is that how many people here have put in the requisite time to even find out. I’d wager less than 0.01%. Duolingo have come out and said their long term aim is for each course to get you to B2 standard eventually. I’d say they’re not there yet but they’re on their way. The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re looking at this from an English perspective. The Duolingo English language test is widely accepted at universities as a demonstration of English proficiency so they must be doing something right in that regard.

> Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics.

What do you mean by “completed the French tree”. Do you mean you went through and unlocked every lesson once. Or did you gold every single lesson? There is a significant difference. You unlock extra vocabulary and the lessons became more focused on writing and listening comprehension when you complete the higher levels of each lesson. This is now baked into the new format as you go along.

> Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

I disagree with this. Hours of study is an important metric. You need proficiency on a standardised test along with hours studied for a true measure of method efficiency. And as you mentioned cost is also a massive factor. Most people cannot afford 65 hours of one to one tuition.

I really don't understand how any method without regular conversational practice can hope to get a learner to B2-level proficiency. (As measured by a standardised test.)

They've added written conversational practice on the new AI plan. The courses aren't at B2 level yet, but it doesn't take much imagination to see that a complete conversational chatbot with verbal and written modes is not very far off. It's pretty much already doable with current off the shelf AI offerings. Eventually you'd probably even be able to tailor the accent to the exact region you're planning on visiting.

Yeah I think everyone, as an adult, underestimates the immense time requirement to learn a language.

I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun. It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve.

It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time.

At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old. When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me.

Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy.

For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.

I agree regarding the time needed, but it's not clear to me that the Duolingo way would really lead to proficiency, even if one would invest all the time in the world.

Over the last couple of years, I've invested some serious time into learning Portuguese, first in Duolingo and then in an actual classroom. Duolingo was definitely helpful for reading proficiency, but did almost nothing for my conversation skills (let alone pronunciation). The real classes helped with the conversation skills, though I ended up supplementing them with a spaced repetition app for vocabulary drilling. Grammar is still lacking.

Another Duolingo language that I've spent quite a bit of time on is Yiddish, and I find that I can now read it quite well — but only in the exact font the app is using. I'm not entertaining much hope of ever being able to write or speak it.

Thank you for this comment. I was looking at everyone asking myself wtf they hope to achieve off. Duolingo works perfectly well if you spend the necessary time with it. I don't think it's faster. It's just convenient. And... just add stuff to it! Like watching movies, reading books, meeting native speaking people or travelling. Why the hell would people want to learn a language anyway if not for these? The comments here made it look like learning a new leanguage is a form of abstract art or something lol.

When I was planning a move abroad I tried Duolingo, as well as every other language learning app I could find recommended online

Of the 8 or so apps I tried, Duolingo was by far the worst. It doesn't feel like it teaches me the language whatsoever, but is instead very good at teaching me the gamification.

I think this is an issue with Duolingo’s target audience. Its niche is definitely not people who need to learn a language because they are moving abroad.

The gamification is a perfect example of how Duolingo is optimized for people whose motivation is low. It’s specifically for people who just casually want to learn a new language. It’s successful not because it carries people to fluency but because it provides a fun way to learn the basics. Those basics are an unmanageable hurdle for people who don’t actually need to learn a language.

Even if that's your metric, I really do think all the other language learning apps are better for this purpose.

Yet none of them have worked for me, and I’ve tried many. The plan is to return to Pimsleur once I’ve spent a couple years with Duolingo. Sure, Duolingo won’t give me fluency, but I’m having fun getting to the point I can use an app that can. I don’t have the motivation for anything more intense. Language learning is very difficult, and Duolingo breaks it into painlessly small chunks.

I almost got banned over a comment I made on another Duolingo post because I got so frustrated with the gatekeeping here. The attitude on HN is disgusting. It’s blatant gatekeeping. “Your way is wrong. If you can’t do it the right way you don’t deserve to learn a language.”

I regret commenting here. I’d delete my comment if I still could, but instead I’m stuck arguing with another language learning snob because I don’t have the self control not to.

I completely agree. I don't say this because it's crass, but DuoLingo is my goto "toilet app". I know it isn't as good as app or service X.

But I can do it when I drop it on a daily basis to do the deed. Same with the other apps but they aren't as much fun, and that's what it's about while pooping.

DuoLingo while pooping is just one plank in my program, the others are Netflix and HBO in Spanish, as well as multiple travels per year to Spanish speaking countries.

> “Your way is wrong. If you can’t do it the right way you don’t deserve to learn a language”.

I never said anything like that. I said that I found Duolingo worse than everything else I've tried. I'm glad Duolingo works well for you, but I posted my own personal review framed as my own experience.

A review that you disagree with isn't gatekeeping!

Well you seem nice so I’m sorry for the aggression. You weren’t aware that I’ve tried everything else that’s popular.

From my position, someone telling me that the only thing that I can even use is “the worst” feels like an attack with the purpose of gatekeeping.

My use case is expressly where Duolingo is nice. I simply don’t care enough to invest the effort that Babel or others require. Tutoring isn’t even in the cards considering the time and money.

From here, other folks in similar conversations have continued to say that I won’t learn anything with Duolingo. This is blatantly false; I’ve already learned to read a new alphabet, and I’m slowly learning vocabulary and basic grammar. I’m perfectly aware that Duolingo will never make me fluent, and even that I might have some bad habits when I transition to something else. The point is that it gets me to the point that I even can transition to something else. And research shows that the only bad habits that cause real problems in language learning are with pronunciation (something Duolingo is actually particularly good about).

Sorry you caught backlash from my frustration.

Nah, you should do ANKI decks for an hour a day and acquire new words from flashcards. Each card should have a sentence on it which somehow counts as context and that is that. If you dont like that or will keep forgetting words brute force memorized this way, you are not worthy of learning. /irony

Don't tease, just let us know already which apps did you find most useful.

Genuinely, they are not and I tried. Or, they were too expensive for me to try.

I'm 280 days into their French course. Have I learned French? no. Have I learned how to game a bunch of XP? yes. Those two are not the same.

I learn better when I pay less attention to XP and approach it like this e.g. on Duolingo's most common exercise where you have to assemble words into a sentence, I avoid looking at the words and formulate a sentence in my head first.

Duolingo’s definitely gotten better in the last few years at least.

I try to do it on a self enforced “hard mode” where I close my eyes and listen before each exercise, and cover the answers. I also type all the exercises instead of the word bubbles which helps with learning the accent placement.

But it’s only a supplement to a more rigorous routine which includes a Pimsleur speaking/listening lesson, and two Anki (spaced repetition flashcards) decks, one for conjugation and one for vocabulary.

And then chatting with friends.

Finally, I listen to radio stations from Spanish speaking countries while working.

I suspect if I keep it up I’ll be pretty decent by the end of the year.

I'm about the same in, and I can now read (or get the gist of) most French signs and posters, and generally understand simple written and basic clearly spoken French.

It's what you make of it. That said, I've clearly hit a wall of usefulness, and I'm looking elsewhere to continue learning. I'm going to be starting a French course next month - in person - because a huge aspect of what's missing is immersion, conversation, and thinking about the language in a way that's more than just repeating things.

Some people seem to have a real talent for languages. Others less so.

I had 4 years of high school French many years ago and was a pretty good student overall.

But I never really used it much afterwards. I've forgotten a lot and was never really any good at understanding spoken French. Mostly I could get a sense for a French newspaper.

On the other hand, I travelled to Paris with a friend a few years backwho had zero exposure to French and the amount I know was actually at least somewhat helpful.

If I were looking to spend some extended time in France at some point, I'd look to do a refresher with some of the modern language study courses.

When I say basic I mean like if someone clearly and not too quickly told me "le magasin est a deux pates de maisons", i would be able to understand it. But if someone said something more complicated like "the store is, well, you must go two blocks past the red statue and then turn left onto the diagonal road", I would probably get lost. And I think that's where DuoLingo tops out at, at least for me. It's a great language intro but what it's lacking is a funnel into more immersive and challenging courses.

Also, I cannot speak the language at all. Or, barely at least. That is why I'm moving on from DL

(sorry, hard to write diacritics on this).

Oh, I don't disagree. Although at this point, I doubt I could realistically parse normal spoken French at all although I can get the gist of simple written.

I do think that, for most people, a relatively low effort introduction to a language may be useful to set a minimal foundation. But you probably need serious immersion to get anything even close to fluent.

I'm at about that level for both French and Spanish. The French I learned in high school, the Spanish on Duolingo. And honestly, the methodology for both was similar too, except Duolingo is more fun.

It's useful enough. I can read the signs to not get lost and navigate the supermarket, and it's a good base for if I ever wanted to properly learn the language with an actual course and immersion.

This is an advertisement

Their CEO has gone on Reddit a few times and came off extremely, probably insultingly poorly. I dropped the app like hot lead after they changed formatting late last year and his behaviour was the last nail in that coffin.

It's gotten progressively worse and more gamified which doesn't equate to learning.

There are some FOSS alternatives beginning to plant seeds. I cannot wait to see what they bring.

What are some FOSS alternatives?

https://github.com/LibreLingo/LibreLingo :)

Thanks. I knew about that one, but are there any others?

I've seen others but lost the links!

can you give some examples on how he came off poorly?

Check the r/Duolingo Reddit. He had an ama there.

Every time they changed the UI it made it worse for free users and worse for learning. The latest iteration which made it like candy crush almost made me quit. The only thing keeping me is the streak, which isn't a positive reason.

Clicked the link to find out how much Duolingo can teach us, but hoo boy is this information hard to find in the article.

Like most internet articles. Just imagine the title prepended with "Long mutterings on the topic of...".

Tangentially, this response is pretty interesting to me in the context of new LLMs replacing traditional search.

I couldn't understand why people thought LLMs would replace search entirely, since I search mostly to find content created by people. I want to read the article or watch the video, not just find some particular fact. But maybe I'm the unusual one in this case?

This applies to all articles from New Yorker in my experience.

I have the firm opinion that Duolingo is not only worthless for learning a second language, but has negative benefit value. If language learning is measured on a positive scale from 0 (know nothing of it) to n, with Duolingo it is possible to dip into the negative numbers.

I've seen this in my own children. My daughter wants to use it occasionally, because it's like a video game. "Papa, look how long I've had the streak going!" but as that number of days climb into the high double digits, she knows less than what someone would know after their first week of a public school class. And I have no flattering opinions of public school, either.

It's Greek lessons are bizarre. I once saw a multiple choice quiz where it asked what the alpha character (the font made it obvious, just the single glyph) was... and the four possible answers were "alpha", "a", "Aay", and (phrase) "the ah sound in caught" (might be misremembering this, but definitely a phrase).

What sort of nonsense is that meant to be? How is that not more confusing?

What it never did was ever show or teach the Greek alphabet. You never learn the counting numbers. You never learn to conjugate verbs.

Other languages are no better, best I can see. If I had to guess, I would think the app is some sort of CIA-inspired conspiracy to prevent Americans from ever learning a language other than English. It pathologically horrible, impossible to describe without sounding melodramatic.

You're right, Duolingo is of negative benefit.

Good, motivated language learners will quickly discard it and proceed and progress with more effective methods. People who stick with duolingo will end up getting something like the old 'highschool French'. Some basic familiarity with the language but gained through an unsatisfactory, frustrating learning process that actually hinders them from getting to any degree of fluency.

Duolingo is a bad app. It makes you think that you're doing progress with satisfying rewards, while actually you don't do a lot with it. Forget about this and do it the traditional way: get Anki, learn grammar, practice, and you'll get better results. "Gamification" and other ways that try to not frustrate people in general, sugarcoating everything as if it was possible to go through life without any hardship, are really the worst thing of our decade IMO.

There are probably much better courses than Duolingo, but Duolingo has the important advantage that I actually do it. Just racked up a one-year streak in Spanish.

I love the gamification. Duolingo uses every scurvy trick of mobile game gamification - and it's all in the cause of getting you to do your practice. I must do my morning and evening sessions so I can rack up the double XP!!

I can almost read Salvadoran Twitter! Thankfully, shitposting turns out to be the universal human language and translates near-perfectly.

Infuriated to find out just a couple of weeks ago - after nearly a year - that Duolingo Spanish from English just leaves out "vos" entirely. (As well as "vosotros".) And von Ahn's from Guatemala!

I went back to it recently and now I find it so spammed up with gamification and ads and asking for IAP that it quickly gets frustrating. I get that they need to make money off of all of this but after every lesson you have to storm through like six more screens for ads and subscriptions and more gamification points that I don't even understand. It makes me want to close the app and find something simpler.

You do have the option to pay a very low monthly fee if you don't want ads.

Je n'apprendre pas le français vite avec Duolingo, mais je apprendre il. J'adore Duolingo. Je l'utilise avec Apple Translate et Google Translate et j'ai changement ma langue dans macOS et iOS en français pour apprendre en immersion. Ma Spotify Discover Weekly est plein avec français musique aussi, qui aide me apprendre plus mots.

Est-ce que mon français bon? Non, sure. Mais, j'essaie et je pence que c'est amusant !

Mais, il faut vouloir l'apprendre en général.

Édit : Ah ! De plus, il y a Reddit français sur reddit.fr qui est plutôt cool.

Not so bad, but it shows you are sometimes translating english constructs to french words literally.

FWIW I've recently used Michel Thomas method to learn a language starting from zero, and found I got comfortable building my own phrases very fast. It's audio only, you just have to respond to questions in the target language before the answer is spoken, almost painless. (this is not an ad, I have no relation to Michel Thomas method). It's not perfect either but I feel it's the best introduction to the mecanisms of a forein language, after which you can start adding up vocabulary.

Oui, je ne connais pas beaucoup d'expressions françaises, alors j'essaie de les construire avec des phrases anglaises.

Mais ce n'est pas vraiment apprendre une autre langue quand tu faites cela.

You asked if your French was good, so here you go. I have some experience with French standardized testing. I had to pass a B2 (upper intermediate) exam for Canadian immigration and a C1 (lower advanced) exam for my professional license in Quebec.

I think this actually highlights a lot of the problems that people have with duolingo. You aren't terrible at French, but you are missing exactly the skills people malign Duolingo for not teaching. There are problems with word order, which looks like a lot of word to word translation or bad Google Translate (e.g., "Est-ce que mon francais bon?" is odd and unnatural). Your present-tense is spotty (e.g., it should be "j'apprends" not "je apprendre"), and your ability to use other tenses correctly appears non-existent (e.g., it should be "j'ai changé" not "j'ai changement" which translates as "I have change").

I don't think you'd pass a B1 exam (lower intermediate) given the above. Maaaybe A2 (upper elementary) for comprehension if your comprehension is better than your production. I suspect you'd have a great deal of difficulty communicating with a native speaker without the help of translation software as well.

Yep, I don't think my French even compares to a primary school student. I just haven't been learning long enough, and I speak to no native speakers on a daily basis. I've probably been learning for less than a year. I think A2 is generous, I think I'm still learning at an A1 level.

I'm hoping after 2 to 4 years, I'll have a bit more understanding.

Thank you for your insights!

Does the fact thar they have been learning less than a year change your mind at all here?

I don't think most people would pass a B1 exam in any language after only a year of learning unless they were extremely motivated and maybe a bit of a language savant.

I suspect most Canadian-born anglophones who took French through high school but stopped there would not be able to do better, despite having years of French instruction in classrooms.

Change my mind? I hadn't meant to make a value judgement about their progress. How could I not knowing how long they've studied?

My comment was about the current level of their French. It's in the elementary range A1-A2, with some problems that look Duolingo-specific around tenses and conjugation.

Would a year of classroom instruction produce better results? I think it would produce different results. I think they'd know basic present-tense verb conjugation, especially first-person. I think they might also get the passé composé (main tense used for past actions) and "aller-verb" ("going to" verb) construction for future tense (which wasn't relevant to the post).

My main point was about the Duolingo-specific errors. Classroom instruction tries to give grammar and conjugation tools that will allow you to construct French. It does not always do so well or efficiently (Language Transfer is much better, IMO). The French I was attempting to assess was missing a lot of this. The author appeared to have words but be missing a lot of grammar, conjugation and common word order information. Duolingo does not really convey these building blocks, and that's one of the primary criticisms of the method.

Yes, your analysis of my deficits also reflects what language concepts I wish Duolingo would focus on, but for some reason it’s dozens(?) or hundreds(?) of units before you get to other tenses.

They don’t focus on word order explicitly at all, and instead correct you with guidelines only after you fail to answer, which I find to be incorrect instruction.

All in all, I’m learning something, but I feel frustrated with the lessons taught and at such pace.

Why should it take me 2 years or more of instruction before I learn tenses or appropriate word order?

Their focus seems to be primarily on building vocabulary, but it too is spotty. There’s no app feature in any language to look up common language features like how to pronounce the alphabet or count.

It’s bizarre. A United States preschool class will cover these things.

1.) Genuinely, do you seriously argue that someone who took French for a year two classes a week would wrote something much better then that? Because from what I see, this is actually pretty motivating and good result after a year of painless causual learning.

2.) I really don't understand why your benchmark would be formal B1 test after a year. That is too high of an expectation. Most people do not reach it with the usual "a lesson with tutor a week or two classes a week in a year either.

The post in French did not mention how long they had been studying. That came in a later comment, so that wasn't part of my thinking. I think you're right that B1 in a year would require more work than a casual 2 classes per week.

So I wasn't giving B1 as a benchmark for any amount of time, because no amount of time was given in the post I responded to. I was just answering the question about the quality of their French, since they had asked that in their post.

If you want to learn a language please give Michel Thomas a try. He is amazing. I would not speak a word of Spanish without his help.

Unlike any other way I’ve found, his method teaches you to form sentences and grammar from the first lesson. If you line to figure out ‘how things work’ which I would guess would be a lot of you guys, it might fit into your way of thinking nicely.

I tried so many language learning apps and audio - and was really bad at languages at school but found his lessons just perfect.

Bonus 1: the BBC made a documentary about him where he teaches the worst pupils at a school French in 2 weeks.

Bonus 2: he was a Nazi hunter in the French resistance.

Bonus 3: he taught Doris day Spanish (Que Será, será)

Bonus 4: despite the lessons seeming like they’ve been planned out, he recorded them in one take towards the end of his life. He refused to let anyone know his ‘method’ before that, having too many trust issues post WW2

BBC doc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic

On Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas

Note - just like duolingo or anything else, this is just a foot in the door (but a really BIG foot). You’ll have to go speak to people in Spanish if you want to be able to speak for real.

Mihalis from Language Transfer teaches in a similar style (but with a Greek accent rather than a Polish one.) He's free (takes donations) and the courses are extensive. The selection is limited, but he's a one man band.

https://www.languagetransfer.org/

I've been using Language Transfer and it's an excellent resource. I wonder if the method can be truly expanded to more languages, such as Mandarin Chinese.

There’s a Michel Thomas Madarin one but it isn’t done by him (sadly he’s dead) but I still found it a bit useful.

Problem was it’s very short and I wasn’t sure what to do after and just stopped.

Yeah I like this too. Pretty much identical method - I’ve recommended this to a few people when Michel doesn’t have a course in that language.

> occupation: nazi hunter, linguist

Nice

https://archive.is/8X5GR

I only used the app in the beginning of my language learning with English, so 6 years ago, but the learning was artificial, making you feel good about making no progress, and I was doing the hardest mode they had with 30 experience or something daily. I switched onto real methods of learning such as immersion and Anki later on, which is when I really learned a number of languages. The gamification is fine, but it should be combined with real progress. As an alternative point, Duolingo is fine to start with as in following the paradigm of "starting small", however has to be abandoned shortly after.

One thing to note is that Duolingo is often compared to various "better ways of learnng a language". Which I think misses the point - it should be compared to not learning a language at all. For me and everybody I know, Duolingo is the gateway drug - something you use for 5-10 min at a time instead of Facebook (or hacker news:). Then one day "if serious" you graduate to other methods. Or you don't, and you're still better off than if you hadn't used it:)

I’m on a 75 day streak learning Spanish and my wife is doing it too.

I took 2 years of Spanish in High School many years ago.

In those 75 days, I’ve gone from remembering basically no Spanish to being able to express and understand a surprising amount of day-to-day thoughts with her, at least as well as I could have in 2002.

We can express what we want, where we want to go, how we’re feeling, etc.

Duolingo isn’t perfect, but the gamification and social aspect keeps us practicing day-after-day and provides a natural jumping off point for using Spanish in our every day.

I took a two-week half day Spanish course followed by about a month of Anki cards.

I switched to Duolingo because Anki cars just don't cut it for speaking a language.

Can I speak Spanish now? No. But I feel that if I were to go back to a Spanish class I would be much better prepared than if I had done nothing...

Flashcards don't teach language, they remind you of things you've already learned. Having that first exposure to something be on a flashcard isn't the greatest context for learning, especially since the impulse with flashcards is to move quickly. Don't switch to Duolingo, do them both.

Flashcards can be customised in any way though. I used to segment movies into sentences. On the front you had the audio and a screenshot. On the back, you had the transcription and a translation. I learned all the words in multiple movies and TV series this way.

Making your own flashcards is the definitive way of learning something elsewhere, then putting it into Anki for long-term retention. What I'm saying is that Anki should almost always be supplemental to other stuff.

I've got exceptions, though; I do algorithmically generated clozes every day that I got from here: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/

They're good for me because you have to give yourself a looser standard for grading i.e. "I used a different word but does it make sense? Did I conjugate it correctly? Then Good. You also have to actively suspend bad cards. It can break you of the gamification habit that Anki stats can get you into. For example, no need to cry over leeches that get suspended; you'll get that word again on another card. Weird idiom? Stop doing flashcards and go look it up.

I found making them and using them during the class to be invaluable.

It was also good for learning some of the conjugations later.

Of course, that is only part of a way to learn a language and can get to be a real grind.

I did the opposite and switched from duolingo to flash cards. However it was for improving a language I already know somewhat, and it seems duolingo is useful mostly when you don't know the language at all, but not once you already know it a bit.

I found flashcards to be just about worst way of learning new words. It made me feel drained and I kept forgetting the words.

That being said, I remember our teachers telling is NOT to use flashcards back in school. And that was in a school that actually taught me foreign language, so they probably knew what they talk about.

I don’t get all the hate for Duo. It’s fun, a better use of my screen time than a lot of other things I could be doing, and even if it doesn’t get me fluency, it has given me enough exposure in less than a year of training to speak with native speakers and be understood for basic things. It makes me more excited for travel opportunities too. I don’t need to be mistaken for a native but at least I’ll be a tourist who’s _trying_.

I don’t need to be mistaken for a native but at least I’ll be a tourist who’s _trying_.

The hate comes from the fact that Duolingo positions itself as something that can do much more for you than that -- "The world's #1 way to learn a language" in fact, from its marketing materials.

When in reality it just doesn't do all that much. And there are infinitely better (albeit less passive) ways to learn a language.

I'm currently using Duolingo to learn Portguese. I've found it to be a very effective way to build up a basic vocabulary and grasp the pronunciation. I plan to start to in-person classes in a couple months once I know ~1000 words. It seems about as effective as anything else to me. In my experience learning a new language is almost entirely about how much effort you put in, rather than the method.

One thing that strikes me from these comments is that many people become focused on completing the exercises and getting points. I can see that could happen, it requires a conscious effort to make sure I understand every sentence and say it out loud.

Starting Duolingo about a year prior to moving to a German speaking country me helped a lot. I can have some very basic conversations at the store and understand ~half the words I read. I think I've managed to not fall in the gamification pitfall by taking the "Learning how to learn" class, which was a good learning catalyst.

I'm starting classes now, and after speaking basic German with the teacher during the intro, she was surprised to learn I only used Duolingo. She said most people didn't progress much with Duolingo.

Someone I know has been doing Duolingo every day for 5y for learning German, but their phrase forming and grammar is still quite bad. I think the missing part is speaking the language and trying to make correct phrases.

As an anecdote, my daughter learned German when she was 6 from Duolingo reinforced with YouTube, all by herself. And English before that. Check my thread history for more specifics. For that, we're greatful that we have Duolingo.

Maybe it's an age thing, that it doesn't work on older people. But for her, I can vouch for Duolingo without thinking.

Lately, she is trying to learn Chinese in the same way. It's not going well but I think she's nowhere near the necessary effort level, based on the experience with previous ones.

Usually adults have some kind of extrinsic motivation for learning a language: to use it while travelling, to become proficient so they can live in a certain country, to talk to their boyfriend/girlfriend, to use it at work, in other words to communicate with other people in some set of situations. Duolingo may or may not help towards their goal of communicating with others in the situations they desire.

If you just want to study a language for the hell of it, without a goal in mind, then Duolingo is fine. Adults tend to fail at learning languages with only intrinsic motivation because it’s a huge time sink.

> Lately, she is trying to learn Chinese in the same way. It's not going well but I think she's nowhere near the necessary effort level, based on the experience with previous ones.

Duolingo's Chinese module is notoriously bad. I haven't looked at the German but it could come down to huge variance between languages.

Give a child a cartoon in a language they don't understand and they'll do their best to figure out what's going on. Try that as an adult and you'll think it's a giant waste of time. A child can do that for the entirety of the day, an adult will feel completely exhausted after an hour, couple of hours tops.

I am confident that was the key difference amongst my pre-Internet generation. I had access to Cartoon Network, therefore I feel very comfortable with English. Some of my peers had access to German TV channels, therefore they speak German. Lucky ones had access to both.

memrise, duolingo, clozemaster, etc.. are all useful to get you reading words. If you're going to a place with foreign languages and not english written everywhere, it can be very useful to start understanding basic constructs and word formations. How certain letters are pronounced can also be a big help.

Nothing beats immersion though. Duolingo at it's best (in the languages offered) can help prepare you a little for immersion but you're going to find out very quickly so little of it is helpful in conversation.

Reading comments here, it seems to me that Duolingo is based on a small set of common misunderstandings, or potentially a set of predication, similar to the following:

  1. Universal Grammar gotta be a thing.  

  2. Perfect parallel texts must always exist.  

  3. From 1. and 2., "learning a language" must be about projecting an existing UG-to-language matrix into the new one. It's just the matter of how to do that cheap and accurate.

  ( 4. Also, from 1., any pieces of text must be complete and free-standing, that translation should always be possible and accurate for texts of arbitrary lengths. It's just sometimes complicated. )

But languages don't work that way; sure you can take a C++ program and port it into bare C to JavaScript or Rust, but try between C-like and functional languages and it falls apart. And that's just for artificial language. Language, in reality, is more like a programming language, or like an image codec, heck, like a codec. That's where/how things like these apps as well as machine translations do not work; because UG is not real, because there aren't parallel texts for everything, and there's no such conversion matrix, and you won't even be thinking the same way looking at a same thing in two languages.

Personally I think Duolingo is a great introductory tool and a help, but only to go from nowhere to an overlap region where an illusion of 1. and 2. exists. That region sure exists but definitely a subset of either languages, and that above predication just cannot be pushed outwards to make it a thing. It's just a convenient illusion.

It works surprisingly well for me. My wife is Spanish and i have been duolingoing for 4 years now and every year we go to Spain i do understand and speak more than i would normally. I tried other apps like Busu but really they dont fit into my day to day as much and i would skip days much more often.

I can understand that it is not very useful for people who don't have a broad understanding of languages, but everyone who already speaks more than one language will have success with it.

The problem is that people give up way to early. Yes its designed to be easy in the beginning because its supposed to form a habit with you. Every night, before i go to bed i will do at least one exercise to keep my streak up.

Obviously its artificial, but do you guys remember how learning a second and third language in school is? Just like this. The best way to learn a language is of course immersion into the country and not an app.

My Mum and my Mother in law are both respectively learning the other language the same way and the progress they make by investing 5 minutes each day is still astonishing.

Furthermore having all of us in that app means we regularly challenge each other, which leads to each of us making hundreds of points that week and progressing much quicker than you would alone.

I don’t believe there is silver bullet to learning a language for anyone - especially your average human. Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, whatever are great for some foundational exposure and I appreciate that service but they aren’t going to get anyone fluent.

I am a native English speaker and learned to fluently speak Spanish starting at 25. I don’t think I have any natural talent for languages but I was committed. Multiple intensive full-time immersion courses, immersion in Spanish speaking countries with an effort to assimilate and a lot of watching TV and reading for me to master. My weirdo catalan-ish accent still has serious issues (applicable to anlmost any accent in the Spanish speaking world) and I still make mistakes I know are mistakes the second I make them - 15+ years later.

IMO Exposure (which in my janky definition includes at least some of what I described above and required usage to manage some regular task or communication) is the only way to really learn a language. And the thing that separates the real polyglots and everyone else is some combination of intrinsic aptitude and accelerated learning as they pick up more languages that drastically reduces the amount of exposure required.

So there is a lot of negativity about duolingo, and yes I can see some of the arguments.

But.

It is largely free, and builds vocabulary.

It is the only system that has kept a language in my head.

Through it, I can now converse with my family in their native language.

Sure, immersion is miles better, but its also n months wage.

Yes, its not great for talking. there are better apps out there for it. but again they are not free.

As a companion to learning, its brilliant. as a replacement, its sub par

Everyone seems to dislike Duolingo. So what are your app alternatives?

Does Pimsluer have an app?

Anki is a good app, but only if you create your own cards. The act of creating cards is more important than the study.

The more I learn about learning languages the less I think an app is good. There are useful things they can do, but the problem is it is a lot of work to create great content and it is hard to get someone to pay

Pimsleur has an app. It's an incredible loss imo, gone are the days we could easily and safely permanently archive the mp3s to cloud drives "just in case". Now you'll have access to the expensive program for as long as you and Pimsleur have good luck.

> The act of creating cards is more important than the study

I see this claim repeated so often but I've yet to find any actual proof that this is true. Do you have a reference to a study?

I like it. It just have a hate club of people who hate it with passion. The rest of users like it.

Duolingo has more to teach in terms of sales/marketing than language. Study them for the details, but the essence is this: sell people what they want to hear, what they want to believe, not what actually is, not what actually might help them, they seldom buy truth anyway.

Has anyone tried VR language apps? There are a couple of apps for Oculus right now with AI speech recognition and some interesting ideas.

I only tried a free trial of NounTown - you're basically being put into a colorless 3D world in which you can navigate, touch/move/throw objects and see/hear what they're called. Once you can repeat their spelling, objects become colorful, and gradually, the world around you becomes colorful.

Really interesting concept. There is something to it, yet I wasn't sold fully to try the paid version. I felt like something important is lacking, can't say for sure what.

There are no real shortcuts to learning a language. Immersion, constant practice, high quality feedback from native speakers are essential elements and they dont come cheap, especially the last part.

Having said that, it does feel that scalable, cheap software solutions that give you to a tangible boost should be possible. Duolingo isnt that boost though. It is a very preliminary step, so simplistic that its not even clear its in the right direction.

I would like to point that duolingo is not only a great tool to learn languages - coupled with other stuff, but it's also a great tool to re-study languages you learnt and you forgot ! Then you already know the grammar, the pronunciation, etc. You used to be able to read books, but you can't anymore. There I found duolingo to be especially useful.

I really don’t get duolingo. Why does it want to teach me how to say the bear is vegetarian before I can say anything useful is beyond me.

The Finnish course is especially bad in this regard. You learn the words for 'lynx' (ilves) and 'wolverine' (ahma), but not for 'left' and 'right'.

Sorry, but this is an incredibly ignorant comment. If you can say "the bear is vegetarian", you are most likely able to say "I am vegetarian", too. Everyone of those silly sentences contains words you may or may not need and grammar that you may or may not need. To dismiss those sentences as useless is short-sighted.

I don’t think you’ve used duolingo much. I do not know how to say anything other than the phrase it throws at me in that moment. So no, I do not know that. The progression in not linear, jumps around a lot, and doesn’t help you understand how the conjugations work, or how to extrapolate he/she/they/I because all I know is the bear, or apple , milk, motor and radio before I can understand that someone is saying hello to me and how to answer.

Sorry, coming back to this comment quite late. Duolingo usually offers some introductory notes for each unit, where stuff like this should be described. I agree that the progression in Duolingo could be better and focus on phrases and conversations that occur more likely in daily life, but that's the choice they made. Also note that the example above was in English. There are languages where the extrapolation is more difficult, because of what are prepositions in English, become suffixes, for instance in Finnish or Turkish. Nevertheless, these topics are usually covered with in the first few units, so I really do not understand the criticism on "useless phrases".

In case there really is a language course that does not cover saying "Hello", "How are you?", "I'm good, thanks." in the first 5-10 units or so, I apologize, I was not aware. That should obviously be different.

Do you work for Duolingo?

DuoLingo is a nice addition to other things such as Tandem or a good grammar book. It will slowly build your vocabulary.

In my experience Pimsleur is way better, and a good primer to be able to quickly get a lot out of immersion.

I would say it is minimal, the help it provides. It will not get you to B1.

Someone else in the comments said it; learning a human language should be approached the same way as learning how to construct anything else. Learn how everything supports each other and why. Then it will click in your brain because your brain actually understands why things are the way they are, and how to use them.

For example

French "je." Okay, sounds and looks nothing like "I." Maybe a bit if you force it. "je(i)?"

But both come from Latin. So what's the connection?

Well, French "je" is descended from Latin "ego." Which means "I."

ego-eo-jo-je

So now your brain knows that. You don't have to consciously recall the direct translation or use a mnemonic anymore. You actually understand how French works.

It's not perfect but for people scared to talk and take part in real life classes in order to learn english it is the only viable option as it has large selection of source languages.

Duolingo is the digital version of the toys that teach counting and basic vocabulary for toddlers. Same principle and methods.

Not much in my opinion/experience (attempted learning german).

You learn words but without grammar you can’t do very much.

>When von Ahn saw what it was capable of, he scrapped the two programs involving human teachers. “It took me approximately one minute,” he told me later.

If someone has been waiting for the moment when AI start take human jobs, this is it. And I have mixed feeling about it.

Does anyone know a good prompt to turn chatGPT into a practice partner?

go on a dating site where the majority of users speak the language you want to learn. use google translate to get by and you'll slowly get better at reading and writing spanish in conversation. I unintentionally learned spanish this way.

If you get matches that reply more than once, or a reasonable rate of matches at all

the dating market is drastically different depending on the country. In general, I get way more interest in Europe, asia or latin america. In latin america, I'd get a respsonse 3 out of 5 tries with 2 out of 5 ending up in an actual date. by comparison, my hit rate was more like 1 in 100 when I'm in america.

tldr: the dating market in america is trash.

Not sure if Chad agrees

I'm not in America

Ok, but

Example: on a dating app, change your zipcode to Manhattan from any other

Ok, but your response rate will also contain some people motivated by the passport, visa or standard-of-living discrepancy. It's not trivial to weed those out, unless you put something like a canary in your profile ("Message me with your favorite color"). There will also be scammers, fakes, catfish, pig-butchering/cryptobunnies, AI fakes.

Example: on a dating app, change your zipcode to Manhattan from any other US location, and you'll get tend to get flooded with matches from eastern Europe and central Asia [if you turn off the distance/country filter]. You can A/B test how much zipcode affects your response, it can be huge.

It can be difficult to weed out scammers for sure. Just don't send money and see who sticks around. theres still a reasonable signal to noise ratio. Meet in person and see if you vibe in person. Same rules wether you're talking to someone in your own country ir another.

That said, if you're just talking for language learning, none of these things matter. langauge pracice is language practice.

You had said "the dating market" so I was talking about dating apps.

Language-learning apps don't broadcast your zipcode or filter suggested friends by zipcode or distance.

Not particularly, but I have used chat GPT to explain grammatical concepts to me that baffled me before, or that baffled someone else and I, as a native speaker, was unable to explain. Works like a charm - provided a suitable prompt. Only tested with GPT4, can't say much about 3.5.

I'd be very careful with this - I've experimented with this extensively and GPT-4 gets some things horribly, horribly wrong (at least for Mandarin Chinese).

I think the best of both worlds is pairing GPT-4 with human curation (that's what I'm doing!)

DL is a freemium app with ever-increasingly heavy gamification and upsells, which cannot be turned off. 75+% of DL's revenue comes from the small number of its users who are subscribers. The former Chief Product Officer openly discusses how they optimized/sacrificed pretty much everything since 2019, to juice their metrics (CURR, DAU, $/user) and monetization for the 2021 IPO ("How Duolingo reignited user growth") [0]. Stock ticker DUOL.

See our recent discussion of DL's strengths, weaknesses, business model etc. [1] with a developer who was acquihired by DL.

I've been using Duolingo for 1300 days now. Currently learning Chinese; the Chinese course was sadly locked in 2021 when China banned for-profit foreign tutoring, but DL locking it prevents volunteer users fixing and improving it.

Strengths and weaknesses: DL does help you to "learn a language" if by that you mean basic competency, vocabulary, basic grammar. But not to exam or conversational level. Some categories of user need the gamification, friending, leaderboard, challenges, streaks, badges etc., but for the rest of us you generally can't turn these interruptions off. Most people find the daily reminder feature legit useful. Other apps could legitimately learn from DL how to gamify and reduce learning to daily chunks, but without going overboard on metrics and retention and sacrificing a large chunk of the learning time to gamification features interrupting the learning.

See [0b] for how Duolingo's claim “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education” is misleading because it's based on their long-discontinued (pre-2013) SRS algorithm. Sounds like false advertising. Note the comparative absence of peer-reviewed studies confirming DL's claims about language acquisition.

Privacy: DL embeds FB tracking which is an intentional trust and GDPR violation, default-on, no informed consent, and the opt-out is pretty buried; doesn't sound ethical [2].

[0]: "How Duolingo reignited user growth" 2/2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435

[0b]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34978841

[1]: "I bought back my acquihired startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456

[2]: "Facebook Still Tracks People on Yelp, Duolingo, Indeed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319215

I find Duolingo’s cartoons racist, somehow the Brown people are always doing funny / silly things, and sound weird. But the other characters are a lot more ‘normal’.

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