Duolingo Sucks, Now What? | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

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132 pointslegrande136 comments

I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language.

When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner.

Someone suggested the free language learning website called ‘Language Transfer’ here on Hacker News last year.

Within the first day listening to Language Transfer I was fairly conversational. By day 21 I could understand some Spanish shows without sub-titles.

Clozemaster is another excellent tool if you want to become proficient in a language.

Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over three years aided your ability to jump start your conversational ability. Very few folks can start from scratch and watch shows in a new language without subtitles in just a few weeks.

Then there's the issue of accents. There isn't a single Spanish language despite what the Spanish Academy would like. Castilian Spanish (lispy) is a very different animal from Mexican (beat poet who's constantly out of breath), Venezuelan (all the sighs), Cuban (if Sean Connery spoke Spanish), Nicaraguan (I dunno. I still really struggle with this one.), Equatorial Guinean (like from Spain only clearly not), Chilean (Spanish is only a rough guideline, ¿Cachay?), Dominican (one word, and it's all the words), or Argentinian (spoken with an Italian accent).

If you're from the US and only learn from Duolingo, you might be able to get by a bit easier with folks from Colombia than with other accents (as long as you steer clear of Medellín).

I generally find my educated mostly urban Southern colleagues to have a pleasant slight drawl. But go into the deep rural South and urban Southerners struggle as I also will in places like northern England where my speech processing centers are forced into overdrive.

These descriptions of the different accents is accurate and hilarious

I wish I could take credit. https://youtu.be/VlK-neOypDM?si=ZE3BJ0_E1pPEvDkp

You mean nobody can start duolingo and watch shows in a new language without subtitles shortly after

I mean nobody can start to learn any foreign language in any modality (even immersion) and watch shows in that new language without subtitles a few weeks after with the possible exception of shows like Plaza Sésamo, but even that would be a hard sprint.

The Defense Language Institute has Spanish at 36 weeks, Russian at 48 weeks, and Mandarin at 64 weeks. And those courses are NOT for the faint of heart. They are for folks who can get down and grind on language learning.

Only prodigies could learn in substantially shorter time, like this guy. https://youtu.be/_GXjPEkDfek

You and I are not that guy.

I'm 250 days into the Duolingo French programme and feeling similar things— I traveled to Quebec City recently and was only very barely functional at the simplest tasks. Duolingo goes to great lengths to make you feel productive, but I think it's prioritizing the wrong things— particularly if you mostly care about spoken communication, there's just a ton of stuff around verb conjugation and gender that really doesn't matter at all; getting it wrong makes you sound like a noob, but it doesn't actually impede understanding the way barely being able to piece together a sentence does. And some of it is just plain invisible in speech, like an English speaker not being able to tell the difference between its and it's; they're the same until you need to write one down.

Anyway, yeah. Putting so much emphasis on streak-maintenance and leaderboard position has me following silly patterns like doing enough of a lesson to net a 2x exp bonus and then cranking on the "match madness" mini game, which is all vocabulary I already know and isn't teaching me anything new.

I did years of French immersion in Canada, only to go to France a few years after i had finished and realized I didn't know French as well as I thought I did (I felt like I was nearly bilingual). A few years after that, with zero practice, I went to Montreal and could understand everything perfectly, and had zero problem communicating. That's when I realized that I had learned Quebecois and not French.

I'm curious where you did French immersion?

As far as I can tell what my friends' tell me (their kids are in French immersion in Ontario), French immersion teaches standard French, not the Quebecois patois (which we call le joual).

Canadian French differs from European French in few areas like pronunciation and vocabulary, but it is very much still the same language and mutually intelligible.

In Alberta, one of the original French Canadian communities with a number of families that have lived there for generations. Accent differs considerably, and use of slang in France seemed significantly greater. We definitely learned things like "les bas" as socks, and not "chaussette".

I also had this issue. I had to ignore all their social features but overall I think the core app is fine. It won't make you fluent but it does teach a lot, and at least for me, I remember a lot of it. I can't say I learned french from the app, I married someone french so I had a lot of extra help, but I learned a lot of vocabulary that probably would have taken much longer to learn from regular conversation with the same few people in the U.S..

People expecting to learn a language from it probably will be disappointed but as an addition to other things I was doing I think it helped a lot although I have no real way to quantify this.

You are comparing doing something with doing nothing, so it is quite likely that doing something gives better results than doing nothing. For a more fair and balanced comparison, you should compare the use of Duolingo with some other "methods" of language learning. For example, for learning new words, spaced repetition would give way faster results than using Duolingo

Making the gap to conversational is probably always going to require more than just an app. You've got to hear real people speak the language and interact with them, maybe it could be done with a lot of very expensive work with LLMs and advanced text to speech generation but there's a big gap between the basic grammar and vocab that language apps teach to really understanding a native speaker. French in particular is rough for this though because of the... loose... association between the spelled word and the ways it's spoken.

I’m curious about how Duolingo fits betwern Quebec, and Metropolitan French etc; I gather it can be like a Glaswegian talking to a New Yorker - one can find the other much harder to follow than vice versa. (My wife for instance speaks metro French fluently, but finds Quebecois really hard to follow )

Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.

If one accepts that the points are meaningless, they lose their value as a motivational tool, which could compromise a person's goals.

There's also the guilt factor, where the meter says "you must be THIS active to be serious about your goals", so disappointing the meter means (supposedly) you've fallen short on something that matters to you. Framing it as "back to square one" doesn't help.

Yeah, I probably will. I originally bought a year of Super to do it with my daughter (yay "friend quests", more stickiness!), but I think she's also been on and off the bandwagon recently, so that's less of a factor as well.

You can still use it and learn with your daughter. Just purposefully miss a day so you know you are using it out of joy instead of out of obligation.

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

I tell people that you should never get more than 100 day streak. If you have not reached the end of duolingo in 100 days, then you should give up as you are not putting enough time into study to ever learn the language, while if you finish the tree in 100 days you are ready to move on.

Obvious 100 days is somewhat arbitrary, but it is a good round number to work with. If you reach 100 days you should at least stop to evaluate your real progress: If you are not at least mostly done with the tree you should be honest with yourself that you are not motivated enough to learn the language. If you are mostly done, then 100 days is a good time to start looking for other ways to engage with the language.

I'm experiencing the same thing. I've got almost 1800 days on my Spanish streak in Duolingo right now, and I speak it decently well [1], but that's only because I knew some Spanish growing up with a multilingual best friend.

Duolingo was pretty good, say, 1500 days ago; I felt like it was really helping me brush up on those forgotten Spanish skills and even helping me learn new things that I didn't know. But it's gone through so much gamification since then that I haven't felt like I've been learning anything in a long, long time. Their primary focus now is to get me to download their AI app and pay a subscription for that, instead of actually teaching me the language I'm learning. And before the AI app, the focus was getting me to purchase DuoBucks (or whatever they are) so I could have more time to race the clock on those impossible timed countdown lessons.

Now I only log in to keep that streak going each day – streaks are one of my primary motivators in other parts of my life so it's hard for me to let this one drop, even though it's not doing much for me.

[1] If I were a young, Spanish-speaking kid.

I did about 100 days on Duolingo and from knowing no Spanish at all was able to converse in very broken Spanish to people at bars in Spain. I mean long 2 hour conversations where I could for the most part understand what they were saying and get my point across. Obviously they had to modify their Spanish like they were talking to a five year old.

I just checked out Language Transfer and learned it was originally created to teach Greek and Turkish to residents of Cyprus, with the aim of bridging the divide between those two distinct populations. Greek happens to be the language I want to work on, and the free resources for that language are incredible! Thank you for the link.

Welcome

Yes +100 for language transfer, it’s super helpful. Same experience as yours, I fell duolingo overemphasis gamification to the detriment of actual learning.

Ai is going to be a game changer there I imagine because the biggest impediment to learning a new language is being able to practice and getting corrected without social embarrassment.

Language Transfer hasn’t got a huge range of language options unfortunately.

I wonder if it would be easily possible, if AI could understand the Language Transfer style and make really good alternative courses?

That’s an interesting idea, the conversational style and the way the teacher was breaking down the language rules in the Spanish language transfer was really useful.

I tried Language Transfer for German an found it very underwhelming. I heard a few bits of the last lesson, and it sounded like A2.1 stuff to me.

Same. Feels like B1 top for Spanish and French.

Duolingo doesn't actually do much if anything to help you become fluent. Nor does almost all the language learning apps such as Drops, Rosetta Stone, etc. What you need to move towards fluency is a lot of "comprehensible input" like with "Dreaming Spanish".

Learning about a language is different from acquiring a language, Krashen et. all has a lot of research on how people actually gain fluency. What most people are doing with language learning is like learning "about" chess, not learning to "play" chess. It's why you have people in China, Japan with seven years of English and they can't engage in simple conversation, or likewise people in the US, UK with seven years of Spanish and have trouble asking for anything beyond where is the library.

This is a great read (worth reading it all if you're really interested in acquiring a second language as an adult) about a guy who taught himself French as an adult to a high level of fluency via only watching TV and radio:

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365

My taxi driver in Mexico spoke perfect English. I figured he was either American or had lived here. He said he learned the language watching YouTube videos and had never been.

My uncle learned Russian by just watching the news in the evenings when he was a student there during the USSR

haha I had a friend in high school, his dad worked at a local store as a clerk, but spoke multiple languages in what appeared to be "fluency", but I was young... anyways, he found this book at a yard sale "Russian by pictures", a year later he is throwing around full Russian sentences...

Some people are just magic at learning languages. 2 vs 10 isn’t that much more work. Always seemed wild to me as I struggled with Spanglish.

That's the main place he learned it but he was also interacting with people in Russian constantly which is what people upthread were saying makes the leap from being able to passably read to conversational and then on to fluency.

Agreed, no app, website, methodology or anything else is going to gain you fluency. The sole way of gaining fluency is speaking the language, and all that goes along with that (mostly it's integrating into the culture, because language is an extension of culture and if you don't get the culture, you won't get the language).

You need to know very little of the language to get started. Just find someone who's willing to talk to you in said language, and you'll fill in the gaps as you go.

Speaking frequently absolutely helps a lot, but I’ve found in my on-an-off language studies (as time allows) that vast amounts of input is also effective if finding speakers isn’t practical.

Reading content a bit above your level with a dual-language dictionary in hand as well as watching native content while actively trying to understand what’s being said paired with SRS of vocab you’ve picked up while reading will do vastly more for language acquisition than any app/subscription or textbook.

For more popular languages there’s community-made guides online that make doing this easier but it’s doable for any language.

That's the frustrating stage with learning a language; the part where you don't know enough to pick up the gist of a sentence, but learning more requires you to first pick up the gist of the sentence.

I'm not sure what the solution for this is, other than to tell you that I got over it with no formal study (or even much _in_formal study, now that I think of it) with time. Just hearing the language all around you helps.

I had 4 years of high school French and could read passably, write some, but was never really conversational. Probably if I had lived in France for a summer I'd have gotten a lot better.

I was actually talking with a (French and English-speaking) friend who now lives in Serbia and they were saying they pretty much just picked Serbian up and didn't sweat all the fancy verb conjugations and so forth.

I had four years of high school French and one year at university, and I was pretty conversational. How much did you use the language outside of class? A bunch of us high school French students would speak with each other outside of class, even just to make silly jokes in the language, which helped with retention.

>How much did you use the language outside of class?

Not at all. Which I think was my basic point. It was a class. I had no plans to move to France. Or any particular plan for French to be integral to subsequent education or career objectives.

Honestly, this just made me excited for AI in these apps. Imagine if you could just have a conversation with a personalized language coach constantly to help you learn a language and immerse yourself in it. Heck, this is HN. Who knows, maybe it's already in the works by someone around here. I think the first few iterations will be rough especially while "AI" generations remain close to current. Though I haven't messed with Gemini or Chat-GPT 4+ultra, maybe they've gotten disproportionately better.

That actually sounds great. If it were particularly smart, it could even take apart the bits of the language you were having problems with — and unbeknownst to you — concentrate on developing those with you.

I'd love to read this - but can't log into UQ. Can you repost or provide more detail please?

I can't access the thesis either, but I believe it's "‘Picking Up’ a Second Language from Television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning".

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/189928232.pdf

I don't know what the research is, but the best way I know to learn a language is to acquire a lot of data at the edge of your comprehension.

Basically, keep just listen to/read things in the target language, that you barely understand. Don't bother with grammar and rules, that's not how anyone thinks or speaks a language.

I'd love to see what's in OP's link, though.

Reposted with editable accessible link above.

Your link is requiring to log in to read.

One of the main disappointments with Duolingo's recent path for me has been the removal of the forum. It was so useful whenever I was confused by a certain phrase or new concept to just hop directly into the discussion forum page for that exercise and see others asking the same questions and getting well-written intuitive answers to them.

Just boosted my understanding so much plus added a sense of community, that we're all going through this learning journey together and thinking about and getting confused by the same things :P Now I'm relegated to Googling the text of the exercise to find similar info online, just far less useful :(

Those forums were mainly a band-aid for DL's complete refusal to actually explain any of the grammar.

There's an overview for each unit section that has some pretty important explanations, and nothing really directs you towards it.

Still, in terms of forums, a lot of the time Googling will lead you to various subreddits that have some good conversations and explanations.

I'm in Unit 6 of Italian, 11 in Russian, and there have been zero of those. I know which section you're talking about, I check it every time I reach a new unit.

Shouldn't have to google. They made the space for it and created the expectation. They're charging a steep price for flashcards and little else.

Crowd-sourcing is a valid form of support.

If that were even implied to be how the site works, that would be acceptable. They also removed all that. That's garbage "support."

As I think I’ve posted previously, they’re one of those companies that have gone to great lengths to made themselves impossible to contact. Try finding a way to get in touch with them. I’ll wait. Except for billing queries, you won’t. Granted, some of the queries will be language questions you might not have the resources to answer, but that’s a consequence of being a language learning site.

Anyway, to me, it’s a big red flag. (For the record I did use Duolingo for over a year as a paid member with a 365 day streak. At which point I stopped.)

I've found ChatGPT great for this. It's way better than a translator at giving you context for grammar and phrases.

My stack is Duolingo + Podcasts + Instagram + ChatGPT:

Duolingo - daily consistency, grammar

Podcasts - "comprehensible input" from intermediate french podcasts (InnerFrench, French with Panache)

Instagram - Just follow a ton of french accounts. They often have subtitles. Listen to native speakers talk at a normal pace about stuff you're interested in.

ChatGPT - answer basic questions about grammar or phrases. I've even started using this for conversation practice too.

How did you find the Instagram accounts?

I made a Spanish twitter account but had no idea where to even start for following Spanish accounts that interest me. I'd probably be more willing to engage if they talked about things I liked

I think I just searched for some translated terms. Once you find some accounts, you can see who follows them, and then see what other accounts they follow, etc.

Can't recommend anki flash cards enough. One thing that I found important is that you need to build the deck yourself and you'll miss out a lot by using prebaked decks of any kind. Reasons:

- Context is the king. Most of the words have multiple meanings and it's easier to remember them if you just added them from a text you've read. Moreover, this approach gives you an opportunity to see the words being used in the wild which gives confidence on when to use the word/idiom - Words with no context are just harder to learn - 3rd party decks will give you loads of words you don't care about

For learning French I've found kwiziq much more useful. Very little gamifications and lots and lots of training and exercises with examples that actually make sense

I've been working on an idea for a long time which is to break classic public domain books (in the original foreign language) into small chunks for study of the source language.

An example passage is here (from one of the greatest works of Japanese literature, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki).

https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag...

If you click on any passage, you can see all the kanji and the translation of that passage in full.

Each kanji is clickable and displays the proper stroke order and animates it. You can practice writing the kanji and then save that for later.

What's unfinished is I want to allow you to save kanji into Anki and build out flashcards.

If there is a cohort of people reading the same passages, they can help each other with grammar questions, and this is all facilitated because the site is built on the incredible discussion platform "discourse."

I would love to hear any feedback: chris@public.do

I took a in person Spanish class for 2 weeks and then tried to continue with Anki and I found it painful since it did not do anything for my pronunciation...

Of course, using it during the class was invaluable

You can take prebuilt decks and alter some cards if needed to accomodate for different meanings of the same word

I've been running through the Japanese course daily for the last 2 months. I'm learning to read somewhat, but I doubt that if I was to speak I would be understood.

I understand there are limitations to this format. However, what drives me nuts is the fact I can't just enable the Japanese keyboard (which I've installed) to type out answers. Instead I just select the correct predefined answer from a list. This allows me to pick the "most likely answer" with a very high success rate, but that's not going to help me in the wild.

I find Duolingo to work best when I go against its desired way and do it my own.

If it asks me to translate a sentence with the multiple choice options, I translate it first before looking at the options. I listen before reading.

Most importantly, ignore streaks, ladders, and most of the gamification. My learning was hindered just doing a quick lesson to keep a streak, or by doing lighting rounds to gain xp.

I wouldn't learn the lessons if I was just trying to further the gamification. But taking my time, doing them when I'm in a good space to learn has been my best result

Is that something unique to Japanese, or maybe if you're on Android?

I'm learning Spanish on the iOS app. I installed the Spanish keyboard, and whenever a text field appears my keyboard is automatically set to Spanish

May well be Japanese course specific. I am on Android and checked on web also — same experience. I have an iPhone too though, so will check it out and report back.

In my experience with the Japanese course, there are no text prompts at all. Well, not in the main course. You do receive prompts when learning the Japanese alphabets, but these text prompts are specifically asking for the Romanised pronunciation.

Same on iPhone. I assume they only allow typing on languages that use the same character set?

I just started Japanese and on the web client for me I can type answers with my keyboard in Japanese mode just fine. Including submitting answers with kanji even though it hasn’t covered any yet

Interesting. Are you on mobile web, or desktop? I tried on mobile web on a tablet and phone, but haven't tried desktop.

Desktop

Android allows an app to define the language which you want the keyboard to use: `setImeHintLocales`, but I've only seen Gboard respond to this

You might want to give Bunpro a shot, it makes you type the answers in Japanese and I find it forces me to nail down exactly how to use a grammar point correctly (it's also usually fairly good about accounting for situations where there are multiple correct answers, and will give you a hint and let you make another attempt if you're only slightly wrong).

Even worse, they only give one coherent response to multiple choice questions. No similar words that learers frequently mix up. Usually words that are never mentioned in the unit.

It works for Chinese input for me.

"A language isn't something you learn so much as something you join."

~Arika Okrent

Now, they are talking about a computer language, but I think that the same holds for human languages as well.

I've used Duo on and off for years now. It's near perfect for picking up the basics and keeping me motivated. However, as many others here report, it's not as good for fluency. For that, you have to join the language; you can't just expect to be able to sit on your phone and never talk to anyone. It's a bit of a scary step, you're outside your comfort zone, almost by definition. But I think that viewing the new language as something that is inherently done with others is a better way to view the process of learning it.

That said, yeah, supplement Duo with a YouTube soap opera (that you like) in the language that you're trying to join, that helps a lot.

Has Duolingo ever worked for actual language learning?

It has always seemed more like pseudo-productivity to me.

At one point it definitely was helpful. I'm not going to claim it could make you fluent but I used it maybe 10 years ago to practice and I found it valuable. It had long form explanations of grammar, exercises that required you to listen and type sentences as responses, and pretty useful forums if you had questions.

I checked it out more recently and it had become much more superficial and I didn't find it worthwhile at all. It seemed totally targeted at mobile where everything was multiple choice and gamified.

Maybe the good stuff is still there somewhere but I couldn't find it and quit.

I'm actually a bit surprised to see this, I've been an ardent Duolingo user for years and it works fantastically for me. Do you need to pair it with learning formal grammar rules on the side? Yeah, if you want to go deeper, absolutely, and when I have paired grammar rule learning with Duolingo it like 5x'd my learning & comprehension speed.

I'm a fairly recent starter, but I've mostly appreciated Duolingo for giving me some kind of structured course for learning. I keep mindful of concepts I'm not understanding, and Google around for discussions on Reddit and Quora with better explanations than what Duolingo offers, tricks for remembering words (e.g. shared etymology). When it wants me to translate stuff, I don't look at the word bank until i've translated the sentence myself in my head. etc

I probably wouldn't find it super useful on its own, but it keeps me moving through lessons and topics better than if I was just trying to learn with no direction. And you need to keep in mind whether you're actually LEARNING or just completing the lesson. Duolingo wants to give you dopamine hits by having you pass lessons, which is not necessarily compatible with learning. Learning requires struggle, which is not a good way to keep users around.

What I love it for in particular is that it expands your vocab in ways that a book may not, or minimally adds an extra bit of "fun study" akin to casually doing flashcards.

For Greek for example, it does expose me to new words/grammatical functions that I maybe haven't gotten to yet in my formal book and then I can hop over to Wiktionary to see it's formal defintion/usage/declensions/etc...

Like with any learning experience, you get what you put into it.

It works for Esperanto (which is arguably the easiest language to learn).

I completed the Duolingo course in a month, then I could read Gerda Malaperis in three days and Vere aux fantazie in another month, then I could read suitably advanced stuff.

For other languages I tried, it didn't work at all, but it could be because of my lack of patience.

I think it can be used for actual language learning. But no, it's not going to do it by itself. Say each word or phrase out loud, multiple times, and possibly other "extra" study (whatever works for you), and the daily DL habit will certainly leave you with better vocabulary and hopefully more than what you start with.

If you just do a single lesson braindead as fast as possible so you don't lose your streak, then no, you won't learn a language.

I have to also say that none of the languages I've studied on DL are completely new to me. I have had formal instruction in each at some point in my life. I've noticed certain concepts that would probably not make as much sense to someone who hasn't studied the language or language in general (case, conjugation).

Finally, I have one major complaint about Chinese on DL, which is that after 9 months or so I still see the pinyin full time, which means I never really get a chance to solidify the characters properly. I've already said to myself that I need to practice writing separately. There are other problems, but overall, you're probably getting more out of 10 minutes a day of Duo Lingo than several hours of whatever other mobile timesink you're using.

As a data point, I stopped using it 10 years ago because I noticed I'd maxed out all the content for the language I was studying at the time without being able to actually, you know, speak or understand the language very well. Since then, all my friends who brag about their 1000 days streaks still can't speak those languages either. I think it's just gamified language learning that heavily emphasizes the gamification part at the expense of the learning part.

DuoLingo is just step 1, to build the vocab.

Step 2 once you finish a DuoLingo track is to watch shows in a foreign language with subtitles in that language (NOT ENGLISH SUBTITLES, very important).

Step 3 is finding a conversation buddy.

This is it. DL is flashcards. They don't even put on a pretense of being anything more than that anymore. Flashcards are still useful.

The problem I found when using it for Swedish and French about 7 years ago is that it emphasises stupid vocabulary. I don't know how many times it asked me the Swedish word for elephant (which you guessed it, is... elefant). Another word I remember in the first lesson was turtle (which is actually a difficult world in Swedish, sköldpaddan) which I never had to know in my first years in Sweden. Ironically it only ever came up when discussing duo lingo. So in my experience while duo lingo teaches you vocabulary, until you have completed a lot of lessons the vocabulary is useless, because you can't actually use it to do anything in the country.

The Spanish Duolingo course starts with vocabulary I think makes sense - i.e. it's for people travelling.

First words/sentences covered is stuff like hotel, taxi, suitcase, ticket, airport, airplane, store, types of clothing, basic foods, etc. And the overall sentences are a lot of "I want" and "I need."

For speaking, maybe not. But for just reading comprehension in another language it works great. I used it for years and now I read the news in French quite often.

I'm really happy it worked for you, however, it's a bit bleak that a language learning tool was only able to help you learn to read in French (from already reading/speaking English) and not even speak it.

The difference between French/English is relatively small, I would have hoped to set my sights higher than that if I was Duolingo.

That being said, props to you for your progress!

I somehow feel it's more due to your perseverance and focus than Duolingo though. It sounds like you focused on absorbing more than just the app lessions (you read news now) and that speaks more to your discipline for language learning rather than it does Duolingo's capabilities.

> Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) ...

Posted Jan 9th, 2024, but that would seem to be an evergreen sentiment. Based on my streak, I've been using it 4 years. I don't think I've never seen a change that improved the user experience or learning and many of them (removing discussions and dictionaries) made learning worse.

Have to say I really hate it when people boost the Anki clone AnkiApp over the original open source project.

Came here to say this. Anki is one of my most-used apps, been using it for years and it's rock-solid and amazing.

It's open source and completely free, except for the iphone version, which is their only source of revenue.

That's their official mobile client and main source of revenue, isn't it?

FYI: https://faqs.ankiweb.net/anki-knockoffs.html

No, it's a copycat with a slightly different name undercutting them.

I really hate that duolingo is perceived by so many people as a singular resource to learn a language. For certain languages it's a great -complement- and can be great for motivating you to study.

But you need stronger primary resources if you desire to actually -speak- the language to a non-trivial degree with natives. It's very frustrating watching people waste so much time on duolingo and then burning out after they "study" with it for a year and don't see much progress toward fluency.

Do not think too hard about this question. Find an answer that seems to work and start studying. There is no shortcut to time spent studying the language. Sure some methods are better than others, but don't spend too much time finding the best, just pick something fast and start in it. Daily study is the key, the more the better - just don't burn out.

Beware that most people who tell you something is the best way have not actually done a formal study. They either used something and it works so they think it is best, or used something, didn't feel like they learned, then used something else and give all the credit to the second thing even though it built off the first.

And yet again, I'm promoting my app on HN.

SRS flashcards, sentences and audio generated with AI, Wiktionary, YouTube, Webbrowser integration: https://vokabeln.io (landing page is old)

Only works for German right now, but I'll be adding Spanish and English in the coming months.

Also I'm looking for an investor to be able to work on it full time, so if you have money to spare... :D

Doulingo is in the interesting position of having such a big userbase with a locked in reward system that they could change their learning strategy overnight and completely revolutionize languge learning forever.

If course they won't do it, it's simpler to just space-repeat vocabulary and spend the money on people with green bird costumes making tiktoks

For mandarin, excelmandarin (grammar, conversations) and HackChinese (vocab) have been incredibly useful for me. Biggest issue is spare time, or the lack thereof.

WaniKani is great for reading Japanese.

A couple alternatives to WaniKani are:

* https://kanji.garden/

* https://www.readthekanji.com (includes hiragana and katakana as well)

You can also use the following for just memorizing hiragana and katakana:

* https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/

* https://www.kana.pro/

And then there are online resources like the following that provide a guided, DIY approach to learning Japanese as a whole:

* https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/

* https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/

* https://docs.google.com/document/d/10bRzVblKVOsQJjTc2PIi1Gbj...

It has a built-in spaced-repetition system with predefined, extremely silly (but effective) mnemonics to help memorize the various kanji (and their various readings) and vocabulary.

The first three levels are free, with the prerequisite of learning a bit of hiragana and how to type them on their website (I don't know how well this translates to an actual Japanese keyboard). The emphasis is on reading, and they suggest you don't put a lot of effort into understanding actual Japanese in the wild (or media) until level 10, when you have enough vocabulary to not be completely lost.

I'm only on level 5, just trying to be somewhat less functionally illiterate for an upcoming Japan trip than I was when visiting Taiwan 20 years ago. Although I can't read many kanji, I'm often able to recognize a few as well as enough of the radicals of the ones I don't know to sometimes make sense of them.

I hope this isn't too nit-picky, but I'd qualify that it's great (fantastic, even) for memorizing kanji and their readings, but not for reading and understanding Japanese text. You need something like a grammar course and lots of comprehensible input for that.

Two more:

For a course format with more audio exposure? Speakly

For an immersion-based approach that will help you improve reading fluency massively once you know just a little bit? LingQ

I have not found Duolingo valuable for learning a language from scratch – my experience with German, in particular, was terrible. Then I tried to do Japanese with it, and trying to use it to learn Japanese from scratch was also terrible.

However, after I took a couple of years of real (institutional) coursework in Japanese, and needed to just get a little better at recognizing proper grammar constructions, it actually proved very useful – at the paid level, anyway, where one can "skip"/place into higher levels – and it seems their Japanese module in particular has drastically improved in the last couple of years.

So my two cents are that used for language learning alone it's pretty useless. But used as a reminder aide for concepts already learned it can be a good app, especially to just hear how one might phrase a sentence more "naturally" (for a Japanese ear).

For Kanji, though, WaniKani is king.

I live in Mexico and have for the last several years. I moved here not knowing any Spanish. I now speak at a B1 almost B2 level.

Every extranjero (foreigner) I know learned Spanish differently.

What they all have in common though is they all read books, starting at the Spanish equivalent of the US "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", magazines, the newspapers.

Additionally, they all like to talk to people and they're never embarrassed by their errors, thus they practice listing to and talking in this new language all the time. You have to lean into practicing with other people and doing it in public.

Book learning for the grammar and vocab, and writing all of it out on paper. Typing notes out on Duolingo or your computer doesn't work.

For me I needed a Spanish teacher, for me it's a lady that teaches English in a local grade school.

I like Duolingo a lot. I don't think it sucks at all. The only problem I've had with the app is that the sentences per lesson are planned by a teacher with clear learning objectives. But, despite this they use speech synthesis for everything but the stories. The synthesized speech is comprehensible but, it seems sort of lazy on the part of the Duolingo team. Especially when so many apps use native speakers for their quizzes.

People create solutions for problems that don't exist. You want to learn a language? Go to a language school with actual human teachers, socialise with native speakers of your target language, watch media in the target language. Unless the language in question is a minority language, or its speakers live mostly in specific regions (like the americans, for example), this is the oldest and most reliable way to learn a language

People overthink language learning. Use Language Transfer[0] for lessons and Anki[1] for flashcards. Both are completely free. You'll be at a passable level within 3 months, which is an amazing rate of growth.

[0]: https://www.languagetransfer.org/

[1]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/

I disagree with premise of this article. I don't see how the quality of Duolingo has fallen, I keep learning more and more. For me, Duolingo made the friction of starting to learn a language (Spanish) very low. It provides with a clear path to follow. I can practice my reading, listening, speaking and writing all in one place. Of course, someone shouldn't restrict themself only to Duolingo.

Yeah exactly. Is Duolingo the optimal way to learn a language? Probably not, but it's really approachable and not terribly onerous, and it does expose the learner to some challenging stuff. The people up thread who say not to do it for more than 100 days probably didn't do all the content and saw a pretty shallow slice of how Duolingo teaches.

I'm at 1000 days today, and it's definitely improved my knowledge of Spanish and my ability to use it. I'm a long way from fluent, but I wasn't going to undertake a more difficult language learning self-study plan in the last few years anyway.

I wouldn't recommend it to someone who seriously needs to learn a language for work or for immigration or something, but it's been a great use of 10-20 minutes a day for me as a Spanish-curious dilettante.

+1 for Mango Languages (available free with my Library Card)

It's very well designed. The spaced repetition is effective. The lesson order is sensible. The Romanian lessons have a real speaker narrating the pronunciation, compared to Duolingo's AI narrator, which was terrible for learning.

I tried Duolingo briefly but the over-gamification wasn't for me. Everything was about gems and lives, major turnoff.

Anki is suggested for SRS, but are there decks available with audio? That would be a pretty near Duolingo replacement in my books.

I really like the Refold 1k decks. They're paid but have good audio (both the word and example sentences), the definitions and examples are well edited, and unlike most "top 1000 word" type decks, are curated to remove common cognates so you're not wasting your time on things you already know. Only available in 6 languages at this time though.

There are lots of decks. Some have audio. Quality varies. https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks

You can also make your own decks using audio from e.g. Tatoeba or Mozilla Common Voice.

but are there decks available with audio?

Yes.

My wife switched to Univerbal/Quasel (they've done a couple Show HNs). It's an AI that holds conversations with her, either text or audio.

She wouldn't suggest it for a total novice, but as a B1 French speaker she's pretty happy with it. It's great practice, and is helping her pronunciation, vocab, etc.

Immersion school is the only way to learn another language. tutors, apps, classes are all garbage in the real world.

Not speaking relative to other apps, but I have found DL useful for learning more words in a language I already have some training in. (and for reviving after breaks from the language)

For Spanish (a really fast language) it wasn't that useful for actual conversational practice. It's much slower than native

I too tried DL & learnt too slowly & gave up on the irritating gamification.

I run alone (at a slow conversational pace) for 5-6 hours a week, and see that time as an opportunity to learn conversational German. Any ideas what I could be listening to... maybe a listen & repeat type app ?

I did Duolingo every day for a year. I don't remember any of it.

Add that to the constant trend of adding features to make you a paying customer, like the hated hearts system, and I honestly don't see the point. Whatever the solution to language learning is, this isn't it.

I recently wrote a langauge app... my approach has been.. 1. start with ear training. (minimal pairs) 2. learn some vocab (anki) 3. then use social media. tik tok specifically.

https://www.oohwoo.com/

I've been building https://yakk.app for the past 2 years. It's only good for anyone curious to learn Esperanto right now, but Spanish + German books coming next.

I am curious how difficult it is to run a business with apple and google's 30 per cent overhead on every transaction. Must be onerous.

Do Duolingo users actually want to speak the language? Or just read it? Because it does the latter a bit, doesn't do the former.

My current project is a "Duolingo for everything" called RubberDuck. GPT4 is used to generate the curriculum.

I started it as a tool to teach myself new programming languages but realized it could be generalized. Right now I'm taking the Linear Algebra and Ancient Greek History courses.

Would love if you checked it out!

https://www.rubberduck.gg

Says who?!

The best test for language mastery is playing deception games like coup or Avalon while speaking the language.

Sorry I have no input on how to actually get to that stage, just had that shower thought one day.

Immersion with native content: develop listening+reading comprehension.

Success is measured with time spent with the language. Find something that interests you at your skill level:

https://languageroadmap.com

and Anki for top 1000 words + sentence mining if you like flashcards.

> Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI

Source?

The formatting on this web site kind of sucks too. I measured 9 inches of horizontal whitespace border on each side of the strip of content that measures 4.5 inches wide. So a full 4/5 of my browser window is unused empty space.

I think they have a custom tumblr theme, it's not usually _that_ compact.

Do you enjoy reading a line of text 13.5 inches long?

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