Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrr_oh_man | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com