LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
librelingo.app
librelingo.app
The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.
After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like
sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti
sarvē janāḥ gacchanti
sarvē janāḥ namanti
and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.
To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.
[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)
some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
[0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/
edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive joke) if you are using something like uBlock!
Sure, they've got that fig leaf covering them.
This happened to me about ten years ago.
I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking around. There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff:
- Alexander Argüelles
- Steve Kaufmann
- Luke Ranieri
I might be missing a few others.
You first have to know what your problem is, before you can solve it.
> no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
True. In culturally homogeneous countries, you don't need four languages to make yourself understood.
It becomes somewhat necessary in places like mine where different groups of acquaintances/relatives/friends speak different languages and finding a single language at the intersection of those groups can be hard.
is that Duolingo fault or users? because that happen in any hobby. heck, take indie gamedev.! hundreds give ups for a single released game. we could also say that there are people who tried Duolingo and years later they are fluent because the app was the kickstart
you have to be quite naive/lazy to stick ONLY with Duolingo for a year or 2 and expect that you will be fluent. there's also different ways of approaching the app... like each lesson allowing one to read or discuss it with the community; meta-thinking stuff like "am i learning or just rushing through lessons?" etc.
i heard podcasts about psychologists suggesting that fluency is subjective and it happens at +4 years time span of active engagement after mastering the basics
i think Niklas Luhmann’s essay on communication is quite relevant here; https://www.unisalento.it/documents/20152/2157613/LUHMANN-Wh...
I have seen lifelong scholars of the Sanskrit language struggling to speak in Sanskrit because they are simply not used to it.
That's true, but the opposite extreme can be even worse. In YouTube and Reddit I see so many people procrastinating in their quest for the perfect learning method instead of just sticking with any of the good enough methods they already have. I know because I've also kind of fell for that trap myself sometimes.
In fact, I imagine that the average Hacker News user is far more likely to fail at language learning because they procrastinate on linguistics and pedagogical theory and not because they churned 10,000 hours at a slightly suboptimal learning methodology.
For some people, it is because they are unsure of which method works for them. So they wander from one theory to the other.
The rest simply enjoy the meta aspect of the journey more than the journey itself.
I don't think that Duolino is absolutely useless. But my reason for learning languages might be different from those of others. Some people want to be able to say a few words in the language they are learning. I want to read novels, poetry and philosophical texts.
The approach you take and the kind of vocabulary you want to acquire will differ accordingly.
It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.
I'm curious what determines whether or not you add a given language to the list. DeepL and Claude, at least, have usable translation ability in more languages than the app currently supports. Is there a lot of manual effort required for each language, or do you want to keep the list limited just to avoid overwhelming users?
DeepL is actually pretty limited in what it supports. Unless I've missed a new language, Nuenki supports all of DeepL's languages.
Some of the additional ones are supported via Claude only and, where permitting, Groq. Groq is far faster than Claude; in languages that DeepL supports, DeepL handles visible text and Claude handles text that you haven't scrolled to yet. Claude-only languages are a bit of a worse experience.
It's pretty easy for me to add a language. It's all stored in a centralised toml file, which happens to be open source - https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-languages/blob/maste... - and it's about a 20 minute job to add a language, test it, etc. Then it's about half an hour and 5 USD to benchmark whether Llama is any good at it, and if so enable Groq and make the experience a bit more pleasant. I'm currently working on improving the translation quality benchmark (https://nuenki.app/blog/the_best_translator_is_a_hybrid_tran...), because people seem to like it and there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.
That 20 minute number is without updating the big language cloud on the website, which is a bit finicky; iirc I haven't added Vietnamese to it yet.
If anyone here has any requests, I'd gladly add them!
My biggest progress in English was when I started to read the English internet (HN, Reddit, etc.). I used an browser extension to translate words that I didn't know.
I'm learning Spanish now, but there is no content that interests me. Maybe the Spanish Wikipedia sometimes.
So this extension gives me that language exposure.
Suggestions: Can I get some transliteration when I hover over it, rather than translation? Maybe a Alt+ ?
For some languages it's available but disabled by default. You can change it in the extension popup under "Hover Behaviour".
In Danish the third line is translated as "Du kan vende tilbage til oversættelser ved at holde musen over dem." which means "You can return to translations by hovering over them." i.e. the opposite of what happens. As a native Danish speaker I'd write "Du kan vende tilbage til originalerne ved at holde musen over dem.". I've had a hard time finding a translation that more accurately matches the wording of the original. The best I could come up with is "Du kan reversere oversættelserne ved at holde musen over dem.", but that just sounds like you're speaking English with Danish words to me, so I don't know if it's useful.
In French the second line is translated as "Plus la difficulté augmente, plus la traduction est importante" which means "As the difficulty increases, translation becomes more important.". Kagi Translate proposes "Plus la difficulté augmente, le volume de traduction augmente" and a few other things that don't look quite right to me.
I don't know how much this matters, since you'd probably end up exposed to a lot of different translations of many different sentences with this tool. Statistically, most of those will be correct and so you'll end up good enough understanding of the other language anyway.
In any case, you'd probably want to make extra sure that the examples on the front page are absolutely correct, so I hope you find my two corrections useful.
Oh! One more thing... when you select Japanese it says "Supports Furigana", but there's no furigana shown in the example. It would've been cool to see that on the example page as well.
I hadn't heard of Kagi Translate; I'll add it to the benchmarking I do. And I'll see about adding Furigana there.
And why do you think did duolingos competitor "toucan" not take off? How does nuenki do the job better?
Seriously interested and happy to read more insights.
Disclaimer: i did create an MVP of this exactly. But it was just to try and generate some cash quickly to finance my main project (dumb idea, of course). I did get some signups but never even launched the app (and not planning to). Just curious what your experience is.
Toucan did take off; it's fairly well known, and if their website is anything to go by they have hundreds of thousands of people using it.
It translates on a per-word basis, which means that the translations are often simply wrong due to a lack of context. Nuenki doesn't translate single word "sentences" by default, despite me spending a few days trying to improve the quality, because there just isn't enough context to go off of.
They try to mitigate that by only translating certain words, mostly nouns, which limits how much you can learn from it.
They also only have three difficulty levels, while Nuenki assigns a numerical score to each sentence's difficulty and has much finer grained control.
The flip side of that is that it's free, while Nuenki needs to pay for the cost of translation.
I've got ~20 paid subscribers. People on HN seem to love it, and most of my users are from here, while capital-L language learners are hard to market to. There's a lot of AI slop in language learning, and I'm really not good at marketing!
Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete, discipuli!" to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"
The fact that all these years later I still remember some things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.
In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other languages), which is a similar "get actual language input rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method, and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!
> I like to think it's worked
It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days every few months, read something, and then disappear.
You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences in the applicable context.
I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation exercises in a foreign language learning course such as Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.
From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.
However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.
I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words" and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to understand what is really going on and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.
I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process: it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency, by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least, by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her running "learning streak".
Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign language learning course. Effortless, magical learning processes simply do not exist.
This is where comprehensible input shines.
- you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences
- the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus
This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.
I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed to recognize the patterns in the language and store the sequence information somewhere.
If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful. However, I believe if you are capable of doing that, comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck. It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days of CI-based learning than the previous six months of memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating random sentences.
That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day, just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine. It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or reading some readers.
You NEED to consume tens of thousands of words repeatedly used in different contexts for the brain to make those automatic connections. Random sentences do not maintain the context which would have otherwise helped you figure out the possible meaning of some words in the following sentences/paras. That is one of the biggest flaws of any translation method.
For example, one big thing that Duolingo's method completely misses out on is the importance of a rich communicative context. This was implicitly there in Krashen's original monitor model, but wasn't fully appreciated until closer to the turn of the century.
It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.
I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of laghukathā collections over the last couple of years and read from them as time permits.
I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:
- a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama
- a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of Lingva Latina.
The first section of the Ramayanam is the Sankshepa Ramayanam, or, the Ramayanam in summary. This gives the outline of the whole story which then is expounded in detail in the subsequent sections.
So, I am avoiding the first four sargas of the Balakanda entirely in my guide. The story starts with a description of Ayodhya and then moves on to Dasharatha and his family. I want to keep things simple and linear so that the story has momentum and readers feel like continuing the story.
I will have to find a way to incorporate all the side stories without damaging the momentum. Will probably add them as "side quests" at the appropriate juncture.
> after completing the basics
I have to disagree here. Best to jump in directly using glosses (will start with an English one. Might add a Hindi one at a future date). This fetish for basics is a big hurdle that I have personally experienced.
You will never be confident enough to start reading the Ramayana no matter how much you study the language because it is a game of vocabulary.
You need vocabulary to understand things. And the only way to acquire vocabulary is to read a lot.
Once parsed, I can look up the meaning of the word on ashtadhyayi.com or elsewhere, but not before.
Take this story (https://www.adhyeta.org.in/sa/k/samskrita-chandamama/198404/...). Assume you have a gloss available for some words. Do you really need to know the pratyayas for the nouns and verbs for you to be able to understand the story?
For this story, you don't need to know the pratyayas but you do need to know the tenses, the ktva-lyap forms, etc to fully understand what is going on. With only an incomplete knowledge of those aspects, one can sort of intuit the overall meaning but eventually would find that they had the wrong idea altogether when reading the corresponding translation in a language they know.
If you have any interest in app based review (not courses - I specifically try to work with input) I would love to get feedback on the Sanskrit experience.
I posted a bunch of comments about it in the past few days, I don’t want to take over another apps thread, but there are so many cool languages being learned here
Grammar is the analytical part of language. It is not the language itself.
Try reading Spanish texts for a few days without doing these drills and you will notice a massive increase in relative comprehension.
Obviously knowing grammer isnt going ti get you all the way there, probably not even 10 percent, but its a much much sturdier foundation than "donde esta la biblioteca", etc
That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?
Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.
Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".
Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).
If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.
I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads. It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic Chinese is better learned elsewhere.
I tried all three when I was first getting started. I didn't end up going with any of them (I bought a textbook instead - gamification just isn't my jam), but I was at least fairly impressed with Lingodeer and HelloChinese. Both were clearly made with love. And I've met several more advanced learners who got started with them. By contrast, for all its users, I've yet to meet a single person who went with Duolingo and subsequently made it to an intermediate level in Chinese. I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere, but overall it seems that people's success rate with that app is bleak.
watching reels first thing in the morning in bed
First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.
With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.
Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.
However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.
Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.
The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.
If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.
People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.
The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.
And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.
And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...
Depends on the context whether it's a good task. Duo seems to aim for low friction and beginner level (A1 ish), high adherence / engagement. It's an app, they can't just say "read this text and think about it", feedback and assessment matter. They ab test like crazy, and have multiple task types, I'm guessing translation works in the real world for their purposes (low friction, app, beginner).
The received wisdom that translation bad comes from the pendulum swinging away from grammar translation.
What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.
If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.
That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.
Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher.
Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here.
To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card.
More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.
It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall
> what's to back up they're better?
Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")
In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)
One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau...
It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books.
Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed.
It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org
Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.
Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried.
Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)
I often wish the locals here would refuse to use English, but I enjoy speaking other foreign languages when I get the chance, so I understand when they want to do the same.
unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.
With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though.
You can also sign up to in-person classes.
Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.
Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.
Beyond projects like Dreaming Spanish, you have around infinite amount of French, Italian, Spanish or German Youtube about whatever topic you want to. There are even dedicated playlists for total beginners you can start to consume with zero knowledge. You have thousands of shows on Netflix in foreign language with various difficulty - some actually suitable for beginners. Some you have already seen in own language, so you can understand them more easily.
For major languages, there are dozens if not hundreds of podcasts with simplified news, "for beginner" discussions. Some of them are useable with literally miniscule amount of knowledge.
I learned French and my experience from best to worst ways to learn were:
1. 1-1 lessons with language teacher (by far the most effective way to learn)
2. audio lessons (Michel Thomas Method)
3. Visiting France a lot, interacting with French people (my wife is french) (and yes, for me this was less impactful than listening to audio lessons)
4. Duolingo (did a year of doing it daily, did almost nothing for me except a bit of vocab)
5. School (3 years of French in school was about equivalent to listening to 5 hours of Michel Thomas audio lessons)
It focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary through listening comprehension. The creator has put an immense amount of effort into it, to a point where I cannot believe its free. I highly recommend it.
I am a year into learning Japanese my self, and kind of wanted to learn vocab and kanji at the same time (and also see example sentences for the vocab which I can put into my anki deck). My method is when I start a new kanji I pick a few words that contain that kanji, bookmark them (and maybe add to my anki deck), and then when it is time for a reading review if I can remember how to pronounce those word I rate it as good.
I just had a look at it, love that it also teaches the stroke order, this is something I have no tool for at the moment.
The gist of it is that I like studying vocab and components (radicals) at the same time as the kanji. I kind of swap out the on/kun-yomi reading practice with bookmarked vocab, if I can remember the pronunciation of a couple of words with the kanji, I mark it as good. I also think writing the kanji helps remembering it (although I‘m not strict about it; personally if I screw up the stroke order, or add an extra tail, etc. I still rate it as good). I am also a fan of self rating rather than input evaluation.
Certainly not a complete resource for learning the language, but very effective for learning (to read) the kanji.
Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.
Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.
I don't know if its the best way but it kept me motivated to come back and put in some work in a fun environment. which i belive is the biggest problem to solve for any sort of learning.
Having conversation partner(s) to practice with generally trumps any other learning method for languages.
There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.
For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not treating you like a toddler and not resorting to emotional manipulation.
Is Duo the best thing on the planet? No, does it serve a purpose? Yes. The reality is that, if people see their skills improving as a result of using the app (gamification etc included) then it doing its job.
> There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.
This I strongly disagree with. Nothing can _make_ you learn other than your own willingness to do so. If you have the desire to learn, you will. If you do not, you won't. It is that simple and that is applicable to any subject.
Agreed, but most people see it anyways as a journey from point A to point B, and then it's done. Also, most people just settles for good enough, not continuously improving.
> if people see their skills improving as a result of using the app then it doing its job.
Problem being that duo tricks you into believing you are learning when you indeed are not. I feel encouraged when I understand something for first time, not when the godam owl gives me a high five because I matched a word with a picture.
> Nothing can _make_ you learn other than your own willingness to do so
Well, I am really willing to be a world class piano concertist and astronaut. Doesn't mean I'll become one. Motivation + habits set the baseline, the mimimum needed, but they are not remotely enough. Success would be pretty darn easy then.
For people who have trouble keeping up hobbies, that's a feature. Even if duolingo isn't the ideal way to learn, it's a lot better than something I give up on or forget about after a week.
However, you'll need some kind of foundation, otherwise it'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach" in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I talked to had never heard about the guy.
When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge mistake was to switch to Duolingo.
It's essentially a move from memorization and learning language as if its math to how children naturally learn language through exposure.
If you have that, you don't need the other things.
One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language.
(You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)
> They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want
These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you want for language learning.
> but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience
Doesn't matter.
> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.
This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.
> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)
If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.
technically, you're correct. But I don't expect to see much given how resources for ai licenses are calculated.
It isn't clear if LLMs are good. The formal studies cannot possibly be done so don't bother looking. (a few early studies might be done, but not enough to draw conclusions). And of course LLMs may well change in the future so even if you have a conclusion it may not apply to what we see next year.
In general the translation was good, but the wording felt a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and also using pronouns where a native never would - where it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a better translation, and after that refreshing the translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).
I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.
The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.
If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.
The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.
I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar".
In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.
Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network.
Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.
Also, if you're looking for entertaining reading in your target language, grammar books are going to be interesting to you. The goal during language learning is to find interesting content that you understand, and your target language's grammar is a known hobby of yours.
In this claim you implicitly say that you are focusing on "learning by memorizing grammar" if you do not are focusing on "learning by example" - hence the dichotomy, that is false.
The parent commenter never talked about grammar.
.. is something I can't fully agree with. The exception being if the target language only has sounds which you are familiar with already (as in _really_ familiar - your native language already have them). Otherwise you'll simply train your brain to pronounce badly, because in the beginning you can't hear the differences. That's something which will be hard to fix later. And it takes time to hear the differences, your brain literally needs to grow new connections. There are other reasons too for doing a lot (a lot) of listening when you start a new language.
> your native language already have them
It seems like there is a strong underlying understanding that learning a new language is done from a source language towards a target language.
The book I am referring to argues that learning a language is about embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task.
The most natural embodiment og a language is speech.
This is fundamentally another way of looking at language learning than what most people think about having had Spanish in high school or what not.
It might not be for all.
What I wanted to say was that even though babies can hear and differentiate between all the sounds of every language on earth (and yes they can), and young children too - what then happens is that the brain will after a time simply keep what's needed for the child's language and discard the rest. Which is why adults will have problems hearing certain sounds of a target language, unless those sounds already exist in that person's language(s). That takes time. Native English speakers, for example, are in my experience generally unable to hear the difference between certain vowels in my native language even though said vowels are as different as night and day for me. It seems to take up to two years for that to get fixed, depending on the person and also age. And in the meantime the pronunciation will be wrong and the person is unable to hear it and thus can't fix it. And later it's so hard that it won't, as a rule, get fixed.
My wife can't hear the difference between certain consonants in my language even though she's fully fluent otherwise. She has to watch my lips. After all these years. The reason is simply that those differences don't exist in her native language. On the other hand, very young people can easily do it and will get the pronunciation right at first try.
I am learning Polish currently, that has "complex consonant clusters". I come from a vowel heavy language, and I use a lot of time with my partner to learn to pronounce these sounds.
That's not better than Duolingo, no.
Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to
* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)
* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)
* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly
* lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons that give more control over subtitles, eventually only foreign subtitles or none)
* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now
You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.
Subtitles though, tricky. The sites that sync with Netflix are probably better than whatever Netflix offers, or whatever you can get that comes with your video files. Subtitles for entertainment are often abbreviated, which is fine for your native language, but it doesn't help if you want to look up a sentence. You need the crowdsourced ones. YouTube can be better in this regard, especially if they're automatically generated. There are also lists of video games floating around that rank games based on the availability of a script, replayable dialogue, that sort of thing. See Game Gengo for a Japanese example [1] (great channel, he also does lessons with all the vocab + grammar in context using games).
Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with Pimsleur, after the same amount of time, it's right into practical stuff like "I would like something to eat" or "I don't understand X but I do speak Y."
Having an extensive vocabulary of random words isn't particulary helpful except to extrapolate meaning out of conversations you don't fully understand, and almost certainly cannot contribute to.
How are these nonsense phrases? Seems like some useful things to know as a traveler.
Maybe it's the different language courses. But I also did a lot of Esperanto and it had similar quality phrases to learn as this French course.
The basic stage stuff is trash. You’re not even getting “ou est la biblioteque” or “donde esta la biblioteca”, you’re getting “la tortuga es verde” or “un homme ne pas femme” or something.
But I haven't done Esperanto in a long while, so I hopped into that. Back in section 1 unit 2, very early. The phrases are things like "La vetero estas bona" (the weather is good), "Hodiau estas bona tago" (today is a good day), "Cu la tago estas varma?" (Is the day hot?), "Hodiau la vetero estas tre bona" (Today the weather is very good), "Hodiau estas varma tago kaj la suno brilas" (Today is a hot day and the sun is shining). Once again, not nonsense like "the turtle has green pants".
So once again my experiences in the app do not mirror yours of just getting nonsense phrases for hours and hours.
"Don't try to remember, don't do homework, but repeat with the two other students. It is of our responsibility [the teacher] to make you understand the language. What you know, you don't forget" (para-phrasing)
And it works (for me© and surely for more software engineers).
* https://www.latudio.com/ - listening first approach, pause and show sentence if you don't understand, practice words you didn't get later, 4 types of exercises, scripted conversations being one of them
And a possibility of a one-time purchase.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder
My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a level of conversations with native speakers or being able to engage with media.
Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not speaking a language but moreso learning about it academically.
There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial. It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and barely be able to speak the language at all with someone... which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?
I love the hobby of studying languages and things like Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they can't speak very much even after a long time investment, which is damn shame.
My point is neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods.
What should one do instead?
1. SRS - Spaced Repetition Software, for flashcards. Anki is the gold standard. It's open source and free on every pc/android/etc except iphone where it's $20 I think. I recommend finding a good starting deck with about 3k to 6k words to help build your core vocabulary. In my case it was "Evita's 5k Korean". For about 6-8 months I grinded 20 new words per day, which means about 30-50 minutes of Anki depending on if you missed a day or not and thus had a backlog. If you have less time I recommend 5 or 10 new words per day.
2. Find trusted resources for grammar and structured learning. You might have to hunt around but for Korean, I found some excellent websites, Youtubers, and textbooks like Korean Grammar in Use I-III. These materials really are the core of your studying. Vocab doesn't help much if you don't know grammar and you certainly can't say anything without vocab. These are how you get to output, i.e. writing and speaking correctly.
3. Find graded readers if possible. Roughly, these are texts designed around 90% comprehension which is a sweetspot for learning new words naturally through context. Unfortunately at the time I couldnt find any for Korean, but I've watched friends use them for e.g. Mandarin Chinese and learn quite a lot of vocabulary in a short time.
4. Find someone who can correct your writing in some form. Whether that's a private tutor or a friend who's native language is your target language and their target language is your native language. In the past I found some dedicated learners through HelloTalk who would trade journal entries with me. I would correct their English and they would correct my Korean. It goes without saying that you need to practice output in your target language when possible, both in writing and in speech.
5. Find a good language exchange and/or friends who speak your target language. By good, I mean a structured language exchange that enforces pairings and language usage. In Seoul I find that most "language exchanges" are excuses to drink and and chat, mostly in English. There was one language exchange that 1:1 Korean language-only pairings for 1 hour, then I repaid that with 2-3 30minute pairings of 2-3 people in English. This is where you put your textbook/solo studies to practice by actually speaking (and hopefully getting corrections). Eventually I hit a plateau and got tired of having similar conversations, plus paying $10 per event. I also found a few lifelong friends who are studying English and thus we can ping each other for random questions.
6. Find some spaces or groups that are -only- in your target language. With the internet it's easier than ever now with Discord. For example, my friend learned a lot of French by hanging out in French speaking gaming servers on discord. There are also apps like Hilokal and HelloTalk, but I haven't used them in a while so I can't speak to their quality anymore. Lastly there are offline options depending on your area. In the US I used Meetup to find language groups and in Korea I use, well, a korean equivalent to find groups in niches I enjoy.
7. Lastly, and this isn't a tool, but "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus. In learning a language, you will make mistakes and you will say things that sound stupid. It's okay. It's unavoidable and you make good progress by learning from these mistakes, so long as you reflect on them and understand why the mistake occurred. The people who focus on being perfect and making zero mistakes in learning a language, in my experience, do not go very far.
Do not worry about grammar; you will learn it intuitively as you move from simple sentences to more complex blocks of text. Do not worry about learning word lists after you have the basics; learn words in the context of the text you're reading.
(I have no qualifications besides being a self-taught English and Chinese speaker, so take my input for what it's worth.)
Is this really how language lessons are taught in US high schools? I've learned English and French in high school, and we were forced to speak all the time.
* Read a story together (who's reading aloud is frequently switched), then the teacher asks questions about the story and picks students to answer. The student answers, if there's errors the teacher fixes them, and the student repeats the corrected answer.
* When you learn new grammar, the teacher starts a sentence, and a student has to finish it using the new grammatical structure (or similar exercises). This was followed by homework, where all those exercises happened again, in writing.
By year 3, we also did lots of essay-style writing, which is where you really drill down into learning the language. Essays were graded and discussed.
In my opinion, this is the best (and also most expensive) way to thoroughly learn a language, it can only really be improved by cutting down the size of the class to ideally 2-3 students - which, of course, makes it even more expensive.
The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise, and the content of "conversations" was always very, very simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.
I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our essays.
It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or another environment to speak/practice the language will yield much greater results much faster. You can study the same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at times to fill in gaps.
I think if you're a college student it's fine since you have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of any language), but as an adult where time is significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a sibling comment I went over what I do use.
That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.
We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think our teachers realized that most students will learn little from that. It was always student teacher interactions, but in a way that required everybody to pay attention/participate. The teacher would ask a question, waited a few seconds so everybody could begin forming a response, and then pick a student to answer.
Not listening and mentally preparing an answer risked getting picked, failing, and getting admonished/ridiculed - and the teachers were (naturally) pretty good at calling on students who had drifted off. If you were paying attention, you also constantly compared your prepared response with what other students were answering, which made you think about correct grammar, ect.
I think if you have the resources to do 5 hours of language lessons a week, this is the best way. If you're learning independently, your way is probably more effective in terms of time and money. I've saved your other comment, I really should get back into Spanish...
The only thing close to what I'd now call "Compelling Comprehensive Input" that I recall is a single week where we watched a Friends-style miniseries about an English speaker moving to Spain.
You would not be surprised ik spreek geen spaans.
After trying for years to learn my wife’s native language, I haven’t really gotten past the “my name is _” and a few other key phrases. I’ve got maybe 10 phrases memorized and I think that’s all my brain can hold at this point. Language learning is not for everyone.
That's certainly true, but there's probably another effect at play here: language learning is extremely time intensive, and you don't progress if you're not practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even lose progress again.
You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of maintenance effort.
The thing is that it requires a lot of time and studying. At least 30 mins per day is the bare minimum, but 1-3 is much better for results.
I don't personally feel like language learning is easier for me than other people. I just focused on putting the time and studying in diligently over many years.
Yup. Motivated students learn the language in the classroom (+ self-study) just fine. Unmotivated students don't, but they are not motivated anyway.
Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to the point where I was having short conversations in that second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.
However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can do things like play D&D in my second language. I still don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still, though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational, and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.
Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature of yours?
Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn’t be a very effective path for me…
For example, to teach plus-que-parfait my teacher used English language analogies and they were all useless for me. Again, I failed that part of the course but my grades were high enough to pass without it.
grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have had around 50 hours in the classroom.
Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.
>the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"
Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.
Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.
It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space
No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.
While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:
- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials
- at what point you should move on from Duolingo
Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.
> at what point you should move on from Duolingo
I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.
Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the app. If critical information about how to use the product effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's poor communication.
Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-learning app for people all over the world, many of whom don't speak English well enough to even understand their blog.
> I won't blame them for assuming common sense.
It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers (who their target audience are by the way). Many users assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are "done."
Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.
The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).
So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.
I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.
I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more.
I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.
And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro.
Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).
For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources.
Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.
Learning how the language works is the easy part. But only through the daily practice part do you develop the skills to read, write, and speak on the fly.
So the question comes down to: what are you willing to do every day to get that practice in? Especially when you're a noob well under the level needed to do (or stay interested in) more interesting things like read the news.
That's what Duolingo helps people with. And it's already compatible with the things you mention, like reading comics.
You might be falling into the trap of looking at people who aren't motivated to do anything but use one app on their phone and then pretending they'd otherwise have the motivation to learn through an ideal you have that requires more motivation.
When I started Duolingo I didn't even see myself as someone who would or could learn a language, so trying to read comics in Spanish was never on the table (much less a phrasebook, ugh), not an alternative that Duolingo was shutting down. Yet after months I realized I could incidentally read BBC Mundo. I'd wager most people are in this camp since Duolingo is such a "might as well" opportunity very much unlike your proposed alternatives where you assume everyone is super motivated.
Thousands of words and grammar rules that you need to grasp real time. Just mindless or Duolingo-ish daily practice doesn't take you nearly there.
Want alternatives? Among apps, LingQ, for example, or LanguageTransfer. Among not apps, Lonely Planet phrasebooks and StoryLearning graded readers.
There are really many good options if one bothers to search.
Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.
On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.
Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.
(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
I'm currently doing German lessons on Duolingo, and what I dislike the most is that it keeps shoving "useless" words into my face (the words that are irrelevant for me and that I'll most likely never use) - I wish there was an option to choose the topics that I find interesting so that it'd mix the words that more relevant with the everyday use words to better taylor the vocab for me. Another shortcoming is that it never actually explains the grammar rules, you can only try to analyze the examples yourself, trying to notice any patterns. Some are good in that, others are bad - so why don't they spare us that mental gymnastics and provide at least minimal explanation?
at the start you use a translation dictionary to look up ever word which is boring - which is why approaches like duolingo where they give you around 2000 common words to memorize quickly are useful. However the goal is to learn just enough of that list that you can find something you understand to start the real learning on.
I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.
The method described in the video involves focusing on listening for the first year by having someone read magazines and books to you in the target language, pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning of words you don’t understand. This method works quite well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will consistently meet with you and practice like this before you have reached a certain level of understanding, and very few people want to learn this way because they see it as a waste of time.
One of the key aspects of this model is that you should not be translating between your native and your target language, which is what you usually do on apps like Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo doesn’t work. The reality is that the method that works is the method you use consistently over time. Once you get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.
Try to force some more exchanges with your wife. Make a day of the week the day you only speak her language (for at least a few hours, but don't give up from the frustration when vocabulary runs short - keep it going even if you need to point and sign).
Doubles as a silly/fun couples activity.
> It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.
Things you don't understand are not comprehensible to you, so this was not experience with comprehensible input. If you don't know anything at all, you can at least collect words.
Look into "graded readers." They're basically children's books, except native children are fluent and would find them primitive.
What you're looking for is a situation where you understand 98% of what is going on, and you're baffled by the last 2%. If that situation is two- and three-word sentences spoken slowly, then that's the input you should be looking for (and which Duolingo isn't bad for.) The goal is to walk away from that thing you knew 98% of, but now with the last 2%.
Anecdotally, download comic books in your target language. The pictures help enormously in getting you to that 98%.
My way of dealing with the fact that hardly any input is actually comprehensible is to actually translate, at leas in the beginning. I got a couple of vocabulary books and a grammar book (aimed at passing the N5 and N4 [A1 and A2 equivalent] language exams), and drilled the vocabulary and grammar with a redsheet and an anki deck. The thing is though, that I only need to translate the word/grammar concept the first couple of times I see it, after that it is much quicker (and better for remembering) to judge if how well you intuitively know the word/grammar concept from the anki deck (or if you are able to fill in the blank with a red sheet). Over time you can build up your vocabulary and grammar and the input gets gradually more comprehensible.
While drilling vocab and grammar I also listen to pod-casts, usually while walking my dog, or at the gym. It is helpful even if you don’t understand most of it. Usually—at the beginning—I am able to pick up a couple of words I know, which reinforces them, but also I get used to the pronunciation and the rhythm of the language. After a year I am able to comprehend maybe 60-70% (on a good day) of some pod-cast episodes aimed at beginners. But at the beginning it was maybe 5%.
I think what Duolingo gets wrong is that after you are introduced to the word or a grammar concept, you keep translating it. This is at best a waste of time, and at worst, prevents you from getting an intuitive understanding of the word/grammar. I think another mistake of Duolingo is the fact they spend too much time on learning a single word or grammar, repeating it too many times at the beginning. What I prefer is to dedicate some time with the word/grammar, find connections (also with the kanji spelling of it), and then move on. Most likely I will remember it after a couple of exposures that session, and if not, SRS should do the trick the following weeks.
But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.
You also end in a false dichotomy.
You want that education, invest in it. With time and money. Of course, the "a few minutes per day in the commute for 9.99" feels attractive and it even gets you to a basic stage but then it's what we already discussed.
Language should not be reserved for people that can throw that kind of money monthly at their random hobbies, and suggesting that this is "the solution" is grotesque at best.
You can't chase me with the "it's only reserved for people with money". There's ways to invest well and less than those numbers. Those numbers may not be bad either if you compare it with how much people invest in other types of education in the US, which I presume is what you're talking about.
No, where I live all education is provided as a free service. The US education system, putting people into a life of debt just acquire the minimum of marketable skills, is broken beyond repair and not a valid point of comparison.
On the other hand, people with qualifications also demand reasonable salaries and need to pay taxes. "Private tutoring" is not a 10 minute zoom call.
TFA might work for my use case.
For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.
I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.
What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.
If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.
To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.
Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.
Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort.
That is just not how it works.
Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.
You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
But I do think there's space for something equally entertaining (not anki decks!) and more effective.
I learned Spanish decently well, and I think one of the most helpful things I did for that was just hanging out with people, speaking Spanish, and drinking -- not grueling at all, very fun!
What's the app equivalent of that?
It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.
"You entered X, because of Y grammar rule you should instead enter Z".
So they aren't something that can be pre-generated for all possible inputs. Some of these questions are free-form input.
You could give Refold a shot! https://refold.la/how-to-learn-russian/
(disclosure: I also used to work there.)
So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?
The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".
In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).
So in other words, the course is programmed by a human?
Well I hope with today's AI tech the course should be highly customizable. I don't want to learn "The cat is a viking" 100 times.
They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.
I was under the same impression, but later the problem disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of sentences that you should already understand.
To answer the question, it depends on which language you're learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most resources for English-speaking learners.
Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.
For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.
That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.
The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.
It actually has a very different learning philosophy from WaniKani so it is not really an alternative.
* shodoku teaches writing as well as reading, the point being that writing it helps you remember it.
* You learn components (radicals) and vocabulary at the same time as the associated kanji.
* The order doesn’t need to be by simplicity. This is deviates from both WaniKani and Remembering the kanji.
* You rate your self, just like anki.
I find it is actually more important to learn the kanji in the words you are learning, if a new kanji has three new components, it is not hard to simply learn these new components at the same time (and create a story / connection of them). And learning the reading of the kanji is easier if you learn words containing it. So what I do is I bookmark a couple of words each time I start a new kanji card, and during reading review, if I remember how these words are pronounced, I rate it as good.
1. Go through hiraganas a few times (however you prefer, I would write a few down on paper and try to memorise them but now I'd probably just get an Anki deck for it)
2. Once you feel generally comfortable with that, move to words (100 or so) using hiraganas only (try not to get words converted from kanji to hiraganas but actually common words that are always written in hiragana - use ChatGPT to generate a deck for you)
3. Once you feel you arw comfortable, move to the most common 1000 kanjis. There are tons of decks but I really liked the G-Anki one. Go through it once.
4. At this step, you can read and speak much more than you imagine, time to practice it. Here you would move to writing, reading or speaking (depending on personal goals and preferences). I found a tutor which spoke in a way I could understand and that I felt I could relate to (and I wanted to learn a bit of Kansai dialect, so that also helped). I did that on Preply as it is easy to see people's introduction videos and trial a few if needed.
5. As you write, read or speak with natives, every time you use a word you didn't know but you think you should (be picky, add a phrase which seems simple but don't get but don't necessarily add some extremely technical jargon you'd never use ever, at least not for now).
6. Keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint. This stage, if you did the Anki decks daily, you could reach it in 1-2 years, depending on your inclination, how much Japanese you were previously exposed to, etc.
I am now at my 5th year, still learning with anki decks, speaking to my tutor (who became a really good friend) and adding new words. I started reading some short stories fully in Japanese, and almost played through Pokemon Scarlet completely in Japanese. I still cannot follow animes without having to stop and read the text but that's not my goal for now.
Good luck and keep it up!
I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30 minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often able to skip two or three units in a row.
Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an easy, gamified supplement to serious study.
That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly, most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality. They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on. After a couple of years you start really wondering what are they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's just community?
That's actually hilarious
https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...
Duolingo's users are sticky so long as the brand ideology holds: "if you want to learn a second language, play duolingo".
Also, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn also founded ReCAPTCHA. Every idea this man has capitalized on has been made obsolete by the advance of AI.
> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone locked.
> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings
I find I pretty convenient.
Do you just watch / listen to random videos or is it more structured?
I am planning a trip to Mexico soon, so I have been listening to how to Spanish, and mextalki podcasts. The latter is pretty difficult to follow, though I feel you need to listen to real native speakers speaking at a normal pace to have any chance of understanding locals.
SAH seems great because she does seem to speak normally and not too slowed down (or it just sounds quick to me :))
Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.
Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.
Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.
The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and comprehension are all practiced and developed through the courses and, for me, it has been the most effective way to learn Spanish.
After just a handful of lessons I was able to structure many useful sentences based on the teachings that we weren’t taught directly but that I was able to create a fresh as needed in the moment.
It's closer to courses like pimsleur or Paul noble where a teacher and student are speaking and there is pause before the student answers in which you are supposed to answer.
The thing I love about LanguageTransfer is how he explains _why_ something works a certain way. I find it easier to remember some grammar when I know the background evolution. He also makes an effort to map between languages which is the biggest contrast to things like pimsleur, which try to be more immersive.
For Spanish, over the years, I have taken formal immersive classes, finished the Duolingo tree and the reverse tree, spent time in Spanish speaking countries etc. My level of Spanish was good but clunky and I made a lot of mistakes. After finishing about half of the course, I found I was making far fewer mistakes.
I love the etymology background he gives, I love linguistics so it keeps me interested, maybe not for everyone.
I completed the Paul noble learn Italian course, so that I could compare to language transfer. In my opinion language transfer was much better, I found Paul noble's a bit slow and less engaging, for me personally.
I think it needs to be supported with other techniques (speaking to natives, watching Spanish TV or movies, etc.), but for taking in and understanding the language it can't be beat.
I have been supporting it with monthly donations for about 4 years now, because I believe it is such an important tool.
I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
But overall, great work !
I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.
One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".
buenos dias does mean good morning. it literally means good day and can be used as such but most often used as "good morning"
Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);
- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.
- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;
- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.
- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.
Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.
Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.
Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store
Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.
A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.
It was really nice to discuss the sentences with other learners and the creator of the course.
And it was always fun to open the thread for the sentence "I love you" in the language that you were learning.
The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.
Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.
I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.
Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.
What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent dictionary app
There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.
But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.
Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]
---
[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.
[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.
Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?
The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better. Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually less janky overall than Win11.
Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are another good example of my point, the former being largely superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity, and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly less of a risk with FOSS.
Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie, not to mention tiling window managers.
I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front page.
Blender is another good example – incredible product with a great community. It's becoming the default choice for 3D now, unless you're working for a company that already uses something else. (As an aside, I don't use it much but really enjoy reading the release notes as they're well written, engaging and show how they're regularly delivering real value.)
Don't want to seem like I'm being down on open source - I'm not, it's genuinely a beautiful thing, but I would love to see more innovation and not just copying existing things. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, like someone complaining about how there's no good new music but never listening further than top 40 radio.
Nevertheless, Duolingo is an amazing and convenient starting point for unlocking the learning of new languages.
Make your way through the entire course as fast as you can, while also listening to music, talking to people, talking to chatGPT, reading books, etc in the target language as soon as you can manage.
Protip: learn your 3rd language using your second as the language of instruction.
Being a far less popular language than the standard "big boys" that most apps, web sites, books etc tend to offer, it's been a lot of false starts for me or simply feeling a bit lost when a resource throws me directly into a scene to learn dialog without having any of the foundational knowledge first.
I plan to spend a year or two (at least) in the Philippines in the not too distant future. While most Filipinos understand English, I feel like learning at least some Tagalog would go a long way in fitting in and feeling less like an outsider.
However, I think apps that focus on one particular language and how to learn that language are better than a one-size-fits-all approach like Duolingo. The structure and grammar of languages like Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and French (I've learned all 4) are all significantly different from each other. Or at least different approaches for language groups (French and Spanish, which I also speak, are similar enough to warrant the same approach).
I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience not to be very janky in the end.
Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out there... Im getting closer...
I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!
Please Duo hear my prayers...
I’m mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two have voice recognition it seems.
I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.
For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.
Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 - April 2025 (43 comments)
Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.
I will agree with you that the implementation matters, but ultimately anki will cover one's needs for SRS and open source efforts should go towards improving anki.
coded applications with injected content are ~GASP~ not the way humans learn language.
I know that this LibreLingo project is probably somebody's baby, and if it works for them great. Heck, if it works for you, great! But for anybody who really wants to (durably) learn a new language, aren't the results already in? Immerse yourself in the language, be around people. At the very least, listen to native speakers on YouTube or something. Read articles/books. Struggle at it, like a baby! That's not pejorative either; babies are the world's premier language learners.
Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?
Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add the word libre?
You don't know about LibreOffice, really? Your post is so ridiculously ironic I'm having trouble determining if it's satire.