An opinionated critique of Duolingo
isomorphism.xyz
isomorphism.xyz
For me to put a foundation for French down it was: Assimil for about 6 months (30 min/day), 30 minutes of daily comprehensible input, and Anki & Clozemaster for vocabulary (~15-20 min/day). Mixed in there was a couple months on Yabla doing listening comprehension, some grammar study from Bescherelle books, and some tutoring on iTalki. After about maybe 9-12 months I could listen to RFI's broadcast targeted to learners [2], but even then I still needed to go to the transcription a lot at the beginning.
To mislead people into thinking that doing some vocab study for 30 min a day in Duolingo is going to get them anything beyond the most basic grasp of a language is kinda not cool.
[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
Good to know ahead of time what you're getting yourself into.
Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?
(Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)
Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good
but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much
Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org
The safe way to use this would be in reverse. You shouldn't be browsing English pages and get 1 in 10 translated into German. You should be browsing German pages and get 9/10 translated into English. You'll still get machine translation artifacts, but they're much less likely to interfere with your learning, and you'll be much better equipped to spot them.
LT's method goes a bit further though, hence why there are courses on Arabic, Swahili and (upcoming) Japanese. Chinese might be even further removed, but the LT courses are about learning to _think_ about how the language works, and the format of the course (teacher + median student + you) goes a long way to encourage this. Beyond Madrigal's "look how similar these words are".
If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.
For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
Based on my experience I don't believe it's true.
Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.
We much overestimate how well kids learn, and how "easy" is for them. Many kids have language difficulties, and they usually know, and they don't feel too great about it.
The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.
It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.
But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.
It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.
A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.
But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.
Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".
It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.
These phonemes are even more difficult to recognize when we're not conversing face-to-face and in-person! So if you're listening to "comprehensible input" if it's on audio, or video voice-over, it is much inferior to seeing/feeling/hearing a native speaker make sound-shapes with their mouth!
I made many efforts to imitate my Spanish teachers in my youth, in terms of pronounciation, mouth shapes, accent and emphasis, etc. I credit the in-person instruction with achieving a nearly fluent comprehension and ability to make myself understood.
So the argument goes: if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?
The answer is sort of "yes". If an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, they will have a more difficult time with the phonemes of a new language than an infant would.
However, "learning new sounds" is not a correct way to think about it. You're born knowing all the sounds. You unlearn the differences between certain ones. If you, as an adult, have unlearned a difference that matters in your target language (because it didn't matter in your native language), you will have trouble with that difference. An infant can't have this problem.
Note that the cutoff point where an immersed child will fail to learn the pronunciation of a new language "automatically" is somewhere in the late teens, though.
The main reason why people fail to learn languages is that they do not put in enough time. There is no magic shortcut, despite countless language-learning programs claiming they have one. You have to spend a significant amount of time every day working at it.
Having good resources (e.g., access to native speakers, competent instruction, a flashcard app like Anki) is important, but again, people fail mostly because they don't dedicate enough time towards the language.
I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English.
Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.
I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.
And let me expand on the 'and all of that for nothing'. The Americans brought us prosperity. To some other countries, they brought misery. I'm not a fan of that. But at least it's very clear they are doing it for the money, that when someone is exploited, someone else is going to be rich. Eventually the exploited people or even whole countries can get rich too if they are smart, like South Korea.
Now contrast that with the Russian imperialism. Not only are they not bringing prosperity anywhere, they also can't manage to create prosperity back home. They plundered Eastern Europe for decades, they have vast natural resources, whole country could live very comfortable life. Instead there is a very small group of people living luxurious life until the next upheaval when they are going to flee into exile or be killed, and a bigger group of people living a mostly comfortable life mostly in big cities. The rest are essentially serfs that are also sent to the war to be killed. Maybe this war will end soon and another will start in a few years. Maybe the oil price will go down and there will be no money for a new war, which means there will be even less monery for the serfs. And all of this for nothing, it does not advance the society, it doesn't do anything good, it's just evil people playing their games. That's why what we really want is to be as far away from Russia as possible.
I do. And I don't agree it's normal human behavior - normal human behavior is also to feel some empathy for people you have never met. Or even for animals.
> If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture
It did. Can't speak for South America (who probably have a more balanced view already) but it definitely changed the perception of American culture in Europe.
> why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture?
Every day the news are full of Russian indiscriminately killing Ukrainian civilians, children in their sleep, the Russian society is quiet about that or even cheering, and you are asking why that should have any impact on our attitude towards the Russian culture?
I'd really like to see some statistics backing that up
It seems that the reputation takes about two generations to recover once the hostilities are over and the country has started to reform. Russia never really attempted a real reform in the first place, so for it the outcome was different. Russia (and yes, the image of Russian culture) will obviously not come back from this disaster during our lifetimes.
I personally think this only worked out because it was easier to sell this as a civi-war-like internal conflict (and the situation was less obvious to other western nations than now). On the other hand, had the Ukraine invasion gone according to plan, I'm pretty confident that Russia could have managed at least a puppet government and lots of regional control at a manageable cost (in international reputation).
But it was very interesting to see how quickly the Ukraine war turned Russias image (at least in Europe) from "slightly crazy, badass" into overt contempt.
This war is different. My generation and the one growing up now will hostile to Russia for our lifetimes. No Russian culture will be willingly ingested, no Russian products will be willingly purchased. I do hope that Ukraine manages to take that cultural spot though, including but not limited to changing all existing multilingual signs from Russian to Ukrainian.
I think this is because while much of the Europe was willing to 'turn the page' from 90s onwards, that changed during the 2008 war in Georgia. Since then there was enough attention in the media to the 'frozen conflicts' (Abkhazia, Transdnistria), then since 2014 we have the situation in Ukraine including MH17. Also how Russia dealt with its own political opposition. So in 2022 while the war itself was surprising, it did not require a total change of worldview to change the image of Russia.
It seems to me that Russia could've easily kept pretending to be a slightly flawed democracy, and it would've been super effective in hoodwinking "the west", but they "blew it" with obvious assassinations even before the Ukraine war.
This raises the question: Why would you ever admit to be totalitarian or a dictator if you have to deal (economically/diplomatically) with softhearted democracies which really hate that?
I think the answer is that just lying about this (to improve your reputation abroad) by itself hurts your local power base. Every signal in that direction undermines that image of strength that dictators rely on to keep in control, and no dictator can stay in power "against" the population because all the instruments to exert that power (prison/murder/army) rely themselves on (parts) of that population.
I mean... it was?
Chechnya had a very popular president and was a stable country.
My point is not Whataboutism. I don't want to relativate any war crimes done by anyone. I don't criticize people that lost relatives in Ukraine for using dehumanizing language like calling Russian soldiers orks. For the growing racist rhetoric that says the Russian culture were inherently imperialistic.
You might reflexively try to figure out whose narrative I am trying to push. What is my angle? I am not sure if this works or is even possible but maybe try to reflect on why you do this. Isn't it because it clashes with your own narrative? Which is not something you are allowed to notice because the West has no narrative, you are the one who is objectively right, only other people have a narrative.
So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently? Because there is Western geopolitical interest that people do so.
But I would argue that in the Ukraine war it is much more obvious who "good guy/bad guy" is, because you have a totalitarian aggressor on one side and a somewhat democratic defender on the other.
In Israel, you have a democratically controlled army vs a terrorists group (Hamas), and it is much less clear where the justifiable limit for collateral damage is or whom to blame primarily for the current level of escalation.
I'd say they both suck. Have you seen how Ukraine abducts random people from the street and sends them to war?
Pressing young men into military service is not even on the same scale by comparison.
And its not just the rape/murder/looting thats the problem- its about how the perpetrators deal with it.
The harsh reality of war is that tragedies like that are hard to completely prevent even for a disciplined force, but if you can not even be arsed to prosecute escalations like that (and respond with obvious lies, denial and finger-pointing instead), you lose any moral high-ground.
Israel had more accumulated goodwill left to burn though. Russia was on thin ice after Abkhazia, Crimea, etc. Israel was basically seen positively beforehand.
It's not infinite. A year ago it was basically only Muslim countries, some UN observers and the odd outlier like Ireland or Spain that were criticising Israel. But we've had in recent times the leaders of the UK and Germany criticising Israeli actions, and a decent number of mainstream US politicians even too. Israel is at serious risk of burning through as much goodwill in 2023-2026 as Russia did in 2008-2022.
Israel has never garnered any goodwill from a humanitarian perspective. Gaza has long before been described as an open air prison. Israel itself as an apartheid nation. It has illegally annexed Syrian territory. Israel was never a beacon of humanity.
When did Ukrainians terror bomb Russia for decades on end?
When did Ukrainian authorities pay people to kill Russian civilians?
When did Ukrainians cross the border to massacre Russians, rape and take hundreds of hostages and take bragging videos of it to share on WhatsApp and Telegram?
Gazans have done all this and those who do it have - until recently - been universally seen as heroes in Gaza although that is finally changing. Gazas official position is still that October 7th was a fantastic day but simultaneously just a small taste of what is to come.
Even those that acknowledge that 07th of October was a mistake seems to be more concerned about what it means for them than the fact that they killed over thousand innocent civilians, documented their own extreme sexual violence and bragged openly about it and took hundreds of hostages.
Ukrainian use cluster ammunition that has been internationally banned because it leads to extreme civilian causalities. They have formations of "idiologically-motivated" soldiers that are literally neo-nazis.
I am repeating the Russian narrative here? Yeah, this is how you framed the Palestinian struggle.
The genocide that Israel is committing did not start as a reaction to the terror. The terror was a reaction to the goal of Israel to eradicate the Palestinian people. Gaza has been an open air prison for decades.
And no I am not defending any war crimes from anyone. But it matters who the victim and and who the aggressor is. The aggressor is Israel. Palestinians have a right to exist.
Donbas looked nicer after years of alleged Ukrainian bombing than any Ukrainian town looked after a week of Russian "liberation".
I used to really want to learn Russian language. I thought of it as an investment in my career as I expected to work a lot more with Russians and Russian companies because I assumed Russia like the Baltics and Poland would become part of Europe.
I have also had some really nice and smart colleagues from Russia over the years.
Then came 2014 and 2022 and now sadly I think Russians will go through what Germans experienced from 1946 and the next few decades.
Hopefully you'll not go through what Germans suffered in 1945.
If you are working against the regime we are still friends.
And I look forward to visit Russia again in a decade or two.
But remember (and everyone should remember this): a people is responsible for the government they choose. Those who cheer when their militaries are successfully attacking peaceful neighbors and taking civilians including kids as hostages and talk about erasing their neighbors can't expect much sympathy when the war returns home.
Friends wasn't that, but close enough. I think I recall Simone Giertz saying that she learned English from it, and I can't be the only one who has noticed that there's something uncannily Lisa Kudrow-like about her stage persona.
Another good "sitcom-like" that you can find on YouTube is extr@. It's cheesy, but it's entertaining enough for what it is, and they have it for French, German, and Spanish (and English). Interestingly, it's the same main actor for French, German, and Spanish, a Dutch actor playing an American, while the rest of the cast changes around him.
I wonder why language learning apps aren't more into making entertainment in the language they're proselytizing these days.
1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY.
2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot.
3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months.
3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way.
Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.
(motivation, I guess, plays a role too)
There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work.
Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.
Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).
You are smarter than a baby and you can learn a language faster (e.g. with fewer hours of study) then a baby.
This app, and I’m sure others, is a polished “overlay” of sorts on top of one LLM or another, but it’s very well done. By far the best way of learning a language is conversation with a native speaker. This puts 90% of that in your pocket on demand. You can chat (out loud) on various topics, or any topic, and this is augmented with various tools, way to save words to a vocabulary list with a flash card UI, etc. After each conversation you get an evaluation. I found it a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, than anything else I’ve tried.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id...
That’s a great way to gimp your language learning curve.
Receptive skills develop before productive skills. This is just a truism about language.
I could buy into dedicating time to speaking, as many folks don’t put enough time into that skill, but I’m not sure I would ever recommend prioritizing it over receptive skills.
> it's the hardest part 90% of the time.
While this is true, it doesn’t mean that production should be one’s “primary focus”.
> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input,"
I assume you are basing this on second hand information, or “really strong evidence” is doing a lot of work here, but volumes have been written about the efficacy of comprehensible input in foreign language learning.
To be charitable, I think many people do “comprehensible input” incorrectly (content too difficult, overly scaffolded with translations/subtitles, etc.), but the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary) almost always have had massive amounts of (comprehensible) input at some point in their language learning journey.
What I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods.
>the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary)
Realistically, this is a small subset of language learners. Most people vastly overestimate the level of proficiency they are going for. People also underestimate just what a high level B2 is.
That's it.
You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast.
Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer.
This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.
But you can speed up the process by simply getting better at memorizing words to give you a much wider vocabulary.
There are various hacks to memorize things such as decks of cards or long sequences of numbers and similar techniques can aid you here too.
If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.
> Category IV Languages – “Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
The 2200 hours represents learning from scratch.
The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language.
Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duolingo? Posts like yours are doomer cringe.
All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads.
And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t take initiative and build a better habit-based approach that incorporates Duolingo, but that’s not what the app is pushing you to do.
The ads are for converting users to paid subscribers, not just "ads."
I don't see your point at all.
They diligently A/B test their notifications, constantly looking for the variations that’ll show a higher click rate. They’ll hit you with “[Your friend’s name] will hate you forever if you don’t do Duolingo right now!” if you start slipping.
I’ve dropped it after a year or so when I realized that I wasn’t really learning any Turkish, but I was caught in some sort of corporate-designed psychological trap.
If the difference is that TikTok is a thing that "the youth" does and that we don't understand, then I guess some introspection is warranted on your closing ad hominem...
I've never used TikTok, but I actually wonder if this hypothetical teenager would learn more following a ton of users in their target language or playing games on Duolingo. I'd be interested in that study.
Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or maybe they're BSing.
I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.
Styles are different oo. I would say my high school was a lot more focused on writing, translation, and grammar than anything truly conversational though they did work on on pronunciation to some extent.
It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.
There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."
I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.
This is a far better one: https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...
Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier.
So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested.
Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.
But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1.
The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.
I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.
Maybe you call that "the most basic grasp of a language", but it doesn't seem to have been less effective than the approach you took with French.
My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.
My goals are: maintain the daily streak; stay in the diamond league; do all the "legendary" bonus levels; get all three daily quest points. That's enough work that I'm usually pushing myself a bit, but not to the point of tedium.
I'm sure that if I actually needed to learn a language, for some practical reason, Duolingo would not be the quickest or most thorough way to do it. As something I'm doing for fun, though, using downtime I'd otherwise waste on puzzle games or pointless web scrolling, it feels like a pretty good deal.
Feeling the world of Dutch-language media starting to open up was kind of magical. I'm not there yet with Spanish, but I look forward to it. How much bigger can my world get, I wonder?
Same problem as dating apps: if you could actually learn a language with Duolingo, then you would stop using Duolingo. No good for business.
The hard part is how to trick people into believing that it works or even "it's better than nothing". Hence gamification.
All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.
I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.
But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.
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Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning as an adult is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself motivated. People who watch native media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.
I think it's not unreasonable to point out that, at least for Americans (I'm guessing the largest user base of Duolingo), of the three options you listed, one costs tens of thousands of dollars for us (academic instruction), and the other is virtually impossible to do because we aren't part of a bloc of nations with border freedom (immersion).
There are a multitude, nay - infinite! number of online classes with teachers who will use "traditional", textbook-based approaches. [2]
Young Americans regularly go for 1-2-3 month trips to Italy, France, Germany, etc. American passports give folks a ton of latitude. You can stay in a hostel and eat cheaply - many thousands of people have done it.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I will definitely push back on the idea that it's impossible.
(and will also absolutely agree that the convenience of an app will be 10,000,000x more tempting to use than doing any of the above)
There are also a number of social media influencers (who probably were language tutors in a past life) that run online paid communities aka you pay to be part of their language community, and then have access to classes, zoom calls, etc.
They're harder to find / it's more difficult to immediately parse which ones will be good. But you can get a preview of "how they are" by consuming what they publish. For instance, for Canadian (Quebec) French, these are great:
https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench
https://www.youtube.com/@maprofdefrancais
https://www.frenchwithfrederic.com/
I'm sure there are equivalents for French from France, and other languages. Searching "Learn {language name}" on YouTube/Instagram would be a good start.
Its really not that common outside of really wealthy people. Only 50% or so Americans under 30 years old even have a passport, much less spend months overseas. And that's a percentage that has gone way up over the years. In fact, its probably more common to find people that have barely even left the same state than have traveled in Europe, especially so for spending any appreciable amount of time in any particular part of Europe.
https://today.yougov.com/travel/articles/46028-adults-under-...
While learning useful language constructs (gender of nouns and pronouns, how to conjugate common verbs), I also had to learn some useless – to me – vocabulary, e.g., names of animals at the zoo. Anyhow, after a 2-3 months of using Duolingo, I had learned enough to be able to communicate with bus-drivers and shop staff. My conclusion was that Duolingo would be a useful tool to complement more structured learning.
I’m currently learning guitar and I feel the same way about Rocksmith: it’s a lot of fun and a great tool to incentivise me to pick up the guitar but it doesn’t substitute a more structured learning course and it completely neglects the theory of music.
But you're not going to learn declension and cases from repeating the same few stilted examples that don't even exhibit enough variety to pick up the underlying rules, especially as an adult.
Duolingo is trying to do implicit language learning but the language input is far too narrow.
I used Duolingo to start learning a language with a different alphabet, and it taught me the alphabet, the sounds, and some basic vocabulary. But it couldn't teach me verb conjugation, noun declension, plurals, ownership, etc. etc. etc. That I needed a teacher for.
With the teacher, I then used Anki cards to help with remembering more vocab and with keeping things fresh everyday in between lessons. Duolingo could be that, if they had enough examples, perhaps. I would prefer Duolingo type exercises over my Anki cards, as well as the streak and friendship network effects, but there's simply not enough content.
Is it?
I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.
At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.
What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.
Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.
We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.
There's no gamification like in Duolingo, you have to bring your own motivation and endure the UI, but it really does get you to the level where you can continue on your own.
In the end this is the only one that matters.
You can do things before going to that country that will help. But you'll never be close to fluent without taking that final step.
Of course, that's easier said than done (and paid for). But if you can afford the money and time away from home, it's probably the way to go.
As an entertainment device, Duolingo is fine. I used it to start my French journey, not truly appreciating the INCREDIBLE difficulty and quantity of effort required. Fortunately for me, I was and still am super curious about languages, and I really want to learn.
I speak French now at roughly a B2 level. When I travel to la Francophonie, I get by, and people are usually reasonably impressed by my level (or at least are humoring me, which is fine). But my friends and family who have seen me hold conversations in French, as impressed as they may be, would never put in the amount of effort that I have.
Babbel was mentioned a few times, Pimsleur as well (they're different companies/methods), https://www.languagetransfer.org/ ...
Mix and match to find what works for you - what seems fun and motivating.
Oh, and consider informal irl meetings as well - https://www.meetup.com/topics/german/ (depending where you live ofc)
To some extent I agree with the critique. Would I be able to write an assay like the op in Italian? surely not. Is their marketing annoying? yes, very much. Is the platform perfect? far from this. However - after 3 years with Duo I am capable of having causal, simple conversations, I can navigate most of the websites in Italian, I understand most of the marketing emails, I can write simple emails myself. I trust this is mostly due to DuoLingo - building the vocabulary and quickly recognizing the patterns (and It was not super simple, my native language is Polish, and I was learning Italian via English interface - there was no Polish-Italian course back then, now there is one but it's just very low quality).
Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns. During the 3 years I've spent with the platform I made trips to Italy, I tried talking to people, tried to read texts and and explored some grammar myself. About a month I go feeling I've outgrown the platform I started doing 50min conversations on Preply platform and I am now confidently moving into stage where I can build longer sentences, use past and future tenses and irregular verbs.
In my discussions with friends I emphasize that IMHO Duolingo alone is not going to teach you (complete) language. If you have a goal to learn a language (in general, not on Duolingo) and you use it as one of the tools - it could be really helpful.
It took about 5 years of on and off practice. Not sure how much actual time I put in. Duolingo was one aspect, where honestly I probably learned like 75% of my vocabulary. I also have a French wife and friends, took classes, hired teachers, watched movies, read news, etc, etc, etc. I probably could have got to where I am without Duolingo but I'll never know. Learning a language is a pain in the ass and I don't think any one thing is really going to do it. Duolingo is free and can be one aspect out of many that will help get you there.
I definitely agree. I would say that my Spanish proficiency was somewhat similar.
I think the Duolingo base is a good launchpad to kickstart your additional learning from. Boska Wloska!
I use Duo, Pimsluer, live in Italy, and will start classes in a month or so. Duo is a fun game that also helps with my language journey.
There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.
So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.
Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.
I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...
Edit: just went to delete my account and they’ve got a tearful owl above the “Erase personal data” button to try to guilt-trip me into staying. https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg
Then they dumbed down the phone app and soon enough they did a similar thing with the website. Tips & Notes section was gone (or they kept it but removed a lot of information? can't remember), the tree-style courses were gone and replaced with some kind of a Path, the exercises became too easy and they'd make you translate from Spanish to English most of the time, which is much easier than the other way around. Then they removed the ability to type with your keyboard, added the "match the word pairs" exercise (which sucks if you use a keyboard and yes, I know you can try to use the numbers on your keyboard), all of which made the whole experience even worse and less effective.
I lost my streak somewhere in the middle of this enshittification process and I've never really gotten back to using the site, other than maybe checking once a year whether it's still shitty (and it always is).
In my opinion, back in 2014 Doulingo used to be a learning website with some gamification aspect that made the learning process a bit easier and more entertaining. Now it's just a gaming app which tries to give you a false sense of learning a language but in reality you aren't learning anything. Just a waste of time.
> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?
Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".
Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.
Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.
Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
This has been exactly my experience with it. I would probably progress faster if I had others to speak with, but for just doing the lessons offered, I'm pretty happy with my results.
It's not just me. There's been some research on this sort of thing, and it tends to find that just about the only thing that's slower than Duolingo is traditional classroom language education.
Admittedly I was doing more than 10 minutes a day. But that's because I was legitimately having heaps of fun. I wanted to spend a bunch of time with Spanish, and I didn't need any weird gamification tricks to help me sustain that level of motivation.
My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.
Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.
Yes, but once you get the hang of how to learn well from each exercise, it's interesting how the app will seem purpose-built to... slow you down.
You know that exercise where you arrange words into a sentence? I learned a lot better once I stopped looking at those words for cues, and just formed a sentence in my mind and then looked.
At that point, it's a pure waste of time to assemble the sentence and tap through all the UI transitions, I'd rather see the next exercise right away!
But the app doesn't allow me to! I have to pass the minigame first! At the end, it seems 80% of my effort was spent practicing "how to visually hunt for words in a word-cloud".
Duolingo is not a complete solution and I don’t think they or anyone else claims that it is. What it solves fantastically well is the zero-to-habit transition.
But you know what? That makes sense. I'm mostly just reading text and clicking words to fill in the blanks. And the listening component is so unrealistic that it barely builds anything up. And I don't do speaking at all.
As you say, it beats doomscrolling. For a free service I'm not expecting that I can parachute into a Spanish speaking country and be fluent. At the same time, I'm a lot better in terms of my skill level than I would have been otherwise.
And that's not a surprise to me. 95+% of my listening experience is listening to Duolingo's unnaturally slow, computer generated voices and that's a poor substitute. But hey, I can also do it quickly while drinking my morning coffee instead of putting a lot of effort into it, so it is what it is.
That's why people advocate against it and advocate for alternatives.
Their goal wasn't to defeat doomscrolling, it was to learn a language!
Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life.
I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into.
* Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests.
* Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit.
* Ignore music, math and other courses
* Stick to 1 language, at most 2.
Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.
Realistically in my situation it's either this or nothing. I work 55 hours a week, the rest goes into my family and running, I hardly can do anything else.
> Duolingo has gotten bad press from writers who try the app and don’t learn much. But Von Ahn promises only to get users to a level between advanced beginner and early intermediate. “A significant portion of our users use it because it’s fun and it’s not a complete waste of time,” he says.
> He’s been logging 15 to 20 minutes of French every day since November, and when asked to describe what he did the previous weekend he says, “Je fais du sport. Je suis mange avec mes amis. Je suis boire du biere en un bar,” mangling his tenses. (Rough translation: I play sports, I am eat with my friends. I am drink beer in a bar.)
> Bob Meese, Duolingo’s 42-year-old chief revenue officer, has been studying Duolingo Spanish for more than six months. In response to the question, “¿Hablas español?” he freezes, then says, “Could you repeat that?”
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/07/16/game-of-t...
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Also, having worked in the language learning industry myself, readers may be curious to learn that Duolingo is seen as a pariah that no one takes seriously as a learning tool. And I'm not one to use the term "scam" lightly, but if that word is to mean anything, then it definitely applies to Duolingo!
So 1500 words a year, which is useful, if you're not a complete beginner
>But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.
Just memorizing 400 vocabs alone is actually pretty good early on because then you aren't tied to practicing grammar with childish content like " I went to school by bus yesterday" because of limited vocabulary.
I spent the first year alone learning about 2000 vocab without any grammar. And when I go on and do grammar I can actually practice with interesting content that related to my daily life. I now recommend new learner to learn their vocab by N + 1 level relative to their grammar.
- The system language in my cell phone is Danish
- I started with Duolingo every day, but then after some 3 months or so it wasn't so fun/effective anymore.
- I read Danish news every day. Most often just the first two paragraphs is enough, but I make a point of understanding everything. Whatever is first on the webpage and is non-trivial. I know more about Danish handball than I ever thought I would.
- I found some Danish bands that I really like and I listen to them very frequently. For now I don't actively try and translate all the lyrics, since this is my "relax in Danish time", but I have noticed that I can pick up more and more - only then, I go and confirm to see if this is true or to learn what it actually is
- I read reddit posts in Danish (including on jokes) and I often try to write some responses myself. I am still ramping this last part up, but my procedure is: I first write in whatever flows: true Danish, broken Danish, a mix of Danish and German. Then before posting I ask ChatGPT to correct to C2 Danish and explain every little correction. I usually learn a lot doing this.
- I read LinkedIn posts in Danish, wikipedia in Danish when I'm searching for a new topic, and asking ChatGPT for responses in Danish when I have the time to read it through.
- I am also now increasingly exploring using Danish dictation on my computer, but this is still very much work in progress.
- Plenty of podcasts as time allows (I don't drive to work)
- Movies, first with subtitles in English and then in Danish
At this point, I feel that I can:
- understand a good enough portion of what is said in movies and songs to make me proud and motivated, although Danish pronunciation is notoriously difficult for the non-initiated and of course I am still a beginner
- understand written texts where the main difficulty is finding vocabulary rather than picking up the grammar
- I can actually understand some written Norwegian and Swedish, which is a pretty cool plus!
I've reported these issues hundreds of times since they added the ML recordings and none of them have been fixed.
But like you I keep using it just to get that little daily exposure to the language. I suspect it's useless for actually learning a new language, but it's maybe just barely good enough to keep up a language you already know.
Sometimes the rhythm of the phrase is very strange and also sometimes the wrong pronunciation is used when there's a heteronym.
It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.
You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:
The language is difficult -> La lengua es difícil.
I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.
I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."
[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to
[1]: https://mangolanguages.com (not sure why no one knows about this)
[2]: https://busuu.com (probably the best for grammar)
[3]: https://memrise.com (very, very good AI text convos with corrections provided and mixed language support)
The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :)
(or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)
That's not something against translating, that just means you haven't done it enough yet, so you're still too slow.
The first time you translate a basic sentence it might take 10s. 2nd time 5s. And so on. The 100th time it takes 0.05s and you can just say it without thinking. If one just keeps translating, you automatically reach that point.
I personally don't believe its pedagogical deficiency is mere incompetence. The whole business model is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, so why would they make you learn faster rather than just enough to keep you there?
As a long time user before, I have observed a lot of mechanism changes that bear out this observation.
You could try not getting suckered in by the gamification. I've been using Duo for years. I have no idea how I'd even find out what a league is, much less if I've dropped out of one.
I do try to use it every day, so my streak is high, but if I don't use it I don't use it.
And no, I don't think my ~15 mins a day over the same amount of time would have made me notably more fluent. I might be *differently* fluent, however as Duo heavily skews towards reading comprehension.
Yes, the social aspect is trash. The "path" is trash. The leagues/incentives don't make sense. It's just a bad app. This blog made me realize that it could possibly be better in concrete terms. And without even going against their bottom-line. Like, it could still be gamified and what-not, but BETTER. But it isn't. It is just a poor design. YES, language-learning takes effort and many different sources, and YES Duolingo-like apps can only hope to be like a SNACK, but they could still be much better, ugh.
It feels like this: Suppose I write a detailed critique of phone cameras, and everyone says "Well, professional photographers would be using a DSLR anyway"
Yes, obviously an actual class with a qualified teacher is going to teach you a language faster than Duolingo. Obviously you will learn faster if you move to a foreign country or if you have people around you to regularly speak your target language. Obviously you can cheat at Duolingo and not learn anything, just like you could turn the speed way down on your home treadmill and not really get any exercise.
But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa, and a ten minute language lesson will still teach you more than no language lesson at all.
That's right. Most of the criticism directed at Duolingo seems to be about unrealistic expectations of engaging with an app for 10 minutes a day. That is not going to get you to fluency, but it does beat doom scrolling on your phone.
Before I committed to study Japanese seriously I did about a year of Duolingo. I learned about a thousand words, maybe 100 kanji, I could follow parts of conversations and read easy sentences, and that is exactly what I expected from the effort I put in. In fact I was happy with what I got out of it. What it excels at isn't teaching you a language fast, it's that it keeps you going and has course material laid out for you.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A8%80%E3%81%86 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FNrpMQZzJ0&t=457s
One source that I (and quite a lot of people on the internet) find fantastic is Cure Dolly's series which is more grammar oriented and you can consume either in the form of Youtube videos on the channel of the same name or in written form here: https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/
those helped me a great deal in addition to consuming media, duolingo etc.
Jk, I agree with you but that doesn't mean there are no meaningful criticisms of the treadmill
1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.
As a basic starter tool, it's cute and briefly enjoyable, and that's enough. But you'll need to supplement it with something else almost right away, and your daughter's structured classes and reading material were almost certainly that something else. I think Duolingo's *streak* is the only key feature worth imitating in any form, as it gamifies habit development, which is difficult for many people. If only the lesson content could keep up with that one good idea.
The caveat here was that I was intensely motivated, my native language (English) is related to German, and I already had learned two other languages, so I had internalized a good process to learn a language (plus an interest in linguistics meant I could read "here's how the subjunctive is constructed in German" and not have to read fifty pages of explanation about what the subjunctive even is.
It CANNOT be overstated how useful it is to understand grammatical concepts at an academic level when you're learning a new language. There's so much that can be conveyed with one term instead of twenty examples you have to read over and over to grok what this construction is for. Pay attention in seventh grade English when you're being taught what passive voice is, pay attention when you're learning about mood. When you hear past and past perfect, remember it! It will make things SO much easier when you decide to acquire another language.
(Edit) Even very different languages like Japanese still have a lot of the same concepts. The most complicated verb ending IMO is the "causative-passive," and many of my classmates struggled to learn it. IMO it's probably because of the "passive" part. But passive voice exists in English, and if you can recognize it, the construction in Japanese is really easy. "To be allowed to XYZ" or "To be forced to XYZ" if you translate in your head (like most learners do at first). You speedrun the whole concept but for actually learning the mechanics of constructing it: for one category of verbs, drop -ru and add -saserareru. For the other, drop the -u and replace with -an and then -serareru.
Bam, if you already know what passive means, you're done. You've literally just learned the entirety of it, a thing I watched take a full week in my university class.
Incidentally I do think Finnish is one of the cases where it could work well. The way I see it the difficulty in learning Finnish is primarily learning an entirely new vocabulary, the grammar and sentence structure isn't that hard, and Duolingo could work well to teach you thousands of new words. The problem is they have a very limited amount of exercises, to the point my phone's auto complete can solve half of them.
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Please don't just link me stuff you've found on Google, I've tried them all. My favourite was Yle Kielikoulu, but that's been shut down.
How about taking lessons with some Finnish tutors on services like iTalki?
Something from this list https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Finnish or reading with lute if everything there is too advanced.
Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.
Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).
I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.
It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.
I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.
I finally abandoned the app this spring.
I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.
I don't understand people who say this. I completely ignore the gamification. If I don't feel like doing it one day, I don't do it. I don't even know what the leagues are, despite seeing people talk about them. I never look at any score or badge that they provide.
Why do people care about this?
I think gamification triggers some innate feature of our brain, just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games, etc. It is designed to be hard to ignore.
It sends me daily reminder emails, which I use as a reminder to do it if I have a chance, otherwise I ignore them. It flashes up a bunch of crap after I complete a lesson that I just mindlessly click through. Which could be the league stuff you mention but I ignore it.
> just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games
Fair, I have the same question about those. It boggles my mind that people fall for the gamification of those too. Or even back in the day stuff like badges in StackOverflow. If one doesn't care, one doesn't care.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the article, but cookie clicker IS a game worth its salt. Input mechanic difficulty is not the sole factor to consider when determining the quality of a game loop.
- Content may be provided by contributors (like Duolingo did for many years)
- It could be supported by donations (I believe the costs can be kept low)
My feeling is that lots of problems with Duolingo are caused by monetization (and many things were better in Duolingo a few years ago).
I'm still not sure of how it should be designed and what we need exactly. One of the problems is also to get enough contributors. I'd be interested in hearing more thoughts on this.
As a hobby, I started building an alternative to the Duolingo Stories feature (https://lingostories.org), but it's still fairly limited.
Previously discussed in April (363 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035
And in 2022 (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142852
However, I would say that for very popular languages (Japanese, in my case), there are probably good (but paid) niche apps/resources. If your target language is Finnish, there are fewer options, like another commenter points out on the parent thread.
Otherwise I don't share the criticisms in this comment section. It's a fun educational game to learn a few words in other languages. I don't think it's misleading anyone into thinking they will become polyglot by using Duolingo. I wanted to learn a few words of Japanese while waiting for a flight to Tokyo and it did the job.
It's really good. It's still flash cards and best for things where you just have to memorize something (I use it for mandarin characters, for example, for which it's really excellent). But it's great at what it does.
I am definitely not saying that Duolingo is useless or a bad (i.e, net negative) use of someone's time. But even good things are not immune to criticism
I definitely didn't mean to imply otherwise
> But even good things are not immune to criticism
100%
It also allows you to skip through the audio and speech tests, so these shortcuts make you chase XPs rather than actually learn the language you originally set out to learn. My biggest pet peeve about this app is that I have absolutely no idea if I'm pronouncing words correctly. Even if I intentionally pronounce a word wrong, it'll tell me it's correct.
I wouldn't say I learned nothing from it. After all, there is nobody I can speak with, so Duolingo made something impossible, possible for me, but it hasn't made me conversational at all. If I watch a German movie or a TV show, I can understand a little bit by looking at the subtitles, but the audio seems to go way too fast for me that I pick up just 1 or 2 words from a sentence. I'd imagine if someone asks me a basic question really slowly, I might be able to answer it, but if I'm in a group or something, words will just fly by too quickly for me to be able to comprehend anything.
One thing it did is make me motivated. After learning so many words, it made me pursue training courses by professional language teachers, and eventually I will join an actual classroom. I don't think I'd have gone all the way if I hadn't got my first start with this app. After all, my original motivation to learn was just cultural / music, and not because I want to move there or that it'll help professionally, but after having coming this far, it made me think I should pursue learning more seriously and become fluent.
I'd classify English as a European language. It is even classified as a Germanic language.
Tandem was a good way for me to improve my Spanish to the point that I felt comfortable traveling. I dropped Duolingo pretty soon after starting on Tandem. Language learning is much more than memorizing words. Unfortunately, Tandem is also basically a dating site for many people, and scammers are using it as well, and this makes it hard to use consistently for language learning.
Once you get the minimal confidence that you think you could find your way back to the airport or bus station in another country, you really should just go visit. Couchsurfing really helped me meet people in many cities. I don't know if the community is still as strong, but it used to have regular meetups of people within a city who are interested in talking with foreigners. You don't need to stay on people's couches if you don't want to.
A lot of people seem to be learning English through multiplayer online gaming. I do not know if this approach works for learning other languages, as I am not inclined to participate.
I can't stress it enough, though. Any language learning approach that isn't writing or conversation is going to max out at a very low level.
A part of what I was saying, which didn't come across, is that I think Duo lacks a way to get people to move on. Being "free", there is less incentive to give it up when it stops having a benefit. Eventually it becomes a daily accomplishment, like doing the Wordle, that doesn't really improve anyone. That doesn't make it bad, but it hinders progress at learning a language.
they have added some "write your own sentence" exercises in recent months. generally a story you listen to and then you write a summary or answer a question about why or how something happened in your own words. your sentence is then graded/corrected by AI. these are still rare but they do make me think more than the typical forms.
there is also some new more expensive level called Max that claims to have audio conversations with you using AI. I haven't tried that one.
Note: The alphabet lessons are separate from the main content.
That and I realized the continuous click buttons got tiresome.
Then, earlier this year my wife and I decided that we wanted to start spending at least a couple of months every year in Costa Rica starting next year and maybe alternate between there and other Spanish speaking countries in us time zones.
This time, I had ChatGPT and a Trello board I put together of concepts and categories of words I wanted to learn based on the CEFR level A1 list. I would create various drills, ask ChatGPT to explain concepts, etc. I became more focused on production - mostly writing. ChatGPT is a good teacher to get through the list of topics of my known gaps.
I even asked it to summarize the most important current event at an A1 level and ask me questions.
As far as speaking, I used Apple’s voice to text and not the better one built into ChatGPT. It’s pretty good with my English native southern twang so I figured any mistranscription in Spanish was caused by my bad pronunciation. The one built into ChatGPT is better. But that’s actually a bad thing when trying to pronuncie words correctly.
After a few months of ChatGPT, I did recently go vac to DuoLingo. I do the first exercise in a unit, then see if I can skip the rest (which it does let you do). If I don’t know vocabulary or a concept, I go back to ChatGPT for drills.
Being able to listen in Spanish in real time at an A1 level is the next step. I can use ChatGPT for that first and then watching kids tv shows in Spanish
That being said, it's helped me immensely with both polishing my Dutch (I passed my state exams a while back but there are still so many words I don't know), and I'm now learning Japanese.
Yes, Duolingo does not teach you directly all the intricacies of Japanese grammar. That's because it's a dumbed down, spaced repetition app. If you're actually serious about learning a language you'll see that pretty much from the start and like, buy some Japanese textbooks or something to supplement what you learn from the owl app.
I'm currently using Satori Reader and have bought a manga to practice my Japanese reading. My grammar is still woeful, so I'll need some other material to work on that and get a real understanding.
Anyway, I don't really disagree with the author on their criticism per se. But I think the criticism applies to a bunch of language learning methods...
What works for me:
- associate words with their meaning. This means not trying to translate words into their counterpart in a different language. So no flash cards with words on both sides, but with pictures.
- listen to music. This helps me develop a feeling for the language, where I understand the beginning and end of words, and intonations.
- watch simple shows in the foreign language. Kids shows, cooking shows. Stuff where the context is obvious, so once again I am not secretly “translating”.
- going on holidays or booking a conversation with a language coach. Because understanding and production are two different brain areas (wernicke vs broca), so there are languages which I can understand, but not speak.
- Being seen as a new and hip way to do a thing
- Making sure their approach scales to lots of users
- Making the first user experience and onboarding seamless
What they are willing to give up:
- Long positive term user outcomes
- Sustainability and supporting complex user needs
It seems their goal is to extract value from the users by promising them a better/easier to use/cheaper product then hooking them and stringing them along until the users grow frustrated enough. I'd list some examples of this exact business model, but there's too many to count, and I'm sure most people here won't have any trouble coming up with some of their own.
If DL taught me something, it's that it's better to completely ignore any gamifications, streaks, "hours of input", levels and other metrics that language learning services give you. It's easy to get into trap of using them as KPI of your learning process, and not your ability to speak to other people.
Does anyone know any alternative apps that achieve the same goals with less of the fluff?
My assumption, despite plausible claims of moderation issues, is that they removed it so that their expensive AI addon provided more value. But it was the last straw for me.
Having a Spanish-speaking language buddy or actually living in Spain or Mexico is much better than Duolingo for learning Spanish. (xx)
Watching hours of brainrot youtube doomscroll is much worse than something like Duolingo.
The niche for Duolingo is the latter. Obviously it can't compete with the former. You don't need an opinionated blog post to realize that.
(xx) unless perhaps it's spanish youtube.
On that note Pimsleur was/is EXCELLENT for me: 1. Focusing on phrases vs words 2. Talking from Day 1 3. Lesson oriented.
Pimsleur's implicit way of teaching grammar works well for me for the most basic stuff, but as it gets into more nuanced grammar, it gets a bit less helpful for me. It also feels less magical to me once it gets past the first couple hundred words.
"[I]f it’s our content, as in, like, our learning content, there’s so much of that - thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs. That is mostly done by computers, and we probably spot-check it. But if it’s things like the user interface of Duolingo, where we say - like, you know, the button says quit, and we have to translate, that is all done with humans. And we spend a lot of effort on that, but that’s because each one of those is highly valuable.
Yes, the button that says ‘quit’ is more valuable than the learning material, which is only ‘probably’ spot-checked."
This quote is bonkers. How the CEO can say such a thing without any shame is beyond me
In most cases, there are no materials. It's intangibles only. Duolingo, for example
There are exceptions. High quality materials are a goal for Apple
However, you also touch upon an other interesting point, namely that learning a language involves many skills, that even differ from language to language. One app pretending to learn it all probably won't work.
I have been making my own language learning app (lingo llama, check out the site :)), and learned the hard way that actually learning a language is not straightforward, and very different for every user. For example, if you want to learn Spanish, and already know Portuguese, you want a different approach then if you come from Japanese. Maybe using tools to learn parts of the language is the way to go.
Anyway, I liked your read, thanks!
I found Babbel to feel much more like an app designed by language instructors.
Please check out Michel Thomas.[1]
You will be speaking sentences and understanding how words connect together in the first 20 minutes.
He is the only reason I speak any Spanish at all, and it’s a borderline miracle I can now speak fluently despite being the absolute worst language learner as a kid.
The BBC made a documentary about him (teaching French) where he goes into a UK school, says “Give me your worst pupils” and then teaches them most of the years long curriculum in a couple of weeks.[2]
He was also in the French resistance a Nazi interrogator in the 2nd world war. [3]
An absolute dude. Would be my #1 historical dinner party guest!
1. https://www.youtube.com/live/XeQODLgjQu8?si=gIcXoh7XwsGIaXhD
My brother talked with his cab driver on Spanish. And is able to understand Spanish at a much better level. All from only using Duolingo for a year. So it seems like, it does work. At least with anecdata
They cannot give you a chart or synopsis to save their lives. They are quite weak on tenses for this reason.
I am convinced that doing some Duolingo while in the bus is a lot better than swiping stupid videos on TikTok.
Will it effortlessly teach you a language? No. There is no such thing, and Duolingo does not pretend there is. But it will regularly expose you to sentences in the language you are trying to learn, which is most definitely better than nothing.
Now if you are motivated enough to spend 1h per day learning, of course there are better ways. But I thought it was obvious that the "I want to sit back and enjoy" attitude won't teach you a language.
†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
Real use of language has many dimensions, changing also ie the ways you think in that language for example.
Nothing beats real use where you have to express yourself and not skip to other languages as a shortcut, no way around this.
I don't necessarily disagree but I do believe it will require some really smart design ideas. I am pessimistic that a big name company will come up with them
There's probably the opportunity to have simple stories and personalities come into play too, early on, to add interest. Think about e.g. the Frog and Toad books for children learning to read.
I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recently was on a date w/ someone who knew about as much English as I know Spanish and only grabbed Google translate about a half dozen times.
It doesn't have much in the way of gamification... to me the fact that it seems very evidently effective is enough motivation to do a daily lesson.
Actual LLM powered free-form conversationalist assistants are better once someone has a solid base understanding, probably at least a 2000 word vocab. What you'd really want is a LLM powered instructor that develops and adjusts a lesson plan based on progress.
That said, my impression is getting to functional in a language quickly requires referencing a source language that is fully understandable by the user to build vocab and comprehension - ie. explaining a new concept in the target language using the target language for a B1 student is going to be inefficient and not expressive enough. Otherwise you're fortifying what you already know vs. actually building more knowledge. Things like comprehensible input are great but seemingly more indirect and less efficient.
If you have an option to get from zero to B2 fairly quickly, you are functional enough in the target language to use a myriad of options to fluency, including doing nothing other than conversing with others.