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The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language. But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.

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It's worse than anki because there is no SSR built in ( at least when i was doing it ).

>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.

In 5 minutes you could probably do 5 new words a day and 30-40 repetitions.

So 1500 words a year, which is useful, if you're not a complete beginner

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