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Comment by kej | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Duolingo criticisms to me read like someone saying "I was walking on a home treadmill for 30 minutes every day but I didn't really get in shape until I started spending 5 hours each week in the gym with a professional trainer."

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.

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>But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa,

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.

Do you have any suggestions for supplements to the Japanese course on Duolingo? I feel like I'm almost ready to make the leap after having built up a good streak and slowly realizing that some of the Duolingo sentences apparently sound unnatural. For example, on review lessons, Duolingo quizzes the sentence "My name is" by using "iimasu"[0]. This older video[1] that is part of a playlist that tracks the Duolingo course claims that it incorrectly teaches you. It's not really explained why it's wrong though.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A8%80%E3%81%86 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FNrpMQZzJ0&t=457s

>Do you have any suggestions for supplements to the Japanese course on Duolingo?

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.

Now you are making me feel bad about walking on the treadmill for 30 minutes.

Jk, I agree with you but that doesn't mean there are no meaningful criticisms of the treadmill

Agreed; I think there are plenty of valid criticisms of Duolingo but that hey are more productive if we start with an honest appraisal of which things are realistic alternatives. (And good work on the treadmill, keep it up!)

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