What are some good alternatives to Duolingo with fewer dark patterns? (And don't suggest traditional methods, I am very much not against them, I am just curious about apps and such.)
Babbel is the least hated of this kind of app among my linguist friends. Pimsleur is highly regarded by phonologists. I get frustrated by almost all of these tools. In particular, I feel like Duolingo is much less useful if you already know another language, and is almost useless as a way to brush up on a language you already know (my boyfriend has been doing Russian Duolingo for three months and his vocabulary is just now finally not a strict subset of mine - when I tried to use it to brush up on French I gave up out of frustration after three weeks of not learning anything except a new insect name).
Forgive the digression, but this reminds me of a general gripe: I wish there were more/better introductions and tutorials and other learning materials geared toward people knowledgeable in another human or computer language, the educational equivalent of P frames in temporal video compression. Rather than feeding you examples piece by piece and making you build up the mental model tediously, brain dump the mental model on you and let you fill in the specifics as you go. Easy Arabic Grammar by Jane Wightwick or Basic Polish by Dana Bielec are decent examples of what I wish were more prevalent.
> Babbel is the least hated of this kind of app among my linguist friends.
As someone who has used Duolingo for multiple languages (German, French, Swedish) for about a decade (2012-2020) I am here to say that Babbel is vastly superior to Duolingo in terms of quality.
Duolingo is just rote memorization of their vocabulary. Despite investing years into "studying" the above languages in Duolingo, I didn't feel I was actually useful in these languages (I studied before relocating to the respective countries).
Babbel on the other hand, is very much like a digital version of the language textbooks you will find everywhere for levels A1/A2/B1/B2. The Babbel lessons involve listening comprehension, speaking (though their voice recognition is... poor), reading, writing, and they make a huge effort to teach you conjugation and grammar rules. There are also no ads or annoying animations.
Babbel does cost money, but it's far less than Duolingo's paid tier, and I personally find Babbel much more effective at actually teaching me the language as opposed to Duolingo having me memorize random vocabulary.
Babbel allows you to set learning goals (though max target is 9 per week) and daily reminders, but they don't have streaks nor do they get up in your face about it.
I will never go back to Duolingo after having used Babbel.
Horace Lunt's Fundamentals of Russian is one I found helpful, particularly for being upfront about the actual pronunciation rules.
There are also many similar gripes among STEM tutorials. Why can't this physics/chemistry/economics book assume I know vector calculus/differential equations?
As an aside, in Duolingo you can click on the checkpoint icon, on the main lesson page, to take a test to advance to the next large group of lessons. If you're not learning anything in a series of lessons, you don't need to grind through them all. Similarly, there is also a sort of placement test each time you start a new language that helps adjust to your preexisting knowledge.
You should never be in a scenario where you're using Duolingo without learning anything new unless it's intentional or you've mastered the entire selection of lessons they offer.
I use Anki. I wouldn't use it in the beginning, but when you're at the point that you can listen to some simple podcasts or videos or read some simple texts, then when you hear/read a sentence with a word or two you're unsure of, you add it to Anki and you get spaced repetition on that. (Don't just add lone words – although the context may feel like cheating, you want that reinforcement of related contexts.) Often I'll look up a word and find some real-world usage example too and add that.
I did use Duolingo a bit when starting out, but I felt like I didn't really remember any of the words introduced there, just learnt how to hit the buttons as fast as I could. (And oh gods those annoying animations). Pimsleur on the other hand is amazing when starting out. Then a combination of podcasts, simple stories and Anki.
I've also heard good things about italki, seems like a marketplace for 1-on-1 language tutoring online.
Piggybacking off your Anki mention, I'd like to continue to spread around something (currently only of interest to people learning Italian or Spanish) that I've been up on lately. A guy came up with a wonderful (and monolingual) deck format for people who are learning Spanish or Italian to use the old-school method of learning Latin where you learn all verb conjugations by rote first and get them (and tenses/moods in general) out of the way. Then you can dedicate your language learning time to acquiring words, sentences and colocations (i.e. interesting stuff) rather than repeatedly and incompletely relearning the verb mess, leading to permanent blind spots.
He also surrounds the verbs in mock clozes, so you get hammered with context. You can also do it without doing anything else; the Romance verb situation can be isolated from the rest of the language completely. At least for Spanish you'll eventually need to know what common subjunctive triggers are, that they'd rather use the present tense (with context) than the future or past more often than you'd think, and other stuff that's an order of magnitude simpler to remember than those damned verbs. If you need to know irregular vosotros conjugations in subjunctive future, you've already got them in your head.
I don’t feel like the dark patterns are really that dark when used by an education platform. All they are trying to do is encourage practice, which is very important to language learning.
I don't feel like Duolingo's gamification is dark, so much as counter-productive. They always give you a 15-minute "double XP" reward when you gain a crown; and there was a time when I got into a rhythm such that I always started my session just about to gain a crown; then I spent 15 minutes almost finishing the next crown, so I could start it again tomorrow.
But of course, when you're doing that, you're pressuring yourself to get through as many lessons as possible, not to engage well with the material. You don't want to stop and read the discussions about a particular translation. And (since I'm studying Chinese), you often have a choice between attempting to speak Chinese, typing Chinese using pinyin, or clicking on the character blocks. The first two are almost certainly better practice; but the last is a lot faster and more predictable.
And of course, now when I'm out of that rhythm, I'm totally not motivated to study, since I'm getting half the points I would otherwise be getting. If I'd been rewarded (not competitively, but just personally) simply for spending time in the platform, I'd probably be spending it more effectively.
I agree. When I started using Duolingo, my intention was to do at least one lesson every day.
I'm rather pissed if the daily reminder comes to late. If I don't want to practice daily anymore, I'll simply switch off notifications or uninstall the app.
It's a paid app, but I enjoyed Speakly's approach of "endless stream of open cloze exercises". It forces you to actually type words in the target language (unlike Duolingo which is mostly translations into the source language), it has a clever spaced repetition algorithm, and it lets you practice for as long as you want and stop immediately at any point, unlike Duolingo locking you into 20 question long lessons.
We made something a couple of weeks ago, you might like it, needs login but is 100% free. Endless (depending on language) listening exercises, sentences are selected (from tatoeba) based on vocabulary (no selection based on grammar yet). It's also integrated with a flashcard system (also free). If you set a small vocab (100 words) and do lots of cards, you start to get a feel for the grammar of a language. Something like 40 languages are supported.
There are a lot of alternatives, but I found myself bouncing back and forth between different resources and spent a lot of time curating content.
I started working on some of my own tooling to help with this. For example, one tool took a list of sentences and translations and ran them through Google TTS to get recording to use in Anki. After working on this tooling for a while, I decided to move away from Anki and just build an app.
Right now, we're working on building out a beginner Thai course focused on reading because educational material in that area is severely lacking. We're also working on a series of graded readers.
Soon we'll be launching quick-study feature that allows you to curate lists of words and phrases that you want to learn. You will be able to select from anything you've already learned, draw from our existing library of 129,000 words and phrases or input new content. Once you've created or lists you can use the quick-study that will create a custom lesson for you based on how familiar with the content you are.
Not launched or even in beta yet, but the site is public. The info is listed in my profile and you can contact me from the site if you'd like to get in touch.
I track my usage separately in a spreadsheet, which avoids the stress of streaks, but still lets me draw motivation from past effort: https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/tracking-goals
I've really enjoyed using Mosalingua! It is focused much more heavily on common phrases and vocabulary, and lets you choose a certain area (such as business, sport, dating) that you want to focus on in another language.
torstenvl|3 years ago
Forgive the digression, but this reminds me of a general gripe: I wish there were more/better introductions and tutorials and other learning materials geared toward people knowledgeable in another human or computer language, the educational equivalent of P frames in temporal video compression. Rather than feeding you examples piece by piece and making you build up the mental model tediously, brain dump the mental model on you and let you fill in the specifics as you go. Easy Arabic Grammar by Jane Wightwick or Basic Polish by Dana Bielec are decent examples of what I wish were more prevalent.
kogepathic|3 years ago
As someone who has used Duolingo for multiple languages (German, French, Swedish) for about a decade (2012-2020) I am here to say that Babbel is vastly superior to Duolingo in terms of quality.
Duolingo is just rote memorization of their vocabulary. Despite investing years into "studying" the above languages in Duolingo, I didn't feel I was actually useful in these languages (I studied before relocating to the respective countries).
Babbel on the other hand, is very much like a digital version of the language textbooks you will find everywhere for levels A1/A2/B1/B2. The Babbel lessons involve listening comprehension, speaking (though their voice recognition is... poor), reading, writing, and they make a huge effort to teach you conjugation and grammar rules. There are also no ads or annoying animations.
Babbel does cost money, but it's far less than Duolingo's paid tier, and I personally find Babbel much more effective at actually teaching me the language as opposed to Duolingo having me memorize random vocabulary.
Babbel allows you to set learning goals (though max target is 9 per week) and daily reminders, but they don't have streaks nor do they get up in your face about it.
I will never go back to Duolingo after having used Babbel.
waqf|3 years ago
There are also many similar gripes among STEM tutorials. Why can't this physics/chemistry/economics book assume I know vector calculus/differential equations?
dymk|3 years ago
somenameforme|3 years ago
You should never be in a scenario where you're using Duolingo without learning anything new unless it's intentional or you've mastered the entire selection of lessons they offer.
unhammer|3 years ago
I did use Duolingo a bit when starting out, but I felt like I didn't really remember any of the words introduced there, just learnt how to hit the buttons as fast as I could. (And oh gods those annoying animations). Pimsleur on the other hand is amazing when starting out. Then a combination of podcasts, simple stories and Anki.
I've also heard good things about italki, seems like a marketplace for 1-on-1 language tutoring online.
pessimizer|3 years ago
He also surrounds the verbs in mock clozes, so you get hammered with context. You can also do it without doing anything else; the Romance verb situation can be isolated from the rest of the language completely. At least for Spanish you'll eventually need to know what common subjunctive triggers are, that they'd rather use the present tense (with context) than the future or past more often than you'd think, and other stuff that's an order of magnitude simpler to remember than those damned verbs. If you need to know irregular vosotros conjugations in subjunctive future, you've already got them in your head.
http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjugat...
gilbertbw|3 years ago
gwd|3 years ago
But of course, when you're doing that, you're pressuring yourself to get through as many lessons as possible, not to engage well with the material. You don't want to stop and read the discussions about a particular translation. And (since I'm studying Chinese), you often have a choice between attempting to speak Chinese, typing Chinese using pinyin, or clicking on the character blocks. The first two are almost certainly better practice; but the last is a lot faster and more predictable.
And of course, now when I'm out of that rhythm, I'm totally not motivated to study, since I'm getting half the points I would otherwise be getting. If I'd been rewarded (not competitively, but just personally) simply for spending time in the platform, I'd probably be spending it more effectively.
lytefm|3 years ago
I'm rather pissed if the daily reminder comes to late. If I don't want to practice daily anymore, I'll simply switch off notifications or uninstall the app.
sanqui|3 years ago
davidzweig|3 years ago
https://dev.languagereactor.com/phrasepump (this is the dev site, will go to prod in a couple of weeks)
NoInkling|3 years ago
emursebrian|3 years ago
I started working on some of my own tooling to help with this. For example, one tool took a list of sentences and translations and ran them through Google TTS to get recording to use in Anki. After working on this tooling for a while, I decided to move away from Anki and just build an app.
Right now, we're working on building out a beginner Thai course focused on reading because educational material in that area is severely lacking. We're also working on a series of graded readers.
Soon we'll be launching quick-study feature that allows you to curate lists of words and phrases that you want to learn. You will be able to select from anything you've already learned, draw from our existing library of 129,000 words and phrases or input new content. Once you've created or lists you can use the quick-study that will create a custom lesson for you based on how familiar with the content you are.
Not launched or even in beta yet, but the site is public. The info is listed in my profile and you can contact me from the site if you'd like to get in touch.
Faaak|3 years ago
LennyWhiteJr|3 years ago
bckygldstn|3 years ago
oliwary|3 years ago
bondant|3 years ago
k8sToGo|3 years ago
Tijdreiziger|3 years ago
hutattedonmyarm|3 years ago