Ask HN: Does Duolingo Work?

[robertkoss]

I've been using Duolingo for 400+ days to learn French. While the App does a pretty good job of giving me the feeling of actual learning, I don't feel like I've learned much when taking a step back and reflecting on it.

Did anyone learn a language using the App? I am not talking about "speaking" the language because Duolingo is not made for this. I am talking about reading / listening comprehension.

[vimy]

Duolingo’s is designed to keep your streak alive so you use the app every day and are exposed to ads. That’s its main function and Duolingo is very good at it.

If they were serious about helping you learn a language they would use flash cards to memorize vocabulary as a main feature.

It did help me learn some words and concepts but I see it more as entertainment than anything else.

[palata]

> If they were serious about helping you learn a language they would use flash cards to memorize vocabulary as a main feature.

I respectfully disagree. I think that learning a language is not only about learning thousands of words, for different reasons:

- First, Duolingo makes you practice vocabulary, in quite a few different ways. It has some kind of "flashcards" system where it makes you practice weak words or old words.

- There are often one-to-many relationships between words in two languages. For instance, on your flashcard you may learn that "to miss (english) = vermissen (german)", and then that "to miss (english) = versäumen (german)". How do you know the difference (there is one)? You need context. Duolingo helps you learning words in a context, and that is very important.

- By reading/writing full sentences, you can practice grammar. And I find that grammar is a lot more important than many people tend to think. It's similar to context: depending on the grammar, the word takes a different meaning (is it the subject or the object? etc.)

Duolingo is a good tool. It's very nice to practice many different things. But it's not enough. You need to seriously learn grammar, too. And at some point you need to start reading, and watching movie, and writing, and speaking.

Said differently: I am convinced that it is easier to learn a language with tools like Duolingo than without (i.e. 30 years ago it was harder). But learning a language is still very hard and requires effort and dedication.

[Yawrehto]

Why flashcards and memorizing vocabulary? I'd think more customization settings would be best, so you could learn in a way that works well for you, gaining the skills you need. Personally, I often find myself wishing I could read untranslated Spanish literature, so some sort of way to say "no, for my purposes I just need to know how to read and I don't need to learn about restaurants or shopping" would be best.

Basically, give people a very customizable course (with defaults if you don't want to fiddle around in settings) and lots of side tools, and let them decide how to use it.

[jamager]

Basically, they have an economic incentive to engage but not succeed. Kind of like dating apps.

[082349872349872]

How much of https://www.lemonde.fr can you read unaided?

According to https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ french is one of the easier languages for L1 english speakers; if you've been doing over a year and aren't at least at A2/B1 comprehension it sounds like an edutaining waste of time.

(if you look around Alliance Française or similar might offer an online quiz that'll give you a rough idea of where you are on the A1/A2/B1/B2/C1/C2 scale; less formally just look for francophone content online and seek out something just above your current level. C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron.)

[palata]

There is no secret: learning a language is hard. It takes time and effort.

If the question is "by doing one Duolingo exercise every day for 600 days, can I get fluent?", the answer is "definitely no". But it's better than doing nothing for 600 days. And it's pretty damn convenient: you can do it while waiting for the bus or whenever you have a few minutes to kill (instead of swiping TikTok).

But if you want to actually learn the language, it's not enough. You can keep using Duolingo, you just need to do a lot of other stuff on the side.

[BWStearns]

I've used it for French and German (and some maintenance practice in Russian). For German it was really the only thing I used and it got me to high A1/low A2. I was able to have decently complex conversations while traveling where German was our only shared language, so it can work to a point.

I think you realistically need to supplement it with other input/practice but I've found it really good for two things:

1) Just doing _something_ every day. Unless you go to DLI or Middlebury, you're just not going to learn a language in a month even if you do nothing but study it. If you're not living in your target language then it's easy to just not use it at all. Duo at least makes you light up the neurons for your target language every day.

2) For French I've found it's good at covering random blank spots that I didn't realize I had. My wife is french so I mostly learn from conversing with her and I'm at like B2/C1(on a good day). But she's not going to correct me every time I misuse a tense or preposition. So _most_ days on Duo I mostly get everything correct and learn like 1 or 2 new words, but sometimes it covers some grammatical nuance that I wouldn't have thought to go improve.

[cdaringe]

I don’t have deep insight to whether it works or not. But I can say is it gave me the ability to state and understand some basic sentences in an obscure language that I’m interested in.

I can’t talk about Duolingo without emphasizing how annoying their attention getting strategy is. The push notifications, the email and the sentiment contained in both of them are very offputting to me. I get that they try and promote an addictive draw that encourages practice, but they do it in a way that just makes me mad. when I get the notifications it makes me want to stop using it. Further, there’s not like a fast mode. You have to suffer through cute little animations and pop-ups and downright malarkey rather than just charging through.

[devKnight]

I would recommend the Assimil language courses, very good if you consistently do it every day, they're also not too expensive. Like 75 bucks last i checked, and that'll keep you busy for 90+ days.

Assimil says it can get you to a b1/b2-ish level, which i think is about where it takes you. I did their German course a long time ago, and was able to read paragraphs and understand them just fine by the end of it(didn't keep up with German, so that skill has atrophied.

After finishing Assimil, i would watch a tv show you've already watched but now in french. Ie: go to Netflix or Prime(which in my experience have the most language options) and watch Friends, 24, The Blacklist, Seinfeld etc etc whatever you can think of, in French, it'll help a lot, and make acquiring vocab easier. Native language content can sometimes be a bit harder to grasp because of cultural events/history you may not be familiar with yet.

But French language content I have enjoyed in the past are the podcasts "Podcast Marketing Digital"(also a youtube channel), deux mille ans d'histoire(history podcast)

[hiAndrewQuinn]

It always depends on what level you mean. From my experience, it excels at getting you from zero to A1 fluency in whatever categories you care about (reading - writing - listening - speaking); everything above that requires a more varied training regimen.

My own story: Around 2021-02 I decided to start learning Finnish, because there was this really cute girl who lived there. (She's now my wife, and pregnant with our first child, so mission accomplished!) I kept my approach as simple as possible: Get Duolingo Plus, and just run through it every day before and after work until I could do every level with my eyes closed.

When I moved in 2021-08, the week after the COVID-19 borders reopened, I was almost entirely useless in Finnish. But not entirely! And nowadays I'm only mostly useless in Finnish. So it was a success in that regard. Some folks here also know me as the guy behind various open-source Finnish language learning software tools, which is also cool.

I still think the KISS approach was the right one for the earliest stages for me - language learning was and is consistently my most hated subject, so I understood that I would have to use every trick in the book if I wanted to stick with it.

[koevet]

It didn't work for me. I spent ~2 years trying to learn German and all I managed to retain are a bunch of nouns, verbs and adjectives. I am still unable to speak properly, let alone read a newspaper article. I suspect that the Duolingo "teaching style" does not work for me. It also depends on the objectives, since I was more interested in some kind of fluency as opposed to being able to read or write in German.

[Quinzel]

I found that Duolingo helped me to learn some German, I haven’t been practicing as much lately, but when I hear German, I can understand more than I can speak, and I find it fun to read in German. I bought a book that was in German and started reading it, my brain reads German the same way I remember learning how to read English; by seeing certain words in certain orders and then being able to fill in blanks. I actually found buying a German book helped a lot with learning because you get familiar with the patterns of the language and then you don’t have to try to translate the language into your mother tongue, you can just know what it’s meaning by inferring the meanings by the structure, pattern, frequency of words etc… The hardest part of learning German for me has been getting the nouns - and knowing why some nouns are feminine or masculine.

[willmeyers]

It works as a supplementary resource.

I think this article[1] explains how to use Duolingo effectively. Anyone who believes they can learn a language only spending 5min a day on the app will get frustrated and fail.

1: https://runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html

[ch3nyang]

Learning a language requires persistence. I think the main purpose of Duolingo is to maintain interest and motivate myself to read other materials.

When I am not very interested in the language, I will just check in on Duolingo every day. But if I regain my interest after a period of time, I will concentrate on studying other learning materials.

[meiraleal]

Motivated people learn languages. Probably the % of people using duolingo that learns it well and not are the same or similar to the people not using it. but the ones that are serious about learning can get some good help from Duolingo and other apps.

[paeselhz]

I've been using Duolingo to learn French for 1300+ days, and one of my ways to measure real improvement is by comparing how well I would do on the TEF ( Test d'Evaluation de Français). During the first two years, I noticed a clear improvement, mostly because of vocabulary, but Duolingo's interface and the way the classes are built made it harder for me to fully understand some of the subtlety of the language, so I feel like I'm stuck forever at a B1 level, even though I keep progressing on the "Duolingo Score".

I believe it is a great tool, especially if you want to skip the beginner's lessons, however, it seems to me to have diminishing returns with time.

[mettamage]

So my wife is American and she’s learning Dutch. She seems to be learning about 50 hours of Dutch per year on the app and on top of that 20 hours of conversation with me.

I think she has learned about 1500 words and she’s picking up some of the grammar.

Right now we bought her an actual book to learn formally and it seems that this is the right time to step in.

So from my perspective: duolingo works to start of chill and then start in earnest 1.5 years later without feeling overwhelmed, as long there is a native speaker willing to tease you and ask if you want coffee

[jamager]

Everything works. The question is how well it works compared to what (opportunity cost).

Soon you will start to find "Duolingo wrapped" posts on Twitter, and you will see that top 1% of active users spend ~5 mins / day avg. and learn a few hundred words.

Considering that to reach fluency you need around 8k words and 700-1000 hours of study + practice (depending on language, and assuming good mindset, methods, teachers and resources), I'd say that Duolingo does not work at all.

Duolingo is not for people that wants to learn a language, it is for people that wants to want to learn a language.

[palata]

> Duolingo is not for people that wants to learn a language, it is for people that wants to want to learn a language.

I disagree. I would rather say that Duolingo is not a silver bullet for lazy people who want to easily learn a language. However, it's a great tool. Like any tool, you may or may not like it, but that doesn't make it useless for everybody else.

Learning a language is just hard. The more you practice, the better. Find tools that you like, and put effort into it.

[jamager]

PS: the 700-1000 hours figure comes from https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...

Everyone quotes the FSI estimate, but I find this one much more generalizable.

[nachox999]

Yes, it works. I recommend you to start reading children books in french, newspapers, wikipedia, and then some short novels or youtube videos with subtitles to keep progressing. Duolingo is great to start

[massung]

I've used Duolingo for a while. It's fine for helping to build random vocabulary, but absolutely nothing beats speaking and listening to a native and actually having conversations about lots of random topics.

There are so many things apps like Duolingo expose you to, but don't explain, and don't provide enough context to learn on your own. A simple example of this would be how in English we ask "why", but in Russian there's both "почему" and "зачем". Both mean "why", but using one instead of the other will result in very different answers. Duolingo will expose you to both words, but will never teach you why you'd use one over the other.

If you're serious about wanting to get good at speaking a foreign language, then I'd recommend finding a way to talk to a native speaker in an environment where you're either both in a "learning" mode or it's difficult to fall back to your native language. There's also something to the idea of "shared trauma" while you're both learning. Suggestions:

* Volunteering at a local immigration center. I did this in college and it was easily one of the best experiences of my life. I helped those who couldn't speak English go shopping, fill out forms, etc. I wasn't fluent in their language, but was helping them learn English while also learning.

* Use an app like Tandem or HelloTalk to find native speakers in another country who are trying to learn your native language. If you find someone with a passion for learning who is at the same "level" of learning that you are, it's a great experience.

* Audit university classes.

It'll feel painful and slow at first, but once you can get past the hump of being scared to speak (note: everyone goes through this stage), things will just start clicking. Also, there's a magical point where your vocabulary will just start skyrocketing. You'll be able to just infer meanings from context and recognize common roots, etc. It's a great feeling when it happens.

One other suggestion: use streaming services to watch children's shows in the foreign language. And turn on the subtitles in the foreign language as well, which will allow you to read and listen at the same time. Apps like "LingQ" also do this with children's books. If you already know the story and understand the context of what's going on, that's even better.

[jotjotzzz]

I guess it works for remembering and retaining words. But Duolingo will not get you there if you expect to converse with someone! Language acquisition requires more than just rote memorization; it's also training your ears for actual native persons speaking the language and talking with them!

[dockien]

a limited amount, eg when i walked by the news stand i could try to read the headlines on the newspapers, or read the menu at a restuarant, that was about it. some languages are very hard to hear. but it's fun to use, that's the big difference. i have used other apps and they're tedious and boring. an app doesn't work at all if you don't use it

[muzani]

After half a year on Arabic, I barely remember the sentence structures. The basic was too basic and it doesn't do a good job of teaching words you'd actually use. There's the argument that you won't forget anything with space repetition but I've forgotten a good chunk of it.