As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult.
The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.
After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like
sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti
sarvē janāḥ gacchanti
sarvē janāḥ namanti
and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.
To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.
[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)
I built a tool[0] that gives you constant input at your level as you browse the web, so you don't need to take time out of your day. You can just learn a little as you browse, and let it compound over time.
It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.
Duolinguo tries to follow the input hypothesis. For instance, it barely teaches any grammar but simply asks its users to translate sentences. Unfortunately that's very ineffective. Compared to reading or watching live conversations, the amount of input in unit time on Duolingo is too little. In the meantime the sentences lack sufficient context for Duolingo users to build up intuitive understanding of phrases. Take Duolingo Japanese for English speakers, for instance, it's really hard to learn the meaning and usage of Hiragana words in those short sentences.
That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day, just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine. It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or reading some readers.
> I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.
I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation exercises in a foreign language learning course such as Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.
From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.
However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.
I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words" and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to understand what is really going on and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.
I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process: it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency, by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least, by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her running "learning streak".
Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign language learning course. Effortless, magical learning processes simply do not exist.
My own experience mirrors yours. My first thought in seeing this was “…why?” Duolingo is a gamified app that feels like learning a language but actually teaches you next to nothing while driving engagement. I get why they got stuck on that path, but why copy it?
I learned Sanskrit by translating the Bhagavad Gita (https://gita.pub), and I experienced a similar jump in comprehension to what you described. At first I needed to look up every word, even the ones I'd seen many times, but eventually (after many many repetitions) I finally started having an intuitive idea of what the words and sounds meant.
It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.
i don't know why people are taking Duolinguo and relatives as the definitive course to learn a language... they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency'
some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
Ah, is Lingva Latina the one with Caecilius and his family? I had a Latin class in 7th grade and remember having a book of that same name, and I somehow remember the main father character's name. They had a dog too, I want to say his name was Cerberus, haha. "Cave canem"—"beware of dog"
Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete, discipuli!"
to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"
The fact that all these years later I still remember some things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.
In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other languages), which is a similar "get actual language input rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method, and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!
Orbeg's Lingva Latina is so good, especially if you use the supplemental exercises and stories as well. It's a shame it didn't catch on as much, the material for modern languages is now outdated and it seems no one is working on newer editions. Deutsch Nach der Naturmethode, Français par la Méthode Nature and English by the Nature Method are excelent at teaching the basics, but I hear criticism over the vocabulary often.
I’m very interested in Sanskrit, and working on an application to learn it (and many other languages).
If you have any interest in app based review (not courses - I specifically try to work with input) I would love to get feedback on the Sanskrit experience.
I posted a bunch of comments about it in the past few days, I don’t want to take over another apps thread, but there are so many cool languages being learned here
learning spanish currently and I disagree on the grammer part. I never made any progress with spanish until I found a program that started with drilling all the grammer rules. after that my learning took off
Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in. Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good offers.
That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?
Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.
Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach?
I tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which of these is The Sun?".
Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".
I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.
First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.
With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started German with it before doing more traditional classes and live speaking with a partner
Annoyances (in particular, ads disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth paying for as a quick daily refresher.
From my experience, Duolingo teaches you the vocabulary and the set sentences very well. But this is by far not enough. I use regular textbooks that describe the structure of the language, the grammar, the syntax, etc, so as to gain some analytical understanding of it. On top of that, Duolingo helps to get used to recognize these structures and flesh them out with various words. Also, unlike a book, it forces you to listen, and, crucially, to speak. It's a very important step from being able to read written language only to being able to actually talk.
Words without structure are generally comprehensible, especially if you are in an interactive situation where you can generally catch cases where there is a coherent but wrong meaning. (No, you do not want the microwave, you want what's in the microwave!)
I think Duolingo does an okay job of teaching structure, but it probably comes around the 2nd year or so (I've been using it about 3 years, but I did have a few years in high school of Spanish a long time ago)
The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary
Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are rather aligned.
However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.
Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.
No, the best way to learn a language is comprehensible input. Every other language acquisition method is bootstrapping that eventually needs to segue into actually using your target language to read or listen to things, unaided.
What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.
If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.
The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.
If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.
People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.
The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.
And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.
And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...
There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".
I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.
Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.
On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.
Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.
(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
been using Duolingo in the 10s and last year, I gave up because the course seems very repetitive. Even if I got the answer right 10 out of 10 times, the same question kept coming. It almost looks like the app is trying very hard to make me stay as long as possible, instead of study as effecient as possible.
So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?
So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?
Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.
Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.
Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.
The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.
Yes! Language transfer is amazing imo. I found it here on hacker news and it's probably the most effective tool I have found for learning languages.
For Spanish, over the years, I have taken formal immersive classes, finished the Duolingo tree and the reverse tree, spent time in Spanish speaking countries etc. My level of Spanish was good but clunky and I made a lot of mistakes. After finishing about half of the course, I found I was making far fewer mistakes.
I love the etymology background he gives, I love linguistics so it keeps me interested, maybe not for everyone.
I completed the Paul noble learn Italian course, so that I could compare to language transfer. In my opinion language transfer was much better, I found Paul noble's a bit slow and less engaging, for me personally.
I learned French, German, Sesotho, Japanese, with a mixture of classroom teaching and full immersion. I decided to learn Spanish with Language Transfer. It is by far the best system I have ever used (short of immersion; the absolute best way to learn Japanese was to fall in love with a Japanese woman in Japan).
I have been supporting it with monthly donations for about 4 years now, because I believe it is such an important tool.
up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I wish there would have been more content though
I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.
I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
The app could use some spinners, when actions lead to a delay. I clicked on the landing page on the only available purple action button and nothing seemed to happen. I already checked my uBlock Origin, whether it is blocking something, but it does not. Already wanted to reload the page, when finally something visually changed, and the course was loaded. Simply a little spinner/animation would make this way less confusing.
I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.
One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".
I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.
Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);
- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.
- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;
- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.
- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.
Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.
It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.
Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.
Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
It's a bad idea to imitate Duolingo, which has become VC without a purpose.
The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.
Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.
I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.
Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.
The problem is that Duolingo optimises for time spent on the app, not for progress in the language. The majority of experienced language learners do not recommend it.
[+] [-] sieve|10 months ago|reply
The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.
After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like
sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti
sarvē janāḥ gacchanti
sarvē janāḥ namanti
and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.
To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.
[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)
[+] [-] Alex-Programs|10 months ago|reply
It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.
[0] https://nuenki.app
[+] [-] hintymad|10 months ago|reply
That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day, just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine. It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or reading some readers.
[+] [-] gary17the|10 months ago|reply
I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation exercises in a foreign language learning course such as Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.
From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.
However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.
I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words" and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to understand what is really going on and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.
I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process: it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency, by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least, by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her running "learning streak".
Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign language learning course. Effortless, magical learning processes simply do not exist.
[+] [-] adastra22|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] primitivesuave|10 months ago|reply
It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.
[+] [-] luqtas|10 months ago|reply
some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
[0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/
edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive joke) if you are using something like uBlock!
[+] [-] syndeo|10 months ago|reply
Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete, discipuli!" to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"
The fact that all these years later I still remember some things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.
In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other languages), which is a similar "get actual language input rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method, and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!
[+] [-] mvieira38|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] barrell|10 months ago|reply
If you have any interest in app based review (not courses - I specifically try to work with input) I would love to get feedback on the Sanskrit experience.
I posted a bunch of comments about it in the past few days, I don’t want to take over another apps thread, but there are so many cool languages being learned here
[+] [-] DontchaKnowit|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pergadad|10 months ago|reply
That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?
Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.
[+] [-] TheJoeMan|10 months ago|reply
Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".
[+] [-] 1oooqooq|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] salimmadjd|10 months ago|reply
Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).
If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.
[+] [-] daniel_iversen|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] darkstar_16|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _fat_santa|10 months ago|reply
First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.
With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
[+] [-] thenoblesunfish|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LorenPechtel|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] leke|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anothereng|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zdc1|10 months ago|reply
However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.
Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.
[+] [-] HPsquared|10 months ago|reply
The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.
Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.
[+] [-] kmeisthax|10 months ago|reply
What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.
If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.
[+] [-] tempest_|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wisty|10 months ago|reply
The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.
If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.
People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.
The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.
And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.
And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...
[+] [-] Tor3|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arghwhat|10 months ago|reply
Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.
On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.
Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.
(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
[+] [-] joaohaas|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] est|10 months ago|reply
So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?
[+] [-] ReflectedImage|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperific|10 months ago|reply
https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...
[+] [-] simonbarker87|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|10 months ago|reply
Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.
Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.
Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.
The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
[+] [-] detectivestory|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jcul|10 months ago|reply
For Spanish, over the years, I have taken formal immersive classes, finished the Duolingo tree and the reverse tree, spent time in Spanish speaking countries etc. My level of Spanish was good but clunky and I made a lot of mistakes. After finishing about half of the course, I found I was making far fewer mistakes.
I love the etymology background he gives, I love linguistics so it keeps me interested, maybe not for everyone.
I completed the Paul noble learn Italian course, so that I could compare to language transfer. In my opinion language transfer was much better, I found Paul noble's a bit slow and less engaging, for me personally.
[+] [-] gramie|10 months ago|reply
I have been supporting it with monthly donations for about 4 years now, because I believe it is such an important tool.
[+] [-] WinstonSmith84|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bornfreddy|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mentalgear|10 months ago|reply
I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
But overall, great work !
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|10 months ago|reply
I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.
One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".
[+] [-] jmyeet|10 months ago|reply
Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);
- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.
- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;
- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.
- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.
Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
[+] [-] GardenLetter27|10 months ago|reply
It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.
Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.
Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
[+] [-] pessimizer|10 months ago|reply
The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.
Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.
I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.
Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.
[+] [-] sschueller|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] neofight78|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
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