[thedanbob]

> "A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.

I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.

[stronglikedan]

At least with Duolingo's Spanish course, the differences in grammar are among the first things they teach. Weird that it would be different with German.

[thedanbob]

It's been almost 10 years so maybe they do it differently now. I just remember they made a big deal about the gendered nouns but nothing about the fact that sentences weren't even close to correctly structured. And too be fair, maybe that was coming later and they didn't want to overwhelm people, but a quick explanation would have been nice.

[kot_manul]

I experienced the same thing with both German and Dutch while trying to learn them via Duolingo over a period of 6 months or so. After all the drilling and gamified lessons I never even started to feel like I was actually _learning_ these languages. With German I figured was just me being stupid or not grokking it properly; it's different enough from English to "feel" very foreign. But Dutch isn't that different.

I remember only two sentences from the Dutch Duolingo, maybe because they were constantly repeated:

"Ik ben een appel." (I am an apple.)

and: "Nee, je bent geen appel!" (No, you are not an apple!)

For comparison, I did self-study with Japanese in my teens and learned enough to ace the first 1.5 years of college Japanese instruction without much effort. And I remember taking Spanish classes in high school and to this day can at least fumble my way through a basic conversation.

In contrast the only use I would have for what I learned of Dutch via Duolingo would be if I came across someone having a psychotic break. You're _not_ an apple, dude.

Granted, I spent more time with both Spanish and Japanese than with any language I tried with Duolingo, but my point is simply that Duolingo just doesn't make languages "click", at least not for me and apparently not for a bunch of others either.

[ponector]

What is your approach to learn German?

[thedanbob]

I haven't tried since that one attempt. I've picked up a few words from learning German songs as part of my voice training, but otherwise it's not useful enough to me to take the time and effort.