

Duolingo: First Impressions - amichail
http://classical-bookworm.blogspot.com/2012/01/duolingo-first-impressions.html

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blahedo
I've been on Duolingo for about a month now, and they must be getting a bit
sick of me because I submit a _lot_ of beta feedback---but they're very
responsive and usually pretty good about fixing things, sometimes by the next
day, including when I type a translation that was correct but marked wrong by
the program.

I agree with the OP that it's overall a great site, although there are a few
lingering things that they seem unable to fix, mostly minor; for instance, the
"practice" is too irritating to keep up with because its randomness is broken
and literally every batch of twenty includes at least six to eight occurrences
of the sentence "Sie liest die Zeitung" and/or "Der Mann liest die Zeitung".
Argh.

But the larger, systemic problem with it is that I don't think it works as
advertised for raw newbies to the language. It's _perfect_ for those of us who
dimly remember the "rules" of a language and just need a lot of structured
practice to get up to speed. But by presenting nothing but example text to
translate, they're basically asking the newbie to induce a complete grammar of
the language without any guidance, and while children learn their first
language(s) that way, adults don't.

(Example: in German, the ending that attaches to an adjective can be one of
six or seven things depending on the case of the phrase, the gender and number
of the noun it attaches to, and the definiteness of the article that commands
the phrase. _None_ of this is explained within Duolingo; it just throws a
bunch of example sentences at you, never talking about gender, number, case,
or definiteness (two of which are concepts that aren't even relevant to
English grammar). That's... tricky.)

On the crowdsourcing translation front, it has an incredible strength, which
is that native English speakers will be _great_ at evaluating whether a
sentence is fluent, valid English. But it has an incredible weakness, which is
that native English speakers who are just learning German are much less good
at evaluating whether a sentence is a valid translation _of what the German
sentence says_. I've seen quite a few situations where a particular
translation has been heavily upvoted despite missing some crucial part of the
source sentence's meaning (and in a few cases, meaning exactly the opposite).

But it's a work in progress, of course. It seems to have a lot of promise, so
perhaps they can surmount these difficulties.

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freehunter
Another one of those "why didn't I think of that" ideas. I haven't tried this,
but it seems like it would be better than the traditional
Anki/Pimsleur/Memrise style in that it would teach (or reinforce or mandate)
context. Anyone can memorize a list of words, but the difficulty comes in
putting those words into context. Duolingo might help that (or might allow
beginners to completely destroy the translation, I don't know their
algorithm).

~~~
davidpoarch
I actually thought of a similar idea before, while I was meditating in rural
Philippines attempting to figure out a viable business idea and trying to
avoid a return to the rat race in the US. Unfortunately, the idea seemed too
daunting to take on by myself.

I don't know if Duolingo already has plans to incorporate it, but I had also
originally thought that 'word completion' functionality would assist in the
process of learning a new language. For example, a beginner trying to learn
the Tagalog language (but knows a few simple words) could begin by typing the
word 'Gusto', and then typing a space after the word would produce a drop-down
with possible words that could follow, such as 'ko', 'niya', 'nila', 'mo',
etc. In essence, it would be 'Intellisense' functionality that provides
grammatically correct word-completion to help students learn sentence
structure -- which is a major part of learning a foreign language, as opposed
to just translating / memorizing fragments (e.g. words). I was even to the
point where I was considering how an AI approach using an inference engine /
chaining might make this process more efficient.

Anyway, I e-mailed Luis von Ahn about it, but he was probably too busy to read
or react to my e-mail. I am just happy to see someone else was able to make
the idea a reality -- another testament that brilliant ideas are virtually
worthless without brilliant execution.

~~~
freehunter
That style of IntelliSense would be fantastic for languages that change the
ending based on context (aka declination). I know I had troubles learning
Finnish because of this, and even the easy Esperanto was tricky at first.

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maratd
I think describing it as flawless is a bit much. It is a great improvement
over the status quo. It allows you to put what you've learned to immediate
practical use. It is a brilliant example of a satisfying non-monetary trade.
It takes a desire for knowledge, provides that knowledge, and allows the
recipient to "pay back" the favor by using that knowledge to assist Duolingo.
It makes learning fun and enjoyable.

That said, there are glitches. It can be very inflexible at times. There's
more than one way to skin a gato, and Duolingo can be very forceful on it's
interpretation. I'm also not sure how useful it can be when it comes to
learning a new language from scratch. I already had a few years of Spanish
before I started, so it was a lot of fun brushing up. However, learning a new
language without a human being there to help you and talk you through it can
be rough. Duolingo tries to compensate through a forum/qa solution, but
there's nothing like talking to a person in the flesh.

That said, it is miles and miles above stuff like Rosetta Stone, etc.

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adrianp
Here is a TED talk with the creator of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn (he also built
reCAPTCHA):
[http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_c...](http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html)

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micah3344
I've been using Duolingo to learn Spanish from scratch, and it has been _very_
effective. It's also a really well done site in terms of UX.

I'm sure it will get really big once they open it up.

