
Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material - ingve
https://www.fastcompany.com/40555712/duolingo-suddenly-has-over-twice-as-much-language-learning-material
======
firefoxd
I did Duolingo seriously for more than 370 days in a row.

Spanish: I speak french and English so Spanish is relatively easy to complete.
After completing the course, I tried having conversations with people (with
friends but mostly uber drivers) and I was surprised how many times i learned
it all wrong. I had to read a lot or children book to remedy that.

French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta course just to see.
It was very awkward. The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of
them even wrong.

Japanese: This is very different from the languages I speak. But after
completing the entire suite, I still can't look at a japanese text and read
it. I can't form a sentence on my own because it never teaches you how. I
can't count to ten because it only gives you numbers randomly. I know a few
colors. I know words, but those words make no sense on their own. I also had
to follow youtube lessons to make any sense of what I learned.

Duolingo is cool at making it look fun to learn. I don't think you'll learn to
speak any languages with it.

~~~
crazygringo
Agreed. I speak Portuguese fluently as a second language, and wanted to see
what the Duolingo material was like. First warning sign: I couldn't pass the
test to study intermediate content, because a significant proportion of the
multiple-choice answers were just _wrong_. Then, looking at the beginner
content, a shocking number of answers were wrong as well. It was kind of
funny, since each piece of material had user comments associated, you'd see
70+ comments from people all complaining about wrong answers.

That immediately destroyed any trust with them. When you put out educational
material, it has to be correct. That _has_ to be the foundation.

~~~
gnulinux
I'm a Turkish native speaker and I couldn't pass their intermediate Turkish
material as well.

EDIT: Also it felt like the whole game was written from an "Indo-European"
perspective. For example, in Turkish there is a word "bir" (read [biɾ]) which
literally means "one" which is sometimes used akin to indefinite articles
(a/an). But they're not exactly indefinite articles, and sentence usually
makes sense without them and when you speak fast you omit them. But in
Duolingo they taught as if you should translate "the X" without "bir" and
"a/an X" with "bir". That's not even remotely close to the truth (and made me
get all "article" questions wrong). In Turkish definiteness is mostly denoted
with accusative case. There is no single language construct similar to
"article", you infer it from other kinds of information. For example "dolaba
bira koy" : "put A beer in the fridge" vs "dolaba biraYI koy" : "put THE beer
in the fridge". You add +I accusative suffix to "bira" (beer). This was not
even mentioned in Duolingo. It also makes sense that they don't mention this
sicne this is probably super advanced nuanced speaking, but then be consistent
and don't teach that "bir" distinction to beginners as well.

~~~
romwell
>You add +I accusative suffix to [imply definiteness]

Very interesting! In Russian, the accusative suffix would play exactly the
opposite role. While there's no real way to say _the_ beer without additional
context, you can say:

поставь пиво в холодильник / put the beer in the fridge

поставь пива в холодильник / put SOME beer into the fridge

~~~
amaccuish
пива (as partitive gen.) here sounds really weird to me, like you're pouring
it out of a can into something else, and putting that in the fridge. If it's a
can you can emphasise it with a number e.g. я поставил _одну_ банку пива в
холодильник :)

 _not a native speaker, just living and studying russian in moscow_

~~~
pandaman
The partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what
form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it
sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the
quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.

~~~
amaccuish
So you would say that though? Like I've just never heard my хозяйка квартиры
say that is all. I hear it often in things like "would you like some
tea/beer?" etc or "i'm going to buy some tea/beer" but never like that. My
impression was that outside of those contexts it's not popular. Mind sharing
some examples? Would be really useful! :)

~~~
pandaman
You probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник."
since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be
said. Поставь here is much more concrete than "put", it's more like "place"
and I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge at some
party and noticed it's running out of beer so I requested somebody to add more
beer there. Much more common would be "Принеси/достань/возьми пива из
холодильника" (get some beer from the fridge).

~~~
romwell
>You probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник."
since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be
said. [...] I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge
at some party and noticed it's running out of beer

Yup, pretty much that. Or like that one time when we went binge-shopping on
craft beers, but there was only enough space in the fridge for a couple of
bottles; so that was a normal request about an hour before we were to watch a
movie. Which is pretty much the exact situation you described :)

------
Sir_Cmpwn
The reason Duolingo is ineffective in my opinion is multi-faceted. First, my
main language for study is Japanese, and Duolingo's Japanese course is _awful_
\- these are the specific things I noticed when trying it:

\- There were several factual errors in their material and important points
entirely omitted

\- Japanese grammar is very flexible and their tools aren't, so they often
mark you as wrong when you were correct

\- Their approach to learning Kanji (borrowed Chinese characters) is
completely ineffective

These flaws make me wonder if they even had actual Japanese users working on
developing the tools for learning Japanese. I can't speak to any other
languages, but my experience with Japanese leads me to belive they don't have
expertise in many of the languages they offer, instead trying to cram their
prepackaged square-shaped tools into a variety of circle-shaped holes. All
languages are different and each requires a different approach.

On top of that, however, is that they don't go nearly far enough. In my
opinion there's no magic bullet that can teach you a language. Each student
learns differently and will need to leverage a large variety of tools. Even if
Duolingo's course were good, it would only make up a small facet of an
effective study strategy. Vocabulary drilling with flash cards, focused
grammatical study, reading genuine material in the language, writing novel
material in the target language, and regular conversation practice with native
speakers are all incredibly important and distinct topics of study. Duolingo
tries to mix a diet version of each into an scatterbrained, ineffectual method
of study.

~~~
zawerf
Once you have the basics down, I like anki or memrise better for picking up
vocab. You can do decks based on JLPT levels or do Core 2k/6k. Here's the
memrise course series I am using (6000 words broken up into chunks of 500,
frequency optimized):

[https://www.memrise.com/course/1091685/sgjl-05-core-2k6k-voc...](https://www.memrise.com/course/1091685/sgjl-05-core-2k6k-vocabulary-
optimized-pt-1/) (first of 500 of 6000)

[https://www.memrise.com/course/1125407/sgjl-07-core-2k6k-voc...](https://www.memrise.com/course/1125407/sgjl-07-core-2k6k-vocabulary-
optimized-pt-2/) (next 500 words)

[https://www.memrise.com/course/1125874/sgjl-10-core-2k6k-voc...](https://www.memrise.com/course/1125874/sgjl-10-core-2k6k-vocabulary-
optimized-pt-3/)

[https://www.memrise.com/course/1125879/sgjl-12-core-2k6k-voc...](https://www.memrise.com/course/1125879/sgjl-12-core-2k6k-vocabulary-
optimized-pt-4/)

The "SGJL" series also does grammar but it was easier to just reread tae kim
every so often: [https://community.memrise.com/t/course-forum-suggested-
guide...](https://community.memrise.com/t/course-forum-suggested-guide-for-
japanese-literacy-sgjl-course-series/1100)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Nice resources. I should probably elaborate on my actual study methods:

\- Vocabulary study with Anki

\- Kanji study (RTK order) with a script that shows vocab on my desktop

\- Grammar study via Tae Kim

\- Listening practice with regular consumption of Japanese music & television

\- Reading/writing practice by engaging in Japanese discussions on Mastodon,
IRC, 2channel

\- Reading practice with Japanese manga and novels

\- Regular meetups with friends (native speakers) IRL

\- Translating anime and manga from Japanese to English

Soon I'd like to start blogging in Japanese, too, but that's a lot of work.
Can also recommend jisho.org as the best Japanese/English dictionary on the
web, and djt's bunpou guide as a deep grammar reference resource.

~~~
jwong_
Can you share how you're showing the vocab on the desktop? That would be a
neat study tool.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/lib/python3/kotd](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/lib/python3/kotd)

Warning: this is a mess

~~~
jwong_
Thanks! What do you use to display this on your desktop?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
This binary puts a porcelain command on the Python library:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/bin/kotd](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/bin/kotd)

This command is run by my status bar, which prints each line sent to stdout on
my desktop:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/bin/custom_statusb...](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/bin/custom_statusbar)

Which is powered by sway:

[http://swaywm.org](http://swaywm.org)

------
WheelsAtLarge
I've used Duolingo for about a year now.

This is what I discovered:

1) It can't be your one learning source. You get the essence of the language
but you'll never become fluent.

2) It's very good at keeping you engaged. It gets an A from me on that.

3) The web app is stricter and will force you to learn better than the Android
app

4)On the Android app you can get thru the challenges without learning a thing.
You can just guess.

5)Your mindset should be to learn as opposed to getting thru the challenges.

6)Grammar is important so make sure you read the text they post on the web
app. The phone app does not have it.

7)Find someone to speak the language with you ASAP. Speaking is the fastest
way to fluency.

8)They've started to monetize the app so ads are a problem now. And ad-free is
expensive.

9) It's many times better than the in-class teaching I got in junior high.
They should replace the 1st few semesters with the app.

------
Itaxpica
The biggest issue I have with Duolingo is that they offer "grammar notes" to
explain why specific elements are the way they are... but only on desktop web.
In-app, which is the main way that I (and I'd imagine most users) use
Duolingo, there are no grammar notes and no way to access the grammar notes -
they just seem to assume that you'll pick it up from context. Personally I've
been studying Russian, a language with extremely complex grammar much of which
has no analogue in English or Spanish (the two other languages I speak), and
were I not supplementing Duolingo with a textbook that actually explains the
grammar, I would be extremely confused.

~~~
stevenjohns
I really can't understand why they don't provide the grammar notes in their
mobile apps. If it's trivial things like table rendering then I'm sure they
can come up with _something_. It's such a crucial part of learning another
language and it's completely ignored.

------
carlosgg
Does anyone have any experience with the Fluent Forever approach? Their
Kickstarter campaign received more than twice the amount requested[0]. Their
book is currently selling for $2 on Amazon[1], and has some glowing reviews.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15498952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15498952)
[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-
Forget-...](https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget-
ebook/dp/B00IBZ405W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523571330&sr=8-1&keywords=fluent+forever%27)

~~~
alangou
It works. And it's written by someone who's (a) learned multiple languages
himself, (b) done the research on human language learning and memory/expertise
to condense an immensely effective method into a book.

He's gathered a vast amount of material for French, Spanish, Japanese,
Chinese, and more on his website, [https://fluent-forever.com](https://fluent-
forever.com). I've used his pronunciation trainers for Spanish and Japanese,
and it's obvious the enormous effort he's put into all of his materials. Wyner
obviously loves his work.

Learning a language has no shortcuts - only different methods with varying
levels of effectiveness, i.e. fluency gained per hour of work put in. I can
say that of all the apps and methods I've tried, from Pimsleur to Rosetta
Stone to Duolingo and Memrise, Fluent Forever is by far the most effective
one.

I used it to learn Spanish for a few weeks - his approach of learning
pronunciation first, then basic vocabulary, seems counterintuitive at first,
but it really, really works. Which I found out to my pleasure when I went to
Spain on vacation with my friends. Even though they'd studied Spanish all
throughout high school, both my pronunciation and my fluency were miles above
theirs. I couldn't employ advanced tenses, but as he explains in the book,
it'd be impossible for me to fluently internalize more advanced grammar before
the simpler forms for any language, anyways.

I've moved on to Japanese for now, since I have a much longer trip there
coming up. This will take much, much longer (it's a Category V language versus
a Category I language), but so far it's been just as effective at teaching me
pronunciation and hiragana/katakana (their phonetic lettering system).

I highly recommend the book - it's practically free at that price. Compare it
to the $300 you'd spend on Rosetta Stone and don't hesitate.

~~~
alangou
And for further knowledge -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508440)
\- this is the comment that got me to look into Fluent Forever in the first
place.

------
Gregordinary
I particularly like the audio courses from Language Transfer. They create
rules that help you transfer words from English into a destination language.

For example, words ending in ation in English, will end in ación in Spanish.
Further, these words are also 'ar' verbs.

Conversation -> Conversación -> Conversar

I've found it quite helpful, especially in conjunction with Duolingo. At some
point, I realized what I learned via Language Transfer was applying more as I
progressed in Duolingo.

[https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-
spanish](https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish)

------
pducks32
I speak Irish pretty well and Duolingo I think is a fantastic tool to get
better and learn some new words that I didn't no. (Neither my dad nor I knew
portán meant crab). The issue is that pronunciation in Irish is kinda varied
but the lady who does it for Duolingo is on some extreme. The majority of
Irish speakers would not pronounce things that way in the slightest and it
would be misleading for someone who learned on the app to actually try and
speak it as I'm not sure I would understand them

~~~
Y_Y
This is a good point. Especially for minority languages like Irish, they can
end up being completely dominated in mass-media by a specific group. Duolingo
and TG4 (main Irish-language tv channel) mostly speak Gaeilge Cúige Connacht
(the western dialect) meaning the northern and southern pronunciation and
style are neglected.

~~~
dorchadas
Which is funny, as the Caighdeán hardly reflects Connemara Irish at all. It's
mostly Munster.

------
wallflower
Doing Duolingo well just makes you better at doing duolingo. In real world,
even in your native language, there are certain situations that can make you
tongue tied. The goal of practicing with teachers from sites like iTalki is to
get you comfortable opening your mouth and spitting out something, anything.
To get past the fear of saying the wrong thing and just saying something.
However, if you want to say the right thing and just spit it out, there is a
way...

For most people learning a second language, one of the fastest ways to learn
can be the most painful way for some of us to learn. Rote memorization. Bor-
ing. Methods like Assimil and Glossika and others use this as their core
method, with some tweaks.

By memorizing grammatically correct phrases, you will know that you are saying
something correctly. I've heard saying that some incorrectly things is
literally like I just wrote - your brain processes based on patterns and when
you say it in the wrong subject-verb order or even phrase cadence, the person
listening gets confused and sometimes irritated.

If you are musically inclined, this can be song lyrics. Or you can hire
someone to translate things that you would like to say from your native
language into your second language.

You must memorize phrases because memorizing single words without the context
of an enclosing sentence can create bad habits that have to be unlearned
later.

Like learning violin, mastering the fundamentals are important before you can
learn to play music. For learning a language, the two most important things
are speaking with the right accent and speaking like a native speaker would in
a given situation (which is usually grammatically correct but smooth).

------
2bitencryption
has anyone had success with any of these language-learning apps, even as
supplemental material to a more traditional education?

I've tried to use Duolingo for Japanese, with very little success on its own.
Paired with my own studying, it was only a bit more helpful, but not more
helpful than flashcards.

Another app, LingoDeer, was better, because it had a curriculum and more
unified lessons, and I could swap between Kanji/Katakana/Hiragana at will to
learn one at a time. (Whereas DuoLingo will bring you to 15% understanding of
Hiragana before dumping you into Katakana).

~~~
lambda
I had taken some Japanese in high school, and French in college, and later
done some Duolingo to try to brush up my French, but then abandoned it.

I recently picked it back up again (couple of months ago), and tried doing
both Japanese and French. I find the French one much more helpful. The
Japanese module is still in beta, and it shows; tapping on one word to look
them up if you don't remember them doesn't work well in Japanese but it works
fine in French.

And yeah, I found the Japanese curriculum pretty lacking, and the kanji really
hard to learn in this format.

I did find an interesting way to practice my hiragana and katakana, though. I
created a slide deck using Tinycards (Duolingo's flash-card app, I found it a
lot easier to set up and use than Anki even if it's less powerful) in which I
would have to write the kana using the handwriting input method for Japanese.
I found that actually trying to write out the characters was way more helpful
for remembering them then just clicking on the right one out of a list.

However, I couldn't figure out a good way to get Duolingo to give me a list of
the kanji I was supposed to have learned by now to use that with kanji, and
figured it would be too much of a pain to go back through all of the lessons,
write all of that down and then create the flash cards manually from that.

I've quit with the Duolingo Japanese lessons by now, I think I want to wait
until they're a little more fully baked, and even then I'll probably need some
other outside resources to study along with.

I think Duolingo in its current form is a good way to stay practiced with a
language and learn some vocabulary and grammar, but only for some of the
languages. However, even for those languages, you will need some other
resources to really develop fluency.

~~~
GuiA
I’ve found WaniKani to be amazing for SRS for kanji. If you are diligent about
it you can go through the jouyou set in 18 months or so.

~~~
lambda
Looks interesting. I think I'd have to be a lot more dedicated to that, and
need some other resource for learning grammar, vocabulary, and testing
complete sentences.

The nice thing about Duolingo for, say, French is that I can kind of
mindlessly do it every day to keep my skills up and improve my vocabulary, and
then do smaller bouts of studying using other methods to improve actual
fluency.

But with Japanese, Duolingo just doesn't work very well, and just learning
kanji with WaniKani would miss all of the rest of the context, so I'd need
something to pair with that for learning the rest of the language. Any
recommendations on good resources for learning the actual spoken language to
go along with WaniKai?

~~~
stordoff
> Any recommendations on good resources for learning the actual spoken
> language to go along with WaniKai?

BunPro is pretty good. It's fairly light on its own lessons, but will point in
the right direction for material on each grammar point (both online and in the
Genki books), and then has a spaced repetition framework for
practice/memorising. It also ties into WaniKani fairly well, so that once
you've learnt a kanji in WaniKani it will stop showing the furigana so you get
kanji practice at the same time.

------
googlemike
I have only used Duolingo for languages I am fluent in. There is a mode
somewhere where you can take a set of exams to see where you place on the
fluency spectrum in any given language they offer. I do this for pure
curiosity to see how far I get up on their "track". I find it to be a super
shallow and lacking system - the words encountered have little to do in the
way of everyday conversation, things you see on TV, the grocery store, or even
most professional settings. I don't have too many examples off the top of my
head, but one that really kept coming up in the French test was "the little
spider is red" \- When does someone need this? Whys is this any mark of
proficiency?

I always leave feeling as though this app/product is a giant waste of time.

~~~
lambda
Hmm. Those all seem like fairly basic words to know; OK, maybe "spider" isn't
as common a word to need, but it is something that comes up in conversation
sometimes. That particular phrase isn't one you're going to have to say very
often, but I'd say it would be pretty hard to say you're fluent in a language
if you don't know those words.

I've been doing Duolingo for French for the past few months, trying to dust
off the couple of semesters of French I took in college and get a bit beyond
that to maybe get to the point where I can get by. Yes, there is a bit skewed
towards things like family relationships, clothes, the house at the beginning;
things that might be important if you're living somewhere but possibly less
important if you're just visiting. But they are always adding new content, and
as the original article points out they just did a revamp to give access to a
lot of newer content they hadn't provided access to before.

I don't know; a language generally has a huge amount of vocabulary, as well as
grammar to learn, and you need to learn it in some order.

The main thing I do find lacking is that it's pretty much all translation or
transcription of simple sentences, or word matching. I do find these helpful
for learning vocabulary and grammar, but they aren't going to lead to fluency.
The article does mention that something that they are working on is longer
listening comprehension exercises, which I think would help out with that a
lot.

------
amaccuish
What really bothers me about Duolingo is its Rosetta Stone approach to
language learning. For adults, learning by osmosis is not a thing for
languages. The creator has said that the reason the grammar notes (as bare
bones as they are) are not available in the apps, is, that he wants, users to
pick up the grammar through the exercises.

I study French, German and Russian at uni, and for doing translations, or even
just writing letters or speaking, this is not good enough. You want to be
comfortable in a language, and that comes with a rock solid grammar
foundation, as 'dull' as it seems.

As many have said, Duolingo should be a tool amongst many. It has actually
been really helpful for drilling through particular problem areas where I get
a case wrong here or there.

What they really need to do is get listening and reading comprehension out
there; working alongside some people who really never understand grammar
explanations, they can often work it out in their head after reading through a
passage with a few examples, it makes it personal to them and they can see the
'point' of the rule.

Also they need to get a better vocab tool, memrise/anki style. Sometimes I
just wanna practice shopping items because I'm on the bus to get 'groceries'
and I wanna make sure im all sured up.

~~~
xtracto
I have found that a combination of Duolingo / Rosetta Stone in combination
with the FSI Courses ( [https://www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-
courses.php](https://www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-courses.php) ) gives a
good combination of Grammar + Speaking material to learn a language.

~~~
amaccuish
The FSI language stuff is great, highly recommend!

------
dbolgheroni
I'm learning Italian with English as the base language. One of the things I
felt with Duolingo (at least the "old" version, didn't try the new version) is
that the exercises make you write mostly in English, not Italian, which is the
main point of why I'm on Duolingo in the first place.

It's rare for an exercise that makes you write in Italian, even when
assembling your own sentences is the basics for those who are learning a new
language. Finishing an entire module doesn't make you entitled to write
anything.

So I inverted things. Instead of the Italian course, I applied to the English
course (which I am already fluent) as an Italian native speaker. This way, I
write mostly in Italian, with almost no exercises to write in English (same
problem with the Italian course).

Learning has been much more effective.

------
nealdt
I'm still puzzled by duolingo - it uses an outdated pedagogy and an
overemphasis on 'fun'. I have only looked briefly at the courses but I find
the structure unconvincing.

Regarding something mentioned in the article: what is the point of learning
'entertaining' phrases like 'they are washing the holy potato'. From a
pedagogical point of view this is a waste of time is no better than the famous
'plume de ma tante' (look that up if you want to know more).

For any language learner, it's important to remember that the most fun you can
have in language learning is experiencing success. That success needs to come
from your language acquisition, not arbitrary games.

Learning a language is great!

~~~
gregn610
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_plume_de_ma_tante_(lingui...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_plume_de_ma_tante_\(linguistics\))

Saved you a click

------
mrcactu5
Duolingo has to be supplemented with reading and / or YouTube materials in the
language of choice. Any language course the examples are necessarily contrived
and never to your exact needs. But we have the internet and can look for (and
hopefully find) something that matches our interests.

If you're looking to do business in Japanese... then you need to be looking at
the NHK news app which has beginner resources. If you're looking to do
scholarship in German or Spanish or cooking in French then you need to search
for vocab resources connected to those tasks.

------
EWBears
It's interesting to see how many people don't find Duolingo or other apps to
be effective learning tools. I spent the last 2 years creating a Thai learning
app (that I think of as a 'digital textbook') specifically to address the
issues that many people here raise. I won't cite the name since I'm not trying
to advertise, just bringing it up as a talking point.

Duolingo does lots of AB testing and found that gamification greatly increased
user engagement, but I think that they took it too far and lost the forest in
the trees.

Everyone learns differently but in my experience you need to hear or read
explanations of the second language in your native tongue and then hear that
construction in the second language to reinforce it, because the key is lots
of comprehensible input.

Can a complex sentence become comprehensible input with just games? Sure, but
if someone can explain how the grammar works in English then you can get to
that same point faster and without the guess work. That's my opinion, at
least, and so far users are seeming to find it effective since reviews have
been largely positive!

I think that serious language students will seek out appropriate apps or
textbooks, and Duolingo will be a fun option for people that want a mixture of
cognitive exercise and entertainment that may also be useful when they're
traveling or interacting in a foreign language.

~~~
kbd
ctrl+f "Thai". Since Duolingo doesn't have a Thai module, would you mind
sharing your app?

~~~
EWBears
Sure the main app is called Pocket Thai Master and it teaches reading and
speaking, with cultural notes and historical facts sprinkled throughout.

I’ve also made a second app that is a subset of the first that only teaches
reading, which I creatively named Pocket Thai Reading.

I’m currently re-writing a lot of the content to create a pared down version
for travelers that teaches basic grammar and vocab through audio and
transcriptions and without learning the Thai script. It takes many hours to
learn the script and it is 100% worthwhile if you’re living in Thailand and
it’s great for pronunciation, but it isn’t a worthwhile use of time for people
that might just be visiting for a week or two.

If you take a look and have any feedback I’d be happy to hear it - I’m
actively working on updates! Next update I’m trying to add some different
exercises to test comprehension since it’s multiple choice quizzes only right
now.

------
losvedir
The biggest problem I had with Duolingo was knowing what to do next. I much
prefer a simple "next lesson" button, which both introduces new material and
reviews stuff you've covered previously. But with Duolingo there's a set of
available lessons you can choose, and you can either work on going down the
list and opening up new lessons, or re-doing ones you've already done and
leveling up those particular ones. Then there's also a "barbell" which you can
press and takes you into some lesson, but I never quite figured out what it
did. But I spent quite a while getting a bunch of "crowns" on the first few
lessons (essentially, doing them over and over) before realizing I should be
doing some forward progress as well.

My wife is a fan of the app and recently paid for premium, but I'm personally
a little happier (at least for my use case of Spanish) with Babbel, which I
pay for. It has a single way forward, so you never have to choose what to work
on next, and that single way will bring back earlier stuff just to refresh
your memory for you. It also has little grammar asides, which I found very
helpful, and which Duolingo lacks.

~~~
tom_mellior
> Then there's also a "barbell" which you can press and takes you into some
> lesson, but I never quite figured out what it did.

It takes you into a lesson that it thinks you should review next. Duolingo is
meant to implement spaced repetition in that it keeps track of all the times
you have seen every word, and it tries to give you lessons that are "due" for
repetition according to its algorithm. In the web interface they show you how
"strong" each word is in their opinion, but I found that their data on when
you last saw a word was buggy.

Anyway, the barbell is useful to keep you up to speed by revisiting stuff once
you have finished all the lessons once.

------
GavinMcG
[Meta]

So far in this thread, there are several comments that _could_ be the grounds
for substantive discussion, but don't bother offering the substance. For
example: _Why_ does jonbarker recommend Anki for going deeper than "complete
beginner"? What does zealsham mean by Duolingo lacking a "structural syllabus"
and why is that problematic?

The conversations can be a very valuable part of HN, but not if most comments
are at the level of "I still find their spaced repetition lacking" with only
the tiniest bit of elaboration. Hopefully I'm not out of place in encouraging
something more substantive.

~~~
skybrian
If you're interested in learning more about something someone said, maybe you
could reply to them with a question?

People often respond well to a bit of encouragement, and replies are more
likely to be seen than a meta-comment.

~~~
GavinMcG
Of course, and to the extent that I want answers to those specific questions
I'm happy to ask.

Asking individual questions, though, doesn't encourage a different mindset in
the way that I hope my meta-comment will.

------
puppet_heart
This thread is living proof why many people are seemingly unable to learn
languages (well): they're more concerned with tools and methodologies instead
of simply putting in the effort and learning the language they want to learn
(emphasis on "want to learn"). Yes, it's (sometimes hard) work to learn a
language and there is no magical fairy dust.

~~~
nemetroid
The top comment is from someone who put 370 days straight into Duolingo and
completed the content for multiple languages. Is that indicative of someone
unwilling to "simply [put] in the effort"?

~~~
puppet_heart
Yes, straight into Duolingo. A tool. A gimmick. And the results were,
according to the commenter, underwhelming. But I can tell you what I mean by
putting in the effort: I had to learn Classical Latin and pass an exam in
order to enrol in University in Germany. For that I took a two-month crash
course.

What did we do in this course? 4 weeks of grammar, interspersed with reading,
analyzing and translating classical texts, then 4 weeks of reading, analyzing
and translating classical texts. 4 hours in class plus 2-4 hours self-study
each day. It worked like a charm. The bottom line: if your aim is to read
classical texts, read classical texts. And the key here was not that I learned
4-8 hours each day, the key was that the learning was not dumbed down,
gamified, artificially made fun. And I have found that this is applicable to
pretty much every other language.

------
mgiannopoulos
It seems the author didn’t bother to really check the app’s forum where users
are heavily complaining (about 1500 comments in the main announcement thread)
about the redesign, which at best was handle badly (people didn’t understand
what was happening) and at worst has removed critical features like spaced
repetition.

------
kwaldman
The new version is very good for Chinese. It is giving me much more complex
sentence structure.

~~~
_betty_
I'm just annoyed it forces you to learn the writing system.

~~~
CrystalLangUser
Right, when I’m learning mathematics I hate how they force you to learn math
notation.

Learning a romanized version of a language is not learning a language. Sounds
in one language don’t map neatly to English sounds, and beginner language
learners who use romanization always have pronunciation issues because their
headspace isn’t in the language, it’s in a romanized variant of that language.

What’s the point of learning Chinese or any other script language if you don’t
learn the script?

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> What’s the point of learning Chinese or any other script language if you
> don’t learn the script?

I once learned Chinese in a very intensive course that focused on the spoken
language and only taught a few hundred characters. It has proven very useful
for my occasional travels in China, being able to interact with hotels etc.,
having nice enjoyable conversations with my drivers when hitchhiking, etc. For
me, my present skills are enough for what I want to get out of the country;
for me, China is just one country among many. The few characters I know are
enough of a bare minimum to find my way around. If I were keen on reading
Chinese literature, then I would definitely go further with characters, but
there is value for many people in having simply a minimum command of the
language.

~~~
xenihn
What was the course?

------
aabajian
Pimsleur audio books all the way. It's spaced-learning/repetition with
conversations.

~~~
visarga
Came here to say the same. Pimsleur is also excellent for pronunciation and I
have this feeling that once I learned something from the course, I never
forget it. It just sticks, even after months or years. It is also most similar
to how babies learn - without grammar, reading and writing, just by dialogue.

~~~
tralarpa
Yes, Pimsleur gives you excellent pronounciation and the sentences really
stick (which is very good, of course!).

But apart from that? It doesn't teach you grammar, so you are repeating and
repeating like a parrot, hoping that one day you will know why they say XY in
one sentence and YX in another sentence. It's true that babies don't learn
formal grammar, but they usually grow up in an environment with full immersion
(several hours per day over several years), surrounded by native adults who
give their best to interprete, repeat and correct (!) their utterances.

In addition, Pimsleur is very slow but it gives you the illusion that you are
learning a lot by keeping you constantly busy. At the end, how many words do
you learn in three levels? 400? That's barely A1! Most annoying, 70% (just a
guess) of the time, you are just listening to the English speaker ("Now repeat
this", "Try to say that",...).

------
slipszenko
I've tried with Duolingo quite a bit, but what I studied never seemed to stay
in my memory. I've had much better luck with Language Transfer -
[https://www.languagetransfer.org](https://www.languagetransfer.org)

Disclaimer: the guy who runs it is a friend, but I met him through the
project.

------
kumarski
Low efficacy ed-tech solutions like this don't work.

Context is king in languages.

I think true solutions have to account for the following in language learning:

Video / Audio

Dual Subtitles

Transliterated Subtitles

Tongue Positioning for Pronounciation

I haven't found a solution that does this....

~~~
mkstowegnv
I would pay good money for a speech to text plus translated text solution -
something like a dual subtitle AR set up. I am probably unusual in that
translation is less of a problem for me than accuracy in hearing. I invariably
wish the other side of the conversation had much better diction/ clear
pronunciation. I often find that I am hearing very different sounds from what
my conversation partner later tells me they were saying. I don't have this
problem with English but I do when the partner is speaking the three languages
I have studied (French, Japanese and Spanish - none of which have particularly
foreign phonemes from English). Any phone apps that do something like this
well?

~~~
tralarpa
> I often find that I am hearing very different sounds from what my
> conversation partner later tells me they were saying.

That's normal. Everybody has the same problem to some degree. Your brain is
mapping what it hears to the sounds and sound sequences that it knows from
your native language. That's usually a good thing because it helps humans to
understand others even in the presence of background noise or speech
impediments.

Less probable but also possible: You have a hearing loss which your brain is
able to compensate for your native language, but not for foreign languages.
Had a friend with that problem. He was not able to discriminate between
similar words starting with different sibilant sounds. He didn't have the
problem in his native language because he knew from context which word would
come.

Have you tried to listen to audio books based on books that you know very well
in your native language?

------
pnathan
Nifty.

I've been able to use Duolingo to bootstrap my way into being able to sort of
read French. It's also decent at drills in German, a language I took in
college.

I really like Duolingo for drills and for getting a sort of 101-level language
map. A lot of the early sentences are absurdly inane, to be honest, but they
are useful in the drill sense.

That said, I took a run at Chinese, a language which I see as something
potentially really useful, and it was a complete non-starter.

------
neeleshs
In my opinion, Duolingo tries to teach language by forcing familiarity. I for
one, just cannot learn a language using that method. I like to learn starting
with fundamentals - alphabet, grammar, words, sentences and so on.

Are there any recommended books/material to learn Spanish that way? Everyone
says spanish is easy to learn, but all apps kinda try to teach you by
repetitive methods with no insights in to the structure of the language.

------
justinhj
I’ve used Duolingo and Memrise for a year learning Mandarin Chinese They both
have pros and cons Memrise has native speakers in videos saying the phrases
you learned Duolingo forces you to learn the characters rather than letting
you get by with pinyin Duolingo is often slightinly wrong or not natural
either in the english or the chinese translating

------
btcindivist
I still find their spaced repetition lacking. I never see some of the words
again after seeing them for the first time.

~~~
rando444
Perhaps that's because they have too many words?

If you look at some of the core languages like German the course has a 'words'
tab and it shows you exactly how strong it thinks you know each word and when
you saw each word last.

It could be different between languages, and who knows how well it works.. but
it's definitely something they seem to be working on and putting thought into.

~~~
btcindivist
Thing is, I do less than 1 lesson per day. Probably 3 lessons per two weeks.
Meaning that I press Practice button about 100 times in that two week period.

After about 40 days, I went back to go through some of the previous lessons,
given their new Crown update, and realized I haven't seen some of the words at
all.

Despite having around 400 words learned so far.

~~~
rando444
Don't forget to take into account that new words are added to each course
regularly. For newer languages and any of the beta languages, the words you
are taught can change very frequently.

------
jonbarker
I think Duolingo is good for getting you past complete beginner but to go
deeper I recommend Anki.

~~~
puppet_heart
1\. If you read enough, (spaced) repetition occurs naturally. No need for a
software.

2\. It's not bad to forget words during the learning process.

3\. Purely personal: SRS reviewing is the ultimate bore, however you design
your cards. And making the cards is even more of a bore. It's the opposite of
fun.

~~~
jonbarker
It's good for 'grinding it out' type learning tasks. Example: I sat for and
passed all three ham radio exams in one shot mainly because of an android ham
radio exam prep app that did SRS. No way I could have done that just by
reading ham radio study guides.

------
bradleyjg
How much does it cost to place an an advertisement masquerading as an article
at fast company?

~~~
njsubedi
Unfortunately Duolingo is only getting bashed here.

------
fapjacks
And there is _still_ no Classical Latin despite years of requests and
overwhelming support and a horde of volunteers and even a few forum posts with
nearly complete but informal Classical Latin courses.

------
seancaptain
Hi folks. I'll be talking to Duolingo next week about your criticisms and
concerns. Feel free to ping me directly with any suggestions to ask them
about. seanjcaptain@gmail.com

------
naveen99
I think google translate is good enough to learn from now. I think duolingo,
rosettastone etc. aren’t going to survive long.

------
seancaptain
This is such a gift, getting to see so many dedicated users' experiences with
the app. Will help my future coverage.

------
zealsham
Duolingo still lacks a structural syllabus

------
qwerty456127
BTW what are some good alternatives to Duolingo? More grammar-focused perhaps,
less fun if necessary.

------
OldFatCactus
Anyone have advice on learning French?

~~~
chillacy
I did the following:

* Start the Duolingo tree

* Start Pimsleur French around checkpoint 2 when I realized I couldn't speak at all

* Start taking classes at Alliance Francaise when I started struggling with the grammar, starting at 103

* Spend at least a week in immersion in a Francophone country to solidify the learning

* Start drilling nouns + gender with Anki when I noticed that native speakers kept correcting my gender usage

~~~
OldFatCactus
thanks!

------
salimmadjd
avid Duolingo user here.

1 - the new update is a massive disaster (I'll explain in a bit). Maybe it's
different for other languages, but for Russian language I vehemently hate the
update. I dislike it so much that I tracked down Duolingo PM person on
LinkedIN and tried to message them directly.

The app updated for me a week ago with one dialogue that I tapped to confirm.
Thinking it's just another incremental update. Suddenly everything changed. I
thought I might figure it out, but nope. The article says, _some of whom wrote
excellent tutorials on the company’s message board_ [0]. It's not a tutorial
as much as people are very confused (glad it wasn't just me) how the new
update works and it's just a LONG thread to help with the confusion. If a
mobile UI/UX designed for a consumer app needs a long thread like this, you
can see it's probably was a poorly executed update.

The UI/UX is not the worse part, the worse part is that now I hate using
Duolingo. Let me explain:

Duolingo has been a great daily motivator for me. The gamification of the app
(up to now) was excellent. That is its biggest benefit. It's a motivator with
a structured progression plan. The Russian lessons are okay, but they're just
the starting point, I often have to go online and google something to
understand the grammatical reasoning. All together, I have now bought 4
Russian books plus a Russian cheatsheet. That's just the Russian version, I
was told the French has some hints and explanations.

Some backgrounds on Duolingo's gamification parameters:

A - You have a daily goal. This could be 1 lesson, 2 or etc. Users set this
goal. I set mine to 1 lesson/day but I often do more. Each day when you
complete a lesson you get some points. You get more points (from a choice of
troves) if you watch an ad.

B - Each lesson is inside a specific language skills. Like "Adjectives 1".
There are 1-8 lessons inside each skills.

C - When you complete all lessons inside a language skill you get more points
and then you can move to the next skill. Each lesson is a series of questions
in form of translation from English to Russian. Russian to English or
listening to a phrase and typing it in Russian. I think there are like 20
questions per lesson (but I have never counted them).

D - When you start a new lesson (up till this new update) you have life levels
(IMPORTANT background about the new update.). This is exactly like a video
game. You get 5 or 6 lives which are visually represented as slices of arcs of
a circle around a heart. If you have a grammatical error each time you answer
a question you lose one life. If you lose all your lives you're unable to
complete the lesson. If you can complete a lesson you lose your streak. But
you can use tokens you have accumulated or buy tokens to get more life. So you
can reach your daily goal. However(till now), if you went back to an already
completed lesson you would not use any lives. So you could repeat an existing
lesson and make your daily quota. This had two benefits. One, I could directly
pick which lesson I wanted to repeat. More importantly it was an stress-free
process for me to accomplish my daily goal. Basically you're not anxious about
losing your allocated lives and instead you can focus on language learning.

D - You have a consecutive daily streak. I'm currently at 197 days now. Which
for me it's a biggest motivator. I also get daily email reminders. If you lose
your daily streak you can pay from $2.99 to $9.99 to maintain it. $9.99 if you
have a longer streak.

E - There is a double-or-nothing wager if you can maintain a 7 day streak.
Basically you spend 50 tokens and if you maintain a 7 day streak you get 100
tokens back.

So what is so terribly wrong with the new update?

i - The UX as I mentioned above is incomprehensible. Basically there is a long
thread on what all these things mean and do now.

ii - MOST IMPORTANTLY, they added a lot of anxiety now to learning a language.
The biggest motivator for me which was maintaining my daily streak, has now
become a source of anxiety. Why? Because I was able to repeat existing task
without the risk of losing all my lives and still finish my daily goal. After
finish my daily goal, I would either repeat another lesson that I thought I
was weak at or start a new lesson. But, it was all risk free. So I had no
worries about making any mistakes just focus on learning. Now, you have no
choice on what specific lesson inside a skill you want to repeat and new level
or old level you lose life with each mistake. As a result I started looking
elsewhere to see what other app I could use.

So why did Duolingo make such an awful update? I'm guessing to increase their
revenues. The new updates at least with my experience is forcing people to buy
more lives to maintain their streaks. I think it might be their way to force
out the people who are just casual users, and focus on serious users like
myself and try to better monetize their serious users. In practically you
could end up paying as much as $1.99/day to maintain your daily streak.

2 - Is it a helpful teaching tool? It's just a great motivator. I already
speak two languages natively (because I'm an immigrant). I took one course of
Japanese in college and I did okay. And I still remember some phrases.
However, learning Russian proved to be harder than I thought. For one, I'm
older now and we do not retain languages as fast. But also Russian grammar and
way of thinking in that language is very different. Verbs not only have
present and past (masculine, feminine) tenses, there is also concept of
perfective and imperfective, also Imperatives. Then nouns have gender and also
nouns have six different cases. Then there is variations on some of these
rules for cases. All that said. It's the vocabulary that finally becomes the
hardest part. Because there are no easy mnemonic to remember a word since
there are very few associations to words we are familiar with in English.

As I said above, I had to buy 4 Russian books and one cheatsheet. One visual
learning book, two books on Russian etymology to help me remember the words
better by understanding their etymology. One Russian grammar book which helps
explain a lot of the stuff. The Russian cheatsheet for a quick reference of a
grammatical rule. I've recently play Russian101 pod twice a week when I'm
driving which has been helpful learning some new phrases. With all these, I
still have to google stuff when I'm using Duolingo to quickly understand
something.

It's worth mentioning Duolingo added TinyCard, flashcards app. Which actually
helped to retain some of these words. I often parallel my daily Duolingo with
TinyCard. It was probably their most important teaching tool they added.

Basically, it's a great motivational tool. It's a free way to get you started
and get you motivated. However, I'm not sure with the new update if the
motivation to continue after the first lessons will be there or not.

[0] [https://www.duolingo.com/comment/26612939/Where-are-the-
inst...](https://www.duolingo.com/comment/26612939/Where-are-the-instructions-
for-new-skill-levels-crowns)

~~~
fapjacks
I understand viscerally this comment about something becoming a source of
stress. Actually a couple of apps have done this to me in the past, and I
immediately reject them (by uninstalling them) when I recognize that the app
is using the anxiety and stress to twist the screws and get me to pay for
something. Fuck that. I'm curious here, though. Except for not having an
exceptionally long streak number associated with your username that you have
earned, what penalties exist for not maintaining your streak? Does Duolingo
like cut you off from completing lessons or otherwise impose restrictions on
using the app if you don't maintain a streak?

Also, I've been putting a lot of time in the Russian module and I'm really
disappointed that there's no way to learn the grammar rules in Duolingo.
Russian especially has surprising behavior depending on the characters used.

~~~
salimmadjd
So as I stated, Duolingo's value for me is the gamification of getting me to
study Russian on the daily bases. BTW, I have used it for 2-3 years now. I've
had various streaks of 50 days, 100 days, etc. I'm 1-2 days now from 200.

To answer you, when I went off grid for camping, I lost my steak. But that was
it. I just had to start from zero streak again. However, my Russian lesson
progress stayed where I left off.

There is (used to be) this power range under each level that you completed.
And if you do not use the app for while, they gradually lose their power
strength level. It's a way to ensure you return back to old lessons and you
repeat them. But still does not effect your lesson progress.

At the end, Duolingo was a free (I actually paid a few times to retain my
streak, so probably have paid them about $20 or more by now) way for me to
have a structured/organized path to learn Russian with a motivator. I always
find ways to complete my daily Russian lessons even in busy days. I think if
the streak was not a factor I would have probably given up on that a while
ago. If you really want to learn Russian you have to get more resources. Often
when I googled some word = "russian grammar" I found an online source or class
that explained which was very helpful. RussianPod101 has some free podcast
lessons that is good to help you with pronunciation and also some common
phrases. But you still need a proper grammar book to make it through it all.

------
senatorobama
Do they have Sanskrit?

~~~
lambertsimnel
Unfortunately not. The only Indo-Aryan language I can find listed on DuoLingo
is Hindi and that hasn't yet started beta testing.

