On: 1,600 days of a failed hobby data science project

[xandrius]

Duolingo is a pretty bad tool for learning a language, it's good to make you feel like you're learning though.

[waste_monk → xandrius]

At this point it's more about being scared of the bird.

[mettamage → xandrius]

Just to give a nuanced perspective on duolingo.

My wife only did 50 hours of duolingo in total the past 2 years. Combine that with me teasing her in Dutch and she’s actually making progress.

Duolingo is a chill tool to learn some vocab. That vocab then gets acquired by talking to me. We talk 2 minutes Dutch per day at most. So about 11 hours in total per year.

She is 67% done with duolingo. So we bought the first real book to learn Dutch (De Opmaat).

That book is IMO not for pure beginners. But for the level my wife was at, it seems perfect.

[ben_w → mettamage]

Human speech is around 150-200 words per minute; even going slow, 2 minutes a day of real talk is probably more vocab than 10 minutes of Duo. And with better feedback, a human rather than a cartoon casino.

[selimthegrim → mettamage]

Do you think it would be good for Flemish too or speaking standard Dutch in Belgium?

[mettamage → selimthegrim]

I don't know how one would learn Flemish from books. I think you'd need to go to Belgium and speak Dutch there and then see what the differences are.

Dutch and Flemish are interchangeable though. Sometimes it falls apart based on accent, but not on language.