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Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

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Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#81

Post by tom_mellior »

losvedir wrote: post #41

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 t…

> 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.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#82

Post by chillacy »

_betty_ wrote: post #46
kwaldman wrote: post #2

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

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

You should look at Pimsleur if you just want to be conversational in Mandarin.

But regarding the writing system, that's where the interesting stuff is IMO, it's a system where words are linked to more to meaning than sound (unlike most other writen languages), which meant it could be used as the writing system for many various regions all around what is now modern China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#84

Post by jakobegger »

savanaly wrote: post #70
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I really don't understand that-- compared to the cost of developing and marketing the app itself, surely the cost to hire someone whose only qualification is that they be bilingual is trivial, and you would only need them for long enough for them to run through all the questions to double check they are correct.

That‘s probably what they thought, too. If you just pick a random bilingual person and let them proofread your learning material you are going to end up with crappy learning materials.

If you want good content, you need good editors, and they are neither cheap, nor easy to find.

The reason why companies try to save money with editors is that they don‘t „scale“ (one dev and a designer can program an interface that can be used for 20.000 different questions, but you need a lot of people to come up with those questions)

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#85

Post by chillacy »

OldFatCactus wrote: post #80

Anyone have advice on learning French?

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

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#86

Post by gilrain »

savanaly wrote: post #70
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I really don't understand that-- compared to the cost of developing and marketing the app itself, surely the cost to hire someone whose only qualification is that they be bilingual is trivial, and you would only need them for long enough for them to run through all the questions to double check they are correct.

Engineer's disease... "why hire an expert when we're already Engineers!"

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#87

Post by thunderplot »

_betty_ wrote: post #46
kwaldman wrote: post #2

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

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

How it's possible to learn a foreign language without learning its writing system?

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#88

Post by chillacy »

harigov wrote: post #83
jonbarker wrote: post #6

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

Did you try tinycards by duolingo? It looks very promising.

I used tinycards, but at some point you want a desktop interface to mass import cards from CSV instead of punching them in the phone. Also as spartan as the Anki UX is, the actual SRS implementation is quite good.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#90

Post by stordoff »

2bitencryption wrote: post #5

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…

I've been having success with WaniKani. It's mainly for vocabulary learning, but just that lets me be able to read enough to be able to start picking up the grammar from context, and (more importantly) being able to apply that grammar in more situations which makes it much easier to learn. It also forces you to rapidly become fluent in hiragana (IIRC romaji isn't used anywhere). I feel like it's working because I'm frequently understanding the terms in real Japanese content, and it's giving me the ability to understand terms that haven't been explicitly taught (e.g. I was reading something the other day and read 心理学校 and 火の用心 as "psychology school" and "beware of fire" [with the correct pronunciations/readings] without any thought, despite never coming across the phrases before).

> DuoLingo will bring you to 15% understanding of Hiragana before dumping you into Katakana

Personally that's how I prefer to learn -- I got to being able to read about 50% of the hiragana without too much effort then went straight to WaniKani, and found I was making much more rapid, reliable (i.e I feel like I'm actually _reading_ them, not just being able to remember the meaning/having to think about it) on the remaining 50%, and I've mostly learn the katakana through context/use -- but of course YMMV.

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