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Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
161–170 of 274 posts
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 learn…
> 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 pres…
What was the course?
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even just "indo-european" bias, it's just that word-for-word translation of sentences without any context only gets you so far. Even for something as "simple" as English-to-French it breaks down when the languages don't map 1:1 with each other. For instance there's no single way to translate "I ran" in French, it could be "j'ai courru" or "je courrais" depending on context and depending no the lesson Duoling…
Which is fine. It is about being understood. You are never going to get fluent from a course. Language changes, and even native speakers are learning new things.
I disagree. The nuances that change are on a different level. I have learned a number of languages from books and this is taught pretty easily. If you can't conjugate a verb, you don't know much about that language.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#164I 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 cours…
Having completed the Duolingo Spanish tree a couple of times, I found that it gave me enough of the basics to work my way through books and follow some basic plot of TV shows with closed captioning.
It hasn't done a whole lot for my listening or speaking skills, but to be fair I often disable the listening and speaking exercises since I tend to do the exercises at work while I'm waiting for something to compile.
Duolingo will not make you fluent in a language, but it can give you the basics to build upon.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#165I 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 cours…
I'm in the exact same boat? I'm French and I've been learning Portuguese for about a year now, including on Duolingo. I currently have a 203 day streak and I had a ~100 day streak before that. I've been using the "Portuguese for English speakers" tree because the French counterpart was so filled with typos in the basic lessons that I didn't trust it. I thought that the more popular English version might have been bet…
As far as your fifth point, they might have messed up explaining the concept. In Portuguese, starting a sentence with "E se...?" (And if...?) is the same as saying "What if...?" in English. In the link to the comments section you provided, only one person (Paulenrique) gets it right, though he doesn't explain why.
- "[E] se nós nos encontrássemos mais vezes?"
- "What if we met each other more?" (ie, what if we saw each other more often?)
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#166It'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 gamificat…
ctrl+f "Thai". Since Duolingo doesn't have a Thai module, would you mind sharing your app?
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.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm not sure they've even gone that far. There are _plenty_ of long-standing complaints (on the Japanese course) that there are errors in the _English_ sentences, such as that they are grammatically wrong, or that you've translated something one way but later don't accept that as a correct answer. Just checking the comments, or proofreading the English sentences, would have caught most of them.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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
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
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But after completing the entire suite, I still can't look at a japanese text and read it. Well, if you're coming from a European language background, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to benchmark on. I mean, there's three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji) for starters! And then unlike European languages, it's not alphabetical and kanji is not even really syllabic - which means, the background you…
It's true that Japanese is harder to learn. However, the Duolingo course is particularly awful. Even with some prior knowledge I was completely lost with much of the stuff they randomly throw at you without any explanation.
Also a lot of it is essentially wrong, since they expect you to transliterate parts of the sentence that would probably not be included in context, e.g. saying "watashi wa" for any sentence starting "I".
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also depends on the languages you already speak. Swedish/Norwegian/Danish do not really have "little grammar", but for an English speaker, there probably won't be any need to explicitly learn the grammar, since it works mostly like English. But on the flipside, they are just as difficult as English for speakers of unrelated languages.
>for an English speaker, there probably won't be any need to explicitly learn the grammar, since it works mostly like English // For a period in the UK there was no English grammar taught in schools. This caused me great problems in Russian class (second high school language) as I had no idea there were cases in English and so had no reference for why a case was needed and what it did. The entirety of my English gram…
Having left school 3 years ago, I can confirm there is still no grammar taught in english lessons. It was all taught to the AQA exam we did. I studied french and german too, and all my grammar knowledge comes from there and from languages at uni. There's obviously basic things in primary school but that's like where to put commas, that's it.