Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 274 posts

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

#191

Post by gnulinux »

megablast wrote: post #155
simias wrote: post #138

Earlier 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.

That's besides the point. My point is "definiteness" is not a concrete concept in Turkish and if you're academically analyzing a sentence you'd have to use other types of information (accusative case, the word 'bir', context, etc...) to judge if a noun is definite or indefinite (or maybe something in the middle?). But Duolingo teaches as if this distinction is as strict in Turkish as it is in English. In English "a bear" and "the bear" are different things even without context whereas in Turkish "ayi" [bear] and "bir ayi" [one bear] mean more or less the same thing outside of a sentence and I'd just use "bear", but in some contexts they'll mean different things. "Ayi cikabilir" roughly means "caution, bear in area" and as you see you don't use "bir" but it is still indefinite. Duolingo would reject this answer. "Bir ayi cikabilir" would be Duolingo's answer, but it sounds awkward, no one would say that.

And there are no hard rules. In that sentence you can't just put +I to make it definite as I described above "ayiyi cikabilir" "der". This is like Duolingo saying 'the'='der' and rejecting 'das' and 'die'.

So, it is not fine, it is wrong. And the wrong thing is not that Duolingo has a bug, it is that it has made-up grammar rules, which users still have to learn. If they never learned this rule, they'd be as well understood.

(I know you were replying to commenter discussing French, but I'm guessing something similar is going on)

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

#192

Post by fatbird »

gnulinux wrote: post #113
dna_polymerase wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you check if other language learning apps were wrong as well?

Why would this matter, at all?

Besides what the sibling comment said, if all apps are generally not great, it speaks to a basic limitation of app-driven study of languages, at least, that indicates one needs to supplement. My plan was to use duolingo to get to the point that I could start reading French newspapers and watching French TV, which I assumed would add a dimension to my learning experience that I couldn't get from DuoLingo.

After this thread, I plan to move that step up as a check on DuoLingo.

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

#193

Post by jwong_ »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #109
jwong_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/lib/python3/kotd Warning: this is a mess

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

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

#195

Post by jwong_ »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #125
jwong_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I liked Tagaini when I was learning Japanese a couple years ago. https://www.tagaini.net/

Nice, I like this. Cross platform too

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

#196

Post by apt-get »

GuiA wrote: post #44
lambda wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wel…

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.

WaniKani is a lot more limiting than Anki (which is free and open source) since it has a fixed schedule, while Anki allows you to learn at whatever pace you wish. In addition, it offers next to no customization.

There's a WK deck if you really want to use their content.

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

#197

Post by ajmurmann »

chrischen wrote: post #110
firefoxd wrote: post #45

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 cours…

I’m trying to learn Japanese and 99% of the apps out there focus on memorizing phrases out of context that could be applied to any topic, and market itself as a language learning system. I’ve yet to find a single app that beat out a one-time read through of a Japanese grammar guide. That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that.

I've been using Anki as called it by a sibling. I'm not super excited about it because everything about it is just a mess. But the are great pre-made decks and it's easy to find help because so many people use it. There is also memrise which seems to be gaining in popularity. If you are using Genki the publisher provides their own mobile apps.

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

#198

Post by noobly »

jakobegger wrote: post #84
savanaly wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

Reading this thread, I'm lead to wonder if there's any open source, Wikipedia style (public editing) apps / sites / courses being developed? This would certainly combat the scaling issue, as Duolingo's comments seem to imply.

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

#199

Post by rangibaby »

firefoxd wrote: post #45

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 cours…

TBF Japanese kids spend 10 years learning how to read their own language, so it’s important to have realistic expectations of what you can accomplish

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

#200

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

jwong_ wrote: post #193
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/lib/python3/kotd Warning: this is a mess

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

This binary puts a porcelain command on the Python library:

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...

Which is powered by sway:

http://swaywm.org

Post reply on HN