Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by toomanybeersies » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 3:46 AM UTC

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've found that Duolingo is very good for learning how to read another language (or at least read enough to get an idea of what a text is saying).

It's mediocre at teaching you how to write, bad at teaching you to listen, and useless at teaching you how to speak.

I've found that if you just grind through lessons without actually reading the supporting material, you don't learn much at all. If you actually read the supporting material you'll learn a lot more.

Duolingo is best used as a tool in a toolbox of language learning tools. It's good for reinforcement learning, but not great for actually developing an understanding.

As an analogy, you could learn algebra by looking at a lot of examples and working through worksheets of algebra problems, but you're not going to actually understand what you're doing, or learn very well.

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

#212

Post by musage » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 3:54 AM UTC

knodi123 wrote: post #142

ljm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience and almost straight away I felt like I wouldn't learn much besides random vocabulary. Learning 'la tortuga es verde' and 'el hombre y el niño' and similar isn't particularly useful in the grand scheme of things and it's not going to help you get to 'la cuenta por favor', 'donde esta el baño', and so on. In fact you might run into certain situations where your vocab tells you one thing but t…

> You might believe that 'estoy caliente' means that you're feeling really hot, because you learned that 'estoy' means 'I am' and 'caliente' means hot, but you would be confused when the room bursts into laughter and won't tell you what's so funny about it. That's pretty funny - I was taught in my german class that "ich bin warm" directly translates to I'm feeling hot, but colloquially it means "I am gay". And here,…

> I was taught in my german class that "ich bin warm" directly translates to I'm feeling hot

It doesn't though: feeling hot would be "mir ist heiß", feeling warm would be "mir ist warm". Kinda like you wouldn't say "ich bin schwindlig", but rather "mir ist schwindlig". In English, "I am dizzy" and "I'm feeling dizzy" are the same, in German they're decidedly not.

[as a fun bonus, "ich fühle mich warm" is never used, while "ich fühle mich schwindlig" is perfectly fine]

Though it's possible to describe a person as "warm" without meaning sexuality (or things related to that which also describe emotional warmth, like "warme Begrüßung", "ein warmer Blick" etc.), "ich bin warm" isn't something you would ever say (in a non-comedy context) I think.

Describing oneself or others as hot can mean a lot of things, kinda like in English: horny, attractive, on top of their game, very popular, and so on.

Hope that helped :)

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

#213

Post by kumarski » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

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....

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

#214

Post by lambda » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

apt-get wrote: post #196

GuiA wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Next to no customization is what I want for something like this. I want to be able to mindlessly drill for a few minutes a day, not spend a lot of time fiddling with my decks to get them perfect.

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

#215

Post by wallflower » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:18 AM UTC

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).

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

#216

Post by School-Cotton » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #190

amaccuish wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's because English grammar is either obvious and doesn't need teaching or is inexplicable and isn't worth trying to make a pattern out of. I ran, she ran, he ran, they ran, we ran, y'all ran. I run, she runs, he runs, they run, we run, y'all run. I'll run, she'll run, he'll run, they'll run, we'll run, y'all'll run. I thought I'd run, he thought he'd run, they thought they'd run. We'll have wished we ran, they'll h…

You seem to think that "verb morphology" is all there is to "grammar".

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

#217

Post by mkstowegnv » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:29 AM UTC

kumarski wrote: post #213

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....

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?

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

#218

Post by foobiekr » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:32 AM UTC

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 can't speak to the others, but I did the Japanese course for a bit as a refresher since I'm 20+ years from my 4Y of japanese. I found the content pretty terrible, some of it is also obviously wrong or very misleading.

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

#219

Post by rayxi271828 » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #206

rayxi271828 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying a few of these lately. I passed French DELF A2 late last year and going for B1 in a week. My chronological progression of picking up French via apps/courses (lots of trial-and-error): 1. Duolingo 2. Michel Thomas audio course - this has its critics but it gave me a much more solid, if limited, foundation on grammar. 3. Lingvist - I was lucky to find this early. Added around 2000 words to my vocabular…

I did the Michel Thomas Spanish course and I found it to be excellent. It can be a lot harder to stay engaged than a gamified app, but you come away knowing a lot more than you would expect.

Yes, plus I can put it on while doing the chores, which is ideal, same as Glossika as my previous post. It's naturally there embedded into my daily workflow.

Everything else e.g.: Assimil is a workflow interruption, a new habit I have to assimilate, so it becomes a lot harder to do consistently over a long period of time.

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

#220

Post by rayxi271828 » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

fatbird wrote: post #192

gnulinux wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Reality check: after finishing the Duolingo French tree I tried to read Tintin. It was quite a wake up call, to say the least.

Since then by my estimate I know roughly about 4000 more French words, and reading lemonde.fr is still a struggle. Doing much better with Tintin though.