221–230 of 274 posts
Pimsleur audio books all the way. It's spaced-learning/repetition with conversations.
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…
French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta course just to see. It was very awkward. The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. This is interesting. I took six years of French in high school + college, and did immersion in Québec. I had not spoken French since then, so a couple years ago when I was planning a trip to France I got Duolinguo and worked through the French course…
It's quite common for correct answers not to be accepted. In particular, often some technically correct literal translation is accepted but the almost certainly correct colloquial translation is not.
For example: "Tu manges ça"
Literally this means "you eat that" or "you are eating that". However, since it's hard to imagine someone saying "you are eating that" in real life (why would you ever say that?) I interpret this as a question ("are you eating that?") or as a command to a child ("Eat that!" or a bit more literally, "you shall eat that!")
However, the accepted answer was indeed "You are eating that.".
By the way, this isn't even taking into account the fact that "ça" should quite commonly be translated as "this", not "that" -- the distinction between "this" and "that" isn't the same in French as it is in English, and it's totally wrong to assume that "ça" should always be translated as "that" and "ceci" as "this". In fact, I think "are you eating this?" is orders of magnitude more likely to be the correct translation of "tu manges ça" than "you are eating that.".
I've only shared one, but there are a million examples like this on DuoLingo.
There are also some translations that are just objectively wrong: "He reads the menu" should be "il lit la carte", but on DuoLingo it's "il lit le menu". Nobody says "le menu" for "menu" in France. (They do say that in Québec, but nowhere was it indicated that I should be answering in nonstandard Québec dialect. "il lit la carte" was marked wrong here even though it's what you would say in France, the primary French-speaking country in the world.)
Similar to the "ça" == "this" fallacy, DuoLingo seems to believe that any phrase in which "le" or "la" appears has to involve "the" in the English translation. "You help kids" is apparently wrong for "Tu aides les enfants". The expected translation was "you're helping the children". Yes, that's one possible meaning, but "les enfants" isn't necessarily definite here: "tu aides les enfants" can certainly mean that "you help children" (or "kids", see the paragraph below), in general, whereas "you're helping the kids" implies some fixed, well-defined set of kids.
Let alone French: there are even cases in which DuoLingo's writers don't seem to understand English. For example, any sentence with "les enfants" has to be translated with the overly formal "children": "kids" isn't accepted, even though I, a native English speaker, would say "kids" something like 99.9% of the time.
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 still puzzled by duolingo - it uses an outdated pedagogy and an overemphasis on 'fun'. I have only looked briefly at the courses but I find the structure unconvincing. Regarding something mentioned in the article: what is the point of learning 'entertaining' phrases like 'they are washing the holy potato'. From a pedagogical point of view this is a waste of time is no better than the famous 'plume de ma tante' (l…
Saved you a click
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A2 is nothing and you definitely don't need a tutor to get there.
If you're actually operating in an environment where it is spoken naturally for a prolonged period of time, I agree with you. Or if you're doing one of those intensive 8 week things with The State Department. But for regular programmers from America learning a foreign language that isn't Spanish it is really hard to get to A2 and impossible without a tutor. I've known plenty of people that think they're at A2 and can…
* Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment).
* Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters.
* Can describe in simple terms aspects of their background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.
No way you need a tutor to get that. Duolingo course seems about right depending on language and language learning experience.
avid Duolingo user here. 1 - the new update is a massive disaster (I'll explain in a bit). Maybe it's different for other languages, but for Russian language I vehemently hate the update. I dislike it so much that I tracked down Duolingo PM person on LinkedIN and tried to message them directly. The app updated for me a week ago with one dialogue that I tapped to confirm. Thinking it's just another incremental update.…
I understand viscerally this comment about something becoming a source of stress. Actually a couple of apps have done this to me in the past, and I immediately reject them (by uninstalling them) when I recognize that the app is using the anxiety and stress to twist the screws and get me to pay for something. Fuck that. I'm curious here, though. Except for not having an exceptionally long streak number associated with…
To answer you, when I went off grid for camping, I lost my steak. But that was it. I just had to start from zero streak again. However, my Russian lesson progress stayed where I left off.
There is (used to be) this power range under each level that you completed. And if you do not use the app for while, they gradually lose their power strength level. It's a way to ensure you return back to old lessons and you repeat them. But still does not effect your lesson progress.
At the end, Duolingo was a free (I actually paid a few times to retain my streak, so probably have paid them about $20 or more by now) way for me to have a structured/organized path to learn Russian with a motivator. I always find ways to complete my daily Russian lessons even in busy days. I think if the streak was not a factor I would have probably given up on that a while ago. If you really want to learn Russian you have to get more resources. Often when I googled some word = "russian grammar" I found an online source or class that explained which was very helpful. RussianPod101 has some free podcast lessons that is good to help you with pronunciation and also some common phrases. But you still need a proper grammar book to make it through it all.
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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 heard Portuguese from South America and from Portugal are different - maybe that could be a reason?
I came here to say the same thing. Spanish from one country is "wrong" in another one. A lot of people doesn´t understand that it´s just not your flavor of the language. It´s almost the same that If I, that speak Spanish, commented how wrong is Portuguese because is similar to Spanish but not the same.
Maybe the mistake is to announce the course as Portuguese instead of, for example, "Brazilian Portuguese".
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…
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 got all the questions correctly, but:
- Given capitalization I was forced to use word order that didn't come naturally. Mind you, what the app requested isn't _wrong_ but it's certainly not the only way to do it. If they were enforcing a rigid wrong order they were incorrectly marking as failures usage that I would argue is more natural, at least given my particular background (Southern). I went with it, but I was adjusting to the app.
- They repeated the sentences and some vocabulary a lot, so if you had any gaps or couldn't remember one particular word you might get three questions wrong, which would have a large impact on your placement.
- There's something inherently weird about the vocabulary, Duolingo-style. This doesn't go well with the previous point.
Overall it felt rigid and random. In any case Duolingo does not correlate at all with fluency. Duolingo correlates well with being trained in Duolingo.
Are there any recommended books/material to learn Spanish that way? Everyone says spanish is easy to learn, but all apps kinda try to teach you by repetitive methods with no insights in to the structure of the language.