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

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

#231

Post by x0x0 » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:11 AM UTC

rayxi271828 wrote: post #159

strken wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would matter to those of us trying to learn a language, because if another app was better, we could use it instead of duolingo. At the moment I'm supplementing duolingo by nattering away to my father in French and asking the half-French guy at work how to say various things, but if the app is teaching me things that are plain wrong, I'll have to either find another app or start taking real life classes, which is w…

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…

Thank you for mentioning speechling. I'm going to give it a try.

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

#232

Post by pandaman » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:20 AM UTC

amaccuish wrote: post #168

romwell wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

The partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.

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

#233

Post by tralarpa » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:23 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #221

aabajian wrote: post #133

Pimsleur audio books all the way. It's spaced-learning/repetition with conversations.

Came here to say the same. Pimsleur is also excellent for pronunciation and I have this feeling that once I learned something from the course, I never forget it. It just sticks, even after months or years. It is also most similar to how babies learn - without grammar, reading and writing, just by dialogue.

Yes, Pimsleur gives you excellent pronounciation and the sentences really stick (which is very good, of course!).

But apart from that? It doesn't teach you grammar, so you are repeating and repeating like a parrot, hoping that one day you will know why they say XY in one sentence and YX in another sentence. It's true that babies don't learn formal grammar, but they usually grow up in an environment with full immersion (several hours per day over several years), surrounded by native adults who give their best to interprete, repeat and correct (!) their utterances.

In addition, Pimsleur is very slow but it gives you the illusion that you are learning a lot by keeping you constantly busy. At the end, how many words do you learn in three levels? 400? That's barely A1! Most annoying, 70% (just a guess) of the time, you are just listening to the English speaker ("Now repeat this", "Try to say that",...).

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

#234

Post by DarqWebster » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:33 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 used three apps to slowly teach myself a little Japanese. Human Japanese, Memrise, and Duolingo. And they all offer distinct advantages and disadvantages, and that's frustrating because a combined app would be far superior.

Human Japanese is great for gentle explanations of grammar, but its flashcards are horrible, so one can't get the spaced repetition needed to remember everything it throws at you. Memrise is fantastic for vocabulary with its spaced repetition, but I couldn't string a sentence together, as Memrise (at least the course I did) mostly ignores grammar. Duolingo is great for practicing reading and writing sentences, checking the comments for sanity if the sentence looks fishy. But it doesn't try and teach anything, just get it wrong until you get it right. Does sentence order matter? Why do we use "wa" here and "ga" there? Duolingo doesn't say.

An app that combines actual lessons with spaced practice sessions would make the whole process a lot smoother.

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

#235

Post by tralarpa » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:42 AM UTC

mkstowegnv wrote: post #217

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…

> I often find that I am hearing very different sounds from what my conversation partner later tells me they were saying.

That's normal. Everybody has the same problem to some degree. Your brain is mapping what it hears to the sounds and sound sequences that it knows from your native language. That's usually a good thing because it helps humans to understand others even in the presence of background noise or speech impediments.

Less probable but also possible: You have a hearing loss which your brain is able to compensate for your native language, but not for foreign languages. Had a friend with that problem. He was not able to discriminate between similar words starting with different sibilant sounds. He didn't have the problem in his native language because he knew from context which word would come.

Have you tried to listen to audio books based on books that you know very well in your native language?

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

#236

Post by gordonguthrie » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

rando444 wrote: post #54

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 been on duolingo since the beginning and am sure that I've spent more time with the site and app than 95% of the userbase. I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language. There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses. #1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking. This is j…

Compared to working from a book it is ace - you get listening, speaking, reading and writing and it gets you where you want to be

I did the first three levels of Ukranian and when I went to Lvyv I picked out a couple of hundred words in shops and restau

Could I speak? No, but Duolingo gets you onto the pitch faster and better than anyone else - it gets you in play fast - so you can start learning the language properly

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

#237

Post by gordonguthrie » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:47 AM UTC

amaccuish wrote: post #170

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Historically we were taught Latin grammer disguised as English grammer - so 'tenses' when English only has two tenses (past and present) and 6 or more moods (shall, could, will, might etc, etc)

Most English 'grammer' discussed in the Anglophone world (split infinitives WTF? English doesn't have infinitives) is gibberish...

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

#238

Post by gordonguthrie » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:52 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…

A 10 word sentence has 10! possible word orders of which only 1 is correct - that is grammer

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

#239

Post by jknightco » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:54 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…

He runs to the store. I suggest that he run to the store.

Even verb morphology is a bit more complex than you've called out here.

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

#240

Post by nemetroid » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 8:29 AM UTC

puppet_heart wrote: post #208

This thread is living proof why many people are seemingly unable to learn languages (well): they're more concerned with tools and methodologies instead of simply putting in the effort and learning the language they want to learn (emphasis on "want to learn"). Yes, it's (sometimes hard) work to learn a language and there is no magical fairy dust.

The top comment is from someone who put 370 days straight into Duolingo and completed the content for multiple languages. Is that indicative of someone unwilling to "simply [put] in the effort"?