Hi folks. I'll be talking to Duolingo next week about your criticisms and concerns. Feel free to ping me directly with any suggestions to ask them about. seanjcaptain@gmail.com
Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
261–270 of 274 posts
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#262The reason Duolingo is ineffective in my opinion is multi-faceted. First, my main language for study is Japanese, and Duolingo's Japanese course is awful - these are the specific things I noticed when trying it: - There were several factual errors in their material and important points entirely omitted - Japanese grammar is very flexible and their tools aren't, so they often mark you as wrong when you were correct -…
Once you have the basics down, I like anki or memrise better for picking up vocab. You can do decks based on JLPT levels or do Core 2k/6k. Here's the memrise course series I am using (6000 words broken up into chunks of 500, frequency optimized): https://www.memrise.com/course/1091685/sgjl-05-core-2k6k-voc... (first of 500 of 6000) https://www.memrise.com/course/1125407/sgjl-07-core-2k6k-voc... (next 500 words) https…
For raw vocabulary, my favorite app is CleverDeck
(https://cleverdeck.com). I really like their simple UX and well curated content.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#263I think Duolingo is good for getting you past complete beginner but to go deeper I recommend Anki.
1. If you read enough, (spaced) repetition occurs naturally. No need for a software. 2. It's not bad to forget words during the learning process. 3. Purely personal: SRS reviewing is the ultimate bore, however you design your cards. And making the cards is even more of a bore. It's the opposite of fun.
It's good for 'grinding it out' type learning tasks. Example: I sat for and passed all three ham radio exams in one shot mainly because of an android ham radio exam prep app that did SRS. No way I could have done that just by reading ham radio study guides.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
While there may be some specific cases where it's done, I'm halfway through the course and watashi was shown on its own, (quite early) but I don't think it was used in even one sentence so far. (Most of them starting with I)
I've made it through the full course. It will generally let you add "watashi wa" on, but rarely mandates it. Most of the time the suggested answer won't include it either.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#265Earlier 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
I think "пива" is the partitive case, though.
That's exactly it! [1]
I'm a native speaker, and I wasn't even aware of partitive case. They never taught us about it, even though a mind-numbing amount of time was spent cramming the name of the usual six cases into our heads.
I only got more interested in linguistics after moving to the US, and, sadly, only took one class in college on it.
Thanks for noticing this, I just learned something!
As a side note, I also mixed up genitive and accusative cases.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#266Earlier 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
It was noted below that this is properly called the partitive case; the Wikipedia articles have good examples in the vein of "А не испить ли нам чаю":[1][2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian
[2]https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B8...
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you would say that though? Like I've just never heard my хозяйка квартиры say that is all. I hear it often in things like "would you like some tea/beer?" etc or "i'm going to buy some tea/beer" but never like that. My impression was that outside of those contexts it's not popular. Mind sharing some examples? Would be really useful! :)
You probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник." since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be said. Поставь here is much more concrete than "put", it's more like "place" and I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge at some party and noticed it's running out of beer so I requested somebody to add more beer there. Much more common woul…
>You probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник." since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be said. [...] I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge at some party and noticed it's running out of beer
Yup, pretty much that. Or like that one time when we went binge-shopping on craft beers, but there was only enough space in the fridge for a couple of bottles; so that was a normal request about an hour before we were to watch a movie. Which is pretty much the exact situation you described :)
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#268I 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 reached the end of Japanese course about a month ago and have continued to practice daily. Here are my thoughts:
* Many of the English translations don't seem like idiomatic English. Sometimes I think it is even grammatically incorrect. This has made me worried about some of the Japanese not being super great as well. With other people chiming in about how languages they already knew having this problem, it doesn't look great.
* I agree with numbers. They way Duolingo handles numbers, days, months, etc is to me worse than the traditional way. It took a long time to get decent at numbers, and I screw them up a bit. I don't know any of the days of the week, but I know what day of the week words look like. They only ever include one day of the week word it the word bank, so you never actually have to learn.
* On the subject of the word bank, I think if the incorrect words where more plausible. For many lessons, you don't need the Japanese input. The word bank only provides one plausible English sentence.
* It needs more sentence variety. For example, if a less has "The tea is hot." and "The ramen is cool.", why not also add "The tea is cool." and "The ramen is hot."? I find if Duo selects the same lesson a few days in a row, I start to memorize the answers and can punch them in without needing the input.
* I can form original sentences. I'm not very fast at it, but I think that is to be expected. I don't think I'll get better until I start trying to actually speak to people.
* The bigger problem I have is a lack of vocabulary. Duolingo seems to like to jump around a lot, never getting good enough at any one thing. Even in a situation where you are able to get by if you stick to a script, eg at a restaurant, there are still gaps that would prevent me from doing everything in Japanese. Looking at Memerise, it seems to focus on giving you more depth. For example, Duolingo taught me how to say "How are you?" and respond "I'm fine.". Later I've been able to add "I'm tired." and "I'm scared." Memerise teaches you "I'm fine.", "I'm tired.", "I'm happy.", "I'm angry.", "I'm hungry.", and "I'm sick.". That feels more useful.
* The audio quality is crappy. Sometimes it sounds like the syllables are clipping into each other or something. Sometimes it seems like their text to speech engine got confused about where word boundaries are. I took a brief look at Memerise's Japanese course, and the audio quality is much better.
* About 50% of the time when I try to tap the button to replay the audio clip, it seems to think I want to quit the lesson.
* It would be nice if there was something you could tap to temporarily see Japanese sentences with spaces between words.
* While I expect Duolingo would never do it, I think a few lessons on innuendos would be useful. It would save some embarrassing situations.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#269Earlier 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.
> stuff they randomly throw at you without any explanation
That's kind of their approach. I agree that in case of Japanese they could do better. E.g. if they explained what is explained here: https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/ - and they have space for such texts, but they are not using it for Japanese - it would save me some frustration and trying to figure out what these weird things are doing inside the phrases. Once you get the principle, it kinda clicks in place. So with the help of some other sources, so far it's not too bad for me with Duo and Japanese I feel. Though of course I don't think it's possible to use it alone without some auxiliary materials.
Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I don't blame them for that. It seems to me (a very early beginner in learning Japanese) that a lot of languages have a formal way of expressing things, and informal shortcuts which native speakers use almost always in real life. But when you're just learning, you need to learn what "wa" does and what "watashi" means, and thus having "watashi wa" may help.
It's like in martial arts you learn kata first, though if you get to apply it later you don't do the same kata, you do something else - but to do it, you have to learn to do kata first.