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

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

#271

Post by RugnirViking » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 1:06 PM UTC

rayxi271828 wrote: post #220

fatbird wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tintin is a fantastic way to learn french. Just wanted to stop by to say I found it super helpful as well :) I remember the first book I finished in french was tintin in russia

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

#272

Post by 3pt14159 » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 12:11 AM UTC

T-N-T wrote: post #247

3pt14159 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way will Duo Lingo get you anywhere close to A2 for writing or speaking. MAYBE A1 if you try hard at it for a long long time in a language it well supports. To get to A2 you need a real tutor and real communication experience. I used Verbling to find a tutor and I traveled to Eastern Europe over the summer to practice and only after hundreds of hours of practice was I able to communicate in Russian to any degree e…

>To get to A2 you need a real tutor No you don't. I'm French, I dropped out of school at 16 and picked up English later in life without using any formal method of learning. I started by memorizing enough vocabulary to read simpler English, after which I began reading popular fiction and watched movies with subtitles (in English) until it clicked. My understanding of the language is more based on intuition (sheer memo…

English is different. It’s everywhere.

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

#273

Post by cema » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #265

cema wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I think the definitive and most authoritative review of the Russian grammatical cases was done by Zaliznyak: http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_sta..., in Russian, pages 36-55. Fascinating reading.

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

#274

Post by speechling » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 2:34 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…

Hey!

CEO of Speechling here. We'll work on (7). It's trivial to implement. We want the functionality of (7) to be better and free.

Hongyu