500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
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Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#2I envy the author's persistence. 500 days of working on a task without skipping a day is impressive.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#3I’ve used Duolingo for several years almost daily for 2-3 minutes to get started with learning Spanish (on a very longterm time horizon). It was a great way to start (because it felt like basically zero effort, other than establishing the daily habit which is naturally easy for me). Nowadays I read and watch Spanish-language news and write a daily journal in Spanish. I’m not at fluency yet but progress is steady.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#4I envy the author's persistence. 500 days of working on a task without skipping a day is impressive.
It is impressive, but you can buy items (with the in-app currency you get from finishing lections) that allow you to skip single days (or even whole weekends, IIRC).
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#5The worst part of Duolingo is how boring it is to level up a skill to 5 when you already understand the topics taught. When learning German or Italian and testing out of the earlier levels, the exercise you get most of the time is just "sort these English words to translate the sentence". You can get it right all the time just by looking for a grammatically correct sentence with the most superficial of understanding. And if you really understand the sentence, you feel like you are wasting your time. What's the point? Let me take the level 4 or level 5 test directly!
I feel that over time, the app has been too optimized for user engagement instead of efficient learning. A/B test abuse, and looking at the wrong metrics.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#6I envy the author's persistence. 500 days of working on a task without skipping a day is impressive.
It gets easier to maintain habits the longer you've been doing them. Most people can manage a 500-day streak of brushing their teeth easily. So the trick is to integrate studying into your daily routine the same way, such that it will feel just wrong to skip.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#7The best way to learn a language is to need to learn it. If you come in contact with a foreign language daily, it becomes much easier to both practice and motivate yourself to continue to practice. As someone who has spent thousands of hours learning a foreign language, I've come to the conclusion that I will never do it again unless I have a proper reason for it. Might seem obvious, but it's worth pointing out.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#8I’ve used Duolingo for several years almost daily for 2-3 minutes to get started with learning Spanish (on a very longterm time horizon). It was a great way to start (because it felt like basically zero effort, other than establishing the daily habit which is naturally easy for me). Nowadays I read and watch Spanish-language news and write a daily journal in Spanish. I’m not at fluency yet but progress is steady.
It's a great way to start, and a great way to practice certain skills that are perhaps less oiled. I read foreign papers, listen to foreign music, and watch foreign films but that only helps so much with the actual speaking part of language. To those complaining of DuoLingo shortcomings, remember it's a part of language learning and not a one-stop-shop.
Practicing tricky conjugations and endings for languages is where DuoLingo is of most use to me, such that I keep up with my "language feel" so on-the-fly speaking isn't as mentally taxing. The times where I have taken extended breaks from DuoLingo would always end in my feeling as though I was getting rusty and not able to properly speak.
Also, thank you to whomever added the "leaderboard" feature to DuoLingo. Really brings out my competitiveness such that I now do something like 300 lessons per week as opposed to doing maybe 50 per week back in the day. Love when apps do things like that, helping me help myself.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#9As far as language learning apps go I've gotten way more milage out of Clozemaster than I ever did out of Duolingo. At least for learning vocabulary Clozemaster's combination of spaced repetition and cloze-completions helps immensely (especially using it on free text input mode instead of multiple choice). That said Duolingo does help a lot more with the dead basics.
For context I could already speak Mandarin because I grew up bilingual but always found that I've have to laboriously re-learn vocabulary for literacy. Clozemaster seems like the most sustainable way for me to maintain an expanded vocabulary (in both Traditional and Simplified characters) that I've found.
I just do Clozemaster every time I sit on a toilet, pretty easy habit cue, if a bit gross.
Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app
#10The best way to learn a language is to need to learn it. If you come in contact with a foreign language daily, it becomes much easier to both practice and motivate yourself to continue to practice. As someone who has spent thousands of hours learning a foreign language, I've come to the conclusion that I will never do it again unless I have a proper reason for it. Might seem obvious, but it's worth pointing out.
Another, closely related, case is when you love the culture the language gives you access to. Learning a language without interesting books/movies/tv shows behind it will most probably be a chore.