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500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

nytimes.com

31–40 of 221 posts

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#31

I’ve found no better technique than a language exchange partner. If you are learning Spanish, find a Spanish speaker trying to learn English. Meet up for an hour speaking English for 30 minutes and Spanish for 30 minutes. For me, this was the only way to put lessons into practice without the stress.

But it doesn't apply when it comes to unpopular(frankly speaking I am a Chinese and several years ago I tried my best to find a partner for English but failed) languages like Chinese.

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#33
I am a Chinese and I am learning German on Duolingo in English and sometimes learn English in German. I am on my 561 day streak today and I find it is very useful.

Before practice I can learn the related grammar and the newly added stories feature and tinycards function is of great help(glean words in context).

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#34
post #5

The 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.…

Repetition is the mother of learning, as the old Russian proverb states. The point is making a phrase really get memorized.

The Pimsleur method, which relies on a progressly timed learning technique really helps commit language to long term memory. It's audio only, but I really recommend then. I believe Ankh is based on this as well.

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#35

I agree with the article insofar as that learning a language solely via an app is not effective. However, I do not get the impression that the author actually has much experience learning languages through other means. > The phrase “learning a language” is deceptively reductive. A language isn’t a > singular monolith, but rather a complex interconnected system of components > that build a way to communicate. The lexi…

[deleted]

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#36
post #5

The 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.…

From my experience most language learning products get boring once you advance. Happened to me with Pimsleur and also Duolingo. At some point you are ready for real conversation with people and the constant repetition that is necessary for the basics gets tedious.

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#37
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can switch between using keyboard input and word banks (at least on desktop)

and you only need level 1 of something to move on to the next lesson.

Yes, that's true. But level 1 doesn't force you to write in the target language - the real value is in the last level. You can go through the level 1 of all lessons relatively quickly, but you won't be actually learning.

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#38
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repetition is the mother of learning, as the old Russian proverb states. The point is making a phrase really get memorized.

The Pimsleur method, which relies on a progressly timed learning technique really helps commit language to long term memory. It's audio only, but I really recommend then. I believe Ankh is based on this as well.

Pimsleur really hammers the language into you until it becomes instinctive.

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#39
post #7

The 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.

I plan to learn Spanish by staying in Peru for a 2 months. I would duolingo spanish before that and put everything together and accelerate when i am in Peru.

Thats the plan for now anyways :D.

Re: 500 days of Duolingo: What you can and can’t learn from a language app

#40
I learned Spanish 12 years ago by studying in Antigua, Guatemala then continuing to backpack through South America. I never felt that I learned Spanish until after about a month in Colombia where I had to use Spanish almost daily for the entire day.

I’ve tried DuoLingo for French and I’ve built several language apps myself. I think we’ll eventually get to the point where we can learn new languages from our phones but it will require a lot more content and interaction.

i haven’t updated my core apps in 4 years:

http://appstore.com/h4labs

At the moment I’m merely trying to assist the learning process with simple games:

Word Search:

- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-search/id1311744...

Matching Games:

- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pictures-and-words/id1459560... - https://itunes.apple.com/sk/app/language-pairs/id1438817614?...

I’m looking for other ideas to build. At the moment, I’m working on a Verb Conjugation Game.

I’m also building Spanish verb rule database on Github:

https://github.com/melling/Spanish_Verbs/blob/master/Conjuga...

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