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

nytimes.com

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

#41

Post by Mirioron »

yorwba wrote: post #6
Mirioron wrote: post #2

I 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.

It sounds pretty impossible to me. I don't think I've had a 500 day streak of anything that isn't a biological function in my life. In the last 2 years I've not even maintained a streak of eating food every day.

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

#42

Post by StavrosK »

macleginn wrote: post #10
msvan wrote: 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.

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.

> Learning a language without interesting books/movies/tv shows behind it will most probably be a chore.

What language doesn't have interesting items of culture behind it?

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

#43

Post by LanceH »

cosarara wrote: post #37
LanceH wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of the distinction between the levels as I'm running them all up to five since Japanese is so completely foreign to me.

The Japanese course seems to be hated by the reddit crowd for learning the language, but it's been very beneficial to me. At least one reason is that if I stuck to writing the language in a workbook my progress on the language would be glacial. I would physically be able to write the characters better but would know a lot less of the language.

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

#44

Post by Sharlin »

cosarara wrote: 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.…

In the desktop web app you can at least always take a test to skip a level or four. On mobile you have to spend credits to skip.

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

#45

Post by navidfarhadi »

Sharlin wrote: post #44
cosarara wrote: 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.…

In the desktop web app you can at least always take a test to skip a level or four. On mobile you have to spend credits to skip.

You can do this on their mobile web app as well which is why I use that over the mobile application. The mobile web app experience is actually quite nice.

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

#46

Post by ben_w »

I agree with the criticisms in this article. I currently have a 1.012 day streak on Duolingo, which I’m using to learn German, Esperanto, and Greek. I’ve “completed” the German course several times as the course was expanded, and even with the help of Clozemaster and Memrise I’m still only a B1 on an online CEFR test. It’s fine for the basics, but there’s no way it’ll make you good enough to, say, start working for a German-language software development company.

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

#47

Post by kabacha »

I was an early duolingo adopter but I feel that the app went nowhere if not down-hill. The main drive force at the beginning was learning a language just good enough and moving onto translating articles and comparing translations with other users and discussing these - that was a very intersting way of learning. Today you just grind simple questions on terribly designed courses. The writte material is an absolute joke and for the longest time wasn't even available on mobile.

Also this obsession with streak really killing motivation for learning. Someone should send duolingo the article that was on HN front-page few days ago about learning being more effecitve when taking breaks.

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

#48

Post by microcolonel »

cosarara wrote: 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.…

> 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.

I think this is just a regression that came in as a result of their mobile app push. They expected it to be difficult for new users to get started with input methods, so they replaced typing exercises with word arrangement exercises, this means that the whole answer is just sitting on your screen, which defeats some of the point.

You can fix this by configuring these exercise types to be typing rather than word rearrangement, there's a little toggle IIRC at the bottom of each of this exercise type.

I agree that in the last year or two they seem to have optimized for metrics which do not map well to linguistic attainment. IIRC they used to have speaking exercises, and as far as I'm aware those are gone (maybe they couldn't make them good enough that they weren't making some people worse at speaking).

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

#49

Post by galfarragem »

I used Memrise until I got bored: being forced to learn and repeat ad nauseam words that I'm sure I will never use is stupid. Since then I use an Anki deck with selected words/sentences picked from a Polish newspaper and a cheatsheet[1], that I should update more often, for patterns and macro understanding.

[1] https://github.com/archimodels/learning-notes/blob/master/no...

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