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

For Mandarin Chinese, I found the Chinese-specific apps HelloChinese and ChineseSkill to be much better than Duolingo. Duolingo seems to follow a one-size-fits-all approach, and it suffers when faced with a language with tones, a complex character system, a romanization system commonly used for learning (pinyin), etc. Those other two apps have been called Duolingo clones, but they were designed with Chinese specifically in mind and it shows, they're leaps and bounds better.

I also have found The Chairman's Bao (news, curated and graded by HSK level, together with pinyin, vocabulary, grammar points and questions associated with each piece of news) and various Coursera courses helpful.

There is also plenty of crappy apps and resources around, and probably much better resources than the current ones will be made, but if one chooses well, it's amazing how easier it is to learn a language now than ten years ago. Getting to any nontrivial level of Mandarin Chinese was all but impossible without classes, now it's doable.

My now 12.5 years old daughter started to learn English on Duolingo when she was around 9. She didn't complete the full course, but has around 100-150 days of lessons. It definitely helped her starting to understand the language.

She loves Harry Potter so much that after reading the whole series in Romanian, she started to read the first volume in English. Didn't finish that either, but managed to read about 100 pages of it and she said that after 30-40 pages, it became substantially easier to understand.

Now she's among top 3 students, if not the first, in her class at English, outpacing colleagues who take 2-3 hours weekly of extra English lessons, without having a single paid English lesson.

Duolingo might not teach you how to speak a language fluently, but it definitely can give you a headstart in learning one.

She's not able to speak English fluently yet, but she's able to watch TV series without subtitles and she's able to actually communicate with other English speaking people when visiting other countries.

2000+ day streaker here, 5.5 years give or take, and I agree that the original article reads about right. I feel Duolingo hit the sweet spot roughly two years in, that is to say a good balance of introducing new vocab with revision of previous topics. It's still a very good way to pick up some basics, and I learned more with it than I ever did when I studied a language as part of my secondary education.

When Duolingo changed the way the skill tree worked a couple (?) of years ago it felt like it became more of a grind. I know they have some pretty smart people working on the app though, so I'm sure they're going in the right direction; but it feels like it's now easier to progress through the tree and the amount of vocab has been reduced, including hiding/simplifying the grammar study. IIRC in the original tree you had things like the "passé composé" introduced sooner, now they appear at a point that I suspect most users will have given up.

FWIW I tried Memrise early on and I didn't like the non-literal approach to the flash cards. I've been using Anki, which has some good decks but they can be questionable - for example the top 500 French words doesn't include the articles with the nouns, not a good thing.

Of course, the biggest things that have contributed to learning: moving to a French speaking country, switching all my devices to French, attending some classes, volunteering in a local gallery where I need to speak and use some vocab I wouldn't usually encounter. Still a long way to go though.

In my mother tongue (Bulgarian), the style of everyday communication is rather different. Ad-hominem arguments are not rare and are sometimes considered a legitimate way of reasoning, people are also expecting to receive and send "orders" when they communicate in a business environment. All of that doesn't foster any deep reasoning and leads to shallow conversations which change their direction quite sporadically.

Coming here to this website, I am able to enjoy a style of coherent communication where your arguments must be well-grounded and logically sound. In the relatively rare cases of applying personal bias while questioning the claims of others, you do so with much softer words and phrases.

For example, something like "I'd like to pretend that the issue is..." is a construct which can be translated to Bulgarian with a very similar grammatical construction, but it is virtually unused and would be considered outrageously snobbish and pretentious when used. We would just say "the issue is...".

Duolingo is not good for learning East Asian languages. For Japanese, it is particularly bad. Try LingoDeer instead.