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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

#111

Post by bigred100 »

magicbuzz wrote: post #109
bigred100 wrote: post #105

Anyone else feel like language learning is overrated? (Yes I’m an uncultured provincial American and I’m sorry). Unless you frequently travel somewhere where another language is spoken, have family that speaks another language, or want to travel places like that, it’s hard for me to see why learning more about your own language, math or something, socializing, learning about how your government and society work, or s…

Learning a language teaches you deeply about that culture and gives you perspectives on your own culture from the standpoint of another.

Maybe, but if that’s the sole purpose I would prefer to follow the traditional route of Latin/Greek classics

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

#112

Post by dashundchen »

blacksqr wrote: post #95
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 app has been too optimized for user engagement instead of efficient learning Yes. As an ad-supported app, the developers overwhelming motivation is to get users to take the next lesson, rather than to progress them toward mastery. The app seems designed to stimulate every reward center in the brain toward that end, the mechanisms for which usually ending up getting in the way of accessing the lesson content effi…

Duolingo also has a website, which is what I used studying German 6 years ago. Not only did it not have ads (don't know if that's still true), input with he keyboard was much easier and I felt gave me a little more memory than swiping a keyboard.

At that time each grammar lesson also had a page summarising the rules you were about to learn with examples and explainations.

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

#113

Post by mgbmtl »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #82

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 specifica…

Much appreciated. I have been learning Mandarin on Duolingo. It was mostly just for fun, but at some point it starts getting a bit frustrating (lack of notes, topics, reading longer texts).

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

#114

Post by notafraudster »

bigred100 wrote: post #105

Anyone else feel like language learning is overrated? (Yes I’m an uncultured provincial American and I’m sorry). Unless you frequently travel somewhere where another language is spoken, have family that speaks another language, or want to travel places like that, it’s hard for me to see why learning more about your own language, math or something, socializing, learning about how your government and society work, or s…

Most things worth learning about have a qualia-like quality where you don't understand the value of learning them until you've learned them. Travel also has this quality.

Learning languages helps you with all of the things you'd prefer doing. I don't know anyone who studies comparative (or increasingly, American) politics without knowing at least a second language and ideally more. Learning other languages helps with knowing your own, or at least it did for me. Knowing languages clearly helps with knowing cultures, and that helps with socializing -- it's amazing what an ice breaker even, like, two weeks of training in a language is when you meet someone who speaks it. I've found multilingual fluency has helped me with coding as well.

Most immersion during language learning is essentially passive. Instead of reading the news or watching TV in your native language, do it in the language you're learning. Very little additional investment, huge reward.

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

#115

Post by DINKDINK »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #84

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 page…

>She didn't complete the full course, but has around 100-150 days of lessons

"Did wet streets cause rain or did rain cause wet streets" Did 100 lessons of treatment (duolingo) cause her to become proficient in English or are children with a natural proficiency towards language the ones that survive the treatment?

If only the strongest people survive having their blood drawn by leeches, it doesn't mean that leeches make you strong. Despite there being a high correlation in treatment outcome.

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

#116

Post by _RPM »

dominotw wrote: post #39
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.

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.

You might be able to speak colloquial phrases, but you will not be able to write correctly. For example, perhaps you will be able to order food from a restaurant, or say hello to a stranger.

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

#117

Post by bluetomcat »

bigred100 wrote: post #105

Anyone else feel like language learning is overrated? (Yes I’m an uncultured provincial American and I’m sorry). Unless you frequently travel somewhere where another language is spoken, have family that speaks another language, or want to travel places like that, it’s hard for me to see why learning more about your own language, math or something, socializing, learning about how your government and society work, or s…

I am Bulgarian and I fall into the same camp. English is the only foreign language I'm striving to learn and improve as I'm considering it a window to the world for knowledge. It gives me access to a vast amount of information which simply isn't available in a language spoken by around 9 million people.

Many of my acquaintances are into German, Russian or French, but I do not consider it an asset unless I'll be relocating to these countries.

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

#118

Post by tdumitrescu »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #84

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 page…

When I started learning more languages as an adult, I found that the biggest accelerator for me personally was likewise to read novels, even if they were way beyond my nominal skill level. The first 50-100 pages would be slow grinding, looking up almost everything in the dictionary, but then it would rapidly get faster and easier as I got used to common turns of phrases, idioms etc. And it was great for maintaining real motivation, wanting to read and understand these captivating stories by Eco, Houellebecq, etc.

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

#119

Post by bit_logic »

Learning a language requires immersion. That's why classes with other students are more effective than flashcards.

VR has potential to really make a difference here. Imagine you load a VR level. It's a busy outdoor market in Taipei. In your inventory you have some cash. NPCs with AI and chat logic are around you interacting. Your goal is to buy some bread and get to the subway. You see a vendor with some bread, but don't remember the word for bread. You hear a NPC talking to the vendor and buying some bread. Now you remember. You speak the words, but the vendor doesn't understand. Your tones are off. You try again, this time the vendor smiles and says how much it costs. You give cash, take the bread, and walk to the subway. The next level, buying a subway pass...

This basically already exists in RPG games. It just needs mic support so you can speak and good "game" design that's designed to help learn the language. Playing this for an hour a day would be more effective than an hour of flashcards. And also a lot fun.

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

#120

Post by andybalholm »

Volrath89 wrote: post #106
zeta0134 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I would mess up the example. :P You're completely right of course. I guess I assumed it applied to both genders, but I'm still picking up the gender of a lot of the words; that's not terribly intuitive.

(almost) All the nouns ending with "a" are feminine - la silla, la mesa, la casa, la luna, la montaña. (Notable exception: el agua). Also feminine all that end in "ción" such as: la nación, la configuración, la confirmación. Almost all the other nouns are masculine - el carro, el niño, el oso, el barrio, el avión, el camión, el árbol. Pretty sure with those 2 simple rules you will catch 90% of genders right.

Actually, agua is feminine. But it takes el instead of la because it starts with an accented a. The common language-learning advice is "Don't learn the genders of nouns; learn the articles that go with them." But it doesn't quite work in Spanish.
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