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

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

#171

Post by usaar333 » Sat, May 04, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #159

usaar333 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive. Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin (that is produce and listen to sounds radically different from my native English). From what I've seen the ability for computers to g…

> Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially alw…

Agreed. By "people" above, I should have clarified "adults".

The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language.

Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.

In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard.

Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.

A source that goes into this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/

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

#172

Post by varjag » Sat, May 04, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #110

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…

Upvoted because I want to see replies to this question. My intuition is that language learning has other positive effects than just the practical one of allowing you to converse with other people in that language. For instance you say that math would be more rewarding in the long run. But why? Most people really don't have a practical need for math past arithmetic. But your intuition is that it is nonetheless rewardi…

I do think differently in every language I know, even swearing mentally has distinct hue. It's a good question how useful is that, but there is no question languages add certain perspective.

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

#173

Post by projektfu » Sat, May 04, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #122

Volrath89 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

poeta, nauta are two -a nouns that are masculine; sofa if you count a with accents

most nouns ending in -ma (but not all) are masculine. Basically the ones with Greek roots. I was taught -ma is masculine like your mom.

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

#174

Post by bluetomcat » Sat, May 04, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

rjf72 wrote: post #154

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…

There are numerous studies you can find showing how learning a new language helps the brain in various quantifiable ways such as increases in white and gray brain matter. But these can be discovered by a simple search, so let's consider other things. To start with only 372 million people speak English natively, with 611 million adopting it as a workable second language. A total of 983 million. Putting these numbers i…

I think that in the context of learning foreign languages, you have to distinguish between the willingness to learn about "cultures" and the willingness to gain information unavailable in your mother language. You can still gain some pretty detailed information about the French revolution in English, and only if you wish to specialise closely on that subject, you'll probably need fluency in French. Conversely, you can learn a lot about Victorian England in French. I'm trying to illustrate the fact that important and valuable information is not necessarily siloed by language.

English is the defacto international language nowadays. I am Bulgarian, and after crossing the border with neighbouring Romania I'm using English, since the effort to learn Romanian is not worth the time when my intentions are just to travel there occasionally. The two languages are very different, and Romanians aren't willing to learn Bulgarian either.

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

#175

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, May 04, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #171

thaumasiotes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially alw…

Agreed. By "people" above, I should have clarified "adults". The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language. Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understan…

> Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.

This is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that infants are born recognizing every potential phoneme, and what they learn to do is to ignore the differences between sounds that their language considers equivalent. They don't learn to make distinctions they weren't formerly able to make. (This supports the idea that learning foreign sounds is much harder for adults -- I mention it because most people intuitively believe that things happen the other way around.)

Adults do preserve the ability to learn to ignore the difference between two sounds, but that's much less useful than learning a distinction would be. :(

> Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality.

English features tones pretty heavily, most prominently in the usually-obligatory tonal marking for yes/no questions, but interestingly also in the I-don't-know tonal sequence.

> I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.

Agreed.

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

#176

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, May 04, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #159

usaar333 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive. Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin (that is produce and listen to sounds radically different from my native English). From what I've seen the ability for computers to g…

> Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially alw…

>That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially always ignore the feedback. //

Interesting, I've some previous and am currently in a situation where I actively correct a child learner, and they respond well to that correction wrt language, less so in behavioural aspects unfortunately ;o)

For clarity, what I do with mispronunciations is break down the word in to phonemes. Yellow is a classic, that a lot of kids struggle with, current child subject has a propensity to say "lellow", though he gets it right more often than not now (age 3) -- I break that down as "yuh-ell-oh" and have him say other words that he can pronounce like "yes" and "yum". So I go "yes, yes, yes, yes, yellow" whilst he listens, then we do it together.

Most early language acquisition is done at home, and for us that has meant away from other parents so I'm not really sure how others do it. I have seen the "aw that's cute" reaction to mispronunciation in the wild, which I guess is a blocker for some.

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

#177

Post by hombre_fatal » Sat, May 04, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

benjaminjackman wrote: post #125

tdumitrescu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

That's a really interesting approach. I wonder if there are reading apps which have that dictionary integrated, but which still require a mouseover / tap to display it for a particular word (they are just using a translation language dictionary).

In my experience, a little hardship when looking up a word helps you remember it. Like having to alt-tab to a Google Translate tab vs just tapping the word inline, or having subtitles.

If it's too easy, then I found I'll look up the same words every time because it's too easy-come-easy-go.

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

#178

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, May 04, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

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.…

>"sort these English words to translate the sentence" //

If I remember correctly you can choose to type in the words, but on mobile it can be easier mechanically to choose the words from the list and place them in order. Later on I think it removes the choice in some tests and has you type full sentences.

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

#179

Post by reactspa » Sat, May 04, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

gibba999 wrote: post #140

bit_logic wrote: post #119

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 d…

I found the article to be BS. My experience: 1) Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. You just reinforce each others' bad accents, grammar mistakes, etc. 2) Duolingo is okay for some things, but not for others. But discounting all apps after having tried one or two, though, is a lot like the famous Gates quote: "640k should be enough for anybody" (which he cla…

> There are apps for watching movies for language learning (which adds subtitles, dictionaries, etc.)

I've been searching for such apps (for watching movies/audio-visual content). Got any names to share? Thanks.

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

#180

Post by chriselles » Sat, May 04, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

Both of our teenagers use Duolingo to “top up” their in person foreign language classes at school.

They are both categorised as “above expectation/level”.

Hard to ascertain how much additional value Duo Lingo adds, but in aggregate it seems to be helping.

However, I wonder if there would be a way to effectively match students learning opposing languages to help each other one in one via Zoom?

We’re certainly grateful for the free language support!