71–80 of 352 posts
I think a big factor in its usefulness depends on the user. If you make it hard for yourself, you will get much more out of it.
Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue growth. They have 40 million monthly active users. Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.
https://venturebeat.com/2008/04/24/one-small-step-for-myspac...
I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…
I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…
I find it really useful for practice, but it's obviously not the best thing to be using solely if you think that's going to reach you to proficiency. It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive. I've got books for learning Russian and German to go through along with using Duolingo as a pretty good opti…
I've tried to use Duolingo to learn a new language. I found it very effective for a few weeks (of daily exercise).
I remember though, that at some point the questions were repeated frequently, went off the intended theme, and overall, they were not intended to make users think or remember.
Getting off track was something that irritated me the most, as I couldn't focus on a subject.
Essentially, after the initial phase, it's completely useless as a learning tool. It's a shame because it could be effective and fun at the same, but I have the suspicion that mid/long-term learning effectiveness is not their target.
I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…
In theory their valuation is based on expected future returns. There are a lot of apps that have no or limited benefits that still drive traffic and revenue (all the brain training apps come to mind).
I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…
I find it really useful for practice, but it's obviously not the best thing to be using solely if you think that's going to reach you to proficiency. It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive. I've got books for learning Russian and German to go through along with using Duolingo as a pretty good opti…
> it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive
This makes it sound like video games are useless and learning a new language is super useful. In your situation this could totally be true but for some people (like me!) learning a new language isn't super useful! If your a video game dev playing games would be 100x more productive than learning a new language and if you travel around the world then learning a language would be 100x better than a video game! I feel like its almost impossible to know whats more "productive" in general.
[0] https://money.cnn.com/2011/12/14/technology/zynga_ipo_price/...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/16/zynga-ipo-...
Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations. You have to decipher confusing sentences, handle unfamiliar words and wrestle your brain into thinking in a different language. You can't really make a fun game that does this. Therefore Duolingo makes a game that focuses on translating the foreign language to your native one. That's great for starting…
Immersion is the only way you’ll ever truly learn a language. All the classes, flash cards, etc., in the world can’t teach you how to clear up a misunderstanding with the manager at hotel in Spanish.
I remember at some point we did Duolingo in Spanish, and the Spanish speaking kids were shocked how fast we (black) tested out of topics and progressed. The reason was pretty obvious; we’re around y’all a lot lol.
My recommendation is even if you don’t have many people speaking the language you want to learn near you, immerse yourself. Read popular modern authors in the language, listen to podcasts in the language, join a game server and practice in-game interaction in the language (hard mode).
Maybe it is useless. But you may find that those encounters take place on a foundation built by some little green bird named Duo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is still an unsolved problem.
I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach
There are also some other easy things like grammar (very few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and some basic sentence pattern (heck you can make full sentences, sometimes conversations, with a single word [the predicative adjectives]).