81–90 of 352 posts
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…
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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…
First if you enjoy learning new languages and you find it useful thats great! Not trying to put you down in any way. However, you say: > 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!) l…
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I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of people. The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks. I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful enough to look beyond Duolingo.
That's cool I'd love to hear more about it, I've actually been thinking about ways that a language app could work better. Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical, an app that just played me conversations, had me read text, etc and 'creatively' formulate responses, not just simply fill in the missing word, obviously in increasing difficulty would be ideal.
This, a hundred times this. Immersion is not only effective in getting you used to the language, but also really helps you solidify what you've learned, and is extremely motivating.
Virtually all of the people that I know in the Japanese learning community who learned the language really fast heavily immersed in a lot of content.
In my own language learning app that I'm making I'm explicitly targeting a feedback loop which looks something like this:
1) You pick an easy show/book/etc. to consume. (I have a list ranked according to difficulty, generated through machine learning.)
2) You prelearn the vocabulary used within using an SRS.
3) You consume it.
4) You continue maintaining your vocabulary through SRS, so the app knows which words you're supposed to know.
5) The app recommends you the next show/book/etc. to consume based on what you've already learned.
6) Rinse and repeat. Gradually the whole thing snowballs and you have to learn less and less for each new work you consume.
I personally believe this to be the most effective way of learning a language, and I'm already seeing some of my users having a lot of success with it.
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.
It's a shame, because Duolingo is fun, the art style is cool and the gamified stuff is potentially useful for keeping people coming back and doing the lessons. It just really hasn't felt very effective to me at language learning at all...
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.
"Balance sheet is red" is about the only thing they can understand about an IPO, and thus they comment about it.
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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 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 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 intende…
I'm surprised how much I get now between translating words I don't know on leo.org and just reading what I know already on news articles which is how I'm keeping up casually on that. The journalism in that country is top notch and it is probably worth learning the language for this alone.
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…
It still improves you way more then anything else you can do alone with low effort.
Being fluent is absurdly high goal. At first, remembering basic structure of sentence and vocabulary is already achievement.
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…
People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.
Reading a menu requires cultural context along with reading comprehension. Unless you're intimately familiar with the culture, being able to read it (as in sound it out by reading the characters) is pretty useless. نان (naan) is probably something you could understand because it's a loanword we use in English from Arabic but without cultural context could someone guess what قابلی پلاؤ (Kabuli Pilau) means? Probably not. If you're in Japan and China, learning to read a menu is in itself a huge barrier.
Now I am learning a 3rd language in a new country. I started with Duolingo and never believed in "Paid courses". I have used it close to a year with little impact on my skills. But I have made most of my progress when I actually talked to someone. There is a feeling of embarrassment and defenselessness when you put yourself in uncomfortable situations like that and that is what you need to make it stay.
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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…
> The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations 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 fa…