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Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

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Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#271

Post by engineeringwoke »

bleverse wrote: post #71

I've been using it on a daily basis for 2 years now and when I switched to 'completely type the answer' instead of 'clicking on words', it made a big difference in learning. 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.

First set of crowns on the phone, move fast. Second set on desktop, completely type the answer. Weave in stories once you feel like you have a foundation. Add immersion from live streams/Netflix. This takes you to at least B2.

There's an unsurprising amount of ignorant responses and strawmen in the thread, kind of sad.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#272

Post by cerved »

rainydaybook wrote: post #260

I've always found Duolingo too boring and it didn't help me at all. I was able to learn 7 languages using different routes. I already knew Russian, I've learned English the usual school + moving to the country route, and I've learned Spanish, French, German, Italian and Latin by mostly reading books and watching online videos and movies. Having bookstores nearby (especially the Strand) with a lot of interesting books…

huh, I've learnt 8 languages, mostly through conversation

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#273

Post by tasogare »

bsder wrote: post #114
tasogare wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Japanese phonology and therefore pronunciation (what the grand parent post is complaining about) is one of the easiest out there. There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. I don't understand how pronunciation could be remotely a problem with Japanese. There are also some other easy things like grammar (very few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and some basic…

> There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. Except that l/r is pronounced differently than most English speakers, the vowels aren't always pronounced yet take up time ("Nan desu ka" is almost always pronounced like "Nan dess ka", for example), and syllable accent is tone rather than volume for emphasis. Other than that, it's completely easy.

Imagine thinking learning ONE phoneme is a hard task... Please never have a look at Arabic or you'll have a stroke.

Moreover [ɾ] can be replaced by [l] perfectly fine and the vowel devoicing is not something you need to do anyway (it's not even occurring in all dialects). So even searching really hard for "difficulties" you can't find even one thing that is remotely difficult which just proves my point.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#274

Post by sova »

csa wrote: post #150
tasogare wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to deleted post: First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. Then count 400-500 kanji per year if learning at university and being motivated (lot of people stops). For conversation count two intensive years for the bare minimum, add one for more fluency. Actually all depends on how much effort you spend on it, I know a guy who was JLPT N2 or so after it's fi…

> First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. You’re still grossly over-representing what is needed to read Japanese. 1. 10k characters is utter nonsense. I assume that people conflate the 10k words needed for JLPT N1 with characters. They are totally different, since words are often combinations of characters. 2. Joyo kanji has 2,136 characters. All government docum…

While it's been posted before, with just under 800 kanji you can have coverage of 90% of kanji in the wild. Of course, one still needs to learn all the clustered terms that these kanji can play together to create, but it reduces the barrier to native media substantially. [0]

[0] https://japanesecomplete.com/777

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#275

Post by mym1990 »

consilla wrote: post #172
tapland wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the test specifications. You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or using words you have no knowledge of. Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages, and the same for my fiancée who is a native English speaker with one secondary language.

I'm surpised this is getting downvoted. The OPs assertion that listening is easier than speaking makes sense in the context he describes, a closed testing environment. In a more practical setting, as someone who is living in another country and learning the language, it is far easier for me to convey my meaning with limited vocabulary, than to listen and interpret another speaker, and especially a group conversation.…

I'm a native Russian speaker but have forgotten most of it since I moved away from there. One thing that makes listening so much easier than speaking is that I can often infer context of a sentence based on just a few words, even if I don't know what the other 5 are. With speaking, I might know what I want to say but I get stuck on the one or two words that I just don't have in my vocabulary, and it crushes my ability to communicate(in Russian).

Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an anecdote :)

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#276

Post by tasogare »

csa wrote: post #150
tasogare wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to deleted post: First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. Then count 400-500 kanji per year if learning at university and being motivated (lot of people stops). For conversation count two intensive years for the bare minimum, add one for more fluency. Actually all depends on how much effort you spend on it, I know a guy who was JLPT N2 or so after it's fi…

> First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. You’re still grossly over-representing what is needed to read Japanese. 1. 10k characters is utter nonsense. I assume that people conflate the 10k words needed for JLPT N1 with characters. They are totally different, since words are often combinations of characters. 2. Joyo kanji has 2,136 characters. All government docum…

Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right. I chatted as soon as yesterday with someone studying Vietnamese dictionaries written in kanbun and nôm, so indeed that person need to know a lot of kanji. That's not representative of the whole society, but you can't rule out the existence of those people. It's also telling that the biggest dictionary of Chinese characters is the Daikanwa Jiten, compiled by a Japanese.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#277

Post by chrisfosterelli »

dorchadas wrote: post #228
AussieWog93 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will. I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language. It is an amazingly powerful tool to bootstrap you from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talkin…

> I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language. I'm active in various Facebook/Reddit groups dealing with language learning. The average user, who's never learned a language before, does think DL will make them fluent. And DL advertises themselves in this manner as well. It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I understand natives?"…

> It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I understand natives?"

As an alternative anecdote, I've been using Duolingo for years and spend some time in the forums + different Spanish learning communities whose users frequently use Duolingo and I have never seen anyone ever ask this.

It's always struck me as obvious to everyone that you would need multiple resources to become fluent, but Duolingo is useful as a good quality free resource that can be done anywhere at any time.

I'm not saying you're wrong, as we probably come across different posts or groups, just an another experience to share.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#278

Post by mym1990 »

high_byte wrote: post #226
least wrote: post #46

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…

the problem isn't that it's hard to do. the problem is that their business model relies on their app not achieving it's portrayed purpose - learning. success means losing your customers. that's why I don't use it anymore and I'm baffled by how good they are at being bad. or rather - staying on the exact thin border between "not good enough" and "not bad enough".

This just isn't true. Duolingo's mission is 'to make education free, fun, and accessible to all'. And for the most part they have succeeded at(or are striving towards) doing those things and have left the learning part to you. Maybe it is not working out for you, and that is likely the case for many people, but to say that their model is to create an unsuccessful learning environment sounds a little bitter.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#279

Post by websites2023 »

least wrote: post #46

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…

Everything you say is true, which is why when I talk about language learning, I discourage people from setting fluency as their goal. Just knowledge of another language is good for the brain, and the fact that you can't become a native speaker should not deter anyone from trying it for fun.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#280

Post by pedroaraujo »

least wrote: post #185
pedroaraujo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 16 month course of 6 to 7 hours per day with a lot of exercise and you didn't learn the language at all? I don't think Duolingo is a good solution but in your case you had all the opportunity to become fully fluent with that kind of regime, it starts to be your fault.

Obviously I knew my language well enough to perform a job which required some amount of proficiency in it. I'd imagine that some people might describe my level of proficiency as fluent. If you were to compare it against university, it'd be around the level of a four year degree, but undoubtedly worse than someone with a master's degree in the language. I think this is more a case of your definition of being "fully fl…

At this point, we are talking about a really high education of a certain language on a thread about a tool to help people going from zero to say basic sentences on another language.

They are two different things. I mean, I am sure that there are academics with superior knowledge than me on my own native language.

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