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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

#301

Post by dnautics »

plainnoodles wrote: post #293
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 agree. I feel like there's 3 phases to learning a new language. Background: English first language, French second, and I've been trying to learn Japanese. The three phases are: 1. Learning basic alphabet (if different from your own), basic grammar. Unlocks: being able to access more learning material and more rapid progress. Progress on these first building blocks is slow and can be discouraging. 2. Learning full g…

Duo is pretty good if your are a second language learner, with some courses/living experience under your belt and want to make sure you've covered all of the basic vocabulary. Like, maybe you never learned the word for "turkey" and it never came up.

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

#302

Post by rafaelero »

JCharante wrote: post #231
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got huge value out of Duolingo as a first step. I live in a German speaking country where it’s entirely possible to speak no German. Duolingo and textbooks got me far enough to enroll in a B1 course and find some speaking partners. The alternative would probably have been paying for a year of A-Level courses, and to be honest I may not have found the time. For absolute beginners, Duolingo has a lot of value.

The alternative could be a $40 textbook and an open source flashcard / srs program.

Ok, boomer.

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

#303

Post by rafaelero »

I don't understand all these comments saying that Duolingo is useless? Maybe your brain is not very fit for acquiring a new language, but the app is nothing more than an easy way to do small exercises. That can be pretty useful by itself, if you really have the motivation to do it a lot.

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

#304

Post by kouteiheika »

dorchadas wrote: post #252
kouteiheika wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have Japanese dramas, light novels, a few normal novels, visual novels and I recently started adding YouTube videos, so it's definitely not only anime.

Perfect, thank you! Please let me know when you release, I'd definitely be interested in it.

Well, it's already publicly available. (:

Here's the link in case you want to take a look: https://jpdb.io

Just a fair bit of warning: it still has ways go to, so don't expect a perfectly polished experienced. That said, in spite of its rough edges I do already have users who use it do hundreds of cards per week and successfully immerse, so it is usable.

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

#305

Post by rafaelero »

holoduke wrote: post #111

My biggest issue with apps like Duolingo is that they pretend learning a language is like a game. Effortless and easy. In reality you need to have quite some motivation to learn every day for a few hours. You need to learn words and grammar by writing them down. Lots of times. You need to talk with people at least a few times per week. You need to repeat a lot. It's very hard work. And even then it takes most regular…

A lot of my English I acquired reading Reddit. Sure, I did have a previous background at school, but I would say that it can be painless.

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

#306

Post by JCharante »

mcluck wrote: post #290
JCharante wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative could be a $40 textbook and an open source flashcard / srs program.

The problem with just textbooks is you don't get to hear or speak the language at all. There's also very little structure so you're expecting a novice to know how to effectively test themselves.

The beginner textbooks I've used have accompanying CDs, and also audio available on their websites. The best beginner listening practice is to focus on minimal pairs so that you can start to hear the difference between different sounds that originally sounded the same. Some textbooks include this (I remember having to combine initials and finals in Chinese with my teacher)

For speaking, Duolingo speech recognition isn't very good and is not going to provide specific feedback for improving your pronunciation. I'm not even a fan of practicing pronunciation virtually with a live tutor. I have found in person pronunciation practice to be very valuable compared to doing the same thing but online. A textbook doesn't solve this and neither does Duolingo.

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

#307

Post by csa »

least wrote: post #190
csa wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure this person was learning Pashto or Dari. The materials were mostly (all?) developed in-house. If they were learning Dari, they would have been better off just using externally-produced Farsi textbooks since they have a more robust history of development. The specific recommended materials for an introduction to a language depend on what your goals are for learning the language.

Yeah, the Dari course was notoriously bad quality and rife with controversy with some of the highest failure rates in the entire Presidio at the time. Not sure if anything's changed at this point?

Things improved slightly, then the program got reduced and then cut due to less demand.

Somewhere in there, they got creative and had folks who passed Farsi take a 3-month Dari course to bridge the gap between Farsi and Dari, and those folks had a lot of success.

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

#308

Post by JCharante »

asoneth wrote: post #288
JCharante wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but you see people still using Duolingo after 6 months or 1 year. If you saw someone still using training wheels after 1 year, you would tell them to stop because it's handicapping them. Duolingo is the same, it's a terrible investment of time after 1 month.

As someone who has used Duolingo and spaced repetition apps for ~10m/day for the last four or five years, is there something specific you recommend transitioning to? I've started with some Netflix and podcasts, but they're a little more awkward in 10m chunks.

If I only had 10 minutes a day, I would go to an online newspaper and go to the advice column. There are people who write in for advice/discuss and people in the comments will reply. They're going to be using native expressions and idioms, making references to shared knowledge that everyone there knows. It's also going to be about a wide variety of problems (although a lot tend to be relationship based) which means you'll be able to naturally recall a large variety of words.

Try to read it. If you don't get some words or sentence, skip the sentence for now. Then once you're done with the first read lookup in a dictionary or glosbe and then finally text someone for an explanation to that phrase. (It can be hard to find those friends without visiting a country that speaks your TL and befriending people there).

And then feel free to enter that phrase in your SRS.

---

I went abroad for 6 months to study my TL (target language) at a foreign language school and would roam campus finding (local) people who don't look busy to help me accomplish this task in real time.

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

#309

Post by jfengel »

splonk wrote: post #286
jfengel wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even if it were, it would take more than six months to get there. A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months. Duolingo could at b…

They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own. https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/

I just completed all of that content up to French level 1. It's helpful in introducing a lot of important-but-uncommon verb cases (conditional, subjunctive), but at least at level 1 I still wouldn't really be able to follow them in context.

It sure as hell doesn't help that in French they all sound the same. They're clear enough in written form, but French in particular requires close attention to context. Even other Romance languages draw the same distinctions more clearly.

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

#310

Post by hirad »

I need to take exception with many of the comments here. Does Duolingo make you fluent in any language? No. But if that's what you're looking for (from any language learning tool), you need to readjust your expectations. The only thing that teaches you a language is immersion in a society that speaks it, in my experience. All language-learning exercises are just prep work for that. And on that front, Duolingo is exemplary.

I've been doing Spanish with it for the whole pandemic. I'm far from fluent but my retention is high and the learning process is easy and fun. Couldn't ask for more.

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