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Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

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Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#61

Post by davidzweig »

djmips wrote: post #45
poulsbohemian wrote: post #22

Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the n…

Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.

I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game..

I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good:

What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake."

>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake."

What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years."

>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016."

This also works: Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#62

Post by BirAdam »

I speak several languages, most living, a few dead. I love languages and have a knack for them. Duo lingo is great at keeping you practicing, which I think is important. However, if you really want to learn a language, you must use it. If you want to learn quickly, use it a lot as often as possible. Speak it, listen to it, read it, and to whatever extent possible think in it. This is easier now than it ever has been. It’s easy to get TV, movies, games, books, music, websites, and so on in whatever language. It would be better to find some actual humans to speak with, but movies and TV are better than nothing.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#63

Post by aeyes »

When I did the full Spanish tree from zero about 5 years ago studying ~1h per day for 3 months it didn't get me very far. I then moved to a Spanish speaking country and started taking 4h of language classes per day immediately. I felt that I could have learned about the same in two weeks there instead of using Duolingo. Some people came in with 0 knowledge and could speak a little after 2 weeks, Duolingo never got me to speak real sentences.

Another problem is that you just repeat without understanding why the words are arranged in a certain way. For adults it is probably more effective to study some grammer rules and to then apply these rules. Learning grammar is really a shortcut and Duolingo doesn't teach you anything about grammar rules. Also, at a certain age you just can't learn grammar by reading/listening and repeating. It takes kids years to learn, you don't have years. I have lived here for over 5 years, took well over 1000h of class in school and still make many grammer mistakes. Other mistakes continue to happen because nobody corrects me, usually we correct kids at least a little bit when they say something wrong.

Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly. I recently tried it again to pick up another language and they put so much monetization on it that it is now basically impossible to learn at your own pace - unless you pay.

I see it as a tool to learn vocabulary. This is very important in the beginning, once you learn 500-1000 words you can rapidly progress on your own. But honestly, to pound vocabulary into my brain, Memrise is a much better tool. I also used grammer tools like conjugator. Another good resource is the free Coffee Break podcast series, Spanish is probably their most complete course and it helped me a lot.

I have seen some good suggestions I didn't know about in this thread, I'll definitely try them when I try to pick up my next language.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#64

Post by Izkata »

alister wrote: post #51
knorker wrote: post #9

Betteridge's law of headlines be damned, the answer is "yes". I've basically only used Duolingo for learning a particular new language. I started from nothing, and just did a little every day during the pandemic. Then I travelled to the country in question, and was able to tell stories in the language. Not easily, and with bad grammar and my vocabulary sucked, but this is more than being able to order at a restaurant…

> surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand" I've seen this too, so many times. If I'm speaking to someone who has trouble with English, I can automatically speak slower, enunciate better, and use simpler words and shorter sentences. But some people cannot adapt the way they speak. I don't think it's because they are unaccommodating o…

Not sure about faster, but louder is what a lot of people do when they're trying to enunciate better, they just don't know how to do it right / what exactly they need to do. Basically they think they were mumbling.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#65

Post by FPGAhacker »

scarface74 wrote: post #40
poulsbohemian wrote: post #22

Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the n…

I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have? But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English. Going the other way is about 95% eff…

> But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.

That's pretty clever.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#67

Post by kaitai »

noduerme wrote: post #46
poulsbohemian wrote: post #22

Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the n…

I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pre…

Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#68

Post by nikolay »

I've been trying to learn Greek, but it's a pain! First, they went overboard with gamification - now, I spend most of my time keeping my place in the Diamond League, not learning new stuff. Sadly, you earn more XP not learning new stuff, so, gamification goes against the learning goals. Another issue is that the scoring is in the app and different versions of the app reward you differently for the same thing - that's why my wife is on a year-old version and earns twice as much XP with less effort, which is unfair. Also, certain languages like Greek are not the same as Spanish and you cannot practice speaking and you learn to recognize the worlds visually well, but not so much to learn a language conversationally.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#69

Post by gsumpster »

simonswords82 wrote: post #34

Wouldn't it be good if Duelingo hooked you up with native language speakers so you could try to strike up conversations in text and voice? It's great to learn words, phrases and so on in isolation but actual conversations in a new language are where the real learning happens. You've got to be on the ball

They do offer real classes done through independent teachers, they are typically group lessons, but they are at a pretty reasonable price! http://classes.duolingo.com

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#70

Post by kaesar14 »

No, it can’t. However, it does have a value as an interest generator. The vast majority of people who start a language on DL, will stop doing DL pretty quickly. Of those who stay, there’ll be a percentage who continue using it for absurd streak lengths while never progressing past the point of basic comprehension or speaking ability. The remaining group will be a group who goes on to use real resources to learn a language the only way possible - through serious, disciplined, and often uncomfortable learning by immersion and real world practice.

I do think Duolingo has great value but I do think the second group I described is seriously wasting their time. I get it’s fun as a game but I figure you really might as well go all in with the amount of time a 1000+ day streak entails

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