What would be your best app for learning a language?
I take lessons through verbling.com
Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
81–90 of 252 posts
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#82Something 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…
> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough.
I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#83Over the past few years I have tried every language learning app I could find. The most success I have had is with LingoDeer. The formatting and I instructions really give that feeling of a classroom lesson. Learning Korean as an English speaker has been very challenging. I feel that LingoDeer has gotten me further in a few weeks compared to what I learned with a months of Duolingo or Rosetta. Duolingo if not paying for it becomes absolutely ad filled and frustrating.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.
Well, for one, learning languages is often just about fulfilling an interest rather than actually needing it.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#85Best way to learn a language is to watch tv and movies.
> Best way to learn [to understand] a language is to watch tv and movies.
There's no replacement for having to dig into the "vocabulary bag" and pull out a word when you need it, or the "fluency" that comes from having someone ask you a question that you have to string together multiple vocabulary words _in the right order_ to answer
It's like any homework: it's the challenge that solidifies the pathways, otherwise just sitting in a calculus class would be all one needed to become Laplace
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly.
Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word transliterations from English which are not native Chinese) and occasionally just regurgitate nonsense. It’s not something that I would freely unleash on the end user but there is definitely a place for it somewhere in the pipeline in future.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. I get your point, but with the pace of AI, there's a good chance this statement is not true in 5 years!
I don’t think so. Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I don’t really know how AI could solve this, unless you mean that the AI can ferret out your gaps and tune the program to your learning needs. Isn’t this what Duolingo tries to do? Genuinely asking. I pay for the “super” Duolingo for no ads and unlimited learning because I’m kind of addicted to it, but I plan trips to German…
I'm guessing he's suggesting the AI can be a conversation buddy anytime you want, and also point out your mistakes so you can learn from them.
imo this would be awesome and a game changer
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#88I have a roughly 600 day streak in Spanish, having started with no background, and I am quite pleased with the progress given how little time I dedicate to it each day. My only issue with Duolingo is that I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules. Their inclusion currently is really poorly executed, haphazardly located in certain lessons as if random. I’d love if I could…
> I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules.
I have had this same wish. I often find myself wondering why something is a certain way and I'm not even sure how to go look it up.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#89Something 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…
I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation.
The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#90Something 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…
Oh man good luck learning to write french! I had lots of success with pimsleur for Spanish (but I'm already a basic competency french speaker so most of the concepts and grammar are familiar to me). Duolingo did not really do it for me. Luckily, Spanish orthography is pretty regular as long as you stay within the same regional pronunciation group.