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Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

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Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#121

Post by fcatalan »

In my experience, Duolingo is as good, in fact better than the average class you can get. It won't get you to fluency by itself, but years of bare lessons won't either.

A few years ago I got randomly interested in Danish, so I started Duolingo Danish. In a few weeks I was able to understand tweets from Danish newspapers. In 4 months I could read novels, slowly but well enough to enjoy them. Do I "know" Danish? Not really, I can't speak past a few sentences and have a hard time understanding it spoken (Danish is a particularly hard one at that). But my RoI for 20 minutes a day for a few months was great.

Then my daughter had a hard time with her school English. She knew nothing and could not even follow the glacial pace of her lessons. I bribed her into keeping a 200 day streak in Duolingo and she was suddenly acing her tests. Now she has some interests with English only sources, and that alone is enough to help her keep learning, but duo was a huge kickstarter.

My wife also had non existent English from years of classes and needed to at least understand emails at work instead of always passing them by me, and a 300 day Duolingo streak fixed that.

I don't doubt that there are very good teachers out there, and you need to complement Duolingo if you really want to learn thoroughly, but it really puts you on track for very little actual effort.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#122

Post by aix1 »

pkulak wrote: post #108
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 agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff. I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.

I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed.

Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:

1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].

2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.

3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.

Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.

Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.

(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#123

Post by aix1 »

simlevesque wrote: post #77
aeyes wrote: post #63

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…

> Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly. This is the only way to learn. You repeat things you know many times to commit them to your memory.

> This is the only way to learn. You repeat things you know many times to commit them to your memory.

Mindless repetition is not the only way to learn. For many types of things, understanding the rules or knowing the patterns is far more efficient and effective.

We were just talking about German noun genders and plurals elsewhere on this thread. Of course, one can memorise the gender and the plural of every noun in isolation, by rote. But simply knowing a few common patterns would save an incredible amount of effort.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#124

Post by com »

digitalsushi wrote: post #7

I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards. I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going. While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scor…

That first laugh at a real joke in a foreign language is precious. I remember reading a collection of short stories for vocabulary, and there was one about a fishing trip going badly anx hilariously wrong. Priceless moment for me and my confidence.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#125

Post by aix1 »

Koshkin wrote: post #49
antiterra wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michel Thomas gave me a very solid understanding of basic spoken French in approximately two hours, and it has stuck for decades. However, my pronunciation is atrocious (as is his.)

The French and the English, the neighbors who cannot pronounce a word of another’s language…

Wait, about 30% of English vocabulary is of French origin (not to mention other Romance influences). :-)

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#126

Post by meatmanek »

barrell wrote: post #119
dwighttk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spelling too... like the 10th thing I care about is how to spell in a new language...

And no typos allowed or you start from zero! Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos

I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is yourself.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#128

Post by aix1 »

sayrer wrote: post #39
to1y wrote: post #18

As a bilingual I tend to believe unless you're living in the country trying to learn a language(using any method) is probably a waste of time.

It's helpful in learning nearby languages. I am a native English speaker, and my French can approach fluency given some immersion (it's pretty rusty right now, though). DuoLingo helped me improve transactional Spanish and Portuguese (BR) very quickly, meaning I can get through airports, grocery stores, restaurants, and read news articles. I'll need something more to have free-ranging conversations or read novels, tho…

Check out "The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages" by Frederick Bodmer. I'm reading it now and it's quite extraordinary. It seems like a particularly good fit for someone with your linguistic background, especially if you have an interest in learning further Germanic or Romance languages.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#129

Post by aix1 »

bombolo wrote: post #52
to1y wrote: post #18

As a bilingual I tend to believe unless you're living in the country trying to learn a language(using any method) is probably a waste of time.

Nah. I've learnt english well enough in a non-english speaking country to move abroad and earn a university degree speaking/writing english.

So did I but, man, that took ten years of pretty intensive study (13 hours a week at the peak, across four school subjects). They taught us really well, but there's got to be a way to reach this level of proficiency with less effort.

This was in the Soviet Union and before the Internet, and so we were studying in complete linguistic isolation. When I met a native speaker for the first time, I had already been studying the language for nearly ten years.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#130

Post by aix1 »

jimjimjim wrote: post #99

I was a long time duo user (1000+ day streak) learning german. I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german. The streak system and the gold->diamond tier system kept me going but after a while I realized I had plateaued and I felt like I was forgetting more than I was learning. Then I realized, I had got to the point where I was good at answering what duo wanted to get t…

> I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german.

German can be quite tricky in this regard, in that the written and the spoken language can be quite different grammatically. One basic example that immediately springs to mind is that the simple past (Präteritum) is used very little in speech but very extensively in writing. This means that, when reading German books, one encounters lots of verb forms they'd never hear in speech (which, I'm guessing, would make it unlikely that Duolingo teaches them?)

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