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Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

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Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#151

Post by knorker »

Markoff wrote: post #111
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…

>But surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand", and instead will go maybe even faster. by my experience when these people see you don't understand, they think speaking louder will make you understand

That would make sense if I'd not just asked them to speak slower.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#152

Post by watwut »

gnicholas wrote: post #2

I learned Spanish in HS and started using Duolingo to see if it was useful for teaching my young child Spanish. She had exposure to spoken Spanish via her nanny, but had very little exposure to written Spanish. My first reaction was that there was no way for someone to learn Spanish just by using Duolingo, as there wasn't enough 'teaching' happening. But then I realized that there is some scaffolding in the app, but…

It worked well for my kids tho. Basically, they ended up using correct words and sentence structures in correct situations.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#153

Post by kubb »

lake-view wrote: post #74
vouaobrasil wrote: post #57

The Spanish course is one of the best courses on Duolingo. I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc. It was a little rough going at times b…

> 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!

You could use it to practice already:

  1. Ask GPT for a list of 20 A1-level sentences in English.
  2. Save them.
  3. Try to translate them to Spanish.
  4. If you can't use a translation service.
  5. Try again the next day.
The only problem is making sure that the AI generates sentences that use the vocab that you don't know, so that you keep expanding it. Not sure how to solve that.

For pronunciation, record yourself repeating after a natie speaker recording, play back and analyze. Make use of phonetic transcription in dictionaries.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#154

Post by watwut »

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…

Native speakers have usually zero idea about what is simple word for foreigner. They go by what feels simple for them. But simple for foreigner means "the variant I found in my textbook" and natives have no idea.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#155

Post by beezlewax »

It's more like a game than actual learning.... which would be great if it worked. I found myself recognising patterns and subconsciously "cheating" while using that app. Nothing beats full immersion in a language and actual real life teachers.

I moved to Spain a few years ago and Duo Lingo had me thinking I understood loads of things when I really didn't. Not in a real life setting. It is good as a side lesson but not great otherwise at least from my perspective.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#156

Post by barrell »

meatmanek wrote: post #126
barrell wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 your…

I don't know Tsurukame but iKnow.jp had the same functionality and it was game changing for me! Immediately any SRS without became unusable

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#157

Post by bombolo »

aix1 wrote: post #129
bombolo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 studyin…

I did have internet for most of my youth. Computer games also helped.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#158

Post by prmoustache »

buildfocus wrote: post #26

I have spent a lot of effort in Duolingo in multiple languages, that I now use daily. Imo it's a mediocre but _extremely_ convenient way to build a base of vocabulary, but it is completely different to seriously learning a language (unfortunately). As far as I'm aware this applies to all the apps - real human conversation is very hard to usefully simulate. That doesn't mean Duolingo isn't useful, it's definitely help…

This.

I moved to south of spain 3 years ago without knowing spanish except a few words to order a beer, ask for the bill and where are the toilets.

I did a bit of duolingo that helped me just grow enough confidence to learn the basic stuff.

Then I met what is now my girlfriend in a language exchange event and my level grew steadily that people in latin america say I am speaking really well. I still struggle a bit sometimes in south of spain but that is just because they speak in an awful way, like they would be drunk 24h a day and it costs the same to native spanish speaker to understand them.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#159

Post by carom »

nmfisher wrote: post #86
davidzweig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 translit…

Even if you just had a set of lessons to run through, that'd be a lot of fun. Prompts that make it the counter party in text book dialogues. Character, pinyin, and translation shown.

The email sign up didn't seem to work on your page.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#160

Post by thdespou »

hyperpape wrote: post #94

One thing about Duolingo is that it’s very easy to spend very little time on it. It will cheerfully tell you how awesome you are, when you’re spending 5-10 minutes a day. When I did 30-60 minutes a day for a few months (I did Spanish, then Portuguese, then switched to Memrise because it had European Portuguese), that seemed to lay a decent foundation. Conversationally, I was hopeless for a few days, but I learned qui…

Thanks for the Memrise recommendation. I tried it today and found it much better than Duolingo.I think Duolingo makes you more stressed to keep up with the day streak and I find my self just redoing a couple of stories just to keep it running.Not good.
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