Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#221

Post by LorenPechtel » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #184

twixfel wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integ…

No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.

I think there's much more of a pattern of seeing such mistakes + an accent as evidence that English isn't their native language rather than evidence of stupidity. We see so many more non-native speakers.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#222

Post by LorenPechtel » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #185

brozaman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles) For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack. In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very g…

It really does matter for spoken language as much as for written. Yes people will be able to understand meaning most of the time, but no, you will sound as bad as if we're writing. It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way. Accent and ignoring g…

Note that if you're coming from a non-gendered language you'll mess it up frequently even if you care. There's a reason Chinese people are notorious for getting gender wrong!

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#223

Post by LorenPechtel » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 6:26 PM UTC

b3orn wrote: post #179

meatmanek wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour…

While I don't know the innards of it I suspect the typos are preprogrammed. Note what frequently gets marked wrong and have a human decide if it's a wrong word or a typo. You could also do a string distance comparison--if it's distance from the right answer is 1 but it's at least two from any wrong answer it's probably a typo.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#224

Post by Natsu » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

mauvehaus wrote: post #192

Natsu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. l…

Technically what you want is a bouteille d'eau. If you're asking for l'eau, you're asking for all of the water, not some of it. Depending on how accommodating the French speaker is, you may just get stonewalled for butchering the language. Lest anybody accuse me of trafficking in stereotypes about the French, this is a real example from my life.

I actually said "je voudrais acheter une bouteille de l'eau", but pronounced so badly they thought I wanted the loo.

It took a second person demonstrating the proper pronunciation of "bouteille d'eau" for me to actually get said bottle of water, despite much pointing at the object in question.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#225

Post by LorenPechtel » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

broof wrote: post #168

Whenever Duolingo comes up, I always like to point out that their website is VASTLY superior to their app. It's essentially more difficult, because you can type your answers without being babied by just clicking on words. Additionally, you can export the website as a PWA onto your phone, so it feels like an app but you get the extra features.

You can turn on/off the word picker.

And there's no server-side component to the web app??

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#226

Post by klodolph » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

dazc wrote: post #133

klodolph wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right. This extended to v…

I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this. I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.

I liked the ruthless correction because it meant that I didn’t get into the habit of pronouncing things poorly.

I also play piano, and if you make a mistake when practicing a piece, it’s easy to just keep making the same mistake over and over. The more you practice making a mistake, the harder it is to fix.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#227

Post by gsumpster » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 8:15 PM UTC

generj wrote: post #91

gsumpster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was super interested, but the link highlights they are unfortunately shutting this down Classes next month.

Oh man, I hadn't seen that! Super disappointed :(

For what it's worth, I use Duolingo (the app itself) as just another way to practice at the moment but feel that most of my real progress comes with a tutor that I found through Preply and eventually started private lessons with. Group lessons were a cheap way to get some more practice in though with other speakers.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#228

Post by kubb » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

davidzweig wrote: post #182

kubb wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repe…

Instead of GPT, you can take sentences from Tatoeba, and analyse and index by vocabulary. 'PhrasePump' does this already. We glued together an NLP pipeline (Stanza etc.) to capture the lemmas in sentences. https://www.languagereactor.com/phrasepump

This is excellent and I love it :)

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#229

Post by remarkEon » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

barrell wrote: post #114

remarkEon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I’d push back on this idea, and instead say that some people learn really well from the current tools, and some people can’t. 99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else. Naturally there are differences in the population, but I would posit that if you learned a language once (or twice or three times - I k…

The ability to learn languages is measurable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Batt...

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#230

Post by Natsu » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #139

posterboy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, the loo is a Water Closet.

Are you correcting GP's 'bathroom'? Americans call the public facilities (e.g. in a restaurant) that or 'washroom', despite there (typically!) being no bathing or washing devices. Fwiw, like 'toilet', 'loo' can be either the room/facility or the... 'appliance' itself.

I think they mean that in French, they call the bathroom WC.