Anki is suggested for SRS, but are there decks available with audio? That would be a pretty near Duolingo replacement in my books.
Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
11–20 of 138 posts
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#12Have to say I really hate it when people boost the Anki clone AnkiApp over the original open source project.
That's their official mobile client and main source of revenue, isn't it?
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#13Has Duolingo ever worked for actual language learning? It has always seemed more like pseudo-productivity to me.
I'm actually a bit surprised to see this, I've been an ardent Duolingo user for years and it works fantastically for me. Do you need to pair it with learning formal grammar rules on the side? Yeah, if you want to go deeper, absolutely, and when I have paired grammar rule learning with Duolingo it like 5x'd my learning & comprehension speed.
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#14I've been running through the Japanese course daily for the last 2 months. I'm learning to read somewhat, but I doubt that if I was to speak I would be understood.
I understand there are limitations to this format. However, what drives me nuts is the fact I can't just enable the Japanese keyboard (which I've installed) to type out answers. Instead I just select the correct predefined answer from a list. This allows me to pick the "most likely answer" with a very high success rate, but that's not going to help me in the wild.
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#15Has Duolingo ever worked for actual language learning? It has always seemed more like pseudo-productivity to me.
For speaking, maybe not. But for just reading comprehension in another language it works great. I used it for years and now I read the news in French quite often.
I'm really happy it worked for you, however, it's a bit bleak that a language learning tool was only able to help you learn to read in French (from already reading/speaking English) and not even speak it.
The difference between French/English is relatively small, I would have hoped to set my sights higher than that if I was Duolingo.
That being said, props to you for your progress!
I somehow feel it's more due to your perseverance and focus than Duolingo though. It sounds like you focused on absorbing more than just the app lessions (you read news now) and that speaks more to your discipline for language learning rather than it does Duolingo's capabilities.
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#16Duolingo doesn't actually do much if anything to help you become fluent. Nor does almost all the language learning apps such as Drops, Rosetta Stone, etc. What you need to move towards fluency is a lot of "comprehensible input" like with "Dreaming Spanish".
Learning about a language is different from acquiring a language, Krashen et. all has a lot of research on how people actually gain fluency. What most people are doing with language learning is like learning "about" chess, not learning to "play" chess. It's why you have people in China, Japan with seven years of English and they can't engage in simple conversation, or likewise people in the US, UK with seven years of Spanish and have trouble asking for anything beyond where is the library.
This is a great read (worth reading it all if you're really interested in acquiring a second language as an adult) about a guy who taught himself French as an adult to a high level of fluency via only watching TV and radio:
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#17Has Duolingo ever worked for actual language learning? It has always seemed more like pseudo-productivity to me.
DuoLingo is just step 1, to build the vocab.
Step 2 once you finish a DuoLingo track is to watch shows in a foreign language with subtitles in that language (NOT ENGLISH SUBTITLES, very important).
Step 3 is finding a conversation buddy.
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#18One of the main disappointments with Duolingo's recent path for me has been the removal of the forum. It was so useful whenever I was confused by a certain phrase or new concept to just hop directly into the discussion forum page for that exercise and see others asking the same questions and getting well-written intuitive answers to them. Just boosted my understanding so much plus added a sense of community, that we'…
Those forums were mainly a band-aid for DL's complete refusal to actually explain any of the grammar.
Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#19Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?
#20Has Duolingo ever worked for actual language learning? It has always seemed more like pseudo-productivity to me.
At one point it definitely was helpful. I'm not going to claim it could make you fluent but I used it maybe 10 years ago to practice and I found it valuable. It had long form explanations of grammar, exercises that required you to listen and type sentences as responses, and pretty useful forums if you had questions.
I checked it out more recently and it had become much more superficial and I didn't find it worthwhile at all. It seemed totally targeted at mobile where everything was multiple choice and gamified.
Maybe the good stuff is still there somewhere but I couldn't find it and quit.