Duolingo Sucks, Now What? • Hacker News Board

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#41

Post by maerF0x0 » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:55 PM UTC

Not speaking relative to other apps, but I have found DL useful for learning more words in a language I already have some training in. (and for reviving after breaks from the language)

For Spanish (a really fast language) it wasn't that useful for actual conversational practice. It's much slower than native

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#42

Post by gms7777 » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:55 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #11

Anki is suggested for SRS, but are there decks available with audio? That would be a pretty near Duolingo replacement in my books.

I really like the Refold 1k decks. They're paid but have good audio (both the word and example sentences), the definitions and examples are well edited, and unlike most "top 1000 word" type decks, are curated to remove common cognates so you're not wasting your time on things you already know. Only available in 6 languages at this time though.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#43

Post by trey-jones » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:55 PM UTC

ted_bunny wrote: post #18

amilios wrote: post #5

One 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.

Crowd-sourcing is a valid form of support.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#44

Post by hbn » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #14

I'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…

Is that something unique to Japanese, or maybe if you're on Android?

I'm learning Spanish on the iOS app. I installed the Spanish keyboard, and whenever a text field appears my keyboard is automatically set to Spanish

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#45

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

Do Duolingo users actually want to speak the language? Or just read it? Because it does the latter a bit, doesn't do the former.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#46

Post by pizza_pleb » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

Immersion with native content: develop listening+reading comprehension.

Success is measured with time spent with the language. Find something that interests you at your skill level:

https://languageroadmap.com

and Anki for top 1000 words + sentence mining if you like flashcards.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#47

Post by S04dKHzrKT » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

janislaw wrote: post #12

zzzbra wrote: post #2

Have 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?

FYI: https://faqs.ankiweb.net/anki-knockoffs.html

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#48

Post by dymk » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

AndyKelley wrote: post #10

WaniKani is great for reading Japanese.

I hope this isn't too nit-picky, but I'd qualify that it's great (fantastic, even) for memorizing kanji and their readings, but not for reading and understanding Japanese text. You need something like a grammar course and lots of comprehensible input for that.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#49

Post by ecto » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

My current project is a "Duolingo for everything" called RubberDuck. GPT4 is used to generate the curriculum.

I started it as a tool to teach myself new programming languages but realized it could be generalized. Right now I'm taking the Linear Algebra and Ancient Greek History courses.

Would love if you checked it out!

https://www.rubberduck.gg

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#50

Post by mikepurvis » Wed, Feb 14, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

tremarley wrote: post #24

I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language. When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner. Someone suggested the free language lea…

I'm 250 days into the Duolingo French programme and feeling similar things— I traveled to Quebec City recently and was only very barely functional at the simplest tasks. Duolingo goes to great lengths to make you feel productive, but I think it's prioritizing the wrong things— particularly if you mostly care about spoken communication, there's just a ton of stuff around verb conjugation and gender that really doesn't matter at all; getting it wrong makes you sound like a noob, but it doesn't actually impede understanding the way barely being able to piece together a sentence does. And some of it is just plain invisible in speech, like an English speaker not being able to tell the difference between its and it's; they're the same until you need to write one down.

Anyway, yeah. Putting so much emphasis on streak-maintenance and leaderboard position has me following silly patterns like doing enough of a lesson to net a 2x exp bonus and then cranking on the "match madness" mini game, which is all vocabulary I already know and isn't teaching me anything new.