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Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

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Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#71

Post by besofrrn »

ghaff wrote: post #63
ghusto wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, no app, website, methodology or anything else is going to gain you fluency. The sole way of gaining fluency is speaking the language, and all that goes along with that (mostly it's integrating into the culture, because language is an extension of culture and if you don't get the culture, you won't get the language). You need to know very little of the language to get started. Just find someone who's willing t…

I had 4 years of high school French and could read passably, write some, but was never really conversational. Probably if I had lived in France for a summer I'd have gotten a lot better. I was actually talking with a (French and English-speaking) friend who now lives in Serbia and they were saying they pretty much just picked Serbian up and didn't sweat all the fancy verb conjugations and so forth.

I had four years of high school French and one year at university, and I was pretty conversational. How much did you use the language outside of class? A bunch of us high school French students would speak with each other outside of class, even just to make silly jokes in the language, which helped with retention.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#72

Post by bossyTeacher »

People create solutions for problems that don't exist. You want to learn a language? Go to a language school with actual human teachers, socialise with native speakers of your target language, watch media in the target language. Unless the language in question is a minority language, or its speakers live mostly in specific regions (like the americans, for example), this is the oldest and most reliable way to learn a language

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#73

Post by huytersd »

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 did about 100 days on Duolingo and from knowing no Spanish at all was able to converse in very broken Spanish to people at bars in Spain. I mean long 2 hour conversations where I could for the most part understand what they were saying and get my point across. Obviously they had to modify their Spanish like they were talking to a five year old.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#74

Post by huimang »

I really hate that duolingo is perceived by so many people as a singular resource to learn a language. For certain languages it's a great -complement- and can be great for motivating you to study.

But you need stronger primary resources if you desire to actually -speak- the language to a non-trivial degree with natives. It's very frustrating watching people waste so much time on duolingo and then burning out after they "study" with it for a year and don't see much progress toward fluency.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#76

Post by bowsamic »

pests wrote: post #67
mikepurvis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.

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

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#77

Post by mikepurvis »

pests wrote: post #67
mikepurvis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.

Yeah, I probably will. I originally bought a year of Super to do it with my daughter (yay "friend quests", more stickiness!), but I think she's also been on and off the bandwagon recently, so that's less of a factor as well.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#78

Post by ttfkam »

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…

Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over three years aided your ability to jump start your conversational ability. Very few folks can start from scratch and watch shows in a new language without subtitles in just a few weeks.

Then there's the issue of accents. There isn't a single Spanish language despite what the Spanish Academy would like. Castilian Spanish (lispy) is a very different animal from Mexican (beat poet who's constantly out of breath), Venezuelan (all the sighs), Cuban (if Sean Connery spoke Spanish), Nicaraguan (I dunno. I still really struggle with this one.), Equatorial Guinean (like from Spain only clearly not), Chilean (Spanish is only a rough guideline, ¿Cachay?), Dominican (one word, and it's all the words), or Argentinian (spoken with an Italian accent).

If you're from the US and only learn from Duolingo, you might be able to get by a bit easier with folks from Colombia than with other accents (as long as you steer clear of Medellín).

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#79

Post by ksherlock »

> Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) ...

Posted Jan 9th, 2024, but that would seem to be an evergreen sentiment. Based on my streak, I've been using it 4 years. I don't think I've never seen a change that improved the user experience or learning and many of them (removing discussions and dictionaries) made learning worse.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#80

Post by rtkwe »

mikepurvis wrote: post #50
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…

Making the gap to conversational is probably always going to require more than just an app. You've got to hear real people speak the language and interact with them, maybe it could be done with a lot of very expensive work with LLMs and advanced text to speech generation but there's a big gap between the basic grammar and vocab that language apps teach to really understanding a native speaker. French in particular is rough for this though because of the... loose... association between the spelled word and the ways it's spoken.
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