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Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

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Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#81

Post by hbn »

groggo wrote: post #54
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'…

I've found ChatGPT great for this. It's way better than a translator at giving you context for grammar and phrases. My stack is Duolingo + Podcasts + Instagram + ChatGPT: Duolingo - daily consistency, grammar Podcasts - "comprehensible input" from intermediate french podcasts (InnerFrench, French with Panache) Instagram - Just follow a ton of french accounts. They often have subtitles. Listen to native speakers talk…

How did you find the Instagram accounts?

I made a Spanish twitter account but had no idea where to even start for following Spanish accounts that interest me. I'd probably be more willing to engage if they talked about things I liked

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#83

Post by pests »

mikepurvis wrote: post #77
pests wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can still use it and learn with your daughter. Just purposefully miss a day so you know you are using it out of joy instead of out of obligation.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#84

Post by swatson741 »

I like Duolingo a lot. I don't think it sucks at all. The only problem I've had with the app is that the sentences per lesson are planned by a teacher with clear learning objectives. But, despite this they use speech synthesis for everything but the stories. The synthesized speech is comprehensible but, it seems sort of lazy on the part of the Duolingo team. Especially when so many apps use native speakers for their quizzes.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#85

Post by jwells89 »

ghusto wrote: post #39
alexawarrior3 wrote: post #16

Duolingo 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…

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…

Speaking frequently absolutely helps a lot, but I’ve found in my on-an-off language studies (as time allows) that vast amounts of input is also effective if finding speakers isn’t practical.

Reading content a bit above your level with a dual-language dictionary in hand as well as watching native content while actively trying to understand what’s being said paired with SRS of vocab you’ve picked up while reading will do vastly more for language acquisition than any app/subscription or textbook.

For more popular languages there’s community-made guides online that make doing this easier but it’s doable for any language.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#86

Post by tarentel »

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…

I also had this issue. I had to ignore all their social features but overall I think the core app is fine. It won't make you fluent but it does teach a lot, and at least for me, I remember a lot of it. I can't say I learned french from the app, I married someone french so I had a lot of extra help, but I learned a lot of vocabulary that probably would have taken much longer to learn from regular conversation with the same few people in the U.S..

People expecting to learn a language from it probably will be disappointed but as an addition to other things I was doing I think it helped a lot although I have no real way to quantify this.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#87

Post by nozzlegear »

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 experiencing the same thing. I've got almost 1800 days on my Spanish streak in Duolingo right now, and I speak it decently well [1], but that's only because I knew some Spanish growing up with a multilingual best friend.

Duolingo was pretty good, say, 1500 days ago; I felt like it was really helping me brush up on those forgotten Spanish skills and even helping me learn new things that I didn't know. But it's gone through so much gamification since then that I haven't felt like I've been learning anything in a long, long time. Their primary focus now is to get me to download their AI app and pay a subscription for that, instead of actually teaching me the language I'm learning. And before the AI app, the focus was getting me to purchase DuoBucks (or whatever they are) so I could have more time to race the clock on those impossible timed countdown lessons.

Now I only log in to keep that streak going each day – streaks are one of my primary motivators in other parts of my life so it's hard for me to let this one drop, even though it's not doing much for me.

[1] If I were a young, Spanish-speaking kid.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#88

Post by alexawarrior3 »

appstorelottery wrote: post #26
alexawarrior3 wrote: post #16

Duolingo 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…

I'd love to read this - but can't log into UQ. Can you repost or provide more detail please?

Reposted with editable accessible link above.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#89

Post by soperj »

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…

I did years of French immersion in Canada, only to go to France a few years after i had finished and realized I didn't know French as well as I thought I did (I felt like I was nearly bilingual). A few years after that, with zero practice, I went to Montreal and could understand everything perfectly, and had zero problem communicating. That's when I realized that I had learned Quebecois and not French.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#90

Post by xrd »

can3p wrote: post #56

Can't recommend anki flash cards enough. One thing that I found important is that you need to build the deck yourself and you'll miss out a lot by using prebaked decks of any kind. Reasons: - Context is the king. Most of the words have multiple meanings and it's easier to remember them if you just added them from a text you've read. Moreover, this approach gives you an opportunity to see the words being used in the w…

I've been working on an idea for a long time which is to break classic public domain books (in the original foreign language) into small chunks for study of the source language.

An example passage is here (from one of the greatest works of Japanese literature, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki).

https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag...

If you click on any passage, you can see all the kanji and the translation of that passage in full.

Each kanji is clickable and displays the proper stroke order and animates it. You can practice writing the kanji and then save that for later.

What's unfinished is I want to allow you to save kanji into Anki and build out flashcards.

If there is a cohort of people reading the same passages, they can help each other with grammar questions, and this is all facilitated because the site is built on the incredible discussion platform "discourse."

I would love to hear any feedback: chris@public.do

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