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Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

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Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#91

Post by david_allison »

hbn wrote: post #44
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

Android allows an app to define the language which you want the keyboard to use: `setImeHintLocales`, but I've only seen Gboard respond to this

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#92

Post by rtkwe »

tetris11 wrote: post #52
codazoda wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My taxi driver in Mexico spoke perfect English. I figured he was either American or had lived here. He said he learned the language watching YouTube videos and had never been.

My uncle learned Russian by just watching the news in the evenings when he was a student there during the USSR

That's the main place he learned it but he was also interacting with people in Russian constantly which is what people upthread were saying makes the leap from being able to passably read to conversational and then on to fluency.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#93

Post by tremarley »

ttfkam wrote: post #78
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 des…

These descriptions of the different accents is accurate and hilarious

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#94

Post by bluGill »

Do not think too hard about this question. Find an answer that seems to work and start studying. There is no shortcut to time spent studying the language. Sure some methods are better than others, but don't spend too much time finding the best, just pick something fast and start in it. Daily study is the key, the more the better - just don't burn out.

Beware that most people who tell you something is the best way have not actually done a formal study. They either used something and it works so they think it is best, or used something, didn't feel like they learned, then used something else and give all the credit to the second thing even though it built off the first.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#95

Post by ghaff »

ttfkam wrote: post #78
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 des…

I generally find my educated mostly urban Southern colleagues to have a pleasant slight drawl. But go into the deep rural South and urban Southerners struggle as I also will in places like northern England where my speech processing centers are forced into overdrive.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#96

Post by cycomanic »

cm2012 wrote: post #17
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #4

Has 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.

The problem I found when using it for Swedish and French about 7 years ago is that it emphasises stupid vocabulary. I don't know how many times it asked me the Swedish word for elephant (which you guessed it, is... elefant). Another word I remember in the first lesson was turtle (which is actually a difficult world in Swedish, sköldpaddan) which I never had to know in my first years in Sweden. Ironically it only ever came up when discussing duo lingo. So in my experience while duo lingo teaches you vocabulary, until you have completed a lot of lessons the vocabulary is useless, because you can't actually use it to do anything in the country.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#97

Post by andylynch »

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’m curious about how Duolingo fits betwern Quebec, and Metropolitan French etc; I gather it can be like a Glaswegian talking to a New Yorker - one can find the other much harder to follow than vice versa. (My wife for instance speaks metro French fluently, but finds Quebecois really hard to follow )

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#98

Post by bluGill »

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 tell people that you should never get more than 100 day streak. If you have not reached the end of duolingo in 100 days, then you should give up as you are not putting enough time into study to ever learn the language, while if you finish the tree in 100 days you are ready to move on.

Obvious 100 days is somewhat arbitrary, but it is a good round number to work with. If you reach 100 days you should at least stop to evaluate your real progress: If you are not at least mostly done with the tree you should be honest with yourself that you are not motivated enough to learn the language. If you are mostly done, then 100 days is a good time to start looking for other ways to engage with the language.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#99

Post by tropdrop »

I have not found Duolingo valuable for learning a language from scratch – my experience with German, in particular, was terrible. Then I tried to do Japanese with it, and trying to use it to learn Japanese from scratch was also terrible.

However, after I took a couple of years of real (institutional) coursework in Japanese, and needed to just get a little better at recognizing proper grammar constructions, it actually proved very useful – at the paid level, anyway, where one can "skip"/place into higher levels – and it seems their Japanese module in particular has drastically improved in the last couple of years.

So my two cents are that used for language learning alone it's pretty useless. But used as a reminder aide for concepts already learned it can be a good app, especially to just hear how one might phrase a sentence more "naturally" (for a Japanese ear).

For Kanji, though, WaniKani is king.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#100

Post by ttfkam »

tremarley wrote: post #93
ttfkam wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

These descriptions of the different accents is accurate and hilarious

I wish I could take credit. https://youtu.be/VlK-neOypDM?si=ZE3BJ0_E1pPEvDkp
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