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Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

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Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#101

Post by brianwawok »

spacecadet wrote: post #69
tetris11 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

haha I had a friend in high school, his dad worked at a local store as a clerk, but spoke multiple languages in what appeared to be "fluency", but I was young... anyways, he found this book at a yard sale "Russian by pictures", a year later he is throwing around full Russian sentences...

Some people are just magic at learning languages. 2 vs 10 isn’t that much more work. Always seemed wild to me as I struggled with Spanglish.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#102

Post by S04dKHzrKT »

AndyKelley wrote: post #10

WaniKani is great for reading Japanese.

A couple alternatives to WaniKani are:

* https://kanji.garden/

* https://www.readthekanji.com (includes hiragana and katakana as well)

You can also use the following for just memorizing hiragana and katakana:

* https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/

* https://www.kana.pro/

And then there are online resources like the following that provide a guided, DIY approach to learning Japanese as a whole:

* https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/

* https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/

* https://docs.google.com/document/d/10bRzVblKVOsQJjTc2PIi1Gbj...

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#103

Post by Balgair »

"A language isn't something you learn so much as something you join."

~Arika Okrent

Now, they are talking about a computer language, but I think that the same holds for human languages as well.

I've used Duo on and off for years now. It's near perfect for picking up the basics and keeping me motivated. However, as many others here report, it's not as good for fluency. For that, you have to join the language; you can't just expect to be able to sit on your phone and never talk to anyone. It's a bit of a scary step, you're outside your comfort zone, almost by definition. But I think that viewing the new language as something that is inherently done with others is a better way to view the process of learning it.

That said, yeah, supplement Duo with a YouTube soap opera (that you like) in the language that you're trying to join, that helps a lot.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#104

Post by borroka »

tarentel wrote: post #86
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…

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…

You are comparing doing something with doing nothing, so it is quite likely that doing something gives better results than doing nothing. For a more fair and balanced comparison, you should compare the use of Duolingo with some other "methods" of language learning. For example, for learning new words, spaced repetition would give way faster results than using Duolingo

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#105

Post by Moldoteck »

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…

You can take prebuilt decks and alter some cards if needed to accomodate for different meanings of the same word

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#106

Post by chrchr »

rareitem wrote: post #66

I disagree with premise of this article. I don't see how the quality of Duolingo has fallen, I keep learning more and more. For me, Duolingo made the friction of starting to learn a language (Spanish) very low. It provides with a clear path to follow. I can practice my reading, listening, speaking and writing all in one place. Of course, someone shouldn't restrict themself only to Duolingo.

Yeah exactly. Is Duolingo the optimal way to learn a language? Probably not, but it's really approachable and not terribly onerous, and it does expose the learner to some challenging stuff. The people up thread who say not to do it for more than 100 days probably didn't do all the content and saw a pretty shallow slice of how Duolingo teaches.

I'm at 1000 days today, and it's definitely improved my knowledge of Spanish and my ability to use it. I'm a long way from fluent, but I wasn't going to undertake a more difficult language learning self-study plan in the last few years anyway.

I wouldn't recommend it to someone who seriously needs to learn a language for work or for immigration or something, but it's been a great use of 10-20 minutes a day for me as a Spanish-curious dilettante.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#107

Post by burner420042 »

I live in Mexico and have for the last several years. I moved here not knowing any Spanish. I now speak at a B1 almost B2 level.

Every extranjero (foreigner) I know learned Spanish differently.

What they all have in common though is they all read books, starting at the Spanish equivalent of the US "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", magazines, the newspapers.

Additionally, they all like to talk to people and they're never embarrassed by their errors, thus they practice listing to and talking in this new language all the time. You have to lean into practicing with other people and doing it in public.

Book learning for the grammar and vocab, and writing all of it out on paper. Typing notes out on Duolingo or your computer doesn't work.

For me I needed a Spanish teacher, for me it's a lady that teaches English in a local grade school.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#108

Post by groggo »

hbn wrote: post #81
groggo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I just searched for some translated terms. Once you find some accounts, you can see who follows them, and then see what other accounts they follow, etc.

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#109

Post by hbn »

cycomanic wrote: post #96
cm2012 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Spanish Duolingo course starts with vocabulary I think makes sense - i.e. it's for people travelling.

First words/sentences covered is stuff like hotel, taxi, suitcase, ticket, airport, airplane, store, types of clothing, basic foods, etc. And the overall sentences are a lot of "I want" and "I need."

Re: Duolingo Sucks, Now What?

#110

Post by tylerFowler »

hbn wrote: post #55
tylerFowler wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a fairly recent starter, but I've mostly appreciated Duolingo for giving me some kind of structured course for learning. I keep mindful of concepts I'm not understanding, and Google around for discussions on Reddit and Quora with better explanations than what Duolingo offers, tricks for remembering words (e.g. shared etymology). When it wants me to translate stuff, I don't look at the word bank until i've transla…

What I love it for in particular is that it expands your vocab in ways that a book may not, or minimally adds an extra bit of "fun study" akin to casually doing flashcards.

For Greek for example, it does expose me to new words/grammatical functions that I maybe haven't gotten to yet in my formal book and then I can hop over to Wiktionary to see it's formal defintion/usage/declensions/etc...

Like with any learning experience, you get what you put into it.

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