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 tried Language Transfer for German an found it very underwhelming. I heard a few bits of the last lesson, and it sounded like A2.1 stuff to me.
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…
Yes +100 for language transfer, it’s super helpful. Same experience as yours, I fell duolingo overemphasis gamification to the detriment of actual learning. Ai is going to be a game changer there I imagine because the biggest impediment to learning a new language is being able to practice and getting corrected without social embarrassment.
Language Transfer hasn’t got a huge range of language options unfortunately.
I wonder if it would be easily possible, if AI could understand the Language Transfer style and make really good alternative courses?
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 just checked out Language Transfer and learned it was originally created to teach Greek and Turkish to residents of Cyprus, with the aim of bridging the divide between those two distinct populations. Greek happens to be the language I want to work on, and the free resources for that language are incredible! Thank you for the link.
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…
You might want to give Bunpro a shot, it makes you type the answers in Japanese and I find it forces me to nail down exactly how to use a grammar point correctly (it's also usually fairly good about accounting for situations where there are multiple correct answers, and will give you a hint and let you make another attempt if you're only slightly wrong).
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…
Honestly, this just made me excited for AI in these apps. Imagine if you could just have a conversation with a personalized language coach constantly to help you learn a language and immerse yourself in it. Heck, this is HN. Who knows, maybe it's already in the works by someone around here. I think the first few iterations will be rough especially while "AI" generations remain close to current. Though I haven't messed with Gemini or Chat-GPT 4+ultra, maybe they've gotten disproportionately better.
Yes +100 for language transfer, it’s super helpful. Same experience as yours, I fell duolingo overemphasis gamification to the detriment of actual learning. Ai is going to be a game changer there I imagine because the biggest impediment to learning a new language is being able to practice and getting corrected without social embarrassment.
Language Transfer hasn’t got a huge range of language options unfortunately. I wonder if it would be easily possible, if AI could understand the Language Transfer style and make really good alternative courses?
That’s an interesting idea, the conversational style and the way the teacher was breaking down the language rules in the Spanish language transfer was really useful.
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
May well be Japanese course specific. I am on Android and checked on web also — same experience. I have an iPhone too though, so will check it out and report back. In my experience with the Japanese course, there are no text prompts at all. Well, not in the main course. You do receive prompts when learning the Japanese alphabets, but these text prompts are specifically asking for the Romanised pronunciation.
I just started Japanese and on the web client for me I can type answers with my keyboard in Japanese mode just fine. Including submitting answers with kanji even though it hasn’t covered any yet
May well be Japanese course specific. I am on Android and checked on web also — same experience. I have an iPhone too though, so will check it out and report back. In my experience with the Japanese course, there are no text prompts at all. Well, not in the main course. You do receive prompts when learning the Japanese alphabets, but these text prompts are specifically asking for the Romanised pronunciation.
I just started Japanese and on the web client for me I can type answers with my keyboard in Japanese mode just fine. Including submitting answers with kanji even though it hasn’t covered any yet
Interesting. Are you on mobile web, or desktop? I tried on mobile web on a tablet and phone, but haven't tried desktop.
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.
I'm curious where you did French immersion?
As far as I can tell what my friends' tell me (their kids are in French immersion in Ontario), French immersion teaches standard French, not the Quebecois patois (which we call le joual).
Canadian French differs from European French in few areas like pronunciation and vocabulary, but it is very much still the same language and mutually intelligible.