Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

librelingo.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 376 posts

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#71

Post by wkat4242 »

Tor3 wrote: post #4

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…

Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification.

I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#72

Post by anonzzzies »

Tor3 wrote: post #4

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…

Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#73

Post by K0nserv »

rmnwski wrote: post #50
xandrius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually learning. Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all. For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter. That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the ha…

Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.

It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.

The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.

0: https://www.wanikani.com/

1: https://www.tofugu.com/

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#74

Post by thaumasiotes »

broodbucket wrote: post #68
thaumasiotes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version. If you have that, you don't need the other things. One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language. (You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)

There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whateve…

> LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning.

> They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want

These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you want for language learning.

> but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience

Doesn't matter.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#75

Post by frank20022 »

makingstuffs wrote: post #41
mobtrain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.

Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet. Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective. Even if you take part in a course with tutors th…

Because duolingo is designed for addiction (that's how they make money), not actual learning (learning would mean you'd stop using the thing, no good for stakeholders).

There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.

For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not treating you like a toddler and not resorting to emotional manipulation.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#77

Post by detectivestory »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #12

Going to plug Language Transfer again, an excellent free app that is a much better way to learn a language than the DuoLingo approach.

I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#78

Post by aquariusDue »

apwell23 wrote: post #47
cyborgx7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.

> some of the things that you prioritize watching reels first thing in the morning in bed

In bed?! You gotta multitask if you want to get things done, try on the toilet next time.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#79

Post by arghwhat »

Tor3 wrote: post #4

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…

I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.

Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.

On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.

Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.

(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#80

Post by Tor3 »

codetrotter wrote: post #56
huimang wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion. My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words an…

> neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods What should one do instead?

internet_points posted good advice a comment or two above. Duolingo _is_ ok as a starting point, but (as was said before), move on as soon as possible. As a poster above did, I also spent way way too long on Duolingo, chasing the 'streak'. And got nowhere. I already had a foundation when I started, but I got no farther in a year or more of daily Duo. All progress stopped. When I finally switched to graded input instead, and deleted everything Duo from my devices, things finally picked up again. I could have used the time I wasted on Duo to get input instead, it's something which actually works (when the input is compelling and something which can be mostly understood).
Post reply on HN