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LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

librelingo.app

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Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#191

Post by vitro »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #177
pergadad wrote: post #174

Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in. Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good offers. That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what…

Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach? I tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which of these is The Sun?". Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".

Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners, you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a listening-first approach and contextual translations with vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other contexts.

[0] https://www.latudio.com/

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#193

Post by HPsquared »

anothereng wrote: post #179

The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary

I find Duolingo is pretty good for vocabulary in a "slow" context.

The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.

Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#197

Post by Ajedi32 »

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…

Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#198

Post by _fat_santa »

I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.

First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.

With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#199

Post by jmyeet »

I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.

Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:

- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")

- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);

- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;

- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.

- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;

- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.

- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.

My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.

Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).

I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.

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