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An opinionated critique of Duolingo

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Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#221

Post by orbital-decay »

tpm wrote: post #215
usrnm wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just sad to hear for me as a Russian. Russia and the Russian culture are a lot older than the current war and will still be around long after the war, but a lot of people just cannot draw a line between the two.

Some also don't really want to draw a line, because the current war is not an exception, it's fully in character with the past 200 or so years of Russian behavior. In the 90s and later some thought it's going to be better, but I think most people can see now nothing has changed for the better and Russian culture does not reflect any sort of guilt and shame like the Germans did.

That's a narrative. Over my life, I've seen 4 regimes and heard about a dozen historical narratives about the particular place I was born in, each radically different from the others and exaggerated to ridiculous proportions. Enough to understand that they're all mostly nonsense. One massive red flag is dealing in absolutes, another is "it's always been like that".

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#222

Post by flurdy »

teiferer wrote: post #195
jmkni wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one? Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?

The hack is immersion. Move to a country where the language is spoken, and have a girlfriend/boyfriend native in the language whom you move in with. That's it.

It is so often dismissed how important the second part is. Many think that just moving to a country is enough, and you will pick up the language. Maybe the basics, but not if you don't speak and think it 24/7, however uncomfortable that is at the start.

You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast.

Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer.

This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#223

Post by lambertsimnel »

laurentlb wrote: post #213

Each time I read this kind of feedback, I wonder if there should be a free, community driven, alternative to Duolingo. - Content may be provided by contributors (like Duolingo did for many years) - It could be supported by donations (I believe the costs can be kept low) My feeling is that lots of problems with Duolingo are caused by monetization (and many things were better in Duolingo a few years ago). I'm still not…

Could LibreLingo be a useful step in this direction?

Previously discussed in April (363 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035

And in 2022 (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142852

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#224

Post by memsom »

mtalantikite wrote: post #87

I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language. It's not that it's a bad app, it's just that that's not going to happen. There's no one resource that will get you to even an intermediate level in a language. And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate fo…

> I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language

But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1.

The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#225

Post by tpm »

usrnm wrote: post #219
tpm wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some also don't really want to draw a line, because the current war is not an exception, it's fully in character with the past 200 or so years of Russian behavior. In the 90s and later some thought it's going to be better, but I think most people can see now nothing has changed for the better and Russian culture does not reflect any sort of guilt and shame like the Germans did.

And yet we're both discussing it on an American site in English, so you clearly have no problem with either imperialism or wars ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ah yes the old 'and you are lynching negroes' defence deployed again because you can't face your failures. My country was occupied by the Soviet Army, many people killed and whole society destroyed, and all of that for nothing. Did we hear an apology, admission of guilt, anything, not only from the Russian heads of state but from artists etc? Of course not.

And let me expand on the 'and all of that for nothing'. The Americans brought us prosperity. To some other countries, they brought misery. I'm not a fan of that. But at least it's very clear they are doing it for the money, that when someone is exploited, someone else is going to be rich. Eventually the exploited people or even whole countries can get rich too if they are smart, like South Korea.

Now contrast that with the Russian imperialism. Not only are they not bringing prosperity anywhere, they also can't manage to create prosperity back home. They plundered Eastern Europe for decades, they have vast natural resources, whole country could live very comfortable life. Instead there is a very small group of people living luxurious life until the next upheaval when they are going to flee into exile or be killed, and a bigger group of people living a mostly comfortable life mostly in big cities. The rest are essentially serfs that are also sent to the war to be killed. Maybe this war will end soon and another will start in a few years. Maybe the oil price will go down and there will be no money for a new war, which means there will be even less monery for the serfs. And all of this for nothing, it does not advance the society, it doesn't do anything good, it's just evil people playing their games. That's why what we really want is to be as far away from Russia as possible.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#226

Post by stevesimmons »

qingcharles wrote: post #103
jmkni wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one? Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?

I have Dutch friends who swear they learned all their English simply by watching Friends on BBC in the Netherlands.

Then they're lying...

(Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#227

Post by alexey-salmin »

Duolingo is surely flawed, but realistically I don't see any other way how I could have progressed in French by spending exactly 3 minutes per day with near-zero mental effort. I do it on auto pilot before going to bed, usually being dead tired after work. After 1000 days (so like 50 hours) I can have simple conversations, I can read and I have a rather big vocabulary.

Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life.

I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into.

* Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests.

* Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit.

* Ignore music, math and other courses

* Stick to 1 language, at most 2.

Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#228

Post by Geert86 »

I really enjoyed your opinionated article. You put the finger on the weak spot of Duolingo: It's an ineffective way of learning a language. With the advent of AI they, we see a lot of different approaches pop up that might actually be more enjoyable and which might put Duolingo in jeopardy.

However, you also touch upon an other interesting point, namely that learning a language involves many skills, that even differ from language to language. One app pretending to learn it all probably won't work.

I have been making my own language learning app (lingo llama, check out the site :)), and learned the hard way that actually learning a language is not straightforward, and very different for every user. For example, if you want to learn Spanish, and already know Portuguese, you want a different approach then if you come from Japanese. Maybe using tools to learn parts of the language is the way to go.

Anyway, I liked your read, thanks!

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#229

Post by tedggh »

usrnm wrote: post #205
skinkestek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was because I dabbled in Russian before, but recent events have led me to avoid anything that could be seen as supporting Russia in any way, including culturally. I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.

That's just sad to hear for me as a Russian. Russia and the Russian culture are a lot older than the current war and will still be around long after the war, but a lot of people just cannot draw a line between the two.

My wife is Russian and we have close Ukrainian friends and Ukrainian neighbors. We often shop at a Ukrainian grocery store. Her dentist is Ukrainian. It’s never been an issue. She spent many vacations as a child in Ukraine and obviously doesn’t support the war. She still loves her country. We watch Russian classics and I learned how to cook Russian dishes for her. It’s wild to me that people who are neither Ukrainian nor Russian take such extreme positions of canceling an entire nation when not even Ukrainians themselves do.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#230

Post by usrnm »

tpm wrote: post #225
usrnm wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we're both discussing it on an American site in English, so you clearly have no problem with either imperialism or wars ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ah yes the old 'and you are lynching negroes' defence deployed again because you can't face your failures. My country was occupied by the Soviet Army, many people killed and whole society destroyed, and all of that for nothing. Did we hear an apology, admission of guilt, anything, not only from the Russian heads of state but from artists etc? Of course not. And let me expand on the 'and all of that for nothing'. The…

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. You don't have any problems with imperialism or wars, when you're not targeted by them personally or even can get some benefit out of them, which is normal human behavior. This is why I don't see why the war in Ukraine is any different. If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture, then why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture? And I'm sad if it does.
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