231–240 of 320 posts
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 give…
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 give…
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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…
I do. And I don't agree it's normal human behavior - normal human behavior is also to feel some empathy for people you have never met. Or even for animals.
> If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture
It did. Can't speak for South America (who probably have a more balanced view already) but it definitely changed the perception of American culture in Europe.
> why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture?
Every day the news are full of Russian indiscriminately killing Ukrainian civilians, children in their sleep, the Russian society is quiet about that or even cheering, and you are asking why that should have any impact on our attitude towards the Russian culture?
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…
However, I would say that for very popular languages (Japanese, in my case), there are probably good (but paid) niche apps/resources. If your target language is Finnish, there are fewer options, like another commenter points out on the parent thread.
Duolingo is a good example of terminal enshittification. "[I]f it’s our content, as in, like, our learning content, there’s so much of that - thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs. That is mostly done by computers, and we probably spot-check it. But if it’s things like the user interface of Duolingo, where we say - like, you know, the button says quit, and we have to tran…
This quote is bonkers. How the CEO can say such a thing without any shame is beyond me
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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".
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 accept that some people are doubtless much more talented in acquiring languages than I am. But I did take 4 years of high school French and was considered "good." And, traveling with a friend in Paris, I clearly knew a lot more of the language than they did. But I'm a very very far way from being fluent. Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or may…
I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.
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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.
It seems that the reputation takes about two generations to recover once the hostilities are over and the country has started to reform. Russia never really attempted a real reform in the first place, so for it the outcome was different. Russia (and yes, the image of Russian culture) will obviously not come back from this disaster during our lifetimes.
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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'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturall…
Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).