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Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#11

Post by jghn »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #4

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate. When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I…

I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 3 months. Prior to this I only had a half year in middle school in the 80s. I'm not quite 20% of the way through their material. I just got back from a trip in a Spanish speaking country and to be honest was pleasantly surprised at the level of ability I had. Mind you that level was nowhere near good, I'm sure I'd still classify as an A1 level. But I had figured everything would still sound like gibberish to me and that was far from the case.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#12

Post by smugma »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #9
bin_bash wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that 6 months into Spanish with no prior experience? If so it sounds like you're doing extremely well

Thanks! I had 4 years in High School (well, 3 years took me 4 years :)). That was 2 decades ago. Some of it, apparently, stayed in my head. I have learned WAY more with Duolingo in 6 months (10 to 15 mins a day, but I started slower) than I learned in 4 years through High School (US). Just one data point, but I've heard similar from friends. TBH I am more motivated today than I was in school, so I'm sure that plays a…

In addition to motivation, you’re now re-learning it. As you said, some of it stayed in your head, so it’s not fair to say you learned more.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#13

Post by rcarr »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #4

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate. When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I…

If you pay for the subscription version, there are dedicated listening and speaking lessons on the practice page that tend to be more challenging than the ones you get in the lessons. It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well. I’m planning on creating a multilingual blog to practice my writing though. They do a duolingo Spanish podcast as well that you might be interested in.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#14

Post by likpok »

Duolingo quality varies a lot based on which specific language you're doing. Some features (e.g. stories) aren't available in all languages.

It's possible this is just the language I'm learning, but the "duolingo learning what you need to learn" seems iffy in my experience. It frequently prioritizes three words for me: "spring", "autumn" and "bag". It's unclear why, but every time I do an "review of old material" practice there are those three lessons.

There's a lot of material which I make actual mistakes on that it could prioritize, but it never does. It used to be you could get a the whole list of words (and duo's rating of your progress) but they killed the endpoint with the redesign. (Probably reasonable, the main use case for it was to dump the course into something like Anki... certainly that's what I was going to do with it).

I definitely made a fair amount of progress using Duo, but never got beyond the "struggle to communicate in any meaningful way" stage. Fluent Forever (a competing app) got me a lot farther (but is expensive and requires a fair amount of invested effort), and some basic flashcards got me much closer to reading comprehension than grinding Duo lessons.

All in all I can't tell if this is a marketing speak that is only loosely connected to reality or if duolingo just has inconsistently rolled out features.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#15

Post by likpok »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #7

It's just so stupid. Every time I give it a chance I end up this way: it repeatedly asks me stupid questions, I get bored, I start clicking-through it faster and faster without thinking, I make stupid mistakes while knowing right answers - for purely mechanical reasons and lack of attention, it asks me more stupid questions because of this. I think there should be a "never show/ask me this again" button on every slid…

I have a related but different experience: it's constantly asking me about "library" or "spring" and it's been a long long time since I've made a mistake. Why is it not trying to review other words where I do make mistakes, or even words where I need to click on the translation / listen to the audio multiple times? It always makes me a little doubtful of their claims.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#16

Post by syrrim »

The article reads like ad copy. Not surprising given the author. My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally. It attempts to make you feel like you're adept at the language to keep you motivated. This is accomplished by teaching you a restricted subset of the language that you can become skilled at, but isn't necessarily sufficient in real world usage. It also contains a number of guardrails meant to prevent you from making any mistakes except by choice. This leads you to learn the language to an extremely shallow depth. Importantly, you forget how much you are relying on these guardrails, and hence think you have a deeper understanding than you really do. Hopefully duo's expansion into teaching other subjects doesn't maintain these flaws.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#17

Post by voisin »

likpok wrote: post #14

Duolingo quality varies a lot based on which specific language you're doing. Some features (e.g. stories) aren't available in all languages. It's possible this is just the language I'm learning, but the "duolingo learning what you need to learn" seems iffy in my experience. It frequently prioritizes three words for me: "spring", "autumn" and "bag". It's unclear why, but every time I do an "review of old material" pra…

> I definitely made a fair amount of progress using Duo, but never got beyond the “struggle to communicate in any meaningful way” stage.

How far did you go in Duolingo? I have been working away at it for 10-30 min/day for around 18 months and am around halfway through Intermediate 2. I find I can read and write quite well but my speaking has a lot of room for improvement. I feel like if I fully immersed myself in the language, the base I’ve built would allow me to get to oral fluency quite quickly.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#18

Post by kelseyfrog »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #4

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate. When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I…

> I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons

I feel the same (approx 205 days of French). While the multi-modal aspect(text&audio) was helpful especially at the beginning of the course, I feel like text now is a crutch at times. I wish some of the tasks were audio only and required either answering from among text responses, or single word speech responses.

Because of this crutch, I feel well equipped to approach written French in my day-to-day life, but freeze up at even simple questions like "Parles-tu français ?" I feel like I would freeze less if I could practice these types of exchanges in app, but part of me also knows that the best solution to this problem is simply getting over it with a language partner or teacher.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#19

Post by jghn »

syrrim wrote: post #16

The article reads like ad copy. Not surprising given the author. My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally. It attempts to make you feel like you're adept at the language to keep you motivated. This is accomplished by teaching you a restricted subset of the language that you can become skilled at, but isn't necessarily sufficient in…

> but isn't necessarily sufficient in real world usage

IIRC Duolingo only claims to get to even B1 level for a couple of their most robust language courses. Not sure what you view as sufficient for real world but B1 is about where I'd personally draw the line.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#20

Post by ehnto »

syrrim wrote: post #16

The article reads like ad copy. Not surprising given the author. My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally. It attempts to make you feel like you're adept at the language to keep you motivated. This is accomplished by teaching you a restricted subset of the language that you can become skilled at, but isn't necessarily sufficient in…

Duolingo can get you surprisingly far for vocabulary and alphabet memorization, but it will not bring you to functional fluency since it simply doesn't have any practice for that in it. They have tried to correct this for some languages, adding in 'stories'.

All that said, it was actually a really great introductory program that made language learning more approchable. As an early intro and vocabulary supplement it is great. After that you will want to seek greater depths of learning and get immersed in content of the target language.

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