The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language.
But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.
An opinionated critique of Duolingo
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Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#12Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?
I agree. But should they wish to go beyond "beating doomscrolling", they have other options
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#13Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?
That's a very, very low bar though.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#14Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?
It's not much better for language learning than just playing Candy Crush. As long as you don't delude yourself into thinking this is time spent productively, then sure.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#15The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language. But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, r…
In 5 minutes you could probably do 5 new words a day and 30-40 repetitions.
So 1500 words a year, which is useful, if you're not a complete beginner
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#16I used Duolingo a fair bit in 2015–2017 to improve my Swedish, and generally enjoyed myself. Having not touched it for most of a decade, I downloaded it earlier this year to try my hand at basic Greek and wow but it’s gone downhill. Everything is massively over the top, all subtlety has left the system, and when I stopped after a couple of days because I couldn’t deal with the intensity they sent me nagging messages for over two weeks in more and more pleading tones trying to get me to come back. I’d never use them again at this point.
Edit: just went to delete my account and they’ve got a tearful owl above the “Erase personal data” button to try to guilt-trip me into staying. https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#17What do you guys think about DuoBook.co?
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#18Duolingo did a great job of encouraging me to find a real human to learn from.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#19Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.) †It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target…
> but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool.
I don't necessarily disagree but I do believe it will require some really smart design ideas. I am pessimistic that a big name company will come up with them
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#20It sucks balls. I learned more in one month of studying from a textbook and attending conversation classes than I did in two years using Duolingo. And its so much worse now than its ever been!