Still waiting for their Russian course!
Here is the status of the Russian course in the Duolingo incubator. It has been there for a while... http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/ru/en/status
Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
111–120 of 189 posts
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#112I am currently in Uruguay learning Spanish and Duolingo is one the the 4 tools I use on my phone for it. The other three are: Ankidroid: A flashcard app for adding vocabulary I need and phrases I want to come more fluidly. Spanish Trainer: A spaced repetition verb conjugation app as Duolingo doesn't give me enough practice with this. Google Translate What would speed things up for me is the ability to easily import t…
> What would speed things up for me is the ability to easily import translations from Google Translate into my flashcard app. You might like to try my webapp for reading and learning a language: http://readlang.com It allows you to read shared texts or upload your own (.txt or .epub) or read any web page with a Chrome extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readlang-web-reade... ) You can click or drag…
Great service. I hate these language learning websites that make me type out all the vocabulary so much.
Your's is almost exactly what I was looking for for a long time.
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#113Since there are so many Duoling fans here, I have to ask: am I the only one who finds the app almost unusable because there's no theory? For German I used to try the exercises on my commute, but suddenly the app expected me to use "dem" instead of "der" without any explanation. I can't be the only one with this problem, right? Or is there a "new concepts" tab that I've never seen?
I'm like you that I prefer to learn the theory before brute force memorizing. Just get a good grammar book and use it besides Duolingo, and you're golden.
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#114I wish Duolingo had a Vietnamese course. You can translate the site to Vietnamese but they can't teach it to you, come on.
I think there is a Vietnamese course hatching.
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#115Since there are so many Duoling fans here, I have to ask: am I the only one who finds the app almost unusable because there's no theory? For German I used to try the exercises on my commute, but suddenly the app expected me to use "dem" instead of "der" without any explanation. I can't be the only one with this problem, right? Or is there a "new concepts" tab that I've never seen?
Try Duolingo.com, which has "Tips and Notes" for some lessons.
For the first German lesson, these are on capitalising nouns, grammatical gender, umlauts and verb conjugation.
I wish they'd add it to the app!
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#116I wish Duolingo had a Vietnamese course. You can translate the site to Vietnamese but they can't teach it to you, come on.
> come on
Nice Viet-English pun there.
(Cám ơn == thank you.)
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#117To me this looks a bit like a "charity" investment. I've heard rumours Duolingo was running thin on capital while frantically searching for a business model.
However, despite not being profitable yet, Duolingo is doing a tremendous amount of good. I know quite a bit about language learning and learning in general, and I have never seen a better tool for learning the languages they offer. The combination of words, sentences, smart repetition and text-to-speech is pretty much unique, and the courses I've seen are quite well designed.
Caveat: No, Duolingo alone is not enough to get fluent in a language, but if you used it as your only (or major) tool, you'll get very close.
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
("What sped things up for me" or I suppose you could say "What speeds things up for me;" hope this is received well by commenter HN community in the spirit of helping someone learn/improve their language)
What I should have written was "What would speed things up for me"
Ah, I thought it was a feature that was already available; I've not deeply used Duolingo yet.
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#119Since there are so many Duoling fans here, I have to ask: am I the only one who finds the app almost unusable because there's no theory? For German I used to try the exercises on my commute, but suddenly the app expected me to use "dem" instead of "der" without any explanation. I can't be the only one with this problem, right? Or is there a "new concepts" tab that I've never seen?
Try Duolingo.com, which has "Tips and Notes" for some lessons. For the first German lesson, these are on capitalising nouns, grammatical gender, umlauts and verb conjugation. I wish they'd add it to the app!
The differences between the iOS app and the web page were startling about a year ago when I first started using it. In particular how different the iOS's coach was and the "on-track" concept on the web. I was excited that they wanted to make it more similar, but then they just cut the coach which I had vastly preferred.
Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M
#120To me this looks a bit like a "charity" investment. I've heard rumours Duolingo was running thin on capital while frantically searching for a business model. However, despite not being profitable yet, Duolingo is doing a tremendous amount of good. I know quite a bit about language learning and learning in general, and I have never seen a better tool for learning the languages they offer. The combination of words, sen…
Yeah I have to wonder how great Duolingo would have been if I had it as a kid as a learning tool for French (I'm Canadian). I generally got good French marks, but I think Duolingo would have boosted my actual ability.