Anki is Free and Open Source Software and it's way more effective. Why waste any time on Duolingo when you could be using Anki instead?
An opinionated critique of Duolingo
121–130 of 320 posts
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#122Earlier 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?
Probably traveling to the local and living there.. ie full immersion. If I were to wager and riff off ya ;)
You would still need to study or this would be super slow. When I went to China even after I did DuoLingo for two years I understood only super basic sentences and sometimes I even missed those because of accents. I couldn't learn "new" words or concepts or grammar through immersion, it only gave me the question to ask my wife so I could learn it through study.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate this take. Duolingo users understand fully, once they clear their language's Section 3 or higher, that they have a long road ahead. The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language. Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duoling…
This is an app that constantly nags you to use it, to the point that its mascot is so widely known as annoying that they play it for laughs in their ads. All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads. And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t t…
Most apps are nagware, that is not a Duolingo issue.
The ads are for converting users to paid subscribers, not just "ads."
I don't see your point at all.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#124Earlier 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?
Immersion and transferring patterns you already know from other languages. Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org
Language Transfer is great. On the topic of immersion, I made https://nuenki.app in my gap year. It estimates the difficulty of sentences in webpages and translates the ones at your knowledge level into the language you're learning.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Immersion and transferring patterns you already know from other languages. Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org
This looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.
Its in the article itself.... Nothing wrong with coming straight for the comments but this is what the author recommends as an alternative lol
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#126I 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…
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?
As others have said, immersion is the only way that you have control of.
If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#127Duolingo is a mobile game with a language learning gimmick, not a serious learning tool.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
People just need to properly set expectations. I've been using Duolingo for about 15 mins per day on average for a few years now. What I've found is that my reading skills are actually pretty good (roughly A2/B1 level), for instance I can open up a Spanish language subreddit and mostly make out what's going on. My listening is rudimentary at best, I can generally have a vague idea of what people are talking about if…
TBH native Spanish speakers talk FAST. Like fast-fast.
Exactly, that's a big part of my issue. I'll catch some words & phrases so can sometimes catch a big picture view of what they're saying, but that's it. If I watch a video intended to be educational & at a slower speed, then I'm much better off.
And that's not a surprise to me. 95+% of my listening experience is listening to Duolingo's unnaturally slow, computer generated voices and that's a poor substitute. But hey, I can also do it quickly while drinking my morning coffee instead of putting a lot of effort into it, so it is what it is.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#129From a 2019 Forbes article [0]
> Duolingo has gotten bad press from writers who try the app and don’t learn much. But Von Ahn promises only to get users to a level between advanced beginner and early intermediate. “A significant portion of our users use it because it’s fun and it’s not a complete waste of time,” he says.
> He’s been logging 15 to 20 minutes of French every day since November, and when asked to describe what he did the previous weekend he says, “Je fais du sport. Je suis mange avec mes amis. Je suis boire du biere en un bar,” mangling his tenses. (Rough translation: I play sports, I am eat with my friends. I am drink beer in a bar.)
> Bob Meese, Duolingo’s 42-year-old chief revenue officer, has been studying Duolingo Spanish for more than six months. In response to the question, “¿Hablas español?” he freezes, then says, “Could you repeat that?”
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/07/16/game-of-t...
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Also, having worked in the language learning industry myself, readers may be curious to learn that Duolingo is seen as a pariah that no one takes seriously as a learning tool. And I'm not one to use the term "scam" lightly, but if that word is to mean anything, then it definitely applies to Duolingo!
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#130[deleted]