Isn't the Duolingo app designed for children? It sure felt so. I mean it's not like adults can't use it, but from the UI/UX of it it did not seem they are targetting adults. Last I tried it was few weeks ago.
Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
181–190 of 252 posts
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. I get your point, but with the pace of AI, there's a good chance this statement is not true in 5 years!
You could use it to practice already: 1. Ask GPT for a list of 20 A1-level sentences in English. 2. Save them. 3. Try to translate them to Spanish. 4. If you can't use a translation service. 5. Try again the next day. The only problem is making sure that the AI generates sentences that use the vocab that you don't know, so that you keep expanding it. Not sure how to solve that. For pronunciation, record yourself repe…
Instead of GPT, you can take sentences from Tatoeba, and analyse and index by vocabulary. 'PhrasePump' does this already. We glued together an NLP pipeline (Stanza etc.) to capture the lemmas in sentences.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#183Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the n…
It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, if you don't get the agreement right I simply won't bother listening to you, unless in a good mood. This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and p…
Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integ…
No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting gender right is something any competent in person course will force you from the start. Having American accent is something to be expected and fine. Using wrong gender causes pain in listener. It really pops up great time. Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles) For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack. In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very g…
It really does matter for spoken language as much as for written. Yes people will be able to understand meaning most of the time, but no, you will sound as bad as if we're writing.
It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way.
Accent and ignoring genders or suffixes are different things. You really can't equate them.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#186Just my anecdote, but I used it before traveling in Mexico for some time. I took 3 years of Spanish in high school, but hadn't used any in years. It definitely helped me refresh vocabulary. One of my friends used it to learn initially before doing a bunch of work across the border. Now he's married to a Mexican woman and considering nationalizing.
It's no substitute for immersion, but I do think any time you spend on the app is worthwhile imo. The UI is great and it makes it easy to form a daily habit.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly. Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word translit…
If you wanted pinyin output, you could use a library like pypinyin? (we use it, no complaints). I assumed GPT models performed best in English, you could machine translate the input/output. MT is pretty fantastic these days, although, you introduce fidelity issues, and an API adds to cost and latency.
I didn't actually need the pinyin conversion (I implement that myself), it was just a test to see how well LLMs* were progressing at "out-of-domain" tasks. I always used recent newspaper headlines, so the possibility of finding matching character/pinyin pairs somewhere in the huge training set was negligible.
For this specific task, Chat-GPT is the first model I've come across that actually shows some ability to chain together concrete steps to form a task (i.e. look up character, fetch pinyin), rather than the simplistic "predict the next word in the sequence" in pure language models.
* Large Language Model - I know ChatGPT isn't a pure language model (which probably explains why it performs so much better), but I don't know what we're calling these models now so I'm sticking with LLM for now.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#188As a bilingual I tend to believe unless you're living in the country trying to learn a language(using any method) is probably a waste of time.
This article is written by an American. Given the immigration rates, you have a damn good chance of finding people who speak the target language you're trying to learn quite well, and Spanish in particular can be quite easy depending on where you live, given a quarter of the country, including the two most heavily-populated states, were formerly Spanish colonies and once part of Mexico. The third-most populated state was never part of Mexico but was also a Spanish colony, and is full of Cubans.
Do you have a maid, landscaper, janitors at your office, kitchen staff at your favorite restaurant? Talk to them.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#189The Spanish course is one of the best courses on Duolingo. I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc. It was a little rough going at times b…
> No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. I get your point, but with the pace of AI, there's a good chance this statement is not true in 5 years!
Riffing on nearby comments: (2022+n): I don't think living somewhere a language was spoken could ever have been a replacement for living _in_ the language. Contrast the oh so limited and scattered signage of legacy RL, versus the ubiquitous object tagging, with text and audio and interactives, of Apple's newest glasses. The moment-by-moment narrated-life apps. The chatbot making up funny stories and cartoons about things you see, and bantering variations with you. Teaming, both meetups and improv - versus what, constantly starting new conversations with people walking near you?? And I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me, learning pronunciation without echo would be like, like learning dance steps without overlays, with just a metal mirror or someone's kibitzing. Living learning versus a legacy call-and-response classroom or paper book - yuck. There's a reason kids historically took so many years to learn language, and so poorly, even with adult focus and peer support. Immersion is just really really essential for learning well. And unaugmented RL doesn't support it.
Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?
#190I was always crap a languages. Top class for everything. Rock bottom for German. Tried lots of language learning things to learn Spanish, including Duolingo - but they just teach you vocabulary - and mostly weird stuff you don’t need initially.
Then I stumbled upon Michel Thomas. I listened to the basic course and 2 weeks later I was in Spain speaking to people - even managed to talk my way onto a bus when I got lost and had no ticket. It’s a completely different way of learning. Speaking sentences from the first 5 minutes. You’re learning grammar from the beginning and how to actually express yourself. It’s more like a conversion course from English to Spanish (but also there’s Portuguese, French, German, some others)
He’s such an interesting guy - emigrated to the USA after the war and set up his school. Invented a whole new way of teaching languages but wouldn’t let anyone know about it because he was so mistrusting (he was a nazi hunter in the war). Only when he was 70 something did someone convince him to record the language method. The tapes when you listen have a perfect learning curve - there’s always 2 students, one is good the other not so good so you feel better than them. I assumed he must have recorded many versions and then extensively edited - NOPE - they’re all recorded in a one time session. He was just that good.
BBC has made a documentary about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 6 worst pupils French in like 2 weeks.
He’s a genuine legend and the only reason I speak Spanish.
If you want to learn a language please try this out. It is just on a different level to anything else, especially the BS repetition of duolingo type sites - although they are useful later when you want to just learn vocabulary.
Anyway, as you may be able to tell, I am always very excited to pass on Michel Thomas. What a dude. RIP.