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LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

librelingo.app

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Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#181

Post by bluGill »

froh wrote: post #24
wodenokoto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.

is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?

I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time.

Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#182

Post by bluGill »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #19
devrandoom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?

I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.

My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English.

Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried.

Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#183

Post by vel0city »

ljm wrote: post #91
internet_points wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach That's not better than Duolingo, no. Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to * https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book) * https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio cour…

I've used Pimsleur on and off for a while and it's great, because even with sporadic usage I can still more or less remember what I learned and most of the time I just need a bit of a refresher in terms of using the right case or conjugation so I don't get I/you/they/it mixed up. Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with Pimsleur, after the sam…

I see people say they get nonsense phrases in Duolingo a lot but I never seem to get them. For example, a lesson I'm doing right now has phrases like "Quand est-ce que vous partez aux Etas-Unis?" (When are you leaving for the United States?), "Tu as ton ticket? (Do you have your ticket?), "Nous cherchons un bon hôtel à Paris." (We are looking for a good hotel in Paris).

How are these nonsense phrases? Seems like some useful things to know as a traveler.

Maybe it's the different language courses. But I also did a lot of Esperanto and it had similar quality phrases to learn as this French course.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#184

Post by mattkevan »

I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project in particular.

But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.

Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]

---

[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.

[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.

Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#185

Post by bluGill »

oguz-ismail wrote: post #48
monkeyelite wrote: post #42

If I’m going to spend a thousand hours learning a new language, I’m willing to pay for professional study material.

>professional study material What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent dictionary app

App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about language learning would consider great. If you are going to pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't about language learning, but it has native content in your language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your money.

There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#186

Post by pbmonster »

ryandrake wrote: post #165
pbmonster wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time. We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think our teachers realized that most students will learn little from that. It was always student teacher interactions,…

> That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time. After trying for years to learn my wife’s native language, I haven’t really gotten past the “my name is _” and a few other key phrases. I’ve got maybe 10 phrases memorized and I think that’s all my brain can hold at this point. Language learning is not for everyone.

> Language learning is not for everyone.

That's certainly true, but there's probably another effect at play here: language learning is extremely time intensive, and you don't progress if you're not practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even lose progress again.

You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of maintenance effort.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#187

Post by lurk2 »

dingnuts wrote: post #169
ryandrake wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe “immersion” works if you already know the language and are going for fluency, but I don’t see how it can get you from zero to one. I’ve tried as an adult and failed to learn my wife’s native language and no amount of “input” at any speed or level helps. It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.

I'm like three days from my one year Duo streak. I've gone from understanding none of my wife's native language to being able to eavesdrop on phone conversations a bit, and to have short exchanges. I've probably spent half an hour daily on average. Sometimes a lot more. I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.

Comprehensible input works really well and was popularized by a video that went viral a few years ago entitled “How to acquire any language NOT learn it!” [0]

The method described in the video involves focusing on listening for the first year by having someone read magazines and books to you in the target language, pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning of words you don’t understand. This method works quite well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will consistently meet with you and practice like this before you have reached a certain level of understanding, and very few people want to learn this way because they see it as a waste of time.

One of the key aspects of this model is that you should not be translating between your native and your target language, which is what you usually do on apps like Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo doesn’t work. The reality is that the method that works is the method you use consistently over time. Once you get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illApgaLgGA

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#188

Post by tempest_ »

anothereng wrote: post #179

The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary

Duolingo is sorta like flashcards and I think it makes a good easy entry into learning

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#189

Post by codethief »

tempest_ wrote: post #188
anothereng wrote: post #179

The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary

Duolingo is sorta like flashcards and I think it makes a good easy entry into learning

But flashcards that connect words and concepts are still much better than flashcards where you merely translate.
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