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An opinionated critique of Duolingo

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Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#191

Post by huhkerrf »

agnishom wrote: post #169
nikolay wrote: post #166

Duolingo is gamification gone wrong, with most of the development effort spent on childish animations! I've been trying to learn Greek for four years using it daily, and most of the time, I'm just trying not to drop out of leagues or ruin my streak, and not so much trying to learn as the gamification incentive is to waste time, not to learn and increase my chance of dropping. What a joke! If I put all this effort int…

Viewed another way, the gamification is a sign that they don't trust the actual content to be good enough that the user would want to return to it

Ehh... language learning drop off rates for all methods is really high. It's a subject that people view as attractive, but it's really hard.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#192

Post by [deleted] »

vintermann wrote: post #183
xormapmap wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1). I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life gett…

Sitcoms are a tried and true language promotion tactic. I remember when I was young there was a French teenage-sitcom, "Helene", which my mother would watch because her students watched it religiously (she was a language teacher). It was outrageously soapy, but even I noticed the relatively accessible language. My mother told me the show was a subsidized export of France's language evangelization program. Apparently…

[deleted]

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#193

Post by sunsetonsaturn »

CrazyStat wrote: post #54
forgotusername6 wrote: post #27

I have a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, mostly learning Russian. The app has got progressively worse since I started, for a while just giving me the same lesson every single day. I of course finished the course years ago, but I keep up with my one lesson a day to keep the bird happy. I find the UI incredibly annoying, I've disabled all the sounds and animations that I can. You might ask why don't I stop? Well I want t…

Last year they replaced all the recordings of native speakers with ML-generated recordings, in both Russian and Ukrainian (probably other languages too but those are the two I have). The ML-generated recordings are terrible, for example they can't deal with the ambiguity betweeen vse and vsyo (written identically in Russian) so they always say vsyo. They'll sometimes randomly say the names of individual letters inste…

The ambiguity goes away if you write them as "все" and "всё". Diacritics, accents, umlauts and cedillas are useful; if you omit them you do a disservice to the reader.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#194

Post by Antibabelic »

jimbokun wrote: post #92
duothrowaway99 wrote: post #25

Both of my parents are teachers of a European language. They both have phd's in linguistics, and rate very highly with students (who basically adore them). All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0],…

> spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. In the end this is the only one that matters. You can do things before going to that country that will help. But you'll never be close to fluent without taking that final step.

I've never been to an English-speaking country and yet I'm pretty close to fluent. How come?

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#195

Post by teiferer »

jmkni wrote: post #102
mtalantikite wrote: post #87

I 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?

The hack is immersion. Move to a country where the language is spoken, and have a girlfriend/boyfriend native in the language whom you move in with.

That's it.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#196

Post by crvdgc »

Duolingo is useful, but not efficient. When people say I want to learn a language, they often mean I want to learn this language efficiently, e.g. to be able to write an essay like the post says after a realistic period of time.

I personally don't believe its pedagogical deficiency is mere incompetence. The whole business model is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, so why would they make you learn faster rather than just enough to keep you there?

As a long time user before, I have observed a lot of mechanism changes that bear out this observation.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#197

Post by thaumasiotes »

laurieg wrote: post #165
Escapado wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning? For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studyi…

I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language. The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.

> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.

It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.

But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#198

Post by thaumasiotes »

ThrownOffGame wrote: post #177
xormapmap wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that child brains are better at learning languages is a myth. Adults struggle with languages because traditional language education is not fit for purpose. If you took a child and isolated them in such a way that they never got comprehensible input, and instead only gave them traditional language lessons (think textbooks, grammar drills) - they too would struggle. The good news is that if you take an adult a…

What about pronunciation? Many of the assertions I've heard about adults in a foreign language is about our ability to recognize, differentiate, and reproduce the different phonemes, many which do not exist in our language. These phonemes are even more difficult to recognize when we're not conversing face-to-face and in-person! So if you're listening to "comprehensible input" if it's on audio, or video voice-over, it…

> if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?

The answer is sort of "yes". If an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, they will have a more difficult time with the phonemes of a new language than an infant would.

However, "learning new sounds" is not a correct way to think about it. You're born knowing all the sounds. You unlearn the differences between certain ones. If you, as an adult, have unlearned a difference that matters in your target language (because it didn't matter in your native language), you will have trouble with that difference. An infant can't have this problem.

Note that the cutoff point where an immersed child will fail to learn the pronunciation of a new language "automatically" is somewhere in the late teens, though.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#199

Post by agnishom »

apple1417 wrote: post #179

2800 day streak here, primarily in Finnish. I haven't been a fan of the app for a long time, but the problem I've always had switching is the question: What else? There might be a thousand different Spanish courses, but for less popular languages there just aren't many choices, the fact that they still host one is great. Yes I haven't really learnt much, it's more maintaining what I do know, but I'd've lost it withou…

Any chance there are textbooks for Finnish as a second language that you could find?

How about taking lessons with some Finnish tutors on services like iTalki?

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#200

Post by jonplackett »

What you all (most likely technical people) need is someone who teaches HOW a language works.

Please check out Michel Thomas.[1]

You will be speaking sentences and understanding how words connect together in the first 20 minutes.

He is the only reason I speak any Spanish at all, and it’s a borderline miracle I can now speak fluently despite being the absolute worst language learner as a kid.

The BBC made a documentary about him (teaching French) where he goes into a UK school, says “Give me your worst pupils” and then teaches them most of the years long curriculum in a couple of weeks.[2]

He was also in the French resistance a Nazi interrogator in the 2nd world war. [3]

An absolute dude. Would be my #1 historical dinner party guest!

1. https://www.youtube.com/live/XeQODLgjQu8?si=gIcXoh7XwsGIaXhD

2. https://youtu.be/mr_NUWhYASg

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas

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