Cool... but nothing will ever beat Anki + Immersion.
Here's one guide most Japanese learners follow:
https://learnjapanese.moe/
LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
201–210 of 376 posts
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#202[flagged]
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet. Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective. Even if you take part in a course with tutors th…
Because duolingo is designed for addiction (that's how they make money), not actual learning (learning would mean you'd stop using the thing, no good for stakeholders). There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn , and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is. For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not trea…
> Because duolingo is designed for addiction
For people who have trouble keeping up hobbies, that's a feature. Even if duolingo isn't the ideal way to learn, it's a lot better than something I give up on or forget about after a week.
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#204If 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
I would probably include duo lingo when I started - but I wouldn’t say “hmm I wish there was something worse but free”.
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#205Anyone as experience with feedback on https://www.rocketlanguages.com/ and https://babbel.com/ ? I’m mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two have voice recognition it seems.
I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on. Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking a class.
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#206There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…
Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.
I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#207[dead]
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar comb…
The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion. My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words an…
That's interesting to me. From my perspective, I didn't find Duolingo great, but it did give me some vocab and basic sentences, and left me feeling more competent than I actually ended up being once I was living where they speak the language I was learning.
Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to the point where I was having short conversations in that second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.
However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can do things like play D&D in my second language. I still don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still, though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational, and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.
Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature of yours?
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#209I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy. First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you…
It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started German with it before doing more traditional classes and live speaking with a partner
Annoyances (in particular, ads disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth paying for as a quick daily refresher.
Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
#210Hope this takes off! Early Duolingo was very community focused and lots of fun, and proves people are really motivated to participate if you make the UI easy enough.