Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material • Hacker News Board

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#251

Post by lambda » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 12:46 PM UTC

lhorie wrote: post #69

rando444 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on duolingo since the beginning and am sure that I've spent more time with the site and app than 95% of the userbase. I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language. There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses. #1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking. This is j…

> When you complete a course you're not done This definitely rings true. I was using it in the hopes it would help me provide some structure to teaching my kid portuguese (and it does to some extent), but by the time the app says a lesson is "complete", my kid is still a long ways away from having memorized it (and he's 5). I tend to complement it with a boogie board and repetition over the course of several days to…

You can't just keep taking new lessons. You have to do "strengthen skills" or go back to practice older lessons on a regular basis. In fact, the new scoring system they just released with levels (crowns) for each lesson is supposed to emphasize this; to really complete something, you have to go back and practice it many times.

When I do duolingo, I usually try to do about a two to one ratio of strengthening skills or going back to older lessons with taking new lessons.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#252

Post by School-Cotton » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:05 PM UTC

selectodude wrote: post #201

3pt14159 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because English grammar is either obvious and doesn't need teaching or is inexplicable and isn't worth trying to make a pattern out of. I ran, she ran, he ran, they ran, we ran, y'all ran. I run, she runs, he runs, they run, we run, y'all run. I'll run, she'll run, he'll run, they'll run, we'll run, y'all'll run. I thought I'd run, he thought he'd run, they thought they'd run. We'll have wished we ran, they'll h…

Also everything in English has dozens and dozens of exceptions that you just need to memorize.

This isn't unique to English.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#253

Post by viraptor » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

aninhumer wrote: post #169

ajmurmann wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that Japanese is harder to learn. However, the Duolingo course is particularly awful. Even with some prior knowledge I was completely lost with much of the stuff they randomly throw at you without any explanation.

Also a lot of it is essentially wrong, since they expect you to transliterate parts of the sentence that would probably not be included in context, e.g. saying "watashi wa" for any sentence starting "I".

While there may be some specific cases where it's done, I'm halfway through the course and watashi was shown on its own, (quite early) but I don't think it was used in even one sentence so far. (Most of them starting with I)

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#254

Post by mrcactu5 » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

Duolingo has to be supplemented with reading and / or YouTube materials in the language of choice. Any language course the examples are necessarily contrived and never to your exact needs. But we have the internet and can look for (and hopefully find) something that matches our interests.

If you're looking to do business in Japanese... then you need to be looking at the NHK news app which has beginner resources. If you're looking to do scholarship in German or Spanish or cooking in French then you need to search for vocab resources connected to those tasks.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#255

Post by pandaman » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

amaccuish wrote: post #245

pandaman wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.

So you would say that though? Like I've just never heard my хозяйка квартиры say that is all. I hear it often in things like "would you like some tea/beer?" etc or "i'm going to buy some tea/beer" but never like that. My impression was that outside of those contexts it's not popular. Mind sharing some examples? Would be really useful! :)

You probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник." since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be said. Поставь here is much more concrete than "put", it's more like "place" and I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge at some party and noticed it's running out of beer so I requested somebody to add more beer there. Much more common would be "Принеси/достань/возьми пива из холодильника" (get some beer from the fridge).

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#256

Post by chrischen » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 3:51 PM UTC

travv0 wrote: post #126

chrischen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m trying to learn Japanese and 99% of the apps out there focus on memorizing phrases out of context that could be applied to any topic, and market itself as a language learning system. I’ve yet to find a single app that beat out a one-time read through of a Japanese grammar guide. That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that.

> That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that. What about Anki?

I’m using StickyStudy, which is built just for JLPT official vocab sets.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#257

Post by ubernostrum » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #222

ubernostrum wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French: As a french speaker, I went through it as a meta course just to see. It was very awkward. The correct answers are always cringe worthy. Some of them even wrong. This is interesting. I took six years of French in high school + college, and did immersion in Québec. I had not spoken French since then, so a couple years ago when I was planning a trip to France I got Duolinguo and worked through the French course…

I read/write fluent French (not native, but close enough for Duolingo purposes). I just went through the course to see what I could find. It's quite common for correct answers not to be accepted. In particular, often some technically correct literal translation is accepted but the almost certainly correct colloquial translation is not. For example: "Tu manges ça" Literally this means "you eat that" or "you are eating…

That makes more sense to me. When I used Duolinguo it was to get caught up on some grammar and sentence structure, not vocabulary (which I can look up if I need to, and starts coming back quickly anyway as soon as I start speaking French). So I didn't really pay attention to word choices, and didn't internalize them.

(also, as my other comments make clear, the fact that my first French immersion was in Québec probably explains a lot, if you think Duolinguo is more Québecois)

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#258

Post by puppet_heart » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

nemetroid wrote: post #240

puppet_heart wrote: post #208

This thread is living proof why many people are seemingly unable to learn languages (well): they're more concerned with tools and methodologies instead of simply putting in the effort and learning the language they want to learn (emphasis on "want to learn"). Yes, it's (sometimes hard) work to learn a language and there is no magical fairy dust.

The top comment is from someone who put 370 days straight into Duolingo and completed the content for multiple languages. Is that indicative of someone unwilling to "simply [put] in the effort"?

Yes, straight into Duolingo. A tool. A gimmick. And the results were, according to the commenter, underwhelming. But I can tell you what I mean by putting in the effort: I had to learn Classical Latin and pass an exam in order to enrol in University in Germany. For that I took a two-month crash course.

What did we do in this course? 4 weeks of grammar, interspersed with reading, analyzing and translating classical texts, then 4 weeks of reading, analyzing and translating classical texts. 4 hours in class plus 2-4 hours self-study each day. It worked like a charm. The bottom line: if your aim is to read classical texts, read classical texts. And the key here was not that I learned 4-8 hours each day, the key was that the learning was not dumbed down, gamified, artificially made fun. And I have found that this is applicable to pretty much every other language.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#259

Post by vram22 » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

namaemuta wrote: post #123

ljm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience and almost straight away I felt like I wouldn't learn much besides random vocabulary. Learning 'la tortuga es verde' and 'el hombre y el niño' and similar isn't particularly useful in the grand scheme of things and it's not going to help you get to 'la cuenta por favor', 'donde esta el baño', and so on. In fact you might run into certain situations where your vocab tells you one thing but t…

> The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say. Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound (for example "que" that would be expected to sound k-u-e but actually sounds like k-e). The entonation is another…

>That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say.

Sanskrit is like that too, pretty much, i.e. as far as:

"what you read is pretty much what you have to say"

goes. There is only one way to pronounce any letter or compound letter or word. In fact Hindi is too, except for regional differences in pronunciation, and both are unlike English in this respect, where a non-native speaker often fumbles to pronounce some words right (even apart from accent), because the right way to say a word can be very different from how it looks when written (if you try to build up the sound of the word from its component letters, at least in many cases).

Examples of this are: cut and put, argue and vague.

IIRC George Bernard Shaw made a well-known observation that I learned as a kid in English class; he is supposed to have said something like: in English, going logically by how you say / spell parts of other words, you could spell "fish" as "ghoti", i.e. "f" as in the "gh" of "laugh", "i" as in the "o" of "women", and "sh" as in the "ti" of "nation".

>Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound

In Spanish, the letter combination "ll" (two ells) sounding like a "y" is another unexpected one, as in "amarillo" (yellow) for example.

https://translate.google.com/#en/es/yellow

Click on the speaker icon under "amarillo" to hear it spoken.

"j" being pronounced as "h" is another one, at least for speakers coming from English.

Interesting stuff.

Re: Duolingo Suddenly Has Over Twice as Much Language Learning Material

#260

Post by puppet_heart » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

jonbarker wrote: post #6

I think Duolingo is good for getting you past complete beginner but to go deeper I recommend Anki.

1. If you read enough, (spaced) repetition occurs naturally. No need for a software.

2. It's not bad to forget words during the learning process.

3. Purely personal: SRS reviewing is the ultimate bore, however you design your cards. And making the cards is even more of a bore. It's the opposite of fun.