LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

> I like to think it's worked

It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days every few months, read something, and then disappear.

You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences in the applicable context.

I don't think that Duolino is absolutely useless. But my reason for learning languages might be different from those of others. Some people want to be able to say a few words in the language they are learning. I want to read novels, poetry and philosophical texts.

The approach you take and the kind of vocabulary you want to acquire will differ accordingly.

What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.

If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.

I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation exercises in a foreign language learning course such as Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.

From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.

I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words" and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to understand what is really going on and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.

I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process: it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency, by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least, by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her running "learning streak".

Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign language learning course. Effortless, magical learning processes simply do not exist.