271–280 of 320 posts
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I've never been to an English-speaking country and yet I'm pretty close to fluent. How come?
English is relatively easy and the default "culture" (games, music, movies, shows, internet, &c.) language for like half of the planet, plus it's mandatory in schools in most of the west.
- Being seen as a new and hip way to do a thing
- Making sure their approach scales to lots of users
- Making the first user experience and onboarding seamless
What they are willing to give up:
- Long positive term user outcomes
- Sustainability and supporting complex user needs
It seems their goal is to extract value from the users by promising them a better/easier to use/cheaper product then hooking them and stringing them along until the users grow frustrated enough. I'd list some examples of this exact business model, but there's too many to count, and I'm sure most people here won't have any trouble coming up with some of their own.
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…
> And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1]. It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.
There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."
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That's a narrative. Over my life, I've seen 4 regimes and heard about a dozen historical narratives about the particular place I was born in, each radically different from the others and exaggerated to ridiculous proportions. Enough to understand that they're all mostly nonsense. One massive red flag is dealing in absolutes, another is "it's always been like that".
Sure, it's easy to dismiss anything as 'narrative, therefore nonsense'. I will give you another narrative to dismiss: oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high. Russia is an oil-rich country. And there are several other reasons why things are the way they are.
I'd really like to see some statistics backing that up
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English is relatively easy and the default "culture" (games, music, movies, shows, internet, &c.) language for like half of the planet, plus it's mandatory in schools in most of the west.
Many people throughout the world certainly do not find it "easy".
Anki is Free and Open Source Software and it's way more effective. Why waste any time on Duolingo when you could be using Anki instead?
Sorry, maybe I'm not using it right in learning a language, but isn't Anki just flashcards?
It's really good. It's still flash cards and best for things where you just have to memorize something (I use it for mandarin characters, for example, for which it's really excellent). But it's great at what it does.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, it's easy to dismiss anything as 'narrative, therefore nonsense'. I will give you another narrative to dismiss: oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high. Russia is an oil-rich country. And there are several other reasons why things are the way they are.
> oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high I'd really like to see some statistics backing that up
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Then again Israel is annexing land and actively committing genocide and voicing any anger is seen a deeply antisemitic and completely taboo. You will see a reflexive assurance that you can not equate the people with the government and so on. My point is not Whataboutism. I don't want to relativate any war crimes done by anyone. I don't criticize people that lost relatives in Ukraine for using dehumanizing language li…
Israel is facing a ton of backlash for the latest conflict too (even from countries like Germany!). But I would argue that in the Ukraine war it is much more obvious who "good guy/bad guy" is, because you have a totalitarian aggressor on one side and a somewhat democratic defender on the other. In Israel, you have a democratically controlled army vs a terrorists group (Hamas), and it is much less clear where the just…
I'd say they both suck. Have you seen how Ukraine abducts random people from the street and sends them to war?
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…
You could try not getting suckered in by the gamification. I've been using Duo for years. I have no idea how I'd even find out what a league is, much less if I've dropped out of one.
I do try to use it every day, so my streak is high, but if I don't use it I don't use it.
And no, I don't think my ~15 mins a day over the same amount of time would have made me notably more fluent. I might be *differently* fluent, however as Duo heavily skews towards reading comprehension.