281–290 of 376 posts
Cool... but nothing will ever beat Anki + Immersion. Here's one guide most Japanese learners follow: https://learnjapanese.moe/
Wish there were similar pages for other languages, I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.
You could give Refold a shot! https://refold.la/how-to-learn-russian/
(disclosure: I also used to work there.)
As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult. The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation met…
Duolinguo tries to follow the input hypothesis. For instance, it barely teaches any grammar but simply asks its users to translate sentences. Unfortunately that's very ineffective. Compared to reading or watching live conversations, the amount of input in unit time on Duolingo is too little. In the meantime the sentences lack sufficient context for Duolingo users to build up intuitive understanding of phrases. Take D…
You NEED to consume tens of thousands of words repeatedly used in different contexts for the brain to make those automatic connections. Random sentences do not maintain the context which would have otherwise helped you figure out the possible meaning of some words in the following sentences/paras. That is one of the biggest flaws of any translation method.
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Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification. I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.
Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM. Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can r…
As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult. The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation met…
It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.
As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult. The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation met…
> I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another. 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 con…
This is where comprehensible input shines.
- you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences
- the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus
This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.
I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed to recognize the patterns in the language and store the sequence information somewhere.
If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful. However, I believe if you are capable of doing that, comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck. It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days of CI-based learning than the previous six months of memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating random sentences.
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Frankly, people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up. This happened to me about ten years ago. I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking aroun…
> You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up. is that Duolingo fault or users? because that happen in any hobby. heck, take indie gamedev.! hundreds give ups for a single released game. we could also say that there are people who tried Duolingo and years later they are fluent because the app was the kickstart you have to be quite naiv…
I have seen lifelong scholars of the Sanskrit language struggling to speak in Sanskrit because they are simply not used to it.
As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult. The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation met…
I built a tool[0] that gives you constant input at your level as you browse the web, so you don't need to take time out of your day. You can just learn a little as you browse, and let it compound over time. It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language. [0] https://nuenki.app
I'm curious what determines whether or not you add a given language to the list. DeepL and Claude, at least, have usable translation ability in more languages than the app currently supports. Is there a lot of manual effort required for each language, or do you want to keep the list limited just to avoid overwhelming users?
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> I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another. 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 con…
> 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. This is where comprehensible input shines. - you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences - the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain us…
As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult. The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation met…
I learned Sanskrit by translating the Bhagavad Gita ( https://gita.pub ), and I experienced a similar jump in comprehension to what you described. At first I needed to look up every word, even the ones I'd seen many times, but eventually (after many many repetitions) I finally started having an intuitive idea of what the words and sounds meant. It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which th…
I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of laghukathā collections over the last couple of years and read from them as time permits.
I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:
- a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama
- a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of Lingva Latina.
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> 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. This is where comprehensible input shines. - you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences - the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain us…
It's also just a hell of a lot more fun.