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Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

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Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#31

Post by jghn »

cletus wrote: post #30

This seems like marketing. I tried Duolingo Spanish pretty much every day for 1-2 years at the highest rate (5 lessons/day IIRC) and honestly... I don't remember any of it. The vocab is extremely selective (and limited). It's too easy to guess answers without knowing them. Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last. It seems like your recor…

> Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last

This might be a newer feature and perhaps only on the browser version, as I don't use the app. But you can configure Duolingo to make you type in all the words freeform instead of suggesting words for you. This helps get rid of the little cheat you mention above.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#32

Post by scarface74 »

I gave up on DuoLingo after 150 days trying to learn Spanish. It was pretty good at first. But the gamification, constant alerts, repetitiveness and everything being multiple choice got to be a bit much.

I switched to Babbel last week. It seems to do a better job at teaching you the basics.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#33

Post by scarface74 »

jghn wrote: post #31
cletus wrote: post #30

This seems like marketing. I tried Duolingo Spanish pretty much every day for 1-2 years at the highest rate (5 lessons/day IIRC) and honestly... I don't remember any of it. The vocab is extremely selective (and limited). It's too easy to guess answers without knowing them. Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last. It seems like your recor…

> Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last This might be a newer feature and perhaps only on the browser version, as I don't use the app. But you can configure Duolingo to make you type in all the words freeform instead of suggesting words for you. This helps get rid of the little cheat you mention above.

That’s not an option on the app.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#34

Post by bstpierre »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #4

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate. When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I…

I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.)

I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.

For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.

I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.

But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.

What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.

I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.

Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)

Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#35

Post by bstpierre »

rcarr wrote: post #13
throwaway9191aa wrote: post #4

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate. When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I…

If you pay for the subscription version, there are dedicated listening and speaking lessons on the practice page that tend to be more challenging than the ones you get in the lessons. It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well. I’m planning on creating a multilingual blog to practice my writing though. They do a duolingo Spanish podcast as well that you might be interested in.

> It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well.

Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections. Nice to get some feedback, but I don’t have any real way to know how correct or comprehensive it is.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#36

Post by climb_stealth »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #21
ojintoad wrote: post #6

This is a really interesting article that not only gives insight into how Duolingo works technically but also maybe how Duolingo works as an organization culturally. The most recent changes to UI reduced user choice on what to learn and practice significantly. Some of it is being repaired, but if you are continuing to use Duolingo you are deferring to its algorithm significantly on how you should learn. This is proba…

The CEO of Duolingo has gone on their subreddit and been super insistent about how the redesign is amazing because they have AB test results to prove it. Complaining directly is useless in the face of a rigid data driven approach (assuming the correct data is even being gathered), so I've decided to vote with my feet and hit em in the OKRs by switching to another app. I've been using Lingodeer

Man, the new redesign is terrible. I usually don't do reviews on the Playstore, but this made me give a 1-star with what I thought of as reasonable and constructive.

Sounds like it's not going to be changed back. It's a shame, really.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#37

Post by chrisfosterelli »

scarface74 wrote: post #33
jghn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last This might be a newer feature and perhaps only on the browser version, as I don't use the app. But you can configure Duolingo to make you type in all the words freeform instead of suggesting words for you. This helps get rid of the little cheat you mention above.

That’s not an option on the app.

I was just using the app and it is for me.

Also the cheat mentioned above only sort of works because the app does remove them when it wants to make a question more difficult I've found.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#38

Post by zaroth »

The pedagogy around learning a language has changed since I tried and utterly and completely failed to learn a language as a student.

Learning languages is awesome, and I fucking hated it and was awful at it. So I’m curious if new approaches will be more successful overall, but after some initial head scratching I’m curious to learn more about language pedagogy and hope my kids do better than I did!

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#39

Post by sfmike »

i wish there was a language app designed around tim feriss' paretto principle with languages where you can focus on the top 500 most used words which are like 60% of a language so you can be proficient at a travel level or survival level in just a few months. Or even a day get the top 50 or so and be ready to order some food where you're going.

Re: Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn

#40

Post by theshrike79 »

salusinarduis wrote: post #23

Students waste a tremendous amount of time learning these things which could be better spent elsewhere. What if what humanity needs to realize is that language learning is a waste of time, unless you are studying the history of language. There's no reason we shouldn't have only one planetary language, besides the whims of governments and nationalists. I dream of a advanced designed language that incorporates the best…

Languages have a lot of nuance and culture behind them.

All this is lost if we all switched to Esperanto tomorrow.

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