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An opinionated critique of Duolingo

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Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#311

Post by jamager »

mtalantikite wrote: post #87

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…

Duolingo doesn't work because that's the point.

Same problem as dating apps: if you could actually learn a language with Duolingo, then you would stop using Duolingo. No good for business.

The hard part is how to trick people into believing that it works or even "it's better than nothing". Hence gamification.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#312

Post by qingcharles »

kabes wrote: post #180
qingcharles wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Dutch friends who swear they learned all their English simply by watching Friends on BBC in the Netherlands.

You don't need to watch BBC for that. Not a lot of tv shows, even child programs are dubbed on Dutch tv. So you get accustomed to it early on. Combined with the fact the languages are closely related means the Dutch usually have a reasonable grasp of English before it's being taught in school.

Yeah, IIRC they mentioned most movie releases in the cinema are also in English too.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#313

Post by abhaynayar »

abhaynayar wrote: post #262

Finally a good critique of Duolingo, couldn't have written it better myself. A fresh take separate from the cliche everywhere on the internet that you can't learn an entire language on Duolingo itself which I've heard a thousand times at this point. (Currently "learning" French on it, but going to quit cause have been guilty of cheat-streaking myself). Yes, the social aspect is trash. The "path" is trash. The leagues…

Actually, I take back quitting French. I will keep consuming it like a snack, with perhaps short (or long) bursts of more than a snack intensity in between, when I get the time/motivation. But would also ideally like to join a language-class when I get time.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#314

Post by elil17 »

csa wrote: post #261
elil17 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturall…

> Focus on producing speech over everything else That’s a great way to gimp your language learning curve. Receptive skills develop before productive skills. This is just a truism about language. I could buy into dedicating time to speaking, as many folks don’t put enough time into that skill, but I’m not sure I would ever recommend prioritizing it over receptive skills. > it's the hardest part 90% of the time. While…

> I assume you are basing this on second hand information, or “really strong evidence” is doing a lot of work here, but volumes have been written about the efficacy of comprehensible input in foreign language learning.

What I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods.

>the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary)

Realistically, this is a small subset of language learners. Most people vastly overestimate the level of proficiency they are going for. People also underestimate just what a high level B2 is.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#315

Post by elil17 »

Roxo wrote: post #240
elil17 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturall…

> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).

What I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods. It is certainly a way to learn a language. But is it a good way to learn a language?

You are smarter than a baby and you can learn a language faster (e.g. with fewer hours of study) then a baby.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#316

Post by thaumasiotes »

laurieg wrote: post #306
thaumasiotes wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same. But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to di…

I appreciate the clarification, but does it provide any actionable insight on how to learn to discriminate those sounds as an adult?

That can be very difficult. Fundamentally, you need to keep trying to tell samples of the two sounds apart until, eventually, you figure it out. You will need a trustworthy source for the sounds.

It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.

A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.

But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.

Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".

It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#317

Post by ghaff »

amonith wrote: post #238
ghaff wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accept that some people are doubtless much more talented in acquiring languages than I am. But I did take 4 years of high school French and was considered "good." And, traveling with a friend in Paris, I clearly knew a lot more of the language than they did. But I'm a very very far way from being fluent. Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or may…

A few weeks is definitely BS, but I took 3 years of German in high school and after roughly 3 months of 30min-1hr daily Duolingo I was already past the high school material. I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.

To be fair, you already had the high school material and you spent at least as much time on Duolingo as in the classroom.

Styles are different oo. I would say my high school was a lot more focused on writing, translation, and grammar than anything truly conversational though they did work on on pronunciation to some extent.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#318

Post by deaux »

luckydata wrote: post #152
jmkni wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one? Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?

In an immersion context I can get to conversational fluency in about 3 months and to complete mastery in a year. I've done it twice, once for Spanish and once for English. A few things in my approach helped me move quite a lot faster than my peers: 1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it whil…

What is your native language? Distance to existing languages you're fluent in makes things ten times easier or harder.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#319

Post by deaux »

sweetjuly wrote: post #91
fny wrote: post #57

Duolingo and many other apps avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other. It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order. You'll never learn to speak this way.…

> avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other. The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :) (or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)

> Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog

That's not something against translating, that just means you haven't done it enough yet, so you're still too slow.

The first time you translate a basic sentence it might take 10s. 2nd time 5s. And so on. The 100th time it takes 0.05s and you can just say it without thinking. If one just keeps translating, you automatically reach that point.

Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo

#320

Post by [deleted] »

dilap wrote: post #66
brandall10 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a newer app I use called Natulang, developed by a Ukranian software dev to solve this problem for themself, which is entirely speaking focused w/ AI support and aims to get a person to a B2 level over 360 lessons w/ about 15 minutes each. I'd round up to 30 minutes each for actual time commitment due to the extra SRS sessions tacked on. I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recentl…

Playing briefly, looks pretty good! -- though I wonder if there's a way to move away from using a source language (or maybe it does this in later lessons?). You really want to try to get your head 100% inside the target language as quickly as possible, and not be translating back and forth.

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