Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by rcarr » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 10:10 AM UTC

bstpierre wrote: post #35

rcarr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but you basically get two stories every unit so it’s not a lot of practice. It’s weird that they have dedicated speaking and listening lessons but no dedicated writing lessons (you could count stories or general practice as reading). It’s definitely another improvement I’d like to see at some point.

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

#42

Post by epistemer » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 12:18 PM UTC

bstpierre wrote: post #34

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 Spani…

Duolingo was my gateway drug to Anki. I just can't imagine going back to Duolingo with the speed of going through say a 100 cards in Anki. There is just so much animation/sounds/nonsense in the way with Duolingo. It would take at least 10X longer.

There is absolutely something special about building decks too. I also get pretty much the same motivation from the timeline statistics in Anki as the streaks in Duolingo.

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

#43

Post by _lnwk » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

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…

What you're advocating for is culture genocide.

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

#44

Post by jghn » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #37

scarface74 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's interesting as I fired up the web app for the first time in a week (was on vacation to a country speaking the language I'm taking) and it won't let me select the keyboard option. I wonder if they're in the process of getting rid of it.

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

#45

Post by cranky908canuck » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 10:24 AM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #16

The article reads like ad copy. Not surprising given the author. My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally. It attempts to make you feel like you're adept at the language to keep you motivated. This is accomplished by teaching you a restricted subset of the language that you can become skilled at, but isn't necessarily sufficient in…

New with Duolingo, agreed that it tends to keep you at a high level of success.

I disagree that this is (only) about keeping you using the app. When I studied piano, it was critical to work through pieces slowly and in small snippets that you could play. If that meant a quarter the speed marked, so be it (if slower than that, you'd bitten off more than you could chew). Otherwise, you weren't practicing the music, you were practicing your own mistakes. So a 95+ success is really about practicing reading and producing the language correctly as it is about playing games (the games may help ease the conscious boredom of the same thing over and over while the reflexes build).

Also, something like 'the owl' and 'the mouse' may seem trivial and logo-ed, but the language angle is 'le hibou' vs 'la souris' (masculine vs feminine gender) and these don't follow across different languages ('die Eule, die Maus' - both feminine) so repeating this along with exercises that flesh this out has value. I do think that the exercises don't often enough provide the opportunity to get it wrong, but that may be the 95% thing.