An opinionated critique of Duolingo

The caveat here was that I was intensely motivated, my native language (English) is related to German, and I already had learned two other languages, so I had internalized a good process to learn a language (plus an interest in linguistics meant I could read "here's how the subjunctive is constructed in German" and not have to read fifty pages of explanation about what the subjunctive even is.

It CANNOT be overstated how useful it is to understand grammatical concepts at an academic level when you're learning a new language. There's so much that can be conveyed with one term instead of twenty examples you have to read over and over to grok what this construction is for. Pay attention in seventh grade English when you're being taught what passive voice is, pay attention when you're learning about mood. When you hear past and past perfect, remember it! It will make things SO much easier when you decide to acquire another language.

(Edit) Even very different languages like Japanese still have a lot of the same concepts. The most complicated verb ending IMO is the "causative-passive," and many of my classmates struggled to learn it. IMO it's probably because of the "passive" part. But passive voice exists in English, and if you can recognize it, the construction in Japanese is really easy. "To be allowed to XYZ" or "To be forced to XYZ" if you translate in your head (like most learners do at first). You speedrun the whole concept but for actually learning the mechanics of constructing it: for one category of verbs, drop -ru and add -saserareru. For the other, drop the -u and replace with -an and then -serareru.

Bam, if you already know what passive means, you're done. You've literally just learned the entirety of it, a thing I watched take a full week in my university class.

Yes, obviously an actual class with a qualified teacher is going to teach you a language faster than Duolingo. Obviously you will learn faster if you move to a foreign country or if you have people around you to regularly speak your target language. Obviously you can cheat at Duolingo and not learn anything, just like you could turn the speed way down on your home treadmill and not really get any exercise.

But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa, and a ten minute language lesson will still teach you more than no language lesson at all.

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. The best way is to flip the order:

    The language is difficult -> La lengua es difícil.

I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.

I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."

[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to

[1]: https://mangolanguages.com (not sure why no one knows about this)

[2]: https://busuu.com (probably the best for grammar)

[3]: https://memrise.com (very, very good AI text convos with corrections provided and mixed language support)