I’ve got a trip to Spain in 4 months. I know a few spanish words now, but nothing beyond that. Will Duolingo get me to some level of being able to muddle my way through conversations (assuming the other person knows I’m a tourist and is using small words) in that timeframe?
Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
71–80 of 250 posts
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Super Duolingo is pretty good. Dropping the Ads alone is totally worth the subscription if you're a daily user (it's the only app I use daily aside from Messages, Email etc). I'm very curious about Max though ... the explain your answer is something I'm really interested in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing (which is where I make most of my blunders!).
I also use it daily but I'm a bit worried I won't concentrate as much if I have unlimited hearts, have you noticed any decline in recall? But yes, the ads are super annoying... especially the same one to upgrade Duolingo puts in every time!
I think any serious user should be using unlimited hearts. You learn by making mistakes.
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#73This is interesting because my impression is that LLMs perform poorly on non-english languages[1]. This is likely 'just' a corpus size problem - but it's not like that is going to be fixed any time soon. That said, at least in language instruction there's a lot of meta material that will be helpful. I wonder how Duolingo is detecting when GPT-4 is hallucinating. [1] https://twitter.com/asmelashteka/status/16309662332…
The Twitter thread you linked is just somebody pointing out poor performance in Tigrinya. That doesn't mean it performs poorly on all non-English languages. It's performing poorly on the languages with little representation in the corpus, but those are also the languages that are least likely to be learned on Duolingo. Duolingo users mainly learn languages like English, Spanish, French, German, etc. and the models do just fine with these languages.
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Super Duolingo is pretty good. Dropping the Ads alone is totally worth the subscription if you're a daily user (it's the only app I use daily aside from Messages, Email etc). I'm very curious about Max though ... the explain your answer is something I'm really interested in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing (which is where I make most of my blunders!).
I've yet to try Super Duolingo. But I've also been tapering off my usage as they keep forcing to use the word bank instead of keyboard at an increasing rate. I've no desire to use the word bank, they seem to have no desire to let me use the keyboard. Unless that's buried in one of the premium options I see the writing on the wall.
Interesting, I am a Super Duolingo subscriber but I don't think that's one of the features. Anywhere I'm inputting a sentence I think I get the keyboard option, maybe I'm misremembering, but I do a lot of typing on my Japanese keyboard when I study.
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#75I’ve got a trip to Spain in 4 months. I know a few spanish words now, but nothing beyond that. Will Duolingo get me to some level of being able to muddle my way through conversations (assuming the other person knows I’m a tourist and is using small words) in that timeframe?
No. Duolingo is gamified junk.
How much time per day do you have to study?
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#76I’ve got a trip to Spain in 4 months. I know a few spanish words now, but nothing beyond that. Will Duolingo get me to some level of being able to muddle my way through conversations (assuming the other person knows I’m a tourist and is using small words) in that timeframe?
If you're able to dedicate time and focus to it, Duolingo will at least get you familiar with words and phrases, so that you can read and recognize more common words (street signs, menus, etc.)
Depending on your fluency and your current ability with other languages, it may get you to the point where you can understand someone who is speaking clear and deliberately enunciated Spanish to you. It may also get you to the point where they can understand your clear and deliberately enunciated Spanish as well.
There's no guarantees, but jumping into it right now is free and you can gain a certain level of confidence regarding how much it might help you pretty quickly. There's literally no reason not to try.
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#77I’ve got a trip to Spain in 4 months. I know a few spanish words now, but nothing beyond that. Will Duolingo get me to some level of being able to muddle my way through conversations (assuming the other person knows I’m a tourist and is using small words) in that timeframe?
Duolingo is good to gain familiarity with common words when you legit don't know a lick of the other language in question, but once you gain a passing familiarity, I would recommend finding someone who speaks Spanish and practicing with them!
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#78Would love to use duolingo, but they have no interest in supporting iranian languages. I’ve never really seen a clear answer for why. They have about 200 million native speakers worldwide. Persian, Pashto, Kurdish are the largest.
There was a point where Duolingo was trying to teach languages including endangered ones as their primary goal. But it feels like every year they're moving more towards making money as their main main objective. I'm not optimistic about them expanding their list of languages. Most of their lesser known languages are getting fewer updates than Spanish, French, Japanese. It makes business sense to focus your hours on features and languages people are actually using but it's still frustrating thinking of what Duolingo could have been and used to promote vs what it turned out to be.
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#79I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-featured app.
Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are no vignettes like in Spanish and French where you watch a conversation and then summarize what was said. They just throw in new concepts with no instruction whatsoever. So you see a word that you know is a verb, but the ending is one you've never seen before. There's no chart or examples, or even explanation that "now we're going to teach you past tense," or whatever. Just suddenly there's a bunch of new stuff you don't understand and you have to go to the Internet to look up what the hell is happening. God forbid you ask a question on the forum. The Greek mods are stereotypically rude and controlling. Nothing is ever the fault of the app, it's always the user's fault, even when native English speakers are telling them, "The English translation of this sentence doesn't make sense and is not valid English."
So yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay for an AI that is likely giving wrong advice anyway.
Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just starting my second paid year - I didn't put up with the adverts for long. Works far better for me without the hearts. Less time staring at sentences trying to make them perfect - more quick failing, learning why, iterating and drilling it into my head. Also much more likely to spend longer in the app, maybe a couple of times a week.
After a few months of Duolingo you should move onto comprehensible input for learning. Your Duolingo subscription is holding you back
That's a new term for me, but after researching it, it makes sense. What are your preferred sources of comprehensible input. After a few months on Duolingo I still find TV shows to mostly not be comprehensible, so not productive.