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LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

librelingo.app

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Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#91

Post by ljm »

internet_points wrote: post #35
gary17the wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar comb…

> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach That's not better than Duolingo, no. Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to * https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book) * https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio cour…

I've used Pimsleur on and off for a while and it's great, because even with sporadic usage I can still more or less remember what I learned and most of the time I just need a bit of a refresher in terms of using the right case or conjugation so I don't get I/you/they/it mixed up.

Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with Pimsleur, after the same amount of time, it's right into practical stuff like "I would like something to eat" or "I don't understand X but I do speak Y."

Having an extensive vocabulary of random words isn't particulary helpful except to extrapolate meaning out of conversations you don't fully understand, and almost certainly cannot contribute to.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#92

Post by huimang »

pbmonster wrote: post #82
huimang wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion. My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words an…

> and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people Is this really how language lessons are taught in US high schools? I've learned English and French in high school, and we were forced to speak all the time. * Read a story together (who's reading aloud is frequently switched), then the teacher asks questions about the story and picks…

We did do those kinds of things. For example, speaking with a partner or having to give a 5 minute talk to the teacher on something.

The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise, and the content of "conversations" was always very, very simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.

I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our essays.

It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.

Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or another environment to speak/practice the language will yield much greater results much faster. You can study the same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at times to fill in gaps.

I think if you're a college student it's fine since you have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of any language), but as an adult where time is significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a sibling comment I went over what I do use.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#93

Post by hombre_fatal »

gary17the wrote: post #81
wkat4242 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification. I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.

> Duolingo is obsolete. I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more. I think the trick is to pu…

Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language.

And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro.

Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#94

Post by Tor3 »

broodbucket wrote: post #68
thaumasiotes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version. If you have that, you don't need the other things. One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language. (You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)

There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whateve…

I and my wife used an LLM to translate something she had written, she could have done that herself but she doesn't feel up to a task like that yet (due to the target audience). And I myself am far away from being able to translate that kind of text to my native language.

In general the translation was good, but the wording felt a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and also using pronouns where a native never would - where it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a better translation, and after that refreshing the translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#95

Post by rvba »

arghwhat wrote: post #79
Tor3 wrote: post #4

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…

I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better. Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having…

Using AI for conversations is really interesting approach - it generally speaks the language correctly (not like classmates).

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#96

Post by hombre_fatal »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #12

Going to plug Language Transfer again, an excellent free app that is a much better way to learn a language than the DuoLingo approach.

So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?

Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.

Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.

Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.

The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#97

Post by isaacremuant »

arghwhat wrote: post #79
Tor3 wrote: post #4

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…

I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better. Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having…

Next time pay enough for a class or have a good private tutor and all you've said becomes true.

But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#98

Post by trueismywork »

Tor3 wrote: post #4

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a co…

One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language.

For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.

I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#99

Post by tossandthrow »

Tor3 wrote: post #84
tossandthrow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite. If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one. The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language . Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concep…

> 2) speech from day one. .. is something I can't fully agree with. The exception being if the target language only has sounds which you are familiar with already (as in _really_ familiar - your native language already have them). Otherwise you'll simply train your brain to pronounce badly, because in the beginning you can't hear the differences. That's something which will be hard to fix later. And it takes time to…

> ... target language ...

> your native language already have them

It seems like there is a strong underlying understanding that learning a new language is done from a source language towards a target language.

The book I am referring to argues that learning a language is about embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task.

The most natural embodiment og a language is speech.

This is fundamentally another way of looking at language learning than what most people think about having had Spanish in high school or what not.

It might not be for all.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#100

Post by GardenLetter27 »

It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.

It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.

Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.

Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.

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