An opinionated critique of Duolingo
isomorphism.xyz
An opinionated critique of Duolingo
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Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#2One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#3What is a non-opinionated critique?
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#4I bought Rosetta Stone for a similar purpose.
They cannot give you a chart or synopsis to save their lives. They are quite weak on tenses for this reason.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#5Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)
†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#6Duolingo's marketing of "learn a language in 5 minutes a day" or whatever their similar slogan is, is bad. Duolingo won't teach you hardly anything at all in only 5 minutes a day, and even with considerably more time (30 minutes to an hour a day), on it's own it is unlikely to teach you a language. However, in combination with other learning tools like classes, immersions, comprehensible input, etc. It is a very valuable tool. I finished the German class in about 2 years, and I found it helpful, and wished that the Duoloingo German class continued further than it did.
Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#7Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#8What is a non-opinionated critique?
I expect a critique of accuracy would be non-opinionated.
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#9One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.
When did they add that? When I was trying to learn Japanese 6-7 years ago Duolingo didn’t have anything for either kana or kanji…
Re: An opinionated critique of Duolingo
#10Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.) †It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target…
You can get quite far with consistent long term approach with stuff like Duolingo. The problem is, its just one or very few... vectors or dimensions in which you progress, specifically aligned with how the material is done. I have a friend, he is doing DL for French for maybe 2 years, every day. He can talk some stuff pretty well, freezes on some other situations. Passive understanding works quite well for him too.
Real use of language has many dimensions, changing also ie the ways you think in that language for example.
Nothing beats real use where you have to express yourself and not skip to other languages as a shortcut, no way around this.