The Spanish course is one of the best courses on Duolingo.
I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc.
It was a little rough going at times but basically it brings you to the basic conversation level. That's all you can really expect from it because it's rather short (took me about 6 months to complete). Of course, I practised regularly outside of Duolingo especially with writing and looking stuff up on Wiktionary.
No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. But Duolingo will give you the starting point so that you'll know where to go next if you really complete all the lessons. After finishing Duolingo, if you spend another year studying, practising, and consuming material in that language, you should be able to get to a reasonable working level in it.
With the length of the Spanish course, I am guessing you can progress even further.
I had a similar experience, although it's going back a few years now. I'd always wanted to learn Spanish and one year my wife and I were going to Spain in the fall, and then three or four months later we were going to a country in Latin America, and I decided that was the year I'd do it. I started with Duolingo and did it for three or four months before my trip to Spain, and after successfully managing a few basic interactions in Spanish and also being able to easily read signage and simple phrases, I was hooked.
When we got back I continued with Duolingo but also got an online teacher and did a pile of other stuff and by the time we went south I was somewhat conversational. You can't truly learn a language with Duolingo (you especially need practice speaking with someone) but it gave me a great start.
I've had a similar experience with Spanish. But I learned another language, Mandarin, in a more formal way, so I alread had experience throwing myself out there and immersing without fear for years. That experience made it much easier to try speaking broken Spanish without hesitation when I finally had the opportunity. In other words, if you already know how to learn languages, Duolingo is a great way to build grammar, vocab, and pronunciation for when you do get a chance to practice, but may not be great for first timers.
If I was younger and without a family I'd still consider in-person courses full time instead though.
I don’t think so. Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I don’t really know how AI could solve this, unless you mean that the AI can ferret out your gaps and tune the program to your learning needs. Isn’t this what Duolingo tries to do? Genuinely asking. I pay for the “super” Duolingo for no ads and unlimited learning because I’m kind of addicted to it, but I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.
> Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t.
I’d push back on this idea, and instead say that some people learn really well from the current tools, and some people can’t.
99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else. Naturally there are differences in the population, but I would posit that if you learned a language once (or twice or three times - I know trilingual people who insist they can’t learn a foreign language because they failed Duolingo Spanish) you can learn a language again.
My bias is that I’m working on an alternative language learning tool now - one aimed at ‘language acquisition’ over ‘language learning’, or basically how can you learn a language by just talking/listening to native speakers. Aimed at those who have finished traditional courses and want to master a language, or those who have tried traditional courses and find it didn’t mentally agree with them.
Ah, okay yeah that would be really good. It’s hard to find time to hang out with a native speaker if you aren’t already in that country. Maybe this is already possible with ChatGPT?
Here's an idea, but it is going to be really difficult to implement. You have lessons but at a certain point you get a chat "buddy" that only uses slightly more vocab than you know to naturally expand your knowledge. This replicates the teacher student in person discussions. You can then analyze the voice and ensure that someone has the right accent and pronunciation. Then use optimization to determine your faults and what you need to practice, optimizing memory. It isn't much different from what a human teacher would do. But I'm not aware of any of these subsystems being relatively close to human level but also not aware of much research in any of these directions. I've seen a few people try and they are just terrible.
> I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.
That's not necessarily true, unless consuming lots of media in the target language counts as immersion. I became fluent in English without ever traveling to an English speaking country.
Imagine ChatGPT but it uses speech-to-text to understand your speech and then it uses text-to-speech to talk back to you. Now you’re getting infinite personalized conversation practice. If you ever don’t understand what it said, hold spacebar to see the phrase in both English and Spanish with each word mapped to its translation, or just say “que?” and it’ll explain the sentence in English and/or Spanish. This seems pretty much doable today. If the speech-to-text fails to understand you, that’s immediate pronunciation feedback. May as well make it one of those boy/girlfriend chatbots too, to encourage participation and make studying more effortless.
I don’t think that will ever be a replacement for living somewhere the language is spoken. I believe true fluency requires that (unless you’re some kind of savant) and I don’t think AI can replace the experience of walking into a shop, reading all the signs and labels in the language, making small talk with others in there, talking to the cashier. It’s that kind of immersion in a language that combines not only practice reading, writing, and speaking the language, but also all the other sensory experiences that reinforce what you’ve learned and forms associations that deepens your understanding.
Riffing on nearby comments: (2022+n): I don't think living somewhere a language was spoken could ever have been a replacement for living _in_ the language. Contrast the oh so limited and scattered signage of legacy RL, versus the ubiquitous object tagging, with text and audio and interactives, of Apple's newest glasses. The moment-by-moment narrated-life apps. The chatbot making up funny stories and cartoons about things you see, and bantering variations with you. Teaming, both meetups and improv - versus what, constantly starting new conversations with people walking near you?? And I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me, learning pronunciation without echo would be like, like learning dance steps without overlays, with just a metal mirror or someone's kibitzing. Living learning versus a legacy call-and-response classroom or paper book - yuck. There's a reason kids historically took so many years to learn language, and so poorly, even with adult focus and peer support. Immersion is just really really essential for learning well. And unaugmented RL doesn't support it.
1. Ask GPT for a list of 20 A1-level sentences in English.
2. Save them.
3. Try to translate them to Spanish.
4. If you can't use a translation service.
5. Try again the next day.
The only problem is making sure that the AI generates sentences that use the vocab that you don't know, so that you keep expanding it. Not sure how to solve that.
For pronunciation, record yourself repeating after a natie speaker recording, play back and analyze. Make use of phonetic transcription in dictionaries.
Instead of GPT, you can take sentences from Tatoeba, and analyse and index by vocabulary. 'PhrasePump' does this already. We glued together an NLP pipeline (Stanza etc.) to capture the lemmas in sentences.
Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the next step or lesson. They want you to absolutely get it right or else you find yourself in a cycle of trying again, to the point of frustration.
My German was probably pretty bad for a long time. It took a decade+ to get any kind of accent and comfort with the language (especially since I wasn't living there for most of that time). But I was up and running with the language, having conversations, reading the news, listening to podcasts, etc even if I wasn't "perfect." That, to my thinking, is at the core of what I need a language learning app to do - get me to the point where I'm making progress with it and forming my own thoughts and statements, don't hold me back because I mispronounced an accent or missed the gender on a word, etc.
My own experience with Duolingo is that it is ok as a way to memorize some grammar, but the lack of context is a problem. Random sentences just designed to mix in vocabulary don't seem to be as useful as contextualized learning, IE: at the train station, at the bank, etc.
I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pretty good, and definitely not American-sounding. To me, being able to get by speaking while traveling is my main purpose in learning a language so I'm not taking it as seriously or studying as long as someone who wants full fluency. But for a really rapid 2- or 3-week launch point into a language you don't speak at all, Pimsleur is really impressive.
I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation.
The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.
Yep. I’ve been learning Spanish off-and-on since high school. The biggest step I took toward some amount of mastery and ability to speak rudimentary Spanish in conversation was with doing Pimsluer tapes. Repeating “un vaso de leche. Un gran vaso” and things like that over and over again just made it sink in.
I’m doing Duolingo Spanish now, every day for over a year and a half. It’s a reasonably entertaining way to practice and pick up vocab, but I don’t know how much proficiency I’m achieving.
Pimsleur has been my goto for over 20 years now also. It's good enough to spur my memory on stuff I know, and get me base functional in something new if I'm travelling. I had a real cool moment when due to Pimsleur I picked up on Egyptian Arabic being spoken in a place that was mostly Levantine. Next on my todo is Hindi. (I also tend to do sticker books all over common items as an assist)
Oh man good luck learning to write french! I had lots of success with pimsleur for Spanish (but I'm already a basic competency french speaker so most of the concepts and grammar are familiar to me). Duolingo did not really do it for me. Luckily, Spanish orthography is pretty regular as long as you stay within the same regional pronunciation group.
Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!
I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right.
This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time.
This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.
I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this.
I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
I liked the ruthless correction because it meant that I didn’t get into the habit of pronouncing things poorly.
I also play piano, and if you make a mistake when practicing a piece, it’s easy to just keep making the same mistake over and over. The more you practice making a mistake, the harder it is to fix.
Flip side of this--many years ago, internet cafe in Shanghai.
Turns out the clerk did know some English--but her pronunciation was so bad that I couldn't understand her even when I knew what she was saying. I never saw a spelling mistake, though.
>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly
Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.
In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.
Around five years ago, I had to learn a new language because I moved country. I've learned several languages before and so I got good at it quite quickly, and I think my pronunciation in general is quite decent, but you can notice the words I learned very early, because I have a habit of pronouncing them with the wrong stress or vowel quality. It's hard to break those habits once you've formed them.
I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have?
But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.
Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.
And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to understand any word with a rolled “r”.
Right now, I’m on lesson 29 in Spanish and trying to pronounce “pruebo” - “I taste” (also can translate to “I try”). It keeps thinking I’m trying to say “huevo” - egg.
Voice dictation works almost perfectly in English for me, so I’m assuming it’s my own mispronunciation
> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough.
I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).
Technically what you want is a bouteille d'eau. If you're asking for l'eau, you're asking for all of the water, not some of it. Depending on how accommodating the French speaker is, you may just get stonewalled for butchering the language.
Lest anybody accuse me of trafficking in stereotypes about the French, this is a real example from my life.
I actually said "je voudrais acheter une bouteille de l'eau", but pronounced so badly they thought I wanted the loo.
It took a second person demonstrating the proper pronunciation of "bouteille d'eau" for me to actually get said bottle of water, despite much pointing at the object in question.
Are you correcting GP's 'bathroom'? Americans call the public facilities (e.g. in a restaurant) that or 'washroom', despite there (typically!) being no bathing or washing devices.
Fwiw, like 'toilet', 'loo' can be either the room/facility or the... 'appliance' itself.
No, I meant etymologically. l'eau is apparently a real hypothesis for the loo. I shouldn't expect anyone to figure out word origin on the spot in a restaurant situation, especially if it's less likely than other hypotheses. But I encourage you to integrate etymology as a method in language learning and as its own effort.
Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.
I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game..
I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good:
What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake."
What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016."
This also works:
Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.
I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly.
Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word transliterations from English which are not native Chinese) and occasionally just regurgitate nonsense. It’s not something that I would freely unleash on the end user but there is definitely a place for it somewhere in the pipeline in future.
If you wanted pinyin output, you could use a library like pypinyin? (we use it, no complaints). I assumed GPT models performed best in English, you could machine translate the input/output. MT is pretty fantastic these days, although, you introduce fidelity issues, and an API adds to cost and latency.
I didn't actually need the pinyin conversion (I implement that myself), it was just a test to see how well LLMs* were progressing at "out-of-domain" tasks. I always used recent newspaper headlines, so the possibility of finding matching character/pinyin pairs somewhere in the huge training set was negligible.
For this specific task, Chat-GPT is the first model I've come across that actually shows some ability to chain together concrete steps to form a task (i.e. look up character, fetch pinyin), rather than the simplistic "predict the next word in the sequence" in pure language models.
* Large Language Model - I know ChatGPT isn't a pure language model (which probably explains why it performs so much better), but I don't know what we're calling these models now so I'm sticking with LLM for now.
Even if you just had a set of lessons to run through, that'd be a lot of fun. Prompts that make it the counter party in text book dialogues. Character, pinyin, and translation shown.
The email sign up didn't seem to work on your page.
That's basically the idea! Thanks for the note on the email signup, I'll have a look - I threw it together very quickly just before I went on a plane a few weeks ago so it's very fragile.
Thanks! I agree, I'll stay away from characters, at least at an early/beginner level (although I am including them mostly for aesthetic purposes). It's a huge hurdle that lots of people don't necessarily need/want to overcome.
Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.
Learning another language can also teach another way of thinking about things. There are also nuances that AI isn't going to help you with.
For instance, 'How's your father?' in Spanish means 'What is your father like?' In English it means 'How is your father's health?' - or it could also mean 'sexual intercourse'.
I agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff.
I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed.
Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:
1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].
2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.
3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.
Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.
Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.
(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
A lot of the language learning methods out there really are built to be graded/measured. Books, courses, duolingo, anki - they all kind of seek to answer this question ‘how can we measure your language and make sure you’re progressing through it’.
There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products.
I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
I worked on a product for nearly 4 years that seems very similar to what you're describing. I would love to tell you all about it and what we could have done better, worse, etc... How can I get in touch?
She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.
If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)
To be honest, if you don't get the agreement right I simply won't bother listening to you, unless in a good mood.
This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and phonemes which are unknown to the recipient.
Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany, and I don't believe the blame lies with the Turks, let's put it that way.
There was an article in the Economist 10-15 years ago about the prevalence of English throughout the world and the typical explanations for it were listed: the British Empire followed by post WWII American economic and entertainment hegemony.
But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.
>But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.
Surely this is just a consequence of that fact that the majority of the world's English speakers speak English as a second language. As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized.
Not only bad English, but regional varieties that I as ESL have trouble understanding, which might formally count as own languages if held against linguistic standards. I just broswed Green's dictionary of slang so I feel I know what I'm talking about.
> As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized
Reading middle and old English, I feel the onus is on you because it changed so much :')
No it's not the same. My German girlfriend is consistently asked in Germany where she's "really from" despite being born there and living there her whole life (and her parents too!). That would be scandalous in my country, and the US too. The intolerance of imperfect grammar that can realistically only be attained by natives is adjacent to this issue. It's naive and simplistic to just state all Western countries are the same in terms of social progress. The English-speaking and German-speaking worlds are not the same.
>Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.
For sure. German culture will either change of I am sure that these waves of immigrants will not integrate properly and there will be strife. One of the benefits of immigration I hope is that Germany will change and become a friendlier and less inward looking society.
No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.
Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.
And no we really don't care, or at least I don't. I am a native English speaker who goes months at a time without speaking to another native English speaker. I would never judge someone for it. I would be ashamed of myself to just stop listening to someone for mixing up word order slightly or dropping a preposition or picking the wrong conjugated form of a verb. If I understand them, then it's fine. If I can help them improve their English, by pointing something out, I will. It's because I'm not an arsehole. Ignoring someone as soon as they mess up a verb conjugation is honestly detestable.
We are talking here about using wrong grammatical gender throughout your speech. That is a bunch of very noticeable mistakes that affect multiple words in the sentence. Just because English does not have grammatical gender does not mean it does not matter in German.
The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affects other words.
I know it's not a gender mistake, but a mistake in the case is generally more meaningful than a mistake in the gender. A mistake in gender is even less important. I agree one should try. I certainly try. I can often look at a word I've never seen before and "somehow" know the gender, but it is ridiculous to just ignore someone who makes mistakes. And it makes no difference what the nature of the mistake is, grammatical gender isn't special, it's not acceptable in English to treat someone like shit because they used the wrong conjugated form of "to be", it shouldn't be acceptable to treat someone like shit for using the wrong gender in German.
English doesn't have gender or anything but a vestige of a case system, but it's still just as complex a language as German. Your comment that you wrote right there is simply incorrect English at worst and unidiomatic at best, and you made a number of grammatical mistakes, but I wouldn't think to ignore you for it, because that would be completely ludicrous. In fact I'm only even mentioning it because of the conversation topic at hand. And if you're making so many mistakes whilst writing English then I'm certain you're making loads whilst speaking it. Still wouldn't ignore you or discount what you're saying because of it. In fact I wouldn't care at all because I understand that learning a language is not easy.
I think there's much more of a pattern of seeing such mistakes + an accent as evidence that English isn't their native language rather than evidence of stupidity. We see so many more non-native speakers.
Getting gender right is something any competent in person course will force you from the start. Having American accent is something to be expected and fine. Using wrong gender causes pain in listener. It really pops up great time.
Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack.
In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very good, but he still he messed some things -including genre- and nobdy cared. He was a comentator for many years and people liked him a lot.
In the US you have other examples of the same things. For instance I can think of Sofia Vergara and Charo to name the first that come to my mind. Both quite popular and I can spot their accent and some mistakes instantly and I'm not even a native speaker.
Also I mess gender a lot myself when I speak English and people don't seem to care.
It really does matter for spoken language as much as for written. Yes people will be able to understand meaning most of the time, but no, you will sound as bad as if we're writing.
It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way.
Accent and ignoring genders or suffixes are different things. You really can't equate them.
Note that if you're coming from a non-gendered language you'll mess it up frequently even if you care. There's a reason Chinese people are notorious for getting gender wrong!
You will mess it up even if coming from other gendered language, because the genders will he different.
But it is one of things you do end up memorizing the same way you memorize the word itself or its conjugations. It just does not make sense to go "I don't care about this stuff and won't learn it" and then demand language app will accommodate your refusal to learn gender.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a dialect coach: his Austrian German accent has faded through years of living in the US, but it’s what his audience expects so he trains himself in it before each new movie.
What you just wrote had a few mistakes on the order of a gender error, and several worse, but I understood you just fine. What matters is that you were able to communicate with me, in my native language; and I'm grateful to you for making the effort. There was no pain involved on my part.
Indeed, years ago now, I tried to brush up on my French which I had learned in school. Duolingo did not like my pronunciation (probably fair), and kept me stuck on very basic French that I knew well rather than actually getting to the point where it was challenging me and helping me improve. There may also have been an element of Canadian pronunciation versus France pronunciation. Anyway, it was annoying, and I quickly gave up. Also, there was at least one time where it would not accept my correct answer and insisted on a (IMHO) worse answer.
Not only do your answer's need to be perfect in order to progress but you can also answer correctly without knowing why you are correct.
Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly.
Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.
I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is yourself.
Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour and you never know if something will be detected as a typo.
While I don't know the innards of it I suspect the typos are preprogrammed. Note what frequently gets marked wrong and have a human decide if it's a wrong word or a typo. You could also do a string distance comparison--if it's distance from the right answer is 1 but it's at least two from any wrong answer it's probably a typo.
It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.
I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.
I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going.
While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scores. While reading a very short story in Spanish, I had the experience of the first time, a second language making me laugh because what I was reading, was funny. Nothing during my five years of 8th-12th grade did that. Just sharing, it's not meant to mean anything.
> I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.
Can confirm. My wife and I both took 4+ years of spanish in high school and college, over 15 years ago. We can almost get by on just that knowledge alone in spanish speaking countries, but it is difficult and we always have a translator around.
That said, we took a vacation last summer to a spanish speaking country and spent the 2 months leading up to it using Duolingo. We both had streaks for that entire time. Personally, the refresher course of Duolingo made conversing with people in their native language of Spanish MUCH easier compared to other attempts in the past. We didn't need to use our phones to lookup phrases or even ask locals to speak English. I even learned a few new words and phrases.
That isn't to say that Duolingo is the best or only option, just an anecdote about our experience.
Interestingly, I had a very similar situation recently, but had the opposite experience. Took 4+ years of Spanish in high school and undergrad, ~20 years ago. Had a trip to Costa Rica and I spent about 2 to 3 months using Duolingo, and I felt it didn't help much at all, other than as a refresher for very basic vocabulary.
I ended using Google translate towards the end of the trip, which was disappointing for me.
The first time you finally get to fire off your first short, stupid joke in a new language that actually makes native speakers laugh is one of the greatest feelings ever.
That first laugh at a real joke in a foreign language is precious. I remember reading a collection of short stories for vocabulary, and there was one about a fishing trip going badly anx hilariously wrong. Priceless moment for me and my confidence.
I have a roughly 600 day streak in Spanish, having started with no background, and I am quite pleased with the progress given how little time I dedicate to it each day.
My only issue with Duolingo is that I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules. Their inclusion currently is really poorly executed, haphazardly located in certain lessons as if random. I’d love if I could get specific lessons on demand for anything I am struggling with.
Also, it is really annoying how sometimes it gives you the translation after you are done and other times it just says “Great!” Or something similar, so if you are slightly unsure of something you don’t always get the actual translation to help clarify.
From my experience, yes. I did about an hour a day total - 20 minutes on waking, 20 minutes at lunch, and 20 minutes before I go to sleep. 3 years ago, I didn't know a lick of Spanish. Now when I go, I can be a translator for my friends. It's not great, and I trip over my pronunciation a lot, but it's functional.
As to the context of article, I'm also in the group that thinks the latest Duolingo updates are the worst to come to the platform since it's inception. It's beyond awful and I honestly despise it. I frequently went back to areas I felt myself getting rusty at, and practiced those. The new "pathway" has broke that method completely. It's impossible to see previous course content clearly, essentially forcing you through poor UX design to take the next step on the pathway instead, like you're playing Candy Crush. The update spurned me to give up on my 500+ day streak and cancel my subscription over the Summer. I haven't used the app in the last 5 months.
I'm lucky enough to live in Oxford, which is renowned so having some great evening language classes. I've signed up to my first semester starting in January which I'm very much looking forward to. If it wasn't for Duolingo, any interest in furthering my language skills would not exist. I guess it's a silver lining that an awful update to my favorite app by incompetent product management and executive decisions forced me to finally peruse a formal education in Spanish. I just wish it was a amenable break-up.
my 9 years old son was really enjoying the app that I bought one year subscription. after the update he stopped and when I asked why it was clear he hated the new update and doesn't like to touch the app.
I was always crap a languages. Top class for everything. Rock bottom for German. Tried lots of language learning things to learn Spanish, including Duolingo - but they just teach you vocabulary - and mostly weird stuff you don’t need initially.
Then I stumbled upon Michel Thomas. I listened to the basic course and 2 weeks later I was in Spain speaking to people - even managed to talk my way onto a bus when I got lost and had no ticket. It’s a completely different way of learning. Speaking sentences from the first 5 minutes. You’re learning grammar from the beginning and how to actually express yourself. It’s more like a conversion course from English to Spanish (but also there’s Portuguese, French, German, some others)
He’s such an interesting guy - emigrated to the USA after the war and set up his school. Invented a whole new way of teaching languages but wouldn’t let anyone know about it because he was so mistrusting (he was a nazi hunter in the war). Only when he was 70 something did someone convince him to record the language method. The tapes when you listen have a perfect learning curve - there’s always 2 students, one is good the other not so good so you feel better than them. I assumed he must have recorded many versions and then extensively edited - NOPE - they’re all recorded in a one time session. He was just that good.
BBC has made a documentary about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 6 worst pupils French in like 2 weeks.
He’s a genuine legend and the only reason I speak Spanish.
If you want to learn a language please try this out. It is just on a different level to anything else, especially the BS repetition of duolingo type sites - although they are useful later when you want to just learn vocabulary.
Anyway, as you may be able to tell, I am always very excited to pass on Michel Thomas. What a dude. RIP.
Has anyone tried "Language Transfer" to learn a foreign language? I've done a few of the lessons and it's so incredibly intuitive. They use concepts and patterns in the listener's native language to learn concepts in the target language. Surprisingly, It's completely free (please donate if you can)
I have, and it’s fantastic to learn. I think there’s a focus on ambiguity that is incredibly important for language learners (combine some gestures with your hands and ‘it’ ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘there’ ‘he’ ‘she’ can get you really far).
However, it’s really not great for review. I’ve tried to go back even after a couple years and listen to the Italian course again, but couldn’t do it.
So it’s a great (amazing (fantastic)) ‘boost’ but I wouldn’t rely on it entirely
I have learned, over the course of five decades, French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, with at least some immersion for all of them.
Outside of being immersed in the language, Language Transfer (which I'm currently using to learn Spanish) is easily the best method I have ever used. It relies mainly on recognizing patterns, rather than memorization, which is right up my alley. Maybe others do better with memorization?
It's also free, and very convenient (lessons are on YouTube, SoundCloud, downloaded MP3 files, or Android/iOS app). I'm a Patreon supporter, because I believe in it.
I did some Language Transfer briefly, but only after I had already learned a significant amount of French with other tools. Then I did it again for a bit when my son wanted me to learn German with him.
While I can't really speak to its efficacy, I really liked it, thus would probably stick with it, thereby making it effective.
I have spent a lot of effort in Duolingo in multiple languages, that I now use daily. Imo it's a mediocre but _extremely_ convenient way to build a base of vocabulary, but it is completely different to seriously learning a language (unfortunately). As far as I'm aware this applies to all the apps - real human conversation is very hard to usefully simulate.
That doesn't mean Duolingo isn't useful, it's definitely helpful, even if you're living in a full immersion environment, but the map is not the territory. If you really want to learn to talk to people, you have to talk to real people. It is a completely different thing to just learning all the words and grammar, far more than I realised before seriously getting into languages.
I moved to south of spain 3 years ago without knowing spanish except a few words to order a beer, ask for the bill and where are the toilets.
I did a bit of duolingo that helped me just grow enough confidence to learn the basic stuff.
Then I met what is now my girlfriend in a language exchange event and my level grew steadily that people in latin america say I am speaking really well. I still struggle a bit sometimes in south of spain but that is just because they speak in an awful way, like they would be drunk 24h a day and it costs the same to native spanish speaker to understand them.
Recently I encountered a tourist who didn't understand anything I said, but said he's from Korea. Recalling that I have been studying Korean on Duolingo for over a year, I excitedly probed my memory for a few seconds, then finally exclaimed, "annyeonghaseyo!" (hello), then blurted in English, "sorry, I don't speak Korean"
Later I encountered a fellow who spoke English. He told me he's from Germany. Recalling that I have been studying German on Duolingo for over a year, I excitedly probed my memory for a few seconds, and finally came up with "sehr gut!" (very good), then "sorry, that's all the German I know"
Then I was at a pizza shop and realized the person at the counter only spoke Spanish. Recalling that I have been studying... finally she lost her patience and thrusted her phone at me, with Google Translate.
True story. I still use Duolingo everyday. But surely, it isn't enough to "know"
I set my phone's language to French, so I get constant practice with the UI. That means the Google Assistant talks to me in French. I've had decent luck making requests and getting information in my target language.
One night, as I was getting ready for bed, I said « okay google, reglez une alarme pour 6h du matin ». My phone responded, "Sorry, I didn't catch that?"
So I said it again, and it responded the same way. I enunciated, I changed the conjugation, I sped up, I slowed down. Couldn't figure it out. Just wanted to set my damn alarm, I looked at my wife and said, exasperated, "I don't get it. It thinks I'm speaking English." That's when the light bulb went off in my head: I speak English. It's my native language. "Okay google, set an alarm for 6am." "Okay, setting alarm for 6am."
I had actually forgotten that I spoke English and couldn't communicate with my phone.
I did Duo Korean for a while with my SO. We got stuck on a section that started introducing a lot of proper names for people - the grammar around it was really confusing.
After a few weeks of struggling, we discovered the website had PAGES of grammar notes for the section we were on. It was impossible without them and the way it was introduced even on the website made progress feel very slow compared to the pacing up to that point.
There was zero indication of the extra notes in the app and eventually googling the for tips on the duo section led us to a bunch of people complaining about it and linking to the notes.
When the pacing is good though duo is fun and easy to do consistently. I'm sure it is not super effective after a certain point but I could definitely see myself navigating Seoul with just the lessons there. The hangul character lessons seemed well done.
Thankfully for me, you can literally learn how to read and write on a long haul plane there. Had a great time despite being functionally illiterate. Just learned numbers, please/thankyou and was fine. This only fell over with the peculiar decision in Taejon to issue tourists with maps with English on one side and Hanja (Chinese character for Koreans) on the other. Completely useless to both me and the taxi driver.
Whenever Duolingo comes up, I always like to point out that their website is VASTLY superior to their app. It's essentially more difficult, because you can type your answers without being babied by just clicking on words. Additionally, you can export the website as a PWA onto your phone, so it feels like an app but you get the extra features.
When I did the full Spanish tree from zero about 5 years ago studying ~1h per day for 3 months it didn't get me very far. I then moved to a Spanish speaking country and started taking 4h of language classes per day immediately. I felt that I could have learned about the same in two weeks there instead of using Duolingo. Some people came in with 0 knowledge and could speak a little after 2 weeks, Duolingo never got me to speak real sentences.
Another problem is that you just repeat without understanding why the words are arranged in a certain way. For adults it is probably more effective to study some grammer rules and to then apply these rules. Learning grammar is really a shortcut and Duolingo doesn't teach you anything about grammar rules. Also, at a certain age you just can't learn grammar by reading/listening and repeating. It takes kids years to learn, you don't have years. I have lived here for over 5 years, took well over 1000h of class in school and still make many grammer mistakes. Other mistakes continue to happen because nobody corrects me, usually we correct kids at least a little bit when they say something wrong.
Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly. I recently tried it again to pick up another language and they put so much monetization on it that it is now basically impossible to learn at your own pace - unless you pay.
I see it as a tool to learn vocabulary. This is very important in the beginning, once you learn 500-1000 words you can rapidly progress on your own. But honestly, to pound vocabulary into my brain, Memrise is a much better tool. I also used grammer tools like conjugator. Another good resource is the free Coffee Break podcast series, Spanish is probably their most complete course and it helped me a lot.
I have seen some good suggestions I didn't know about in this thread, I'll definitely try them when I try to pick up my next language.
> This is the only way to learn. You repeat things you know many times to commit them to your memory.
Mindless repetition is not the only way to learn. For many types of things, understanding the rules or knowing the patterns is far more efficient and effective.
We were just talking about German noun genders and plurals elsewhere on this thread. Of course, one can memorise the gender and the plural of every noun in isolation, by rote. But simply knowing a few common patterns would save an incredible amount of effort.
I said "stuff you already know", there is no point in repeating vocabulary which you already know. Some words or phrases are easier to learn, others are harder.
Duolingo has no way to only work on your weekness. It's more time effective to put them on a piece of paper and to go through them a couple of times.
In my experience, Duolingo is as good, in fact better than the average class you can get. It won't get you to fluency by itself, but years of bare lessons won't either.
A few years ago I got randomly interested in Danish, so I started Duolingo Danish. In a few weeks I was able to understand tweets from Danish newspapers. In 4 months I could read novels, slowly but well enough to enjoy them. Do I "know" Danish? Not really, I can't speak past a few sentences and have a hard time understanding it spoken (Danish is a particularly hard one at that). But my RoI for 20 minutes a day for a few months was great.
Then my daughter had a hard time with her school English. She knew nothing and could not even follow the glacial pace of her lessons. I bribed her into keeping a 200 day streak in Duolingo and she was suddenly acing her tests. Now she has some interests with English only sources, and that alone is enough to help her keep learning, but duo was a huge kickstarter.
My wife also had non existent English from years of classes and needed to at least understand emails at work instead of always passing them by me, and a 300 day Duolingo streak fixed that.
I don't doubt that there are very good teachers out there, and you need to complement Duolingo if you really want to learn thoroughly, but it really puts you on track for very little actual effort.
I had similar experience with a kid. A kid that was slowly falling behind in English got bribed to do duolingo. Grades slowly got better and English slowly became "that easy class" and eventually the kid started to be able to read mangha and watch movies in English.
The best method for learning a new language I have ever come across is a combo of Language Transfer + Anki flash cards and making a serious effort to study them 4-7 times per week.
It’s incredible how quickly I started learning doing this every day for 6 straight months despite not having anyone to actually talk with or any media to consume in the new language.
Eventually, I started taking in person classes for the language, which has helped too, but after 3 courses, I still haven’t come close to the level I had learned via Language Transfer and regular self study. Language Transfer taught me quite advance concepts much quicker than traditional classes did.
I would say I learned more studying Greek in 6 months via that method than I did in 5 years learning Spanish via traditional classes. After an additional 5 years (10 years total) studying Spanish, I’ve become highly proficient. It blows my mind how quickly I’ve been able to learn Greek. The way the language is taught in Language Transfer is so intuitive. I wish it had been around when I learned Spanish.
My experience with Duolingo over the years is learning a pretty minimal amount. It’s like a worse version of Anki. It’s mostly fluff. The gamified concept is clever, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. If you enjoy doing it in addition to the methods I listed above, then I’m sure that can’t hurt. However, I’d recommend avoiding it and using your valuable time on the methods above. I can’t emphasize enough how remarkable my learning path for Greek has been.
P.S. If you’re really craving a gamified learning supplement, try Clozemaster once you’re at a high enough level of proficiency.
Two bits of advice from something of a polyglot here:
Languages aren't something you learn, they are something you join.
With Duolingo, take a second language along with the primary one. No, not German or French. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and select Latin, or Klingon, or Dothraki, something really short and just for kicks. That way when you are stuck in your primary language, you can switch to the fun language and keep up the habit. Duolingo is all about keeping up that habit. Also, you get to learn another 'language' and checking that off feels good and makes it so that you want to be a polyglot.
I learned Spanish in HS and started using Duolingo to see if it was useful for teaching my young child Spanish. She had exposure to spoken Spanish via her nanny, but had very little exposure to written Spanish.
My first reaction was that there was no way for someone to learn Spanish just by using Duolingo, as there wasn't enough 'teaching' happening. But then I realized that there is some scaffolding in the app, but you have to go search it out. This could work for a motivated adult (or older student who has some existing language knowledge). But I wouldn't recommend it for a younger student starting out.
Duolingo is great for building a base but after maybe the first 5 levels it’s a complete waste of time.
If your goal is to actually learn Spanish you need to be listening and speaking it as soon as possible. Both the listening and speaking parts of the app are absolutely terrible. I think the worst thing is people get stuck in the trap of thinking they are learning by keeping the streak going but in reality it has diminishing returns.
All this coupled with Duolingo gamifying it more and trying to squeeze money out of you by making the timed challenges pay out more points.
Overall great for beginners and then you are wasting your time.
I have gone from literally zero Spanish to be able to understand basic spoken and written sentences and read basic signs etc.
I might venture a basic spoken question or statement (e.g. ordering a coffee, asking where check-in is etc), but not much else.
For me that is amazing. I've gone from nothing to basic toddler-level language skills just for messing about in the app a bit (and tantalisingly there was one or two moments where I caught myself thinking in Spanish too). That is valuable I think. I don't want to be fluent enough to be able to "chat with my Spanish friends" or whatever, just know enough to get by when on a vacation (which worked a treat when I spent a month in South America which was the main reason I learnt any at all - I didn't want to be utterly helpless)
I speak several languages, most living, a few dead. I love languages and have a knack for them. Duo lingo is great at keeping you practicing, which I think is important. However, if you really want to learn a language, you must use it. If you want to learn quickly, use it a lot as often as possible. Speak it, listen to it, read it, and to whatever extent possible think in it. This is easier now than it ever has been. It’s easy to get TV, movies, games, books, music, websites, and so on in whatever language. It would be better to find some actual humans to speak with, but movies and TV are better than nothing.
It's more like a game than actual learning.... which would be great if it worked. I found myself recognising patterns and subconsciously "cheating" while using that app. Nothing beats full immersion in a language and actual real life teachers.
I moved to Spain a few years ago and Duo Lingo had me thinking I understood loads of things when I really didn't. Not in a real life setting. It is good as a side lesson but not great otherwise at least from my perspective.
What sort of cheats did you find? The only one I could find in the Finnish course was that the correct first word from the word bank would have its first letter capitalized, and that was almost never be the word that was difficult.
Over the past few years I have tried every language learning app I could find. The most success I have had is with LingoDeer. The formatting and I instructions really give that feeling of a classroom lesson. Learning Korean as an English speaker has been very challenging. I feel that LingoDeer has gotten me further in a few weeks compared to what I learned with a months of Duolingo or Rosetta. Duolingo if not paying for it becomes absolutely ad filled and frustrating.
I was a long time duo user (1000+ day streak) learning german. I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german. The streak system and the gold->diamond tier system kept me going but after a while I realized I had plateaued and I felt like I was forgetting more than I was learning.
Then I realized, I had got to the point where I was good at answering what duo wanted to get the daily requirements rather than learning.
> I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german.
German can be quite tricky in this regard, in that the written and the spoken language can be quite different grammatically. One basic example that immediately springs to mind is that the simple past (Präteritum) is used very little in speech but very extensively in writing. This means that, when reading German books, one encounters lots of verb forms they'd never hear in speech (which, I'm guessing, would make it unlikely that Duolingo teaches them?)
same here, after while it felt like daily chore than something I wanted to do in the beginning
btw you could disable leagues by stop sharing your progress, but they hide this in web settings, not possible to switch it off in the app, that makes learning less stressful
now after they introduced path UI I uninstalled it after more than 1000+ streak and keeping in phone Drops and FunEasyLearn, second one looks very childish and amateurish, but I actually like it, seems less pushy with dark patterns than Duolingo where whole new Path UI is dark pattern to make you cough up money
One thing about Duolingo is that it’s very easy to spend very little time on it. It will cheerfully tell you how awesome you are, when you’re spending 5-10 minutes a day.
When I did 30-60 minutes a day for a few months (I did Spanish, then Portuguese, then switched to Memrise because it had European Portuguese), that seemed to lay a decent foundation. Conversationally, I was hopeless for a few days, but I learned quickly (unlike when I went to Mexico without having done Duo). I don’t think there’s any substitute for being thrown a curveball or two by a real person and having to muddle through.
Meanwhile, here are CIA estimates for time to reach professional working proficiency. 600 hours for Spanish or French, up to 2200 for Japanese or Arabic. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/. Just gotta wait for that 3000 day streak!
Thanks for the Memrise recommendation. I tried it today and found it much better than Duolingo.I think Duolingo makes you more stressed to keep up with the day streak and I find my self just redoing a couple of stories just to keep it running.Not good.
No, it can’t. However, it does have a value as an interest generator. The vast majority of people who start a language on DL, will stop doing DL pretty quickly. Of those who stay, there’ll be a percentage who continue using it for absurd streak lengths while never progressing past the point of basic comprehension or speaking ability. The remaining group will be a group who goes on to use real resources to learn a language the only way possible - through serious, disciplined, and often uncomfortable learning by immersion and real world practice.
I do think Duolingo has great value but I do think the second group I described is seriously wasting their time. I get it’s fun as a game but I figure you really might as well go all in with the amount of time a 1000+ day streak entails
>I do think Duolingo has great value but I do think the second group I described is seriously wasting their time.
which is why I stopped using Duolingo after they introduced new Path UI with 1000+ day streak, but by the end it was just daily chore to not break streak instead learning anything new, now I have two different apps in my phone which I use only when I want without trying to fulfill some streak, will probably keep just one to refresh vocabulary
I've been trying to learn Greek, but it's a pain! First, they went overboard with gamification - now, I spend most of my time keeping my place in the Diamond League, not learning new stuff. Sadly, you earn more XP not learning new stuff, so, gamification goes against the learning goals. Another issue is that the scoring is in the app and different versions of the app reward you differently for the same thing - that's why my wife is on a year-old version and earns twice as much XP with less effort, which is unfair. Also, certain languages like Greek are not the same as Spanish and you cannot practice speaking and you learn to recognize the worlds visually well, but not so much to learn a language conversationally.
The first thing that poked my eyes in this article was the "Czech" sentence in the illustration which is just totally wrong... Even when we ignore the missing diacritics, "isi" is not a word in Czech. It's probably a typo from "Jedl si ten žlutý sníh?", although that translates to "Did you eat the yellow snow?", not "Why are you eating the yellow snow?" like the caption suggests which would be translated to "Proč jíš ten žlutý sníh?"...
Looks kinda bad in an article about language learning in a serious newspaper like Bloomberg... unless it's also mistranslated in duolingo in which case I think it should have been explained...
Just my anecdote, but I used it before traveling in Mexico for some time. I took 3 years of Spanish in high school, but hadn't used any in years. It definitely helped me refresh vocabulary. One of my friends used it to learn initially before doing a bunch of work across the border. Now he's married to a Mexican woman and considering nationalizing.
It's no substitute for immersion, but I do think any time you spend on the app is worthwhile imo. The UI is great and it makes it easy to form a daily habit.
I believe it was developed for the US Department of State to crash train people who were going to work overseas. It isn't silly vocab drills. It has you reading entire literary passages and holding minutes-long conversations also immediately. None of the "get it right before you move on" stuff, either. You're absolutely going to fail, just like if you were really in the other country trying to talk and listen and not getting anything, but keep at it, and you will eventually get it. You can't get true immersion from an app, but this is as close as you'll get.
I've been doing Duolingo religiously for about 150 days now. like anything, it is what you make of it. My Spanish has gotten significantly better during that time, and I think I'm learning at a faster pace than I did in high school. sure, it's not perfect and I wish it would explain some things a little better. but it does get me to come back and do it every day and hopefully in a couple years I'll be at least able to understand things.
Just before the pandemic I had a trip to Mexico City planned and spent a couple months learning Spanish, and I like many others took 3 years of Spanish in high school, but that was over 10 years ago
I went on the trip and while it helped a little, in conversation it was practically useless outside of the very basics.
I dropped Duolingo and took an intensive 3 month course of Spanish with a minimum courseload
minimum 2-3 hours a day because there was nothing else to do. I changed all media I consume to Spanish (music, news, shows, books, etc) I learned more in those 3 months than all of my high school classes and any amount of Duolingo could have helped me.
Now it's 3 years later and I have spent a cumulative 1.5 years of time as a digital nomad in Spanish speaking countries and most consider my Spanish to not necessarily be native fluent, but conversationally fluent in that I can understand jokes, ask for whatever I need, etc.
I'd personally only recommend Duolingo for maybe vocabulary, but if you really want to learn you need to immerse and actually talk with people frequently, as in basically daily.
You need to make those stupid mistakes that native speakers may giggle at and then correct you.
I’m currently residing in Mexico after years of HS and Rosetta refresher, my main critique: Rosetta didn’t teach big numbers well enough. At 20 pesos to the dollar, learning 100-1000+ is pretty much mandatory but I didn’t see it, especially not in the form of the rapid fire audio you’ll encounter in the wild (with a line of annoyed people behind you perhaps…).
Don’t try to get natives to tell you the english either - it’s much more confusing than you probably realize!^ Instead, if you aren’t sure you can repeat back the number you think you heard digit by digit and people will generally get what you’re going for (or “lo siento no entiendo, puedes decir cada digito por favor?”). Writing it out is a decent last resort, helps that there’s dirt everywhere.
^ “three fifty” is 2 numbers, 2 orders of magnitude apart. “thirty five” is one number, in between them. “three hundred fifty” is the same as the second “three fifty”. “thirty five hundred” is a totally different number entirely, but the same as “three thousand five hundred”. etc.
Oh, and the tenses. When the Military stops you to ask what you did in the past and what you’re going to do in the future, Rosetta’s passion por present tense won’t help.
That said, having shit tier spanish at the checkpoints can “naïveté” you out of some sticky situations. A cute dog helps too (when they ask, and they will, “ella no muerde”).
Michel Thomas gave me a very solid understanding of basic spoken French in approximately two hours, and it has stuck for decades. However, my pronunciation is atrocious (as is his.)
Been living in France for 10y. I took a basic one semester French course paid by the company. It was difficult to then continue because of low availability / timing / difficult commute / price so I turned to Duolingo.
The best aspect was that you can learn any time you have 5-10 min spare. At the bus stop, a coffee break etc.
But it can only get you so far.
After finishing Duolingo French course I took to Memrise to build the vocabulary: 500 verbs, 500 adjectives etc.
In parallel, I'd read local newspapers online, and Google Translate any word I didn't understand.
This gave me a reading comprehension but talking was still difficult.
I only learnt talking proficiency by joining a French company where everyone would talk French at lunch breaks. (First one was more international with many non-speaker fresh grads, talking English).
After that, watching a lot of TV with subtitles to improve listening.
Not by itself, no. No methods can. Trully learning anything is an immersive, active, and consistent process. The app is only a scaffold, that can simulate this to some extent and only if you let it. On top of that, you have to start listening to contents in spanish. Try to repeat a few sentences that you've heard in a movie. You have to read books/articles, sometimes outloud to train the muscles involved in your mouth. Eventually, you want to graduate to having conversations. Each step challenges you and forces you to adapt. That's learning. When the app nudges you (through tips) to pronounce the words and sentences that you see, instead of (passively) just filling blank spaces, that's not meaningless. You'll get as much from it as you're willing to take.
Ik heb nederlands geleerd van duolingo. is het de allebeste? nee, maar het is goed genoeg voor mij. voor ~£35 per jaar, het is heel goedkoop
Where does it not work as well? speaking. I have a terrible accent. Listening comprehension isn't that great either, because the text is almost always there to prompt you. this means that out in the wild, I need people to speak slower than if I had been taught in a traditional lesson.
but I would not have a second language if I had not been doing duolingo.
The new scheme was a bit shit to start with, but it gives you a much wider vocab lesson than before. For non spanish languages there are much less explanations of grammar and syntax, so you just have to learn by reinforcement, which can be frustrating.
I love the idea of Duolingo, but I wish it was more about making the act of learning itself a game, rather than 'gamification' which is more about adding extrinsic rewards, achievements, and other small nudges.
I really like Duolingo as a way to practice (Spanish) every day, on top of a foundation of via-zoom language classes for 2h/day over a couple months from Baselang, and living in a Spanish speaking place (Puerto Rico), traveling to Spanish speaking places, etc. I don't really interact with people locally in Spanish all that much at home, and beyond basic transactional interactions at the airport, shooting range, and costco, can easily go a month+ without speaking Spanish, so it's nice to have a consistent motivation to practice.
I found that Duolingo is good for learning vocabulary, not so good for learning grammar. The online course I found most helpful was "Spanish with Paul," but I am sure there are other good courses.
Je suis anglais et j’étudie[0] français avec Duolingo tous les jours depuis 2019. J’écris ces phrases sans dictionnaire ou traduction Google. J’ai étudié français au lycée pendant trois ans il y a vingt quatre ans. Je ne sais pas si j’ai fait beaucoup d’erreurs de grammaire mais peut-être quelqu’un pourrait me dire?
[0]Not sure if I’m using the right tense here I’ve got a feeling it’s present where we would use past continuous? Expect there’s lots of other mistakes I don’t know about.
Didn't read the article as I'm out on the streets, however, I used Duolingo but it was very basic and it never became difficult. My biggest issues were with conjugations and I found another app called ConjuGato which helped me with that. What taught me to speak and understand was moving to a Spanish speaking country, meet a girl, found friends through her. Learned a lot of slang from listening to reggaeton and asking my friends what the lyrics mean...
Betteridge's law of headlines be damned, the answer is "yes".
I've basically only used Duolingo for learning a particular new language. I started from nothing, and just did a little every day during the pandemic. Then I travelled to the country in question, and was able to tell stories in the language.
Not easily, and with bad grammar and my vocabulary sucked, but this is more than being able to order at a restaurant. My stories could be understood, and if they spoke slowly and gave me time to think then I could mostly understand them too.
But surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand", and instead will go maybe even faster. Like… do you think this will help us communicate?
It won't teach it on its own, but it can help you along with other methods of practice. I think even classes at school aren't enough on their own to teach you a language. You need other things to help you really learn the language.
> surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand"
I've seen this too, so many times. If I'm speaking to someone who has trouble with English, I can automatically speak slower, enunciate better, and use simpler words and shorter sentences. But some people cannot adapt the way they speak. I don't think it's because they are unaccommodating or impatient. For some puzzling reason, they just can't speaker slower and simpler. Ironically they might instead speak a bit faster as you observed, or louder.
Communicating with people who don't know the language well is a skill you have to learn and practice. It's not something people can do by default. Especially in their native language.
When you speak in your native language, the words may just come out automatically, without any effort. If you need to speak slowly, you have to be more deliberate and maybe even consider each word separately. If you don't remember that and just start speaking, you may end up speaking normally without even realizing that until it's too late.
Not sure about faster, but louder is what a lot of people do when they're trying to enunciate better, they just don't know how to do it right / what exactly they need to do. Basically they think they were mumbling.
Native speakers have usually zero idea about what is simple word for foreigner. They go by what feels simple for them. But simple for foreigner means "the variant I found in my textbook" and natives have no idea.
>But surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand", and instead will go maybe even faster.
by my experience when these people see you don't understand, they think speaking louder will make you understand
I find it good for vocabulary (the little it has), just awful for grammar and speaking practice/confidence.
Also since it's Hindi I'm learning rather than Spanish, it's great for learning the script - no better way than flashcards to memorise/remind each character really.
But it's absolutely not the only tool you should use, you at least need a book, and someone to speak to.
I tried to start Korean, and was getting so many "fake cognates" (silver is 은 "eun" but it gives 실버 "silbeo") that I had to quit. At least in the "learn the alphabet" stage, it's not teaching Korean, it's teaching "fake Korean using English words transliterated".
Followers of Krashen know that it's sensible input that results in language acquisition. Duolingo gamifies the frequency of sensible input. Therefore Duolingo will work if frequently and consistently used. Fluent is an outdated term. It probably takes about six months to achieve any lasting result. Illusion of progress is impossible to prove or disprove probably.
I just want to note (this is what I studied for my MA) that Krashen is very controversial in the field. Many researchers argue that output is critical to learning, and "interactionism," the idea that learning is facilitated through conversation, is probably the dominant theoretical approach at the moment. See, for example, Second Language Learning Theories, by Mitchell, Myles, & Marsden, chapter 6.
I learned Spanish on Duolingo and used it to travel through Cuba (where very few people speak English).
It worked well enough, I was able to communicate. Not knowing Spanish would make things much more difficult.
Of course I have by now mostly forgotten it, a language that isn't used frequently (best via immersion, living where it's spoken by plenty of people) will atrophy...
Wouldn't it be good if Duelingo hooked you up with native language speakers so you could try to strike up conversations in text and voice?
It's great to learn words, phrases and so on in isolation but actual conversations in a new language are where the real learning happens. You've got to be on the ball
They do offer real classes done through independent teachers, they are typically group lessons, but they are at a pretty reasonable price! http://classes.duolingo.com
For what it's worth, I use Duolingo (the app itself) as just another way to practice at the moment but feel that most of my real progress comes with a tutor that I found through Preply and eventually started private lessons with. Group lessons were a cheap way to get some more practice in though with other speakers.
Seems like a fair article about Duolingo and its relation to language learning and competing apps it its space.
I have a grip about a tiny part of the article, when it mentions Ibo, a Nigerian tribal language. Leave the "tribal" bit out - we're not living in the 20th century any more.
Isn't the Duolingo app designed for children? It sure felt so. I mean it's not like adults can't use it, but from the UI/UX of it it did not seem they are targetting adults. Last I tried it was few weeks ago.
I used duolingo to learn spanish for few months. I know some words and sentences (most important: donde esta una biblioteca?) But one day I got bored and stopped but it was kinda fun.
I'm not even sure living in the country helps that much on its own. The issue is that the vast majority of your language intake comes from your immediate surroundings - the media you consume, the friends you have, the books you read, the place you work, etc. I've seen a lot of language learners move to a country, take classes, but get stuck in an expat bubble. The worst part is, when you take classes, you're surrounding yourself with other non-natives.
For most major languages, a heavy immersion is possible in your home country, especially with the amount of media that's now easily available. Heavy immersion is very effective, but it's also extremely difficult to pull off. The AJATT guy[1] was a big advocate for it and was extremely successful with it when it came to Japanese, but even he couldn't replicate it for Chinese from what I recall.
If you're not going the heavy immersion route, I guess the best thing would be to just have fun with the language, pick up what you can, and accept that you'll never be great at it.
I've come to a very similar conclusion. The absolute only way to learn a language is to have an incentive to learn it, IE: to be exposed to it constantly by work, daily life, romance, friendship, IE: whatever it is that is providing the regular need for the use of the language. People who say they are bad at languages might be surprised how fast they would learn if they were suddenly forced to learn by necessity.
I think learning a language at a young age likely sets up some brain development for language learning in the future. Brains remain plastic even through adulthood, but I definitely feel like whatever language I am studying tends to fill “Language Slot 2,” if you will, which exists because of an atrocious 12 year long present-tense-only public school Spanish program.
Results from learning a language in an immersive environment are going to be greater and more justify the time spent. However, it can definitely be rewarding otherwise if cramming before a vacation or even just to remember how to clumsily pronounce “l'esprit d'escalier.”
This article is written by an American. Given the immigration rates, you have a damn good chance of finding people who speak the target language you're trying to learn quite well, and Spanish in particular can be quite easy depending on where you live, given a quarter of the country, including the two most heavily-populated states, were formerly Spanish colonies and once part of Mexico. The third-most populated state was never part of Mexico but was also a Spanish colony, and is full of Cubans.
Do you have a maid, landscaper, janitors at your office, kitchen staff at your favorite restaurant? Talk to them.
Learning rudimentary components being a waste of time may be a bit of a stretch however expecting to master the language through apps, YouTube tutorials, not using books and physical media is laughable if not delusional.
It's helpful in learning nearby languages. I am a native English speaker, and my French can approach fluency given some immersion (it's pretty rusty right now, though). DuoLingo helped me improve transactional Spanish and Portuguese (BR) very quickly, meaning I can get through airports, grocery stores, restaurants, and read news articles. I'll need something more to have free-ranging conversations or read novels, though.
Check out "The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages" by Frederick Bodmer. I'm reading it now and it's quite extraordinary. It seems like a particularly good fit for someone with your linguistic background, especially if you have an interest in learning further Germanic or Romance languages.
So did I but, man, that took ten years of pretty intensive study (13 hours a week at the peak, across four school subjects). They taught us really well, but there's got to be a way to reach this level of proficiency with less effort.
This was in the Soviet Union and before the Internet, and so we were studying in complete linguistic isolation. When I met a native speaker for the first time, I had already been studying the language for nearly ten years.
I don't remember the name, but I've had some friends do remote teaching for foreign languages through an app, where you'd get scheduled 1 on 1 video time with a person who knows the language. I think that's an interesting approach I would look into over the self directed learning
I've seen quite the positive impressions. I gave it a brief try and I'm not sure it's for me. I went through a number of superbeginner videos and was just feeling more and more frustrated at how much I didn't understand. I like the idea though and I'm sure it works for other people. Maybe with some adjustments to the concept it might be more palatable to me, I don't know.
Get a basic understanding of the language first with something like Duolingo such that you can watch the videos without struggling.
What I have found successful (aka maximizes my development) is when I am watching the videos and only about one out of every thirty words is a challenge to understand from context.
I download old Pimsleur mp3s from TPB and listen to them when travelling. It's super repetitive, but I find it really useful to learn some quick basic conservation.
If you can listen to them with a partner, it's even more efficient, because you can practice pronunciation together. It's been two years since we listened to Japanese bits (trip was cancelled), but we still joke about the words we remember.
(I also use Duolingo, but you have to very consciously make an effort to learn. And I'm mostly just doing it for fun and exposure to languages)
> Best way to learn [to understand] a language is to watch tv and movies.
There's no replacement for having to dig into the "vocabulary bag" and pull out a word when you need it, or the "fluency" that comes from having someone ask you a question that you have to string together multiple vocabulary words _in the right order_ to answer
It's like any homework: it's the challenge that solidifies the pathways, otherwise just sitting in a calculus class would be all one needed to become Laplace
I do 30 mins to an hour of a language every day. After I’m done in Duolingo I work my way through a news story on a local news aggregator (I.e. dumbed down) website using Google Translate to figure out things I don’t understand by picking out words. I find trying to identify phrases in the articles useful as it’s starting to give me a sense of basic idiom.
Feels like a good way to consolidate and push forward. It also gives me a bit of culture since news articles are revealing of the way people think.
https://archive.vn/pdNgC
The Spanish course is one of the best courses on Duolingo.
I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc.
It was a little rough going at times but basically it brings you to the basic conversation level. That's all you can really expect from it because it's rather short (took me about 6 months to complete). Of course, I practised regularly outside of Duolingo especially with writing and looking stuff up on Wiktionary.
No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. But Duolingo will give you the starting point so that you'll know where to go next if you really complete all the lessons. After finishing Duolingo, if you spend another year studying, practising, and consuming material in that language, you should be able to get to a reasonable working level in it.
With the length of the Spanish course, I am guessing you can progress even further.
I had a similar experience, although it's going back a few years now. I'd always wanted to learn Spanish and one year my wife and I were going to Spain in the fall, and then three or four months later we were going to a country in Latin America, and I decided that was the year I'd do it. I started with Duolingo and did it for three or four months before my trip to Spain, and after successfully managing a few basic interactions in Spanish and also being able to easily read signage and simple phrases, I was hooked.
When we got back I continued with Duolingo but also got an online teacher and did a pile of other stuff and by the time we went south I was somewhat conversational. You can't truly learn a language with Duolingo (you especially need practice speaking with someone) but it gave me a great start.
I've had a similar experience with Spanish. But I learned another language, Mandarin, in a more formal way, so I alread had experience throwing myself out there and immersing without fear for years. That experience made it much easier to try speaking broken Spanish without hesitation when I finally had the opportunity. In other words, if you already know how to learn languages, Duolingo is a great way to build grammar, vocab, and pronunciation for when you do get a chance to practice, but may not be great for first timers.
If I was younger and without a family I'd still consider in-person courses full time instead though.
> No online course can ever teach you to become fluent.
I get your point, but with the pace of AI, there's a good chance this statement is not true in 5 years!
I don’t think so. Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I don’t really know how AI could solve this, unless you mean that the AI can ferret out your gaps and tune the program to your learning needs. Isn’t this what Duolingo tries to do? Genuinely asking. I pay for the “super” Duolingo for no ads and unlimited learning because I’m kind of addicted to it, but I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.
> Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t.
I’d push back on this idea, and instead say that some people learn really well from the current tools, and some people can’t.
99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else. Naturally there are differences in the population, but I would posit that if you learned a language once (or twice or three times - I know trilingual people who insist they can’t learn a foreign language because they failed Duolingo Spanish) you can learn a language again.
My bias is that I’m working on an alternative language learning tool now - one aimed at ‘language acquisition’ over ‘language learning’, or basically how can you learn a language by just talking/listening to native speakers. Aimed at those who have finished traditional courses and want to master a language, or those who have tried traditional courses and find it didn’t mentally agree with them.
> 99.99% of the population picked up their mother tongue just like everybody else.
They have - over the course of many years, completely submerged in the environment of their mother tongue, when they had an abundance of leisure time.
Not to mention their brains had more plasticity than an adult's.
The ability to learn languages is measurable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Batt...
I'm guessing he's suggesting the AI can be a conversation buddy anytime you want, and also point out your mistakes so you can learn from them.
imo this would be awesome and a game changer
Ah, okay yeah that would be really good. It’s hard to find time to hang out with a native speaker if you aren’t already in that country. Maybe this is already possible with ChatGPT?
spell checkers cant even get things right half of the time, not too confident AI will be able to change that
Here's an idea, but it is going to be really difficult to implement. You have lessons but at a certain point you get a chat "buddy" that only uses slightly more vocab than you know to naturally expand your knowledge. This replicates the teacher student in person discussions. You can then analyze the voice and ensure that someone has the right accent and pronunciation. Then use optimization to determine your faults and what you need to practice, optimizing memory. It isn't much different from what a human teacher would do. But I'm not aware of any of these subsystems being relatively close to human level but also not aware of much research in any of these directions. I've seen a few people try and they are just terrible.
> I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.
That's not necessarily true, unless consuming lots of media in the target language counts as immersion. I became fluent in English without ever traveling to an English speaking country.
Consuming a lot of media do count as immersion.
What is your native language?
Imagine ChatGPT but it uses speech-to-text to understand your speech and then it uses text-to-speech to talk back to you. Now you’re getting infinite personalized conversation practice. If you ever don’t understand what it said, hold spacebar to see the phrase in both English and Spanish with each word mapped to its translation, or just say “que?” and it’ll explain the sentence in English and/or Spanish. This seems pretty much doable today. If the speech-to-text fails to understand you, that’s immediate pronunciation feedback. May as well make it one of those boy/girlfriend chatbots too, to encourage participation and make studying more effortless.
Pls go build this, thx.
Couldn't ChatGPT? As-is, this seems almost a good prompt...
I don’t think that will ever be a replacement for living somewhere the language is spoken. I believe true fluency requires that (unless you’re some kind of savant) and I don’t think AI can replace the experience of walking into a shop, reading all the signs and labels in the language, making small talk with others in there, talking to the cashier. It’s that kind of immersion in a language that combines not only practice reading, writing, and speaking the language, but also all the other sensory experiences that reinforce what you’ve learned and forms associations that deepens your understanding.
Riffing on nearby comments: (2022+n): I don't think living somewhere a language was spoken could ever have been a replacement for living _in_ the language. Contrast the oh so limited and scattered signage of legacy RL, versus the ubiquitous object tagging, with text and audio and interactives, of Apple's newest glasses. The moment-by-moment narrated-life apps. The chatbot making up funny stories and cartoons about things you see, and bantering variations with you. Teaming, both meetups and improv - versus what, constantly starting new conversations with people walking near you?? And I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me, learning pronunciation without echo would be like, like learning dance steps without overlays, with just a metal mirror or someone's kibitzing. Living learning versus a legacy call-and-response classroom or paper book - yuck. There's a reason kids historically took so many years to learn language, and so poorly, even with adult focus and peer support. Immersion is just really really essential for learning well. And unaugmented RL doesn't support it.
You could use it to practice already:
The only problem is making sure that the AI generates sentences that use the vocab that you don't know, so that you keep expanding it. Not sure how to solve that.For pronunciation, record yourself repeating after a natie speaker recording, play back and analyze. Make use of phonetic transcription in dictionaries.
Instead of GPT, you can take sentences from Tatoeba, and analyse and index by vocabulary. 'PhrasePump' does this already. We glued together an NLP pipeline (Stanza etc.) to capture the lemmas in sentences.
https://www.languagereactor.com/phrasepump
Or use clozemaster since it’s a fully realized app that does all the work for you.
This is excellent and I love it :)
Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the next step or lesson. They want you to absolutely get it right or else you find yourself in a cycle of trying again, to the point of frustration.
My German was probably pretty bad for a long time. It took a decade+ to get any kind of accent and comfort with the language (especially since I wasn't living there for most of that time). But I was up and running with the language, having conversations, reading the news, listening to podcasts, etc even if I wasn't "perfect." That, to my thinking, is at the core of what I need a language learning app to do - get me to the point where I'm making progress with it and forming my own thoughts and statements, don't hold me back because I mispronounced an accent or missed the gender on a word, etc.
My own experience with Duolingo is that it is ok as a way to memorize some grammar, but the lack of context is a problem. Random sentences just designed to mix in vocabulary don't seem to be as useful as contextualized learning, IE: at the train station, at the bank, etc.
I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pretty good, and definitely not American-sounding. To me, being able to get by speaking while traveling is my main purpose in learning a language so I'm not taking it as seriously or studying as long as someone who wants full fluency. But for a really rapid 2- or 3-week launch point into a language you don't speak at all, Pimsleur is really impressive.
I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation.
The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.
Yep. I’ve been learning Spanish off-and-on since high school. The biggest step I took toward some amount of mastery and ability to speak rudimentary Spanish in conversation was with doing Pimsluer tapes. Repeating “un vaso de leche. Un gran vaso” and things like that over and over again just made it sink in.
I’m doing Duolingo Spanish now, every day for over a year and a half. It’s a reasonably entertaining way to practice and pick up vocab, but I don’t know how much proficiency I’m achieving.
Pimsleur has been my goto for over 20 years now also. It's good enough to spur my memory on stuff I know, and get me base functional in something new if I'm travelling. I had a real cool moment when due to Pimsleur I picked up on Egyptian Arabic being spoken in a place that was mostly Levantine. Next on my todo is Hindi. (I also tend to do sticker books all over common items as an assist)
Oh man good luck learning to write french! I had lots of success with pimsleur for Spanish (but I'm already a basic competency french speaker so most of the concepts and grammar are familiar to me). Duolingo did not really do it for me. Luckily, Spanish orthography is pretty regular as long as you stay within the same regional pronunciation group.
Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!
I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right.
This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time.
This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.
I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this.
I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
I liked the ruthless correction because it meant that I didn’t get into the habit of pronouncing things poorly.
I also play piano, and if you make a mistake when practicing a piece, it’s easy to just keep making the same mistake over and over. The more you practice making a mistake, the harder it is to fix.
Flip side of this--many years ago, internet cafe in Shanghai.
Turns out the clerk did know some English--but her pronunciation was so bad that I couldn't understand her even when I knew what she was saying. I never saw a spelling mistake, though.
>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly
Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.
Oh, for sure. The apps don't provide good guidance for how to get you past the block.
In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.
Around five years ago, I had to learn a new language because I moved country. I've learned several languages before and so I got good at it quite quickly, and I think my pronunciation in general is quite decent, but you can notice the words I learned very early, because I have a habit of pronouncing them with the wrong stress or vowel quality. It's hard to break those habits once you've formed them.
I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have?
But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.
Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.
> But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.
That's pretty clever.
And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to understand any word with a rolled “r”.
Right now, I’m on lesson 29 in Spanish and trying to pronounce “pruebo” - “I taste” (also can translate to “I try”). It keeps thinking I’m trying to say “huevo” - egg.
Voice dictation works almost perfectly in English for me, so I’m assuming it’s my own mispronunciation
> use iOS’s built in Translate app
Thank you so much for this tip, it is honestly astounding how well this works and I can instantly see how useful it's going to be!
> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough.
I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).
Technically what you want is a bouteille d'eau. If you're asking for l'eau, you're asking for all of the water, not some of it. Depending on how accommodating the French speaker is, you may just get stonewalled for butchering the language.
Lest anybody accuse me of trafficking in stereotypes about the French, this is a real example from my life.
I actually said "je voudrais acheter une bouteille de l'eau", but pronounced so badly they thought I wanted the loo.
It took a second person demonstrating the proper pronunciation of "bouteille d'eau" for me to actually get said bottle of water, despite much pointing at the object in question.
My Spanish teacher told once me that when she was working in a hotel in London someone asked her where the 'ladies' were.
She took it upon herself to walk through the hotel bar & restaurant searching out a group of mature, well-spoken women.
Interestingly, the loo is a Water Closet.
Are you correcting GP's 'bathroom'? Americans call the public facilities (e.g. in a restaurant) that or 'washroom', despite there (typically!) being no bathing or washing devices.
Fwiw, like 'toilet', 'loo' can be either the room/facility or the... 'appliance' itself.
I think they mean that in French, they call the bathroom WC.
No, I meant etymologically. l'eau is apparently a real hypothesis for the loo. I shouldn't expect anyone to figure out word origin on the spot in a restaurant situation, especially if it's less likely than other hypotheses. But I encourage you to integrate etymology as a method in language learning and as its own effort.
Are you joking? I've seen the abbreviation in France, de temps en temps, but never spelt out, it being obviously not French. WC is an English term.
Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.
I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game..
I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good:
What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake."
What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016."
This also works: Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.
I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly.
Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word transliterations from English which are not native Chinese) and occasionally just regurgitate nonsense. It’s not something that I would freely unleash on the end user but there is definitely a place for it somewhere in the pipeline in future.
[0] https://polyvox.app
If you wanted pinyin output, you could use a library like pypinyin? (we use it, no complaints). I assumed GPT models performed best in English, you could machine translate the input/output. MT is pretty fantastic these days, although, you introduce fidelity issues, and an API adds to cost and latency.
I didn't actually need the pinyin conversion (I implement that myself), it was just a test to see how well LLMs* were progressing at "out-of-domain" tasks. I always used recent newspaper headlines, so the possibility of finding matching character/pinyin pairs somewhere in the huge training set was negligible.
For this specific task, Chat-GPT is the first model I've come across that actually shows some ability to chain together concrete steps to form a task (i.e. look up character, fetch pinyin), rather than the simplistic "predict the next word in the sequence" in pure language models.
* Large Language Model - I know ChatGPT isn't a pure language model (which probably explains why it performs so much better), but I don't know what we're calling these models now so I'm sticking with LLM for now.
Figured I'd add a screenshot of my pinyin test with ChatGPT:
https://twitter.com/NickFisherAU/status/1598621215056625664?...
Even if you just had a set of lessons to run through, that'd be a lot of fun. Prompts that make it the counter party in text book dialogues. Character, pinyin, and translation shown.
The email sign up didn't seem to work on your page.
That's basically the idea! Thanks for the note on the email signup, I'll have a look - I threw it together very quickly just before I went on a plane a few weeks ago so it's very fragile.
I've been looking for ages for a way to learn chinese with pinyin (or just audio, no chinese characters), please don't give up.
Thanks! I agree, I'll stay away from characters, at least at an early/beginner level (although I am including them mostly for aesthetic purposes). It's a huge hurdle that lots of people don't necessarily need/want to overcome.
Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.
Well, for one, learning languages is often just about fulfilling an interest rather than actually needing it.
Learning another language can also teach another way of thinking about things. There are also nuances that AI isn't going to help you with.
For instance, 'How's your father?' in Spanish means 'What is your father like?' In English it means 'How is your father's health?' - or it could also mean 'sexual intercourse'.
There will be better examples, obviously...
For talking to actual people, you know...
Might as well ask "Why cook when there's delivery?"
I see your point but people still like to interact with people in other languages in person. Babelfish isn't there yet.
I agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff.
I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed.
Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:
1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].
2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.
3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.
Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.
Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.
(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
A lot of the language learning methods out there really are built to be graded/measured. Books, courses, duolingo, anki - they all kind of seek to answer this question ‘how can we measure your language and make sure you’re progressing through it’.
There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products.
I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
I worked on a product for nearly 4 years that seems very similar to what you're describing. I would love to tell you all about it and what we could have done better, worse, etc... How can I get in touch?
Emailed :)
Also added contact details to my about page here in case that didn't go through / got sent to spam
This is my wife's main beef with the owl.
She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.
If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)
To be honest, if you don't get the agreement right I simply won't bother listening to you, unless in a good mood.
This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and phonemes which are unknown to the recipient.
Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany, and I don't believe the blame lies with the Turks, let's put it that way.
There was an article in the Economist 10-15 years ago about the prevalence of English throughout the world and the typical explanations for it were listed: the British Empire followed by post WWII American economic and entertainment hegemony.
But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.
>But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.
Surely this is just a consequence of that fact that the majority of the world's English speakers speak English as a second language. As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized.
Not only bad English, but regional varieties that I as ESL have trouble understanding, which might formally count as own languages if held against linguistic standards. I just broswed Green's dictionary of slang so I feel I know what I'm talking about.
> As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized
Reading middle and old English, I feel the onus is on you because it changed so much :')
> Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in German
No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.
> I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany
Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.
>No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.
No it's not the same. My German girlfriend is consistently asked in Germany where she's "really from" despite being born there and living there her whole life (and her parents too!). That would be scandalous in my country, and the US too. The intolerance of imperfect grammar that can realistically only be attained by natives is adjacent to this issue. It's naive and simplistic to just state all Western countries are the same in terms of social progress. The English-speaking and German-speaking worlds are not the same.
>Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.
For sure. German culture will either change of I am sure that these waves of immigrants will not integrate properly and there will be strife. One of the benefits of immigration I hope is that Germany will change and become a friendlier and less inward looking society.
No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.
Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.
And no we really don't care, or at least I don't. I am a native English speaker who goes months at a time without speaking to another native English speaker. I would never judge someone for it. I would be ashamed of myself to just stop listening to someone for mixing up word order slightly or dropping a preposition or picking the wrong conjugated form of a verb. If I understand them, then it's fine. If I can help them improve their English, by pointing something out, I will. It's because I'm not an arsehole. Ignoring someone as soon as they mess up a verb conjugation is honestly detestable.
We are talking here about using wrong grammatical gender throughout your speech. That is a bunch of very noticeable mistakes that affect multiple words in the sentence. Just because English does not have grammatical gender does not mean it does not matter in German.
The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affects other words.
I know it's not a gender mistake, but a mistake in the case is generally more meaningful than a mistake in the gender. A mistake in gender is even less important. I agree one should try. I certainly try. I can often look at a word I've never seen before and "somehow" know the gender, but it is ridiculous to just ignore someone who makes mistakes. And it makes no difference what the nature of the mistake is, grammatical gender isn't special, it's not acceptable in English to treat someone like shit because they used the wrong conjugated form of "to be", it shouldn't be acceptable to treat someone like shit for using the wrong gender in German.
English doesn't have gender or anything but a vestige of a case system, but it's still just as complex a language as German. Your comment that you wrote right there is simply incorrect English at worst and unidiomatic at best, and you made a number of grammatical mistakes, but I wouldn't think to ignore you for it, because that would be completely ludicrous. In fact I'm only even mentioning it because of the conversation topic at hand. And if you're making so many mistakes whilst writing English then I'm certain you're making loads whilst speaking it. Still wouldn't ignore you or discount what you're saying because of it. In fact I wouldn't care at all because I understand that learning a language is not easy.
I think there's much more of a pattern of seeing such mistakes + an accent as evidence that English isn't their native language rather than evidence of stupidity. We see so many more non-native speakers.
Getting gender right is something any competent in person course will force you from the start. Having American accent is something to be expected and fine. Using wrong gender causes pain in listener. It really pops up great time.
Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack.
In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very good, but he still he messed some things -including genre- and nobdy cared. He was a comentator for many years and people liked him a lot.
In the US you have other examples of the same things. For instance I can think of Sofia Vergara and Charo to name the first that come to my mind. Both quite popular and I can spot their accent and some mistakes instantly and I'm not even a native speaker.
Also I mess gender a lot myself when I speak English and people don't seem to care.
It really does matter for spoken language as much as for written. Yes people will be able to understand meaning most of the time, but no, you will sound as bad as if we're writing.
It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way.
Accent and ignoring genders or suffixes are different things. You really can't equate them.
Note that if you're coming from a non-gendered language you'll mess it up frequently even if you care. There's a reason Chinese people are notorious for getting gender wrong!
You will mess it up even if coming from other gendered language, because the genders will he different.
But it is one of things you do end up memorizing the same way you memorize the word itself or its conjugations. It just does not make sense to go "I don't care about this stuff and won't learn it" and then demand language app will accommodate your refusal to learn gender.
In the case of Charo and Sofia Vergara, the accent and grammar mistakes are a cultivated part of the brand.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a dialect coach: his Austrian German accent has faded through years of living in the US, but it’s what his audience expects so he trains himself in it before each new movie.
What you just wrote had a few mistakes on the order of a gender error, and several worse, but I understood you just fine. What matters is that you were able to communicate with me, in my native language; and I'm grateful to you for making the effort. There was no pain involved on my part.
Indeed, years ago now, I tried to brush up on my French which I had learned in school. Duolingo did not like my pronunciation (probably fair), and kept me stuck on very basic French that I knew well rather than actually getting to the point where it was challenging me and helping me improve. There may also have been an element of Canadian pronunciation versus France pronunciation. Anyway, it was annoying, and I quickly gave up. Also, there was at least one time where it would not accept my correct answer and insisted on a (IMHO) worse answer.
Not only do your answer's need to be perfect in order to progress but you can also answer correctly without knowing why you are correct.
Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly.
Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.
spelling too... like the 10th thing I care about is how to spell in a new language...
Exactly. Wasn't sure if I was fully conveying my meaning, but yes - spelling can be learned along the way and is a real barrier in these apps.
And no typos allowed or you start from zero!
Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos
I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is yourself.
Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour and you never know if something will be detected as a typo.
While I don't know the innards of it I suspect the typos are preprogrammed. Note what frequently gets marked wrong and have a human decide if it's a wrong word or a typo. You could also do a string distance comparison--if it's distance from the right answer is 1 but it's at least two from any wrong answer it's probably a typo.
I don't know Tsurukame but iKnow.jp had the same functionality and it was game changing for me! Immediately any SRS without became unusable
duolingo is fairly permissive with typos
It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.
I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.
I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going.
While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scores. While reading a very short story in Spanish, I had the experience of the first time, a second language making me laugh because what I was reading, was funny. Nothing during my five years of 8th-12th grade did that. Just sharing, it's not meant to mean anything.
> I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.
Can confirm. My wife and I both took 4+ years of spanish in high school and college, over 15 years ago. We can almost get by on just that knowledge alone in spanish speaking countries, but it is difficult and we always have a translator around.
That said, we took a vacation last summer to a spanish speaking country and spent the 2 months leading up to it using Duolingo. We both had streaks for that entire time. Personally, the refresher course of Duolingo made conversing with people in their native language of Spanish MUCH easier compared to other attempts in the past. We didn't need to use our phones to lookup phrases or even ask locals to speak English. I even learned a few new words and phrases.
That isn't to say that Duolingo is the best or only option, just an anecdote about our experience.
Interestingly, I had a very similar situation recently, but had the opposite experience. Took 4+ years of Spanish in high school and undergrad, ~20 years ago. Had a trip to Costa Rica and I spent about 2 to 3 months using Duolingo, and I felt it didn't help much at all, other than as a refresher for very basic vocabulary.
I ended using Google translate towards the end of the trip, which was disappointing for me.
The first time you finally get to fire off your first short, stupid joke in a new language that actually makes native speakers laugh is one of the greatest feelings ever.
That first laugh at a real joke in a foreign language is precious. I remember reading a collection of short stories for vocabulary, and there was one about a fishing trip going badly anx hilariously wrong. Priceless moment for me and my confidence.
I have a roughly 600 day streak in Spanish, having started with no background, and I am quite pleased with the progress given how little time I dedicate to it each day.
My only issue with Duolingo is that I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules. Their inclusion currently is really poorly executed, haphazardly located in certain lessons as if random. I’d love if I could get specific lessons on demand for anything I am struggling with.
Also, it is really annoying how sometimes it gives you the translation after you are done and other times it just says “Great!” Or something similar, so if you are slightly unsure of something you don’t always get the actual translation to help clarify.
> I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules.
I have had this same wish. I often find myself wondering why something is a certain way and I'm not even sure how to go look it up.
Re: grammar
You can find the excellent tips that cover grammar that used to be on the DuoLingo website at https://duome.eu/tips
From my experience, yes. I did about an hour a day total - 20 minutes on waking, 20 minutes at lunch, and 20 minutes before I go to sleep. 3 years ago, I didn't know a lick of Spanish. Now when I go, I can be a translator for my friends. It's not great, and I trip over my pronunciation a lot, but it's functional.
As to the context of article, I'm also in the group that thinks the latest Duolingo updates are the worst to come to the platform since it's inception. It's beyond awful and I honestly despise it. I frequently went back to areas I felt myself getting rusty at, and practiced those. The new "pathway" has broke that method completely. It's impossible to see previous course content clearly, essentially forcing you through poor UX design to take the next step on the pathway instead, like you're playing Candy Crush. The update spurned me to give up on my 500+ day streak and cancel my subscription over the Summer. I haven't used the app in the last 5 months.
I'm lucky enough to live in Oxford, which is renowned so having some great evening language classes. I've signed up to my first semester starting in January which I'm very much looking forward to. If it wasn't for Duolingo, any interest in furthering my language skills would not exist. I guess it's a silver lining that an awful update to my favorite app by incompetent product management and executive decisions forced me to finally peruse a formal education in Spanish. I just wish it was a amenable break-up.
my 9 years old son was really enjoying the app that I bought one year subscription. after the update he stopped and when I asked why it was clear he hated the new update and doesn't like to touch the app.
I was always crap a languages. Top class for everything. Rock bottom for German. Tried lots of language learning things to learn Spanish, including Duolingo - but they just teach you vocabulary - and mostly weird stuff you don’t need initially.
Then I stumbled upon Michel Thomas. I listened to the basic course and 2 weeks later I was in Spain speaking to people - even managed to talk my way onto a bus when I got lost and had no ticket. It’s a completely different way of learning. Speaking sentences from the first 5 minutes. You’re learning grammar from the beginning and how to actually express yourself. It’s more like a conversion course from English to Spanish (but also there’s Portuguese, French, German, some others)
He’s such an interesting guy - emigrated to the USA after the war and set up his school. Invented a whole new way of teaching languages but wouldn’t let anyone know about it because he was so mistrusting (he was a nazi hunter in the war). Only when he was 70 something did someone convince him to record the language method. The tapes when you listen have a perfect learning curve - there’s always 2 students, one is good the other not so good so you feel better than them. I assumed he must have recorded many versions and then extensively edited - NOPE - they’re all recorded in a one time session. He was just that good.
BBC has made a documentary about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 6 worst pupils French in like 2 weeks.
He’s a genuine legend and the only reason I speak Spanish.
If you want to learn a language please try this out. It is just on a different level to anything else, especially the BS repetition of duolingo type sites - although they are useful later when you want to just learn vocabulary.
Anyway, as you may be able to tell, I am always very excited to pass on Michel Thomas. What a dude. RIP.
You could also try Pimsleur.
It's very effective for learning conversation essentials.
I tried Pimsleur first and personally didn’t get anywhere with it!
Has anyone tried "Language Transfer" to learn a foreign language? I've done a few of the lessons and it's so incredibly intuitive. They use concepts and patterns in the listener's native language to learn concepts in the target language. Surprisingly, It's completely free (please donate if you can)
https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish
I have, and it’s fantastic to learn. I think there’s a focus on ambiguity that is incredibly important for language learners (combine some gestures with your hands and ‘it’ ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘there’ ‘he’ ‘she’ can get you really far).
However, it’s really not great for review. I’ve tried to go back even after a couple years and listen to the Italian course again, but couldn’t do it.
So it’s a great (amazing (fantastic)) ‘boost’ but I wouldn’t rely on it entirely
I have learned, over the course of five decades, French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, with at least some immersion for all of them.
Outside of being immersed in the language, Language Transfer (which I'm currently using to learn Spanish) is easily the best method I have ever used. It relies mainly on recognizing patterns, rather than memorization, which is right up my alley. Maybe others do better with memorization?
It's also free, and very convenient (lessons are on YouTube, SoundCloud, downloaded MP3 files, or Android/iOS app). I'm a Patreon supporter, because I believe in it.
I did some Language Transfer briefly, but only after I had already learned a significant amount of French with other tools. Then I did it again for a bit when my son wanted me to learn German with him.
While I can't really speak to its efficacy, I really liked it, thus would probably stick with it, thereby making it effective.
Yes, see my comment here[0]. I highly recommend it as someone who loves learning languages.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33933602
i've tried but didn't keep up with it. it seemed promising at least.
I have spent a lot of effort in Duolingo in multiple languages, that I now use daily. Imo it's a mediocre but _extremely_ convenient way to build a base of vocabulary, but it is completely different to seriously learning a language (unfortunately). As far as I'm aware this applies to all the apps - real human conversation is very hard to usefully simulate.
That doesn't mean Duolingo isn't useful, it's definitely helpful, even if you're living in a full immersion environment, but the map is not the territory. If you really want to learn to talk to people, you have to talk to real people. It is a completely different thing to just learning all the words and grammar, far more than I realised before seriously getting into languages.
This.
I moved to south of spain 3 years ago without knowing spanish except a few words to order a beer, ask for the bill and where are the toilets.
I did a bit of duolingo that helped me just grow enough confidence to learn the basic stuff.
Then I met what is now my girlfriend in a language exchange event and my level grew steadily that people in latin america say I am speaking really well. I still struggle a bit sometimes in south of spain but that is just because they speak in an awful way, like they would be drunk 24h a day and it costs the same to native spanish speaker to understand them.
Recently I encountered a tourist who didn't understand anything I said, but said he's from Korea. Recalling that I have been studying Korean on Duolingo for over a year, I excitedly probed my memory for a few seconds, then finally exclaimed, "annyeonghaseyo!" (hello), then blurted in English, "sorry, I don't speak Korean"
Later I encountered a fellow who spoke English. He told me he's from Germany. Recalling that I have been studying German on Duolingo for over a year, I excitedly probed my memory for a few seconds, and finally came up with "sehr gut!" (very good), then "sorry, that's all the German I know"
Then I was at a pizza shop and realized the person at the counter only spoke Spanish. Recalling that I have been studying... finally she lost her patience and thrusted her phone at me, with Google Translate.
True story. I still use Duolingo everyday. But surely, it isn't enough to "know"
Okay, my true story:
I set my phone's language to French, so I get constant practice with the UI. That means the Google Assistant talks to me in French. I've had decent luck making requests and getting information in my target language.
One night, as I was getting ready for bed, I said « okay google, reglez une alarme pour 6h du matin ». My phone responded, "Sorry, I didn't catch that?"
So I said it again, and it responded the same way. I enunciated, I changed the conjugation, I sped up, I slowed down. Couldn't figure it out. Just wanted to set my damn alarm, I looked at my wife and said, exasperated, "I don't get it. It thinks I'm speaking English." That's when the light bulb went off in my head: I speak English. It's my native language. "Okay google, set an alarm for 6am." "Okay, setting alarm for 6am."
I had actually forgotten that I spoke English and couldn't communicate with my phone.
That seems like a lot of languages to try to learn via any method. Why not focus on making one usable?
I did Duo Korean for a while with my SO. We got stuck on a section that started introducing a lot of proper names for people - the grammar around it was really confusing.
After a few weeks of struggling, we discovered the website had PAGES of grammar notes for the section we were on. It was impossible without them and the way it was introduced even on the website made progress feel very slow compared to the pacing up to that point.
There was zero indication of the extra notes in the app and eventually googling the for tips on the duo section led us to a bunch of people complaining about it and linking to the notes.
When the pacing is good though duo is fun and easy to do consistently. I'm sure it is not super effective after a certain point but I could definitely see myself navigating Seoul with just the lessons there. The hangul character lessons seemed well done.
> But surely, it isn't enough to "know"
honestly, I think the missing part is trying harder than you did in person. Applying what you've learned.
-- don't worry - 한국어는 어려운 언어입니다 (Korean is hard) --
Thankfully for me, you can literally learn how to read and write on a long haul plane there. Had a great time despite being functionally illiterate. Just learned numbers, please/thankyou and was fine. This only fell over with the peculiar decision in Taejon to issue tourists with maps with English on one side and Hanja (Chinese character for Koreans) on the other. Completely useless to both me and the taxi driver.
Whenever Duolingo comes up, I always like to point out that their website is VASTLY superior to their app. It's essentially more difficult, because you can type your answers without being babied by just clicking on words. Additionally, you can export the website as a PWA onto your phone, so it feels like an app but you get the extra features.
You can turn on/off the word picker.
And there's no server-side component to the web app??
When I did the full Spanish tree from zero about 5 years ago studying ~1h per day for 3 months it didn't get me very far. I then moved to a Spanish speaking country and started taking 4h of language classes per day immediately. I felt that I could have learned about the same in two weeks there instead of using Duolingo. Some people came in with 0 knowledge and could speak a little after 2 weeks, Duolingo never got me to speak real sentences.
Another problem is that you just repeat without understanding why the words are arranged in a certain way. For adults it is probably more effective to study some grammer rules and to then apply these rules. Learning grammar is really a shortcut and Duolingo doesn't teach you anything about grammar rules. Also, at a certain age you just can't learn grammar by reading/listening and repeating. It takes kids years to learn, you don't have years. I have lived here for over 5 years, took well over 1000h of class in school and still make many grammer mistakes. Other mistakes continue to happen because nobody corrects me, usually we correct kids at least a little bit when they say something wrong.
Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly. I recently tried it again to pick up another language and they put so much monetization on it that it is now basically impossible to learn at your own pace - unless you pay.
I see it as a tool to learn vocabulary. This is very important in the beginning, once you learn 500-1000 words you can rapidly progress on your own. But honestly, to pound vocabulary into my brain, Memrise is a much better tool. I also used grammer tools like conjugator. Another good resource is the free Coffee Break podcast series, Spanish is probably their most complete course and it helped me a lot.
I have seen some good suggestions I didn't know about in this thread, I'll definitely try them when I try to pick up my next language.
> Back in the day Duolingo was already a very slow progression repeating stuff you already knew endlessly.
This is the only way to learn. You repeat things you know many times to commit them to your memory.
> This is the only way to learn. You repeat things you know many times to commit them to your memory.
Mindless repetition is not the only way to learn. For many types of things, understanding the rules or knowing the patterns is far more efficient and effective.
We were just talking about German noun genders and plurals elsewhere on this thread. Of course, one can memorise the gender and the plural of every noun in isolation, by rote. But simply knowing a few common patterns would save an incredible amount of effort.
I said "stuff you already know", there is no point in repeating vocabulary which you already know. Some words or phrases are easier to learn, others are harder.
Duolingo has no way to only work on your weekness. It's more time effective to put them on a piece of paper and to go through them a couple of times.
In my experience, Duolingo is as good, in fact better than the average class you can get. It won't get you to fluency by itself, but years of bare lessons won't either.
A few years ago I got randomly interested in Danish, so I started Duolingo Danish. In a few weeks I was able to understand tweets from Danish newspapers. In 4 months I could read novels, slowly but well enough to enjoy them. Do I "know" Danish? Not really, I can't speak past a few sentences and have a hard time understanding it spoken (Danish is a particularly hard one at that). But my RoI for 20 minutes a day for a few months was great.
Then my daughter had a hard time with her school English. She knew nothing and could not even follow the glacial pace of her lessons. I bribed her into keeping a 200 day streak in Duolingo and she was suddenly acing her tests. Now she has some interests with English only sources, and that alone is enough to help her keep learning, but duo was a huge kickstarter.
My wife also had non existent English from years of classes and needed to at least understand emails at work instead of always passing them by me, and a 300 day Duolingo streak fixed that.
I don't doubt that there are very good teachers out there, and you need to complement Duolingo if you really want to learn thoroughly, but it really puts you on track for very little actual effort.
I had similar experience with a kid. A kid that was slowly falling behind in English got bribed to do duolingo. Grades slowly got better and English slowly became "that easy class" and eventually the kid started to be able to read mangha and watch movies in English.
The best method for learning a new language I have ever come across is a combo of Language Transfer + Anki flash cards and making a serious effort to study them 4-7 times per week.
It’s incredible how quickly I started learning doing this every day for 6 straight months despite not having anyone to actually talk with or any media to consume in the new language.
Eventually, I started taking in person classes for the language, which has helped too, but after 3 courses, I still haven’t come close to the level I had learned via Language Transfer and regular self study. Language Transfer taught me quite advance concepts much quicker than traditional classes did.
I would say I learned more studying Greek in 6 months via that method than I did in 5 years learning Spanish via traditional classes. After an additional 5 years (10 years total) studying Spanish, I’ve become highly proficient. It blows my mind how quickly I’ve been able to learn Greek. The way the language is taught in Language Transfer is so intuitive. I wish it had been around when I learned Spanish.
My experience with Duolingo over the years is learning a pretty minimal amount. It’s like a worse version of Anki. It’s mostly fluff. The gamified concept is clever, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. If you enjoy doing it in addition to the methods I listed above, then I’m sure that can’t hurt. However, I’d recommend avoiding it and using your valuable time on the methods above. I can’t emphasize enough how remarkable my learning path for Greek has been.
P.S. If you’re really craving a gamified learning supplement, try Clozemaster once you’re at a high enough level of proficiency.
Two bits of advice from something of a polyglot here:
Languages aren't something you learn, they are something you join.
With Duolingo, take a second language along with the primary one. No, not German or French. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and select Latin, or Klingon, or Dothraki, something really short and just for kicks. That way when you are stuck in your primary language, you can switch to the fun language and keep up the habit. Duolingo is all about keeping up that habit. Also, you get to learn another 'language' and checking that off feels good and makes it so that you want to be a polyglot.
> you get to learn another 'language'
But "languages aren't something you learn" right?
Sarah Connor's explosion gif
haha, yes, thank you.
I learned Spanish in HS and started using Duolingo to see if it was useful for teaching my young child Spanish. She had exposure to spoken Spanish via her nanny, but had very little exposure to written Spanish.
My first reaction was that there was no way for someone to learn Spanish just by using Duolingo, as there wasn't enough 'teaching' happening. But then I realized that there is some scaffolding in the app, but you have to go search it out. This could work for a motivated adult (or older student who has some existing language knowledge). But I wouldn't recommend it for a younger student starting out.
Duolingo is great for building a base but after maybe the first 5 levels it’s a complete waste of time.
If your goal is to actually learn Spanish you need to be listening and speaking it as soon as possible. Both the listening and speaking parts of the app are absolutely terrible. I think the worst thing is people get stuck in the trap of thinking they are learning by keeping the streak going but in reality it has diminishing returns.
All this coupled with Duolingo gamifying it more and trying to squeeze money out of you by making the timed challenges pay out more points.
Overall great for beginners and then you are wasting your time.
What do you mean by "scaffolding in the app"? Are you still using Duolingo?
You can get hints and tips when you're doing problems. This helps you understand root words and such. I'm not using the app anymore.
It worked well for my kids tho. Basically, they ended up using correct words and sentence structures in correct situations.
I have gone from literally zero Spanish to be able to understand basic spoken and written sentences and read basic signs etc.
I might venture a basic spoken question or statement (e.g. ordering a coffee, asking where check-in is etc), but not much else.
For me that is amazing. I've gone from nothing to basic toddler-level language skills just for messing about in the app a bit (and tantalisingly there was one or two moments where I caught myself thinking in Spanish too). That is valuable I think. I don't want to be fluent enough to be able to "chat with my Spanish friends" or whatever, just know enough to get by when on a vacation (which worked a treat when I spent a month in South America which was the main reason I learnt any at all - I didn't want to be utterly helpless)
I speak several languages, most living, a few dead. I love languages and have a knack for them. Duo lingo is great at keeping you practicing, which I think is important. However, if you really want to learn a language, you must use it. If you want to learn quickly, use it a lot as often as possible. Speak it, listen to it, read it, and to whatever extent possible think in it. This is easier now than it ever has been. It’s easy to get TV, movies, games, books, music, websites, and so on in whatever language. It would be better to find some actual humans to speak with, but movies and TV are better than nothing.
It's more like a game than actual learning.... which would be great if it worked. I found myself recognising patterns and subconsciously "cheating" while using that app. Nothing beats full immersion in a language and actual real life teachers.
I moved to Spain a few years ago and Duo Lingo had me thinking I understood loads of things when I really didn't. Not in a real life setting. It is good as a side lesson but not great otherwise at least from my perspective.
What sort of cheats did you find? The only one I could find in the Finnish course was that the correct first word from the word bank would have its first letter capitalized, and that was almost never be the word that was difficult.
Over the past few years I have tried every language learning app I could find. The most success I have had is with LingoDeer. The formatting and I instructions really give that feeling of a classroom lesson. Learning Korean as an English speaker has been very challenging. I feel that LingoDeer has gotten me further in a few weeks compared to what I learned with a months of Duolingo or Rosetta. Duolingo if not paying for it becomes absolutely ad filled and frustrating.
that doesn't even launch on device without gapps, while Duolingo, Drops, Memrise and others have no problem with that, seems like extremely lazy devs
I was a long time duo user (1000+ day streak) learning german. I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german. The streak system and the gold->diamond tier system kept me going but after a while I realized I had plateaued and I felt like I was forgetting more than I was learning.
Then I realized, I had got to the point where I was good at answering what duo wanted to get the daily requirements rather than learning.
One day I just stopped and let it go
> I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german.
German can be quite tricky in this regard, in that the written and the spoken language can be quite different grammatically. One basic example that immediately springs to mind is that the simple past (Präteritum) is used very little in speech but very extensively in writing. This means that, when reading German books, one encounters lots of verb forms they'd never hear in speech (which, I'm guessing, would make it unlikely that Duolingo teaches them?)
same here, after while it felt like daily chore than something I wanted to do in the beginning
btw you could disable leagues by stop sharing your progress, but they hide this in web settings, not possible to switch it off in the app, that makes learning less stressful
now after they introduced path UI I uninstalled it after more than 1000+ streak and keeping in phone Drops and FunEasyLearn, second one looks very childish and amateurish, but I actually like it, seems less pushy with dark patterns than Duolingo where whole new Path UI is dark pattern to make you cough up money
If you only want to learn to read German, check out a book called "German For Reading" by Karl Sandberg. I'm using it now and it's pretty good.
One thing about Duolingo is that it’s very easy to spend very little time on it. It will cheerfully tell you how awesome you are, when you’re spending 5-10 minutes a day.
When I did 30-60 minutes a day for a few months (I did Spanish, then Portuguese, then switched to Memrise because it had European Portuguese), that seemed to lay a decent foundation. Conversationally, I was hopeless for a few days, but I learned quickly (unlike when I went to Mexico without having done Duo). I don’t think there’s any substitute for being thrown a curveball or two by a real person and having to muddle through.
Meanwhile, here are CIA estimates for time to reach professional working proficiency. 600 hours for Spanish or French, up to 2200 for Japanese or Arabic. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/. Just gotta wait for that 3000 day streak!
Thanks for the Memrise recommendation. I tried it today and found it much better than Duolingo.I think Duolingo makes you more stressed to keep up with the day streak and I find my self just redoing a couple of stories just to keep it running.Not good.
No, it can’t. However, it does have a value as an interest generator. The vast majority of people who start a language on DL, will stop doing DL pretty quickly. Of those who stay, there’ll be a percentage who continue using it for absurd streak lengths while never progressing past the point of basic comprehension or speaking ability. The remaining group will be a group who goes on to use real resources to learn a language the only way possible - through serious, disciplined, and often uncomfortable learning by immersion and real world practice.
I do think Duolingo has great value but I do think the second group I described is seriously wasting their time. I get it’s fun as a game but I figure you really might as well go all in with the amount of time a 1000+ day streak entails
>I do think Duolingo has great value but I do think the second group I described is seriously wasting their time.
which is why I stopped using Duolingo after they introduced new Path UI with 1000+ day streak, but by the end it was just daily chore to not break streak instead learning anything new, now I have two different apps in my phone which I use only when I want without trying to fulfill some streak, will probably keep just one to refresh vocabulary
I've been trying to learn Greek, but it's a pain! First, they went overboard with gamification - now, I spend most of my time keeping my place in the Diamond League, not learning new stuff. Sadly, you earn more XP not learning new stuff, so, gamification goes against the learning goals. Another issue is that the scoring is in the app and different versions of the app reward you differently for the same thing - that's why my wife is on a year-old version and earns twice as much XP with less effort, which is unfair. Also, certain languages like Greek are not the same as Spanish and you cannot practice speaking and you learn to recognize the worlds visually well, but not so much to learn a language conversationally.
See my comment[0] on successfully learning Greek.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33933602
The first thing that poked my eyes in this article was the "Czech" sentence in the illustration which is just totally wrong... Even when we ignore the missing diacritics, "isi" is not a word in Czech. It's probably a typo from "Jedl si ten žlutý sníh?", although that translates to "Did you eat the yellow snow?", not "Why are you eating the yellow snow?" like the caption suggests which would be translated to "Proč jíš ten žlutý sníh?"...
Looks kinda bad in an article about language learning in a serious newspaper like Bloomberg... unless it's also mistranslated in duolingo in which case I think it should have been explained...
Just my anecdote, but I used it before traveling in Mexico for some time. I took 3 years of Spanish in high school, but hadn't used any in years. It definitely helped me refresh vocabulary. One of my friends used it to learn initially before doing a bunch of work across the border. Now he's married to a Mexican woman and considering nationalizing.
It's no substitute for immersion, but I do think any time you spend on the app is worthwhile imo. The UI is great and it makes it easy to form a daily habit.
I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but if you absolutely need to use an app and can't take in-person classes or talk to actual people, Camino is the best I've encountered (iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/camino-spanish/id1461459420, Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studylangu...).
I believe it was developed for the US Department of State to crash train people who were going to work overseas. It isn't silly vocab drills. It has you reading entire literary passages and holding minutes-long conversations also immediately. None of the "get it right before you move on" stuff, either. You're absolutely going to fail, just like if you were really in the other country trying to talk and listen and not getting anything, but keep at it, and you will eventually get it. You can't get true immersion from an app, but this is as close as you'll get.
It's not freemium, though. You have to pay.
I've been doing Duolingo religiously for about 150 days now. like anything, it is what you make of it. My Spanish has gotten significantly better during that time, and I think I'm learning at a faster pace than I did in high school. sure, it's not perfect and I wish it would explain some things a little better. but it does get me to come back and do it every day and hopefully in a couple years I'll be at least able to understand things.
Just before the pandemic I had a trip to Mexico City planned and spent a couple months learning Spanish, and I like many others took 3 years of Spanish in high school, but that was over 10 years ago
I went on the trip and while it helped a little, in conversation it was practically useless outside of the very basics.
I dropped Duolingo and took an intensive 3 month course of Spanish with a minimum courseload minimum 2-3 hours a day because there was nothing else to do. I changed all media I consume to Spanish (music, news, shows, books, etc) I learned more in those 3 months than all of my high school classes and any amount of Duolingo could have helped me.
Now it's 3 years later and I have spent a cumulative 1.5 years of time as a digital nomad in Spanish speaking countries and most consider my Spanish to not necessarily be native fluent, but conversationally fluent in that I can understand jokes, ask for whatever I need, etc.
I'd personally only recommend Duolingo for maybe vocabulary, but if you really want to learn you need to immerse and actually talk with people frequently, as in basically daily.
You need to make those stupid mistakes that native speakers may giggle at and then correct you.
I’m currently residing in Mexico after years of HS and Rosetta refresher, my main critique: Rosetta didn’t teach big numbers well enough. At 20 pesos to the dollar, learning 100-1000+ is pretty much mandatory but I didn’t see it, especially not in the form of the rapid fire audio you’ll encounter in the wild (with a line of annoyed people behind you perhaps…).
Don’t try to get natives to tell you the english either - it’s much more confusing than you probably realize!^ Instead, if you aren’t sure you can repeat back the number you think you heard digit by digit and people will generally get what you’re going for (or “lo siento no entiendo, puedes decir cada digito por favor?”). Writing it out is a decent last resort, helps that there’s dirt everywhere.
^ “three fifty” is 2 numbers, 2 orders of magnitude apart. “thirty five” is one number, in between them. “three hundred fifty” is the same as the second “three fifty”. “thirty five hundred” is a totally different number entirely, but the same as “three thousand five hundred”. etc.
Oh, and the tenses. When the Military stops you to ask what you did in the past and what you’re going to do in the future, Rosetta’s passion por present tense won’t help.
That said, having shit tier spanish at the checkpoints can “naïveté” you out of some sticky situations. A cute dog helps too (when they ask, and they will, “ella no muerde”).
I found Michel Thomas very effective for Spanish.
Michel Thomas gave me a very solid understanding of basic spoken French in approximately two hours, and it has stuck for decades. However, my pronunciation is atrocious (as is his.)
The French and the English, the neighbors who cannot pronounce a word of another’s language…
Wait, about 30% of English vocabulary is of French origin (not to mention other Romance influences). :-)
This probably only has served to exacerbate the issue on the English side.
Been living in France for 10y. I took a basic one semester French course paid by the company. It was difficult to then continue because of low availability / timing / difficult commute / price so I turned to Duolingo.
The best aspect was that you can learn any time you have 5-10 min spare. At the bus stop, a coffee break etc.
But it can only get you so far.
After finishing Duolingo French course I took to Memrise to build the vocabulary: 500 verbs, 500 adjectives etc.
In parallel, I'd read local newspapers online, and Google Translate any word I didn't understand.
This gave me a reading comprehension but talking was still difficult.
I only learnt talking proficiency by joining a French company where everyone would talk French at lunch breaks. (First one was more international with many non-speaker fresh grads, talking English).
After that, watching a lot of TV with subtitles to improve listening.
Not by itself, no. No methods can. Trully learning anything is an immersive, active, and consistent process. The app is only a scaffold, that can simulate this to some extent and only if you let it. On top of that, you have to start listening to contents in spanish. Try to repeat a few sentences that you've heard in a movie. You have to read books/articles, sometimes outloud to train the muscles involved in your mouth. Eventually, you want to graduate to having conversations. Each step challenges you and forces you to adapt. That's learning. When the app nudges you (through tips) to pronounce the words and sentences that you see, instead of (passively) just filling blank spaces, that's not meaningless. You'll get as much from it as you're willing to take.
No - something like Dreaming Spanish where you are immersed in the language in a natural form is far better.
Ik heb nederlands geleerd van duolingo. is het de allebeste? nee, maar het is goed genoeg voor mij. voor ~£35 per jaar, het is heel goedkoop
Where does it not work as well? speaking. I have a terrible accent. Listening comprehension isn't that great either, because the text is almost always there to prompt you. this means that out in the wild, I need people to speak slower than if I had been taught in a traditional lesson.
but I would not have a second language if I had not been doing duolingo.
The new scheme was a bit shit to start with, but it gives you a much wider vocab lesson than before. For non spanish languages there are much less explanations of grammar and syntax, so you just have to learn by reinforcement, which can be frustrating.
I love the idea of Duolingo, but I wish it was more about making the act of learning itself a game, rather than 'gamification' which is more about adding extrinsic rewards, achievements, and other small nudges.
I really like Duolingo as a way to practice (Spanish) every day, on top of a foundation of via-zoom language classes for 2h/day over a couple months from Baselang, and living in a Spanish speaking place (Puerto Rico), traveling to Spanish speaking places, etc. I don't really interact with people locally in Spanish all that much at home, and beyond basic transactional interactions at the airport, shooting range, and costco, can easily go a month+ without speaking Spanish, so it's nice to have a consistent motivation to practice.
I found that Duolingo is good for learning vocabulary, not so good for learning grammar. The online course I found most helpful was "Spanish with Paul," but I am sure there are other good courses.
Je suis anglais et j’étudie[0] français avec Duolingo tous les jours depuis 2019. J’écris ces phrases sans dictionnaire ou traduction Google. J’ai étudié français au lycée pendant trois ans il y a vingt quatre ans. Je ne sais pas si j’ai fait beaucoup d’erreurs de grammaire mais peut-être quelqu’un pourrait me dire?
[0]Not sure if I’m using the right tense here I’ve got a feeling it’s present where we would use past continuous? Expect there’s lots of other mistakes I don’t know about.
Didn't read the article as I'm out on the streets, however, I used Duolingo but it was very basic and it never became difficult. My biggest issues were with conjugations and I found another app called ConjuGato which helped me with that. What taught me to speak and understand was moving to a Spanish speaking country, meet a girl, found friends through her. Learned a lot of slang from listening to reggaeton and asking my friends what the lyrics mean...
Betteridge's law of headlines be damned, the answer is "yes".
I've basically only used Duolingo for learning a particular new language. I started from nothing, and just did a little every day during the pandemic. Then I travelled to the country in question, and was able to tell stories in the language.
Not easily, and with bad grammar and my vocabulary sucked, but this is more than being able to order at a restaurant. My stories could be understood, and if they spoke slowly and gave me time to think then I could mostly understand them too.
But surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand", and instead will go maybe even faster. Like… do you think this will help us communicate?
I would say the answer is "Yes, but..."
It won't teach it on its own, but it can help you along with other methods of practice. I think even classes at school aren't enough on their own to teach you a language. You need other things to help you really learn the language.
> surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand"
I've seen this too, so many times. If I'm speaking to someone who has trouble with English, I can automatically speak slower, enunciate better, and use simpler words and shorter sentences. But some people cannot adapt the way they speak. I don't think it's because they are unaccommodating or impatient. For some puzzling reason, they just can't speaker slower and simpler. Ironically they might instead speak a bit faster as you observed, or louder.
Communicating with people who don't know the language well is a skill you have to learn and practice. It's not something people can do by default. Especially in their native language.
When you speak in your native language, the words may just come out automatically, without any effort. If you need to speak slowly, you have to be more deliberate and maybe even consider each word separately. If you don't remember that and just start speaking, you may end up speaking normally without even realizing that until it's too late.
Not sure about faster, but louder is what a lot of people do when they're trying to enunciate better, they just don't know how to do it right / what exactly they need to do. Basically they think they were mumbling.
Louder can certainly help too. Especially when people have masks on.
But slower helps more than louder.
Native speakers have usually zero idea about what is simple word for foreigner. They go by what feels simple for them. But simple for foreigner means "the variant I found in my textbook" and natives have no idea.
>But surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand", and instead will go maybe even faster.
by my experience when these people see you don't understand, they think speaking louder will make you understand
That would make sense if I'd not just asked them to speak slower.
I find it good for vocabulary (the little it has), just awful for grammar and speaking practice/confidence.
Also since it's Hindi I'm learning rather than Spanish, it's great for learning the script - no better way than flashcards to memorise/remind each character really.
But it's absolutely not the only tool you should use, you at least need a book, and someone to speak to.
I have done French and Chinese, and it is fine.
I tried to start Korean, and was getting so many "fake cognates" (silver is 은 "eun" but it gives 실버 "silbeo") that I had to quit. At least in the "learn the alphabet" stage, it's not teaching Korean, it's teaching "fake Korean using English words transliterated".
Followers of Krashen know that it's sensible input that results in language acquisition. Duolingo gamifies the frequency of sensible input. Therefore Duolingo will work if frequently and consistently used. Fluent is an outdated term. It probably takes about six months to achieve any lasting result. Illusion of progress is impossible to prove or disprove probably.
I just want to note (this is what I studied for my MA) that Krashen is very controversial in the field. Many researchers argue that output is critical to learning, and "interactionism," the idea that learning is facilitated through conversation, is probably the dominant theoretical approach at the moment. See, for example, Second Language Learning Theories, by Mitchell, Myles, & Marsden, chapter 6.
Six months of what to achieve what result?
Yes.
I learned Spanish on Duolingo and used it to travel through Cuba (where very few people speak English).
It worked well enough, I was able to communicate. Not knowing Spanish would make things much more difficult.
Of course I have by now mostly forgotten it, a language that isn't used frequently (best via immersion, living where it's spoken by plenty of people) will atrophy...
Wouldn't it be good if Duelingo hooked you up with native language speakers so you could try to strike up conversations in text and voice?
It's great to learn words, phrases and so on in isolation but actual conversations in a new language are where the real learning happens. You've got to be on the ball
They do offer real classes done through independent teachers, they are typically group lessons, but they are at a pretty reasonable price! http://classes.duolingo.com
I was super interested, but the link highlights they are unfortunately shutting this down Classes next month.
Oh man, I hadn't seen that! Super disappointed :(
For what it's worth, I use Duolingo (the app itself) as just another way to practice at the moment but feel that most of my real progress comes with a tutor that I found through Preply and eventually started private lessons with. Group lessons were a cheap way to get some more practice in though with other speakers.
According to that page, Duolingo classes is "going away" on January 18.
HelloTalk does this (chat/voice/video, with language corrections as a first-class feature). It's aggressively monetised, but I'd still recommend it.
I've heard good things about Tandem, but haven't used it myself
https://www.hellotalk.com/?lang=en
https://www.tandem.net/
Seems like a fair article about Duolingo and its relation to language learning and competing apps it its space.
I have a grip about a tiny part of the article, when it mentions Ibo, a Nigerian tribal language. Leave the "tribal" bit out - we're not living in the 20th century any more.
Isn't the Duolingo app designed for children? It sure felt so. I mean it's not like adults can't use it, but from the UI/UX of it it did not seem they are targetting adults. Last I tried it was few weeks ago.
I used duolingo to learn spanish for few months. I know some words and sentences (most important: donde esta una biblioteca?) But one day I got bored and stopped but it was kinda fun.
As a bilingual I tend to believe unless you're living in the country trying to learn a language(using any method) is probably a waste of time.
I'm not even sure living in the country helps that much on its own. The issue is that the vast majority of your language intake comes from your immediate surroundings - the media you consume, the friends you have, the books you read, the place you work, etc. I've seen a lot of language learners move to a country, take classes, but get stuck in an expat bubble. The worst part is, when you take classes, you're surrounding yourself with other non-natives.
For most major languages, a heavy immersion is possible in your home country, especially with the amount of media that's now easily available. Heavy immersion is very effective, but it's also extremely difficult to pull off. The AJATT guy[1] was a big advocate for it and was extremely successful with it when it came to Japanese, but even he couldn't replicate it for Chinese from what I recall.
If you're not going the heavy immersion route, I guess the best thing would be to just have fun with the language, pick up what you can, and accept that you'll never be great at it.
[1] http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/
I've come to a very similar conclusion. The absolute only way to learn a language is to have an incentive to learn it, IE: to be exposed to it constantly by work, daily life, romance, friendship, IE: whatever it is that is providing the regular need for the use of the language. People who say they are bad at languages might be surprised how fast they would learn if they were suddenly forced to learn by necessity.
I think learning a language at a young age likely sets up some brain development for language learning in the future. Brains remain plastic even through adulthood, but I definitely feel like whatever language I am studying tends to fill “Language Slot 2,” if you will, which exists because of an atrocious 12 year long present-tense-only public school Spanish program.
Results from learning a language in an immersive environment are going to be greater and more justify the time spent. However, it can definitely be rewarding otherwise if cramming before a vacation or even just to remember how to clumsily pronounce “l'esprit d'escalier.”
This article is written by an American. Given the immigration rates, you have a damn good chance of finding people who speak the target language you're trying to learn quite well, and Spanish in particular can be quite easy depending on where you live, given a quarter of the country, including the two most heavily-populated states, were formerly Spanish colonies and once part of Mexico. The third-most populated state was never part of Mexico but was also a Spanish colony, and is full of Cubans.
Do you have a maid, landscaper, janitors at your office, kitchen staff at your favorite restaurant? Talk to them.
Learning rudimentary components being a waste of time may be a bit of a stretch however expecting to master the language through apps, YouTube tutorials, not using books and physical media is laughable if not delusional.
It's helpful in learning nearby languages. I am a native English speaker, and my French can approach fluency given some immersion (it's pretty rusty right now, though). DuoLingo helped me improve transactional Spanish and Portuguese (BR) very quickly, meaning I can get through airports, grocery stores, restaurants, and read news articles. I'll need something more to have free-ranging conversations or read novels, though.
Check out "The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages" by Frederick Bodmer. I'm reading it now and it's quite extraordinary. It seems like a particularly good fit for someone with your linguistic background, especially if you have an interest in learning further Germanic or Romance languages.
Nah. I've learnt english well enough in a non-english speaking country to move abroad and earn a university degree speaking/writing english.
So did I but, man, that took ten years of pretty intensive study (13 hours a week at the peak, across four school subjects). They taught us really well, but there's got to be a way to reach this level of proficiency with less effort.
This was in the Soviet Union and before the Internet, and so we were studying in complete linguistic isolation. When I met a native speaker for the first time, I had already been studying the language for nearly ten years.
I did have internet for most of my youth. Computer games also helped.
What would be your best app for learning a language?
I don't remember the name, but I've had some friends do remote teaching for foreign languages through an app, where you'd get scheduled 1 on 1 video time with a person who knows the language. I think that's an interesting approach I would look into over the self directed learning
Is it italki (https://www.italki.com/)? You can hire tutors there for online lessons.
iTalki. HelloTalk also works.
https://www.italki.com/en
https://www.hellotalk.com/?lang=en
I used Livemocha a bit in ~2008, and it does this.
Livemocha got acquired by Rosetta Stone and was closed in '16.
Its not an app - but Dreaming Spanish has really improved my ability to learn Spanish by leaps and bounds.
I've seen quite the positive impressions. I gave it a brief try and I'm not sure it's for me. I went through a number of superbeginner videos and was just feeling more and more frustrated at how much I didn't understand. I like the idea though and I'm sure it works for other people. Maybe with some adjustments to the concept it might be more palatable to me, I don't know.
Get a basic understanding of the language first with something like Duolingo such that you can watch the videos without struggling.
What I have found successful (aka maximizes my development) is when I am watching the videos and only about one out of every thirty words is a challenge to understand from context.
I download old Pimsleur mp3s from TPB and listen to them when travelling. It's super repetitive, but I find it really useful to learn some quick basic conservation.
If you can listen to them with a partner, it's even more efficient, because you can practice pronunciation together. It's been two years since we listened to Japanese bits (trip was cancelled), but we still joke about the words we remember.
(I also use Duolingo, but you have to very consciously make an effort to learn. And I'm mostly just doing it for fun and exposure to languages)
I take lessons through verbling.com
Anki
Spanish yes, but less popular languages (e.g. Polish) don't have nearly as well-developed Duolingo courses.
I still miss Cat Spanish (by CatAcademy), it was such a niche yet effective way to learn a foreign language.
No, you can’t learn a language that way. It’s good for some supplementary practice, but don’t take it too seriously:
https://lee-phillips.org/whyDuoLingoWhy/
So, what's the answer?
Lol no
deleto
Sounds great. Anyone who wants something more structured but wants similar swift progress could check out baselang.
https://baselang.com/
> Unlimited 1-on-1 Spanish Tutoring
All-you-can-eat Spanish classes with native teachers, online via Zoom.
> $149 a month
Best way to learn a language is to watch tv and movies.
> Best way to learn [to understand] a language is to watch tv and movies.
There's no replacement for having to dig into the "vocabulary bag" and pull out a word when you need it, or the "fluency" that comes from having someone ask you a question that you have to string together multiple vocabulary words _in the right order_ to answer
It's like any homework: it's the challenge that solidifies the pathways, otherwise just sitting in a calculus class would be all one needed to become Laplace
I do 30 mins to an hour of a language every day. After I’m done in Duolingo I work my way through a news story on a local news aggregator (I.e. dumbed down) website using Google Translate to figure out things I don’t understand by picking out words. I find trying to identify phrases in the articles useful as it’s starting to give me a sense of basic idiom.
Feels like a good way to consolidate and push forward. It also gives me a bit of culture since news articles are revealing of the way people think.
No.