[salimmadjd]

Hopefully my use case is useful to you.

I'm a heavy user of Duolingo. Been trying to teach myself Russian for the past 2-3 years. Almost use it on daily bases (I have missed a few days here and there by accident or when I had no connection). Usually my repeat usage is anywhere from 20 days to now 143 consecutive days. My biggest frustration with Duolingo (Russian language) is that none of the grammar rules are explained. So even thought I'm able to repeat something, it's only after I google variations of a verb or a noun and the grammar case, is when I get the answer why something is, for example, ending in a "e", etc.

I have not paid the premium fee for Duolingo. Mainly because the premium adds no value to my learning. I've spent over $100-150 on Russian books from grammar to vocabulary.

If Duolingo added more grammar explanation for premium price, I would pay for that.

It takes Duolingo a few years to roll out a new language. It's hard to do it in-house. And still, with Russian language, they don't have all the grammar hints that exist on other languages like French (I've been told, French has it).

My view is, why not turn Duolingo into a marketplace and let other language expert create additional educational material to augment the lessons and let them sell it to me and follow the Apple's revenue share model. Perhaps a specific lesson might have 3-4 additional learning modules that I can buy from different providers. Each module has a star-rating (you can filter out the fake stars by how often someone is using Duolingo). Also once I find one provider's way of explaining, I'll look for more teaching modules from them.

My point is, if you can look into Udemy and how they turned their video system into a paid learning platform, you might come up with a premium model for your business.

Good luck!

[btilly]

Are you using Duolingo on iOS, Android, or a computer?

My wife has used all three, and says that grammar explanations are not on iOS and is on the other 2 platforms. She also believes that the explanations make us feel good, but don't actually help. (Then again she's using it to learn Polish and already knows Russian. So the grammar rules are pretty close to what she already knows.)

Plus there are some natural language rules that are just a mass of exceptions. For example try to explain to a non-native speaker why you ride in a car and on a bus.

And furthermore, most native speakers don't know their own grammar rules. For example why do we say "big red truck" and not "red big truck"? Odds are that you've never been taught this order, but you do it correctly:

    Quantity or number
    Quality or opinion
    Size
    Age
    Shape
    Color
    Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
    Purpose or qualifier

[salimmadjd]

I use it on iOS. So, for me the explanations really help. Because I understand the rules after seeing a few examples and the rules help me grasp it easier or see something subtle that I may have missed. Especially important in Russian.

But I can see it in a case where if you come from a language that has some grammatical overlap with Russian. It may not be as helpful, because she already has a mental language mapping for it. For English speakers or languages that some of these concepts are not native, it's quiet hard.

I do agree many native speakers do not know the rules. But they'e not the ones who would be creating the additional teaching modules. I'm sure there are plenty of Russian teachers who would love to make side money teaching Russian to non-native speakers and create explanation material.

[simias]

I use Duolingo premium on android and PC and I haven't seen the grammar blurbs on the android app either, maybe I just don't know how to access them. They're not very high quality anyway in my experience (for the portuguese course) so I didn't miss them too much. I use other sources to learn the grammar. Actually the more I progress the more I end up preferring memrise, it's much better for drilling vocabulary and the phrases it teaches you are more practical than Duolingo's "my uncle spoke to the tiger".

>Plus there are some natural language rules that are just a mass of exceptions. For example try to explain to a non-native speaker why you ride in a car and on a bus.

Some grammar and syntax is more important than other. If I told you "I rode in a bus" I'm sure you'll get immediately what I said. If on the other hand I told you "I rided on a bus" it might make you pause to process what I meant. Learning all the rules of a language is generally a daunting task but getting the basics right can save you a lot of time and trouble. When are you supposed to use the preterite and when the present perfect? What's the difference between "I will do it" and "I'm going to do it"? Etc...

>And furthermore, most native speakers don't know their own grammar rules.

Sure, in the same way that I never wonder when I'm supposed to use the subjunctive or about the gender of nouns when I speak my native french while a foreigner could struggle with that. I don't think it means that grammar courses are not hugely important when you learn a foreign language.

Learning one's mother tongue by being completely immersed in it 24/7 for years as a child and learning a foreign language as an adult in a few hours per week is hardly comparable. If you want to maximize your result you should learn the basics of the grammar instead of going entirely by trial and error like a child would do.

Furthermore as an adult you're more likely to require the use of complex and diverse concepts because you're not actually a 3 year old child. That means that you need to be able to actually "invent" new phrases that are not like any you've encountered before. "I've been asked to get the blueprints and bring them to the 3rd floor, could you tell me where they are?". Eventually as you become fluent the rules fade and you get a more intuitive grasp of the language.

[zpr]

FYI, if you are interested in the gramatical explanation of a level, you could log into the web version of Duolingo (your same account will work) and they are all there for many languages, as well as several other features (depending on the language) such as a full dictionary of words you've studied, and each has its own "health bar". There are also flash cards although now Duolingo has a separate app for that called TinyCards.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way but with the number of people I've convinced to use it, I should be getting commission.

[desireco42]

One of my complaints on DuoLingo was that there was no Russian, I am glad thay added it. I am learning Spanish and could use some grammar explanation for sure.

[mikekchar]

The following advice is based on the assumption that you want to eventually acquire both adult level fluency and adult level proficiency in your second language. If you do not, then it's a whole other conversation. Having learned Japanese late in life, and also taught English as a second language professionally for 5 years, my advice is -- don't bother with grammar explanations. Instead of using Duolingo, read books.

There is nothing inherently wrong with learning grammar (and if you want to, I recommend reading grammar books in your target language). However, it is unnecessary. Memorising grammar rules will especially lead you down the road of approaching language like a recipe. The problem with grammar rules is that there are a lot of sentences that are grammatically correct from a prescriptive sense, but that are idiomatically impossible to understand.

Programs like Duolino are nice because the give you vocabulary in the context of sentences. However, you'll never get very much beyond basic sentence construction because you don't have the larger context. You don't know when to use one phrase and when to use another. You don't know the situations where idioms naturally pop up. You don't know how to organise your thoughts and to express them in the target language as opposed to translating your English ideas.

It's really funny, but when I read a Natsume Souseki book, I can't help but think how similar a writer he is to Dickens, and yet if I try to translate his writing to English it ends up incredibly dry and uninteresting. The charm of it is the expression in Japanese. Especially because Japanese and English are nothing alike, I find that I can't speak Japanese fluently unless I abandon English.

The thing that makes people worry is that they think that their second language is not good enough to become fluent. It's important to understand that fluency and proficiency are different things. Children are not at all proficient in their native languages -- especially 3 or 4 year olds are awful. But they are very fluent. With 2-3 years of Russian, you will also be awful, but there is no reason why you can't be very fluent with what you have -- and that includes reading.

It's too bad we can't have adopted parents in our second language to read us bed time stories because that would be awesome. But you can read by yourself. When I was very small, I had to be made to read because it was difficult for me. Eventually I got to the point where people had to tear the books away from me. The same thing was true in Japanese.

The advantage you have by doing it this way is that you have an endless supply of natural language. Your only task is to try to understand what it is saying. What I used to do when I was learning was to scan a piece of text to find vocabulary I didn't know. I would take about 20 pieces of vocabulary and look them up in a dictionary (I actually wrote software to make that efficient, because I'm a geek). Then I used a spaced repetition drill program (my own) to remember the vocabulary. Then I would read the text. Most of the time I could understand it based on vocabulary alone. If I ran into new grammar I would enter the sentence into the SRS drill with my understanding of the meaning. Rinse and repeat. Every week or so I would go back and reread bits of the book, updating my SRS data with my new understanding -- and it's incredible how quickly you form new understanding. After I read a section of text about 5-10 times, I could read it just like I was reading English.

After you get about half way through a novel, you start to learn the idioms that an author uses. You can then often read several books in a row without having to study -- just read them. But then when you switch to a different author, it's back to study mode. Of course I didn't start with novels. I started with picture books (Momotarou!!!), moved on to manga (great for conversational Japanese), then novels for elementary students and I'm currently in a phase where I'm enjoying books that are in the Japanese junior high school curriculum -- but at that point you're pretty functional in the language. I don't actually study at all any more (though I really should practice writing my kanji).

Not sure if any of this is helpful to the OP as well. I spent a lot of time writing my Japanese SRS tool (now sadly a victim of bitrot -- I don't think it even runs any more). I never could find a good way to really efficiently bootstrap native sources of information, but things like a built in dictionary and a deinflection/deconjugation tool are life savers. Honestly, if I were to concentrate on anything it would be that because Anki is already pretty hard to beat on any other front. Focusing on making it easy to create cards based on material found in the wild would be a great differentiator.

P.S. Last word on the grammar thing -- I actually learned Japanese grammar eventually. I had to teach English grammar in Japanese, so that forced me to read Japanese grammar books so that I knew what the vocabulary was. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.

[zpr]

This is great advice. Thanks for the anecdotes.

I'm a native English/Russian speaker who took a few Spanish courses in high school and college, and recently decided it would be a waste if I didn't finally learn to speak it fluently, at least like a child. In some sense, I suppose I already do. I can read many things and spoken slowly enough can understand partially -- but there is some mental block, mostly in the smaller, connecting words and other "minor" details that are actually major and completely central to the language. So I drill duolingo from time to time but it seems like mostly a waste of time since I know a majority of the words, and the ones I don't know such as "curtain" aren't critical for me. I always had the idea to visit Spain for several months to force myself to adapt to the language but that's been impractical thus far. I knew reading would be good too and your story of learning Japanese is inspiring, so I think I will find some children's books or Mexican menus. Thank you

[barry-cotter]

I highly recommend LibriVox audiobooks for listening comprehension. My German had deteriorated greatly from when I was living in Germany and I decided I wanted it back so I listened to Anna Karenina in English and German, chapter by chapter. Wonderful book, beautifully read in English and in German. LibriVox has Don Quijote in English and Spanish though I can’t speak to the quality of the reading.

And LibriVox is free.

[mikekchar]

Oh wow! I didn't know about this. And there are 126 Japanese books there. This is like gold! Japanese audio books are basically non-existent. Thanks!

[mhb]

I was so looking forward to using the Kindle for reading a book in a different language and easily being able to highlight a word I didn't know and have it translate it.

Unfortunately the process of doing that on the Kindle is so arduous that it is unusable.

[mikekchar]

Yep. And the dictionaries are terrible (at least the Japanese ones). I still use the Kindle for reading, but it's not nearly as nice as I'd like. Strangely the English -> Japanese setup is much nicer. My wife uses it all the time and is thrilled with it. I use a dead tree version of a kid's Japanese to Japanese dictionary most of the time, but it's slow. I haven't been able to find anything similar that will work on the Kindle so far. I highly recommend transitioning to a native children's dictionary as soon as you can manage it (maybe with a translation dictionary as backup).

[_xgw]

Have you tried Memrise or something simpler such as Anki?