[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.