[zojirushibottle]

has anyone used duolingo for an extensive period of time and can confirm it helps with actually speaking a new language? my experience with tools like these is that they help build vocabulary but you can't actually hold a conversation for a long time...

[ainar-g]

I'm a linguaphile with a lot of experience with Duolingo. I've joined in the very first months of Duolingo. There are many problems with it:

* First and foremost, Duolingo isn't a product, it's a series of products, which all have different characteristics. A person using Duolingo on Android will have an experience completely different from the experience of someone who uses iOS. And the difference is even more drastic when comparing mobile with the desktop version. The desktop version is sometimes three or four time more challenging.

* Even within one platform, the A/B testing has become so large-scale that even two Android users might see a completely different product.

* Courses for “popular” languages get way more attention than the “unpopular” ones. And the quality varies greatly.

* The ads they show are sometimes loud and obnoxious, NSFW, or straight up scams. That doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but I've had my portion of loud-as-hell game ads and borderline pornographic hentai game ads. And before you say what people always say when it comes to NSFW ads, Duolingo says that ads aren't personalised, so no, my search history has nothing to do with them.

* Finally, it is indeed a good way to learn some basics and acquire some basic vocabulary, but there is no way you'll get fluent with it. A friend of mine has summed Duolingo up very well: it gives you a feeling that you learn something, even if you don't progress at all.

That's just the stuff I could remember off the top of my head. It's still nice to have it, but we still should remember that the service has lots of issues, some of which could be eliminated, if the management wanted to do so.

[Riverheart]

I'll second this. Another problem is the subscription, which IMHO, is overpriced for what you're getting. They also seem to spend an unusual amount of time redesigning already functional UI's.

[dep_b]

> the A/B testing has become so large-scale that even two Android users might see a completely different product.

Also a bitch to maintain with three experiments that might or might not be going on at the same time in one screen.

[Mirioron]

English is not my first language. We had 11 years of 4-7 hours of English a week, yet this was still not enough to get everyone to be decent at the language by the end of high school. The people who used English to play video games or chat online tended to be much better at it than others.

What I've realized is that experience teaches you to speak, read, and write a new language. You need a lot of experience to become good at it, because the language has to feel intuitive if you want to hold a conversation in it. There's the recommendation that if you want to learn a language you should immerse yourself in it (in real life). I think the reason why that works is because it forces you to figure out how to use the language and gives you an immense amount of experience in it.

I think that Duolingo is just another way to get slightly more experience in the language, but it's probably not going to be enough on its own. You're just not going to be spending hours every day on it to compete with language classes. From my experience, it was a nice way to quickly learn some of the basics of Japanese, but Duolingo really can't make you understand Kanji more easily than other methods.

[Dobbs]

One of the hardest parts of learning a language is just that building enough vocabulary so you can start stumbling your way through speaking it. Duolingo, Drops and similar are never going to be "the one tool" that you need. But they are a useful way of building some of that initial knowledge to then start reading (childrens books), having horrifically slow bad conversations, and the other things that allow you to learn the language.

[graeme]

Have you learnt a language? Important qualification to comments in this thread.

I’ve learnt languages with immersion and Pimsleur. Sadly I haven’t found Duolingo useful at all. The effort to actual useful knowledge ratio is high.

Other helpful resources: Assimil, Anki, and Conversation exchange. Mundo Lingo is good for that if they have an event locally.

[Fnoord]

Anki is great for learning (and allows the same spaced repetition), and AnkiWeb allows proper synchronization, but you gotta maintain and build your own deck (which itself aids you, but is a lot of work with things like pronunciation) or use another amateur's build deck. The power of Duolingo is that it reuses SVG artwork, and that the TTS engine plus voice sets work reasonably well.

[jddj]

As someone who followed the same method (DuoLingo for vocab, start reading, start talking) and now speaks a second language fluently, I'm not OP but I'll go ahead and vouch for their comment.

[graeme]

Great! Did you complete the tree, or just do some then switch to reading and talking?

[jddj]

Completed the tree, but admittedly it was shorter back then.

I also did it in parallel with the Language Transfer podcast, which I've mentioned on HN before but is an amazing resource for understanding how a new language works structurally and grammatically.

I did find Duolingo valuable, but purely for vocab.

[superhuzza]

There might be more studies out there but I've come across this one a few times (It has an unsafe browser warning, but I think it's fine):

https://static.duolingo.com/s3/DuolingoReport_Final.pdf

A few notes about it though:

1. It was funded by Duolingo but carried out by an outside team of academics. I can't judge how much this impacted their analysis.

2. No control group, which isn't very promising for the rest of the methodology.

3. More time spent using Duolingo did seem to result in higher improvement

4. Lot of dropouts, some participants excluded for taking up courses. They tried to control for 'outside resources' like watching movies in Spanish but it's unclear if that problem was really solved.

5. Novices of the language learned the most. Makes sense, as Duolingo focuses a lot of vocabulary and basic sentence construction

Personally I'm using Duoling to learn Italian, and I find that I am definitely learning, especially in terms of conversational phrases and vocabulary.

However, I've learned a few other languages by immersion, and this is going much, much slower. I'm 99% sure I would learn more by moving in with an Italian family or by consuming all my media in Italian, instead of Duolingo. For now, Duolingo is a nice compromise, and I accept that I'll learn a limited amount from it.

[sweeneyrod]

I think the correct conclusion from that study is not that Duolingo is good, but rather that it is not quite as bad as typical college language courses which are truly terrible.

[knoke]

I used it to quickly get from close to zero to an A1 level - which enabled me to directly take an A2 levels course - instead of getting bored of a too easy one too quickly.

At least it saved me a hundred euros, but it's not a substitute for a real course and real interactions.

But later it talks helped in using more esoteric grammar that I never hear in small talk.

I'd suggest to use the website from time to time as it has some well done explanation to what is grammatically going on (the app is theory free)

[anticodon]

I've tried it multiple times (android) but I found it incredibly boring. So much time repeating the same basic words over and over for weeks. Real courses with live people are much more interesting, although expensive and challenging.

[ProstetnicJeltz]

Not very good for vocab either.

Duolingo is a feel good tool - it makes you feel like your learning, perhaps quickly, without really learning anything.

For example, it uses multiple choice questions. Presented with a word (ananas), it then shows a few pictures (apples, bananas, pineapples and pears, for example). You incorrectly choose 'bananas', because really who wouldn't, and the pineapple lights up in green.

This method is really at odds with the 'best' ways to learn. If your recall is dependent on contextual cues, you will struggle away from that context.

Additionally, the volume really isn't that great. Like a lot of 'feel-good learning' platforms, duolingo encourages consistancy over volume. It's better to study for 10 minutes a day, than for 90 minutes every sunday. That's true, but if you want to learn a language (no small feat), then even 90 minutes a week is woefully inadequate. Being conversant in multiple languages is something to be proud of, and things to be proud of tend to take substantial effort.

Vocabulary acquisition is almost the perfect problem for spaced repetition, so use anki. There's a few strategies here: english word -> foreign word, picture -> foreign word, foreign word -> foreign synonym, foreign word -> english options, english sentence -> foreign sentence.

Pronunciation is difficult at first but gets easier. Accents are tricky - they're verbal gymnastics. Its easiest if you can find a native speaker of your target language, and you should just converse with them. Don't focus on minor details, because you usually pick these up naturally over time.

Listening is easy - listen to their radio, watch their TV. Similar with reading.

But there's one thing I haven't mentioned. Grammar. You do not need to learn foreign language grammar. You'll pick it up. How often have you studied English grammar? Unless you went out of your way, probably never. You learned some basic rules in your first few years of school, but everything else you picked up.

[WhipGhostrider]

I've used it near daily for 2 years to learn Spanish. Can confirm it actually helps, but only if you put in additional effort beyond the bare minimum the app requires. The app suggests that you speak out loud every sentence it presents you, and I usually do that, sometimes multiple times. I listen to them spoken by the app with my eyes closed to train my ear. I try to visualize the meanings behind words and sentences rather than just translating mentally to English. And I then seek out opportunities to practice Spanish in real life. I have the opportunity to travel to Latin America a few times a year, and I always go out of my way to use Spanish as much as possible there.

I had no Spanish background before Duolingo, or any spoken language other than English. I took Latin in HS, which helps somewhat with vocab and reading but not at all with speaking and listening. With solely Duolingo plus the additional practices I mention, I've gotten to the level where I can survive in a Spanish speaking country. I can't speak or listen well, my grammar isn't good, but I know enough to ask for what I want and understand basic information being told to me. I can also read enough to understand at least the key information from most written sources. I think I'll definitely need a more dedicated class and/or a longer full immersion experience to get towards my goal of being conversationally fluent, but Duolingo has been a great starting point.

[h2odragon]

If you're using duolingo, its probably because you dont have an opportunity anywhere else to use that language. In that circumstance, I don't know that duolingo is any worse than any other method of learning. However you're learning a language, however, you're going to have to get out and use it with other humans at some point.

[Majestic121]

I've been using it for more than a year to study Hungarian, pretty regularly : 2 lessons a day, pretty much no streak break.

It's pretty good for the first steps, and to get some vocabulary. I can't follow a non-basic conversation, but I can pick up words from native speakers.

I'm now at the point where I should work on my own with more seriousness.

Overall, it's good to start learning a language, and to keep a regular practice, but it's not enough on its own to actually speak the language.

[simias]

I've been learning Portuguese to near-fluency over the past few years and I've started learning Russian intensively for about a year using a variety of resources but mainly language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise, LingQ and a few others. I currently have a 800+ day streak on Duolingo: https://duome.eu/liofla

I find that Duolingo is the least useful of these apps. Its main advantage is that it's easy and a small commitment if you decide to do one or two lessons every day. For the rest I don't understand why it's so popular. Duolingo's main strength is that it makes you actually construct the language instead of just memorizing individual words or expressions but I'm not super impressed with that either, mainly because in my experience it's very, very common to have a sentence rejected because it didn't match the internal "regexp" used to validate it even though it's perfectly correct (and sometimes these mistakes linger for literally years despite being reported). I actually got a very mediocre result in the placement test for the "French for English speaker" tree despite being a native French speaker who's reasonably fluent in English, mainly because some perfectly correct answers were rejected by the system. That really destroys your confidence when that happens (both in yourself and in the app).

You have a forum to discuss these issue which contains some very valuable information but it's the worst forum software I've ever used bar none, it feels like a teenager's first PHP project in the early 2000's.

Oh and if you use the mobile app it'll have you build the language by selecting one full word at a time, which means that you usually won't have to thing about the conjugations/declensions and just vaguely remember what word means what. It's fine for English, not so much for Russian and its complex declensions and aspect system.

For vocabulary Anki and Memrise easily win because they only do that and they do it well. You can find podcasts aimed at learners of many languages to improve oral comprehension and LingQ is great to improve reading comprehension, although it's expensive for what it is and I feel like you could make a better clone of it in one weekend.

In general I haven't been really impressed by any of these language learning apps, it seems that they really lack the resources to do anything but the bare minimum. It's probably too niche to generate some real R&D.

So overall if you enjoy Duolingo then stick with it, but keep in mind that you probably won't get anywhere just using this app. If I had to recommend only one language learning app it would be Memrise because it's got some decent decks for many languages (including user-contributed ones) although of course you can't learn a language solely by memorizing the dictionary.

[andrewseanryan]

Same here. I think there is a lot of room for growth in tech based language learning.