[smcl]

DuoLingo is alright for very light language practice but it gets frustrating very quickly. Some examples:

1. About 25% of the time it's asking me to type out letter-by-letter the meaning of a sentence in my native language. So I'm learning Czech and it'll give me a sentence like "Ta moucha seděla na něčem zvláštním" and present me with a free-text field where I have to write out the English version. The other way round (making me type out "Ta moucha..." in Czech) I totally understand but this way is really stupid, not least because...

2. The expected translations are often wrong or inflexible. In the case above it wanted me to write out "That fly was sitting on something weird" - but I had written "That fly was sitting on something unusual" which is a perfectly valid interpretation of the sentence, but because they basically did a strcmp() I got it "wrong". Another example I remember was particularly bad because of the content of the sentence - "Tuhle větu jste opravdu nepřeložili příliš dobře", which I translated as "You really did not translate this sentence very well" (I'd expect "didn't" IRL but because I know how dumb DuoLingo can be I went with the simple version). The expected meaning was "You really did not translate this sentence too well" which is pretty clumsy IMO, and it's like they're taunting me but they're the ones who who didn't translate it "too well". I've dozens of these, there's seemingly no way to report them (I can see discussions but there's no way for me to participate)

3. There were enough lessons and material early on to give me the impression it was worth paying for the service, but after a couple of weeks I realised that I was being served the same sentences over and over. Now I understand there's value to spaced repetition, but what I'm experiencing is beyond a joke.

It's a really polished app in some respects, but in some areas where it really matters it's as useful as learning by copy-pasting into Google Translate.

[blindmute]

Yeah, I'd say it's about as polished as it can get, but it conceptually is just not going to be useful for any serious learning. It's been my experience over the years that the more enjoyable a language learning technique is to do, the worse it actually works. And duolingo is to their credit very enjoyable.

[smcl]

That's quite an astute observation - I guess getting out of your comfort zone is a necessary part of language learning. I've written on HN before about relatively simple things I have found useful (keeping a diary in $language, or watching films with $language audio) but looking back, if I'm honest the toughest situations were probably the most valuable for building confidence and testing my abilities.