[vncecartersknee]

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

[ngokevin]

I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of people. The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks.

I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful enough to look beyond Duolingo.

[thesausageking]

Duolingo has worked great for me. I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely forgotten it. In a few months of consistent practice, I learned enough to get around. And after 6-9 months, I could have basic conversations.

I was never good at learning languages and Duolingo has been the best system for me. I like the paced repetition it does. Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and listening.

[dorchadas]

> I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely forgotten it.

I would argue this is why it worked well for you. You already knew the language and just needed to revise, which is something I would argue DL does do good at, especially the web version.

> Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and listening.

The thing is, in most courses (the home-developed ones with stories might be exceptions), you don't practice those skills. You learn to translate stuff from the target language to English; that's not reading. You don't learn to read texts and interpret them in the language. The writing is awful as well, since it's just reverse translation, not actually responding to a prompt or natural conversation.

The speaking leaves a lot to be desired, unless it's massively improved since I last tried it. I once said "blah" on the Spanish course and it was accepted as correct; I've also had it accept background noise before too. And the same with listening -- it's a TTS, you don't actually practice listening to native speakers and understanding what's being said with comprehension questions, etc.

It doesn't really teach the four skills as they would be applied in the real world at all. Not to mention that default on the app has you click words in the proper order instead of actually recalling them. That's another huge negative.

[linsomniac]

>You don't learn to read texts and interpret them in the language.

Are you sure? I regularly come across questions that involve a few sentences, a question, and a multi-choice answer. All in language, and some of them are somewhat tricky. Something along the lines of: "Juan's is with his girlfriend. Her name is Antonia. She is buying a green dress. Where is Antonia?" "A: A restaurant. B: A clothes store C: A party."

There are also questions that are a few sentences and you have to fill in the blank, which often require understanding the context, in language: If Juan is speaking to waiter, then the place he is at is a restaurant...

>Not to mention that default on the app has you click words in the proper order instead of actually recalling them.

Not at all true. I've been using DuoLingo for less than a month and I regularly see questions that are an English sentence and a free form text box for you to type the translation into. And one of the questions for the second "Checkpoint" is: Here is a sentence in language, and a free form text box to type the response.

As far as the clicking words, I'll say I really like that as one of the components of learning, because it lets me focus on the structure of sentences without getting frustrated by typos or misremembering words or even in some cases forgetting words. The prompts of the bubbles are good and still make me remember the differences between the conjugations and the like.

I spent a semester in a class in Jr HS, and was much more frustrated and less educated than I feel after 3 weeks of solid DuoLingo. For me, it's a fun tool for establishing some confidence and understanding.

[cerved]

it's not multiple choice if there's only Juan answer

[vncecartersknee]

That's cool I'd love to hear more about it, I've actually been thinking about ways that a language app could work better. Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical, an app that just played me conversations, had me read text, etc and 'creatively' formulate responses, not just simply fill in the missing word, obviously in increasing difficulty would be ideal.

[kouteiheika]

> Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical

This, a hundred times this. Immersion is not only effective in getting you used to the language, but also really helps you solidify what you've learned, and is extremely motivating.

Virtually all of the people that I know in the Japanese learning community who learned the language really fast heavily immersed in a lot of content.

In my own language learning app that I'm making I'm explicitly targeting a feedback loop which looks something like this:

1) You pick an easy show/book/etc. to consume. (I have a list ranked according to difficulty, generated through machine learning.)

2) You prelearn the vocabulary used within using an SRS.

3) You consume it.

4) You continue maintaining your vocabulary through SRS, so the app knows which words you're supposed to know.

5) The app recommends you the next show/book/etc. to consume based on what you've already learned.

6) Rinse and repeat. Gradually the whole thing snowballs and you have to learn less and less for each new work you consume.

I personally believe this to be the most effective way of learning a language, and I'm already seeing some of my users having a lot of success with it.

[davidzweig]

We are moving 'Language Learning with Netflix' in this direction. There's some stuff to see already: https://www.languagereactor.com/ (my email is in my profile, I'd be happy to hear from you :)

[dorchadas]

If you could do step one that wasn't based entirely on anime I'd love it. That's always been my biggest hurdle with the Japanese learning community -- almost all recommendations seem to be anime, and I'm just not that interested.

[kouteiheika]

I also have Japanese dramas, light novels, a few normal novels, visual novels and I recently started adding YouTube videos, so it's definitely not only anime.

[dorchadas]

Perfect, thank you! Please let me know when you release, I'd definitely be interested in it.

[k__]

I had a somewhat similar idea once.

You share Twitter accounts with a service, and it would use the tweets of that account to generate a language course.

I was hoping that this would lead to learning something that I could use right away.

[monkeybutton]

Immersion provides the strongest motivation to learn and to try. When you want something or have a problem that needs to be solved and the other party doesn't speak English, you're going to be very motivated. The 'dopamine hit' from getting it right and communicating successfully in another language is also way better than from an app/game. The results are just so much more real and tangible.

[Jare]

Immersion also creates connections between the language and other stimuli (visual, emotional, etc). Connections are powerful for creating reliable memories.

[jcranberry]

My "theory" is that learning a language is like learning any other discipline to a high degree of fluency. If you study a couple hours a week even if you don't forget what you learned in short order it's something which requires a period of immersion for you to be able to recall it as well as the day you learned it. To be able to expound at length on a topic at the drop of a hat you essentially need to dedicate a few hours a day every day. I think languages work the same way.

[ngokevin]

I'm targeting couples that are bilingual that want to learn each other's languages. Immersion is difficult to achieve alone. So I'm trying to channel a native speaking resource that is around you all the time.

Right now the system is a mixture of SRS on your own, sourcing vocabulary from songs and podcasts, and combined with immersive multiplayer mini-games with the native speaking partner.

[trwired]

> The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks.

I think this is an issue of mismatched expectations. For actually getting to know a language a tool like Duolingo is too limited, as knowing a language is an umbrella term comprising multiple skills and Duo helps with only vocabulary, a bit of grammar and pronunciation to some extent (but I have no experience with that aspect). If someone starts a course thinking they'll be able to speak the language once it's over, no wonder they eventually end up disappointed. What Duolingo is excellent at, however, is kickstarting the process of learning a language you're interested in. Hard to find a better tool for that.

[Areading314]

I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is still an unsolved problem.

[wyxuan]

I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach

[tasogare]

No, Japanese phonology and therefore pronunciation (what the grand parent post is complaining about) is one of the easiest out there. There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. I don't understand how pronunciation could be remotely a problem with Japanese.

There are also some other easy things like grammar (very few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and some basic sentence pattern (heck you can make full sentences, sometimes conversations, with a single word [the predicative adjectives]).

[bsder]

> There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant.

Except that l/r is pronounced differently than most English speakers, the vowels aren't always pronounced yet take up time ("Nan desu ka" is almost always pronounced like "Nan dess ka", for example), and syllable accent is tone rather than volume for emphasis.

Other than that, it's completely easy. </s>

[tinco]

You say that sarcastically, but those are all easy things you can master in a week, and they are the sort of thing you might find in the English language or even a dialect. It doesn't compare to learning Chinese or Arabic it seems to me.

Just the fact that you can write out romanji and get reasonably understandable Japanese makes it easier than a significant amount of languages out there.

In my opinion the only thing that makes Japanese truly hard is that they decided for some insane reason to borrow the Chinese writing system, which is the most insane writing system in the world, for half (why half!?) of their writing.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

A guess as a beginning Japanese learner: Japanese has a lot of homophones because it has so few syllables. It is also almost always written without spaces. Kanji is actually pretty helpful in reading because it provides semantic meaning that disambiguates homophones as well being more terse and breaking up the writing along grammatical boundaries.

I'm approaching this from the angle of wanting to understand video-game Japanese, and when I am trying to parse some 8-bit era all-katakana chunk of text I find myself wishing it included kanji even though I can only recognize a few dozen just so the grammar is more clear.

[tasogare]

Imagine thinking learning ONE phoneme is a hard task... Please never have a look at Arabic or you'll have a stroke.

Moreover [ɾ] can be replaced by [l] perfectly fine and the vowel devoicing is not something you need to do anyway (it's not even occurring in all dialects). So even searching really hard for "difficulties" you can't find even one thing that is remotely difficult which just proves my point.

[bawolff]

If your native language is english, surely romance languages are going to be easier than something like japanese

[meepmorp]

even though english is a germanic language?

[gen220]

The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to Romance languages than Germanic languages.

You can convert many English sentences into a sensible (if not idiomatic) Spanish sentence by translating one word at a time.

German has not so forgiving been :)

[meepmorp]

> The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to Romance languages than Germanic languages.

I'm pretty sure that's not true.

[WanderPanda]

I've had some success with talking to the Apple Translate app (formulating my own sentences) while learning Arabic using Duolingo. Arabic people could actually understand my simple, mostly nonsense sentences

[greesil]

I took foreign language courses in high school and college. I couldn't actually communicate until moving to the country where they spoke it and living there for six months. Then I had to go back home :(

[daxaxelrod]

My personal experience leads me to disagree. I've been using Duolingo to learn Chinese for about 400 days now. I recently took another step and started taking private zoom lessons and my tutor said a few of her students have come from the same path. Duo has given me a good understanding of sentence structure and raw vocabulary. Even though my pronunciation needs work, Duo has given me so much for watching a few ads and I hope to continue with it. Given everything, my tutor said I would pass HSK 1 and maybe level 2.

[mdorazio]

I learned Chinese in college and then lived in China for a year and a half. Personally, I think sentence structure and basic (spoken) vocabulary are the easiest parts of Chinese since there's no real conjugation and particles do all the heavy lifting instead of messing with word forms [1]. The hard parts are memorizing a decent number of hanzi and properly pronouncing with tones. I tried duo to learn some Japanese and found it... not great.

[1] Note: Personally, I find Chinese superior to romance languages in this regard - it was actually really refreshing as a learner.

[daxaxelrod]

I agree, building the mental map of written characters->translation was certainly difficult early on.

Duo is not going to be as good as institutional schooling or immersion but I don't think it has to be to be considered a net positive for all of us. It has lowered the barrier enough to allow people to get started for what is essentially free. I remember 10 years ago I saw rosetta stone cds being sold in barnes and noble for $179+ for just a single level. Sacrificing the time of just 170 SWEs for something like this just seems like a no brainer to me, valuation aside.

[dorchadas]

If it took you 400 days to pass the HSK level 1, I would argue that you're absolutely doing something wrong or extremely inefficient.

[caddemon]

It depends how much time he spends per day, no? I always thought of Duolingo as something you do in 15 minutes of downtime here or there. Nowhere near the level of time commitment that a class would be.

[daxaxelrod]

I averaged about 10 minutes a day for ~20xp.

[daxaxelrod]

Hrm maybe you're right. I was doing 50 lessons a day, spent thousands of hours on the app. Quit my job even. Maybe I just suck and am a horrible person. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

[hardwaregeek]

The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations. You have to decipher confusing sentences, handle unfamiliar words and wrestle your brain into thinking in a different language.

You can't really make a fun game that does this. Therefore Duolingo makes a game that focuses on translating the foreign language to your native one. That's great for starting out, but eventually you gotta start composing sentences and ideas in the foreign language.

[okwubodu]

> The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations

Immersion is the only way you’ll ever truly learn a language. All the classes, flash cards, etc., in the world can’t teach you how to clear up a misunderstanding with the manager at hotel in Spanish.

I remember at some point we did Duolingo in Spanish, and the Spanish speaking kids were shocked how fast we (black) tested out of topics and progressed. The reason was pretty obvious; we’re around y’all a lot lol.

My recommendation is even if you don’t have many people speaking the language you want to learn near you, immerse yourself. Read popular modern authors in the language, listen to podcasts in the language, join a game server and practice in-game interaction in the language (hard mode).

Maybe it is useless. But you may find that those encounters take place on a foundation built by some little green bird named Duo.

[okwubodu]

Also, native languages are weird. The last sentence above, for instance. If I had said “green little bird” or even “little cute green bird” you would have clocked it as wrong immediately. Apps alone aren’t sufficient to learn these nuances; every language has tons.

[N00bN00b]

>The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations.

I think that's a really good description of learning in general.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Growth in general really. Stretching and building muscle, for instance, or training endurance.

[this_is_not_you]

I wouldn't call it "pretty useless". I think it has two distinct places in a language learning process.

1) They make learning a new language very accessible and fun to get started. Books and courses do not have such a low level of entry. 2) It's good for learning new words in a context. Memrise for example often just gives you a single word and translation. But I think it's much more effective to then put words into sentences.

That said, if you really want to learn a language past the "I can manage for a few days as a tourist" you need to add other methods to it. Read books, listen to audio content, watch TV, have lessons (speak the language!), study grammar etc.

Then not everybody is alike. So try different methods. See what works for you. Some might have more success with Duolingo, some will have less.

[stephen_g]

Yeah, I've gone through not quite half the introductory Spanish audio course from Language Transfer [1], and it feels like I've made massively more progress than Duolingo, even though I'd spent at least twice as long on the Duolingo courses over the year. All the Language Transfer is available free too so that's nice.

It's a shame, because Duolingo is fun, the art style is cool and the gamified stuff is potentially useful for keeping people coming back and doing the lessons. It just really hasn't felt very effective to me at language learning at all...

1. https://www.languagetransfer.org/

[zwayhowder]

Their business model isn't to teach you languages, it is to make money off the millions of people who want to learn a new language.

[gokhan]

For Duolingo, you might mix it with other materials for a much better experience. I told our kids' experience learning foreign languages here [1]. My wife used the same technique to learn some French, Duolingo reinforced with audio and visual materials, songs with lyrics, regular learning books, podcasts etc.

Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not seeing ads.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408576

[devin]

This proves the OP's point. Duolingo is trash if you aspire to fluency. It's only useful in fluency as an additive to a robust training program. You don't get fluent by following Duolingo alone.

[gokhan]

I disagree. Duolingo is not trash as the op suggests, it's a great fire starter and makes you able to use other materials by handling the intro well. Peppa Pig is a sustainable language learning tool if you did something before to learn the basics and Duolingo handles that part well for free. How is that trash?

[Semaphor]

It’s useless for properly learning a language. For getting the basics of a language in a game-y way that doesn’t feel like studying, it’s great. My wife managed to pass her German A1 (CEFR [0]) exam almost completely by just using Duolingo. She took some free Deutsche Welle exam prep courses in the week before, but to even get to the level to understand those, she used Duolingo.

If you need to learn a language quickly, I’d call it the wrong tool. If you are okay spending time properly studying a language, I’d say that will be better. But for certain cases, Duolingo is great.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

[vr46]

So I am using Duolingo as I will have to take the sane exam at some point over the next year or two. I think it works ok for being able to consume simple German but less well for understanding spoken German, or constructing one’s own ideas.

In other words, it doesn’t make the hard things easy or easier.

It is a great alternative to wasting time on social media or news sites, however.

[Semaphor]

The A1 exam is a pretty simple test ;)

[vr46]

Is that right? So how come they’re charging a fortune for the course in London??!!

[scrooched_moose]

I find their approach of "drag and drop these 6 words to form a sentence" or "fill in the missing word in this sentence" was just leading me to recognize correct patterns of letters, not words or meaning.

"aog" always goes after "Lor" and before "san" (obviously made up example) - I couldn't tell you what the individual words meant or what the full sentence said; but I knew that those groups of letters belonged in that order.

I'm also a lapsed B2 in German and played around with that course a few years ago. 3 or 4 weeks ago I got an email that they finally accepted my correction on a blatantly incorrect translation, which had apparently been unfixed in one of their most popular courses for years.

[colordrops]

I'm learning tons of grammar and vocabulary through Duolingo. Are you not learning these things, or do you find them useless?

BTW the quality of the language programs differs vastly. Spanish, which I'm studying, is very fleshed out. Tried Arabic and it was anemic and even broken in parts.

[estaseuropano]

Can only agree. Duolingo gives some basic vocabulary but after that basically is useless, especially as the way it teaches grammar forms (and on the mobile app barely any explicit rules) is 100% useless. Native speakers looking at example sentences in the target language are often shocked at the nonsense that is provided.

But worst for me is that it wastes time. The unnecessarily ineffective repetitions, all the features and ads intended to upsell 'Pro', etc. There are dozens of other apps that do it better for free (e.g. good old Anki, or newcomers like Clozemaster) and when on a desktop a whole wealth of professional learning resources are available, both old ones that are now public domain, the world of wikis and collaborative learning and flashcards, and no-profit materials. For instance lots of organizations fund free courses, e.g. the EU funded a bunch of sites for learning languages, like https://deutsch.info, and national broadcasters like RF1 (French), DW (German) provide great professional and current materials. Podcasts and youtubers teach any language imaginable, etc.

Try Duolingo to get a taste, but after a few lessons look for your language online and you'll find much better stuff.

[rtpg]

My partner is doing a “cocktail” of Duolingo, Memrise, and a grammar textbook for French. They are progressing a lot in just a month (and given the early learning curve from the grammar, I’ve found it good)

I think that these language tools work best when you have a mixture, because they can complement each other and keep on feeding into the novelty factor.

(In particular Memrise and Duolingo operate on different sort of teaching strategies so just those two together is really interesting)

[whatever_dude]

For non-ubiquitous languages (everything other than English), part of the difficulty of learning is not just the basic learning, it's retaining what you've learned; it might be difficult to practice it unless you're on the country that speaks it. Of I'm in the middle of Tennessee, probably don't have a lot of opportunity to prescribe my Japanese. That's where Duolingo shines, in my opinion: as a learning companion.

[orky56]

Totally echo all of this. I'm one of the owners at the Orange County Lingual Institute (oclanguages.com) and we see Duolingo as the gateway for people to tap into their language learning interest but then get serious with in-person or online language learning classes. We have seen firsthand hundreds of students unsuccessful with apps since they are not practicing live conversations and not understanding grammar. With 80+% retention of our 2 month/once a week classes, adult professionals get through a college textbook in a year and can become fluent enough to travel to those countries, speak with relatives, and read novels & newspapers with high levels of profiency. Language learning is hard work with no shortcuts but can still be accessible without apps that overpromise and underdeliver. Ping me privately or check out our site for more info.

[baby]

Same here. This valuation makes no sense to me. I’ve spent a LOT of time optimizing ways in which I learn languages, and duolingo doesn’t do much.

Here’s what I can recommend:

- follow as many instagram account as possible to teach you the language. There’s so many “teaching chinese” instagram account for example. Every day when I check instagram I learn a few chinese words.

- check browser plugins to display subs in different languages simultaneously on netflix

- use memrise or anki or other app or real world flash cards. There’s a reason people always go back to the flashcards.

It’s all about input. You need to learn a lot of vocab, fast. Don’t even focus on grammar at first, and even less on output. Output will come naturally after a while.

[BooneJS]

I moved on to Babbel.

[achow]

Thanks for the pointer.

Quick search gave this review: The main differences between Babbel vs Duolingo are: Babbel is best for learnings looking to completely master a language, whereas Duolingo is better for sporadic learners who want to dabble. Babbel offers lessons with conversational practice and cultural immersion, whereas Duolingo offers adaptive learning lessons.

[tomduncalf]

Yeah I used Babbel to pick up some basic Italian a few years ago and thought that while a bit more “boring” than Duolingo, I felt like I was learning more useful stuff. It’s structured more like a language class at school.

Memrise is worth a look as a Duolingo alternative. It’s similar but feels a bit more “serious”, there are some nice features like you get videos of native speakers saying phrases with a variety of accents.

[rtpg]

Memrise also has fun sketches that offer something most language tools miss: entertainment. They’re dumb but can cause a little chuckle (extra satisfying when it’s in an unknown language)

[jansan]

Babbel is great and they also have shorter subscription plans. I only needed a quick fresh up of my French skills and did not see why I should subscribe to a full twelve months plan, which was the shortest that I could find on Duolingo.

[vncecartersknee]

yeah babbel seems better although iirc the interface was a bit clunky.

I also found busuu and linq to be okay as well.

[ALotOfBees]

I find that Duolingo is to human languages what Codecademy is to programming languages. It's gamefied and fun but will only scratch the surface teaching you the very basics. In order to truly learn the language you have to put in the much harder work elsewhere. That's not to say that both platforms dont have a place, they still can be pretty valuable tools for beginners.

[dazc]

It serves as a useful tool for learning some fairly basic words and phrases, not much else. Languages have many subtle nuances that simply can not be taught via spaced repetition.

[mgh2]

Its UX is good enough to gamify the starting language learning process, but that is where it stops - novice excitement

[chillingeffect]

having just returned from mexico for 2 wks i can say the pace of duolingo is waaaay to slow compared to conversation.