[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.