[throwaway9191aa]

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate.

When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I find out I need to learn how to recognize Haber, Poder, Ir, and Tener in preterite and future tenses at conversational speed. Otherwise I can't hold the context for whatever is going on (we tend to talk about what I did the last week, which I love. Throughout the week I lookup words and build a vocabulary in anticipation for our conversations)

I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons, and answering questions about stories. I pay way more attention for those questions and really feel like I am getting better at hearing the language. However, I spend more time, and I do better at those questions. I fly through the other questions and tend to make typos which are bad enough where I get the question wrong. I don't know if this trains the AI to keep giving me easier things that I don't pay much attention to.

[bstpierre]

I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.)

I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.

For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.

I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.

But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.

What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.

I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.

Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)

Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)

[epistemer]

Duolingo was my gateway drug to Anki. I just can't imagine going back to Duolingo with the speed of going through say a 100 cards in Anki. There is just so much animation/sounds/nonsense in the way with Duolingo. It would take at least 10X longer.

There is absolutely something special about building decks too. I also get pretty much the same motivation from the timeline statistics in Anki as the streaks in Duolingo.

[kelseyfrog]

> I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons

I feel the same (approx 205 days of French). While the multi-modal aspect(text&audio) was helpful especially at the beginning of the course, I feel like text now is a crutch at times. I wish some of the tasks were audio only and required either answering from among text responses, or single word speech responses.

Because of this crutch, I feel well equipped to approach written French in my day-to-day life, but freeze up at even simple questions like "Parles-tu français ?" I feel like I would freeze less if I could practice these types of exchanges in app, but part of me also knows that the best solution to this problem is simply getting over it with a language partner or teacher.

[jghn]

I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 3 months. Prior to this I only had a half year in middle school in the 80s. I'm not quite 20% of the way through their material. I just got back from a trip in a Spanish speaking country and to be honest was pleasantly surprised at the level of ability I had. Mind you that level was nowhere near good, I'm sure I'd still classify as an A1 level. But I had figured everything would still sound like gibberish to me and that was far from the case.

[rcarr]

If you pay for the subscription version, there are dedicated listening and speaking lessons on the practice page that tend to be more challenging than the ones you get in the lessons. It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well. I’m planning on creating a multilingual blog to practice my writing though. They do a duolingo Spanish podcast as well that you might be interested in.

[bstpierre]

> It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well.

Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections. Nice to get some feedback, but I don’t have any real way to know how correct or comprehensive it is.

[rcarr]

Yeah but you basically get two stories every unit so it’s not a lot of practice. It’s weird that they have dedicated speaking and listening lessons but no dedicated writing lessons (you could count stories or general practice as reading). It’s definitely another improvement I’d like to see at some point.

[bin_bash]

is that 6 months into Spanish with no prior experience? If so it sounds like you're doing extremely well

[throwaway9191aa]

Thanks! I had 4 years in High School (well, 3 years took me 4 years :)). That was 2 decades ago. Some of it, apparently, stayed in my head.

I have learned WAY more with Duolingo in 6 months (10 to 15 mins a day, but I started slower) than I learned in 4 years through High School (US). Just one data point, but I've heard similar from friends. TBH I am more motivated today than I was in school, so I'm sure that plays a part.

[smugma]

In addition to motivation, you’re now re-learning it. As you said, some of it stayed in your head, so it’s not fair to say you learned more.