[satvikpendem]

Duolingo really isn't good for learning languages. When I learned Latin, I used the immersive method of just starting to read simple texts to more complex ones. The principal book of this form is called Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, I have the color PDF if anyone so needs it. It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story goes along.

[thaumasiotes]

> It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story goes along.

I'm not sure this is actually an approach I'd recommend. I was recently asked to give some supplemental English tutoring to a Chinese brother and sister, 9 and 5 years old. The 5-year-old could already use and understand 'simple' sentences such as "what do you see?" and "where is your brother?", though I'll note that the subject-auxiliary inversion required by a question of that form isn't exactly a simple concept.

I got them a copy of The Cat in the Hat, and their mother objected that it was too advanced for either of them, because most of the verbs in The Cat in the Hat are in the past tense, which apparently isn't covered within the first four years of Chinese English instruction.

You can't learn what you're not exposed to, but you can learn a lot of what you are exposed to in a language.

[satvikpendem]

Lingua Latina is for adults who already have some base level knowledge of tenses in their own language, preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses), not for children who have no concept of them. Once you start reading the book, it really does start to make sense while teaching you the various forms. It's on Internet Archive if anyone wants to read it: https://archive.org/details/lingva-latina-per-se-ilustrata-p...

[thaumasiotes]

> preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses)

A couple of points:

- If you natively speak a Romance language, learning Latin by example is going to be really easy for you. This doesn't belong in a comparison with anything else.

- Germanic speakers have no special advantage over any other Indo-European speakers.

- You might be interested to know that while Mandarin verbs don't inflect for tense, the negative particle does, so you have to observe a distinction between past and present tense whenever you're negating a verb.

我不理解 I don't understand

我没有理解 I didn't understand

[jhbadger]

I think there is a big difference between learning a living language versus a classical language like Latin or Ancient Greek. The point of learning a living language is to learn practical ways to communicate. While there are tiny communities of people who enjoy talking in classical languages, the vast majority of people learning a classical language do so to read real classical texts in the original.

[thaumasiotes]

I'm not sure how this responds to my comment?

[hombre_fatal]

Meh, when you say Duolingo isn't great, you should compare it to something in its same class. I don't think Duolingo competes with sitting down with a grammar book. The whole reason I used Duolingo, which got me up to speed with Spanish enough to read books, is that I could do it anywhere and any time rather than bust out a book for serious study. I was never going to do that, so Duolingo was strictly better for learning a language than a book.

People lose track of that every time they dunk on Duolingo.

[satvikpendem]

There are better apps for that than Duolingo though, it does not have a monopoly on app based learning of languages. For example, Anki, Babble, Memrise, etc. This isn't to even mention simply reading a book like the one I mentioned, just on your phone instead. That is in fact how I read most of that book. There was also an audiobook version which I used from time to time to get the pronunciation right as well. My point is that studies have shown that Duolingo does not measurably increase language learning for most people, most of the time, it is more akin to those brain or puzzle game apps that people use, which also have been shown not to actually increase any sort of learning.

[Suppafly]

>People lose track of that every time they dunk on Duolingo.

This, people want so badly to shit on stuff online that they don't consider that different people have different wants and needs.

[ljsprague]

I just wish Duolingo would move faster.