Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in. Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good offers.
That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?
Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.
Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach?
I tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which of these is The Sun?".
Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".
Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners, you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a listening-first approach and contextual translations with vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other contexts.
Do they have a version that's not a mobile app? Or will it at least work on the desktop/web browser? I'm not going to use something like that on my phone.
I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.
First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.
With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
From my experience, Duolingo teaches you the vocabulary and the set sentences very well. But this is by far not enough. I use regular textbooks that describe the structure of the language, the grammar, the syntax, etc, so as to gain some analytical understanding of it. On top of that, Duolingo helps to get used to recognize these structures and flesh them out with various words. Also, unlike a book, it forces you to listen, and, crucially, to speak. It's a very important step from being able to read written language only to being able to actually talk.
I think Duolingo does an okay job of teaching structure, but it probably comes around the 2nd year or so (I've been using it about 3 years, but I did have a few years in high school of Spanish a long time ago)
Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5 years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site works.
It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started German with it before doing more traditional classes and live speaking with a partner
Annoyances (in particular, ads disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth paying for as a quick daily refresher.
The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary
Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are rather aligned.
However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.
Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.
The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.
If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.
People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.
The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.
And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.
And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...
This space seems like one of those areas where it would be really hard to break in because their whole selling point is having had hundreds or thousands of people record and annotate an enormous amount of voice input, which I assume has to be hand polished for every single exercise?
I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience not to be very janky in the end.
Nice to see this pop up, not that I mind giving Duo money every month for my kids account.
Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out there... Im getting closer...
I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!
There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".
I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.
Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.
On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.
Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.
(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.
You've twice written about what is the wrong way to learn a new language -- what's your right way? Why did you use Duo' instead of 'the right way'? Perhaps that explains why one might create a OSS version of Duo.
Comprehesible input. find something basic you can understand and immerse your self in it. Often this is childrens books/shows or similar level designed for adults.
at the start you use a translation dictionary to look up ever word which is boring - which is why approaches like duolingo where they give you around 2000 common words to memorize quickly are useful. However the goal is to learn just enough of that list that you can find something you understand to start the real learning on.
Maybe “immersion” works if you already know the language and are going for fluency, but I don’t see how it can get you from zero to one. I’ve tried as an adult and failed to learn my wife’s native language and no amount of “input” at any speed or level helps. It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.
I'm like three days from my one year Duo streak. I've gone from understanding none of my wife's native language to being able to eavesdrop on phone conversations a bit, and to have short exchanges. I've probably spent half an hour daily on average. Sometimes a lot more.
I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.
Comprehensible input works really well and was popularized by a video that went viral a few years ago entitled “How to acquire any language NOT learn it!” [0]
The method described in the video involves focusing on listening for the first year by having someone read magazines and books to you in the target language, pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning of words you don’t understand. This method works quite well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will consistently meet with you and practice like this before you have reached a certain level of understanding, and very few people want to learn this way because they see it as a waste of time.
One of the key aspects of this model is that you should not be translating between your native and your target language, which is what you usually do on apps like Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo doesn’t work. The reality is that the method that works is the method you use consistently over time. Once you get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.
The method that worked for me: A 90 day course for learning the basic of the grammar and some thematic vocabulary (better than duolingo as it has whole conversation, both written and spoken). An awful lot of reading book, listening to shows, sporadic speaking and writing. Learned English that way without ever travelling to an English speaking country.
I've learned English by scrolling endless memes on Imgur (back when it used to be an image storage for Reddit), and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the topics that interested me (tech and car reviews - like LTT and Doug DeMuro). But that only developed my passive vocabulary (reading and listening). I only really learned speaking English once I started working remotely for an australian company, and further improved the fluency after moving abroad (to the Netherlands).
I'm currently doing German lessons on Duolingo, and what I dislike the most is that it keeps shoving "useless" words into my face (the words that are irrelevant for me and that I'll most likely never use) - I wish there was an option to choose the topics that I find interesting so that it'd mix the words that more relevant with the everyday use words to better taylor the vocab for me. Another shortcoming is that it never actually explains the grammar rules, you can only try to analyze the examples yourself, trying to notice any patterns. Some are good in that, others are bad - so why don't they spare us that mental gymnastics and provide at least minimal explanation?
No, private tutors are definitely better but they are no silver bullet. Having a great private tutors often and long enough to exercise sporadic conversation and gain confidence in language use - a class a few times a week at least - is also a prohibitively expensive solution suggestion for most people, making it a non-solution.
This site is full of web developers telling people they get what they pay for but then call tutors "prohibitively expensive".
You want that education, invest in it. With time and money. Of course, the "a few minutes per day in the commute for 9.99" feels attractive and it even gets you to a basic stage but then it's what we already discussed.
> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages
I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.
The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.
> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach
That's not better than Duolingo, no.
Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to
* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)
* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)
* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly
* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now
You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.
A big shootout and kuddos to Language Transfer. I love their method (since I loved Michel Thomas, we see the influence).
"Don't try to remember, don't do homework, but repeat with the two other students. It is of our responsibility [the teacher] to make you understand the language. What you know, you don't forget" (para-phrasing)
Translated stories are sometimes called Graded Readers, you can buy them aligned with most common language levels (CEFR, JLPT, etc)
Subtitles though, tricky. The sites that sync with Netflix are probably better than whatever Netflix offers, or whatever you can get that comes with your video files. Subtitles for entertainment are often abbreviated, which is fine for your native language, but it doesn't help if you want to look up a sentence. You need the crowdsourced ones. YouTube can be better in this regard, especially if they're automatically generated. There are also lists of video games floating around that rank games based on the availability of a script, replayable dialogue, that sort of thing. See Game Gengo for a Japanese example [1] (great channel, he also does lessons with all the vocab + grammar in context using games).
I've used Pimsleur on and off for a while and it's great, because even with sporadic usage I can still more or less remember what I learned and most of the time I just need a bit of a refresher in terms of using the right case or conjugation so I don't get I/you/they/it mixed up.
Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with Pimsleur, after the same amount of time, it's right into practical stuff like "I would like something to eat" or "I don't understand X but I do speak Y."
Having an extensive vocabulary of random words isn't particulary helpful except to extrapolate meaning out of conversations you don't fully understand, and almost certainly cannot contribute to.
You need very little grammar in the first place. And if you learned your native one, it becomes easier to just store the difference (leaks may still happen). Coherent input where previous words are repeated while you learned new one are best (watch subtitled movies, and you can pick a lot if you’re focused on that).
Probably especially with a related language. I remember high school French (vaguely) abd it was probably a pretty good 4 years of high school French. But I also remember memorizing a ton of complex tenses and the like, many of which I probably rarely use in English, couldn't name, and would probably be hard for a lot of people to parse if I did, especially conversationally and mixed with negation.
Yep, French has a lot of rules! But they are grammar rules only. So while rote memorization is hard, a good tutor can hel you with the basic understanding. At the end of the day, it’s just practice. With english, you have to practice spelling and pronunciation, with French you have to practice grammar.
I see people say they get nonsense phrases in Duolingo a lot but I never seem to get them. For example, a lesson I'm doing right now has phrases like "Quand est-ce que vous partez aux Etas-Unis?" (When are you leaving for the United States?), "Tu as ton ticket? (Do you have your ticket?), "Nous cherchons un bon hôtel à Paris." (We are looking for a good hotel in Paris).
How are these nonsense phrases? Seems like some useful things to know as a traveler.
Maybe it's the different language courses. But I also did a lot of Esperanto and it had similar quality phrases to learn as this French course.
* https://www.latudio.com/ - listening first approach, pause and show sentence if you don't understand, practice words you didn't get later, 4 types of exercises, scripted conversations being one of them
This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.
If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.
The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.
> This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.
I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar".
In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.
You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language!
Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network.
Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.
A very interesting point, I stand corrected. When I think about it, my brain usually does strongly prefer to consciously create a set of "rules" about a knowledge base rather than unconsciously memorize a set of ready-made samples. But that might be just me.
I feel like it's the opposite. Most people who speak languages with complex grammar natively can not clearly explain the grammar to you, because they use the correct grammar intuitively, and they have learned to do so by having a ton of input in that language.
This is a bad example because it's probably more wordy/complex than it needs to be but I couldn't begin to name the various grammar being used in: "I would not have gone to Paris except that a friend decided to give me a free ticket."
Good luck getting a 3 year old Finnish person lecturing you on Finnish grammar - Even though the kid can easily ask for a ice cream in both past, present, and future.
> I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar"
In this claim you implicitly say that you are focusing on "learning by memorizing grammar" if you do not are focusing on "learning by example" - hence the dichotomy, that is false.
.. is something I can't fully agree with. The exception being if the target language only has sounds which you are familiar with already (as in _really_ familiar - your native language already have them). Otherwise you'll simply train your brain to pronounce badly, because in the beginning you can't hear the differences. That's something which will be hard to fix later. And it takes time to hear the differences, your brain literally needs to grow new connections.
There are other reasons too for doing a lot (a lot) of listening when you start a new language.
I did not at all in any way mean to say that learning a language should be from a source language towards a target language. Quite the opposite really. I completely agree with the statement ".. embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task". That matches my own anecdotal experiences, at least.
What I wanted to say was that even though babies can hear and differentiate between all the sounds of every language on earth (and yes they can), and young children too - what then happens is that the brain will after a time simply keep what's needed for the child's language and discard the rest. Which is why adults will have problems hearing certain sounds of a target language, unless those sounds already exist in that person's language(s). That takes time. Native English speakers, for example, are in my experience generally unable to hear the difference between certain vowels in my native language even though said vowels are as different as night and day for me. It seems to take up to two years for that to get fixed, depending on the person and also age. And in the meantime the pronunciation will be wrong and the person is unable to hear it and thus can't fix it. And later it's so hard that it won't, as a rule, get fixed.
My wife can't hear the difference between certain consonants in my language even though she's fully fluent otherwise. She has to watch my lips. After all these years. The reason is simply that those differences don't exist in her native language. On the other hand, very young people can easily do it and will get the pronunciation right at first try.
Does it really matter? You can always take a diction course later if it is that important. I’ve never bothered myself to learn the different sound for ‘th’ in English, nor the exact spanish flow.
Ah yes, I agree. There are biases from previous language experience.
I am learning Polish currently, that has "complex consonant clusters". I come from a vowel heavy language, and I use a lot of time with my partner to learn to pronounce these sounds.
The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion.
My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a level of conversations with native speakers or being able to engage with media.
Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not speaking a language but moreso learning about it academically.
There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial. It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and barely be able to speak the language at all with someone... which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?
I love the hobby of studying languages and things like Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they can't speak very much even after a long time investment, which is damn shame.
My point is neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods.
That's interesting to me. From my perspective, I didn't find Duolingo great, but it did give me some vocab and basic sentences, and left me feeling more competent than I actually ended up being once I was living where they speak the language I was learning.
Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to the point where I was having short conversations in that second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.
However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can do things like play D&D in my second language. I still don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still, though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational, and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.
Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature of yours?
> and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people
Is this really how language lessons are taught in US high schools? I've learned English and French in high school, and we were forced to speak all the time.
* Read a story together (who's reading aloud is frequently switched), then the teacher asks questions about the story and picks students to answer. The student answers, if there's errors the teacher fixes them, and the student repeats the corrected answer.
* When you learn new grammar, the teacher starts a sentence, and a student has to finish it using the new grammatical structure (or similar exercises). This was followed by homework, where all those exercises happened again, in writing.
By year 3, we also did lots of essay-style writing, which is where you really drill down into learning the language. Essays were graded and discussed.
In my opinion, this is the best (and also most expensive) way to thoroughly learn a language, it can only really be improved by cutting down the size of the class to ideally 2-3 students - which, of course, makes it even more expensive.
We did do those kinds of things. For example, speaking with a partner or having to give a 5 minute talk to the teacher on something.
The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise, and the content of "conversations" was always very, very simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.
I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our essays.
It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or another environment to speak/practice the language will yield much greater results much faster. You can study the same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at times to fill in gaps.
I think if you're a college student it's fine since you have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of any language), but as an adult where time is significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a sibling comment I went over what I do use.
> "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation.
That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.
We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think our teachers realized that most students will learn little from that. It was always student teacher interactions, but in a way that required everybody to pay attention/participate. The teacher would ask a question, waited a few seconds so everybody could begin forming a response, and then pick a student to answer.
Not listening and mentally preparing an answer risked getting picked, failing, and getting admonished/ridiculed - and the teachers were (naturally) pretty good at calling on students who had drifted off. If you were paying attention, you also constantly compared your prepared response with what other students were answering, which made you think about correct grammar, ect.
I think if you have the resources to do 5 hours of language lessons a week, this is the best way. If you're learning independently, your way is probably more effective in terms of time and money. I've saved your other comment, I really should get back into Spanish...
> That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.
After trying for years to learn my wife’s native language, I haven’t really gotten past the “my name is _” and a few other key phrases. I’ve got maybe 10 phrases memorized and I think that’s all my brain can hold at this point. Language learning is not for everyone.
That's certainly true, but there's probably another effect at play here: language learning is extremely time intensive, and you don't progress if you're not practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even lose progress again.
You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of maintenance effort.
In my four years of US high school Spanish in South Florida, I don't recall a single time we read complete stories or newspaper articles. It was entirely grammar and vocabulary in isolation. When there was speaking exercises the teachers did not make an effort to have the native speakers speak with the non-native speakers.
The only thing close to what I'd now call "Compelling Comprehensive Input" that I recall is a single week where we watched a Friends-style miniseries about an English speaker moving to Spain.
> It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
Yup. Motivated students learn the language in the classroom (+ self-study) just fine. Unmotivated students don't, but they are not motivated anyway.
I can only tell you what worked for me: it's input. Read. Start using any brute-force method to learn the basics, like the 100 most common words. Then start reading stories aimed at toddlers (or especially written for language learners, there are apps), and keep going to more complex input as you progress.
Do not worry about grammar; you will learn it intuitively as you move from simple sentences to more complex blocks of text. Do not worry about learning word lists after you have the basics; learn words in the context of the text you're reading.
(I have no qualifications besides being a self-taught English and Chinese speaker, so take my input for what it's worth.)
internet_points posted good advice a comment or two above. Duolingo _is_ ok as a starting point, but (as was said before), move on as soon as possible. As a poster above did, I also spent way way too long on Duolingo, chasing the 'streak'. And got nowhere. I already had a foundation when I started, but I got no farther in a year or more of daily Duo. All progress stopped. When I finally switched to graded input instead, and deleted everything Duo from my devices, things finally picked up again. I could have used the time I wasted on Duo to get input instead, it's something which actually works (when the input is compelling and something which can be mostly understood).
There is no one magic solution. Every person I know who has learned a language to an advanced degree has used a variety of methods, diligently, over a long period of time, depending on their current needs. I can give a brief overview of some tools that I find to be efficient in terms of time and payoff, in no particular order.
1. SRS - Spaced Repetition Software, for flashcards. Anki is the gold standard. It's open source and free on every pc/android/etc except iphone where it's $20 I think. I recommend finding a good starting deck with about 3k to 6k words to help build your core vocabulary. In my case it was "Evita's 5k Korean". For about 6-8 months I grinded 20 new words per day, which means about 30-50 minutes of Anki depending on if you missed a day or not and thus had a backlog. If you have less time I recommend 5 or 10 new words per day.
2. Find trusted resources for grammar and structured learning. You might have to hunt around but for Korean, I found some excellent websites, Youtubers, and textbooks like Korean Grammar in Use I-III. These materials really are the core of your studying. Vocab doesn't help much if you don't know grammar and you certainly can't say anything without vocab. These are how you get to output, i.e. writing and speaking correctly.
3. Find graded readers if possible. Roughly, these are texts designed around 90% comprehension which is a sweetspot for learning new words naturally through context. Unfortunately at the time I couldnt find any for Korean, but I've watched friends use them for e.g. Mandarin Chinese and learn quite a lot of vocabulary in a short time.
4. Find someone who can correct your writing in some form. Whether that's a private tutor or a friend who's native language is your target language and their target language is your native language. In the past I found some dedicated learners through HelloTalk who would trade journal entries with me. I would correct their English and they would correct my Korean. It goes without saying that you need to practice output in your target language when possible, both in writing and in speech.
5. Find a good language exchange and/or friends who speak your target language. By good, I mean a structured language exchange that enforces pairings and language usage. In Seoul I find that most "language exchanges" are excuses to drink and and chat, mostly in English. There was one language exchange that 1:1 Korean language-only pairings for 1 hour, then I repaid that with 2-3 30minute pairings of 2-3 people in English. This is where you put your textbook/solo studies to practice by actually speaking (and hopefully getting corrections). Eventually I hit a plateau and got tired of having similar conversations, plus paying $10 per event. I also found a few lifelong friends who are studying English and thus we can ping each other for random questions.
6. Find some spaces or groups that are -only- in your target language. With the internet it's easier than ever now with Discord. For example, my friend learned a lot of French by hanging out in French speaking gaming servers on discord. There are also apps like Hilokal and HelloTalk, but I haven't used them in a while so I can't speak to their quality anymore. Lastly there are offline options depending on your area. In the US I used Meetup to find language groups and in Korea I use, well, a korean equivalent to find groups in niches I enjoy.
7. Lastly, and this isn't a tool, but "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus. In learning a language, you will make mistakes and you will say things that sound stupid. It's okay. It's unavoidable and you make good progress by learning from these mistakes, so long as you reflect on them and understand why the mistake occurred. The people who focus on being perfect and making zero mistakes in learning a language, in my experience, do not go very far.
These are some great tips. Having consistent daily exposure to your target language I think is important. Compelling graded readers can make spending that time every day enjoyable and not feel like a chore. A stress-free positive learning environment helps quite a bit with the subconscious process of language acquisition; it's what Krashen calls the "Affective Filter Hypothesis".
> recently started to learn another language with Duolingo
Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.
>the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"
Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.
Research has figured out that grammar is the wrong thing to focus on in a classroom. There are better ways to teach in a classroom that work. However many schools are not following the latest research so you need to find a good one.
grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have had around 50 hours in the classroom.
English grammar (my native language) has always been a mystery to me. Any time I hear about participles or present perfect or infinitives or passive voice etc… my eyes glaze over and I have no idea what any of it means. In school I failed those units.
Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn’t be a very effective path for me…
It's funny, but I always found English grammar (also my native language) to be completely pointless, but I find myself really enjoying learning about Latin grammar, and as a result marveling about how weird English is. It's fascinating that one subsystem in our brain can completely understand our native language's grammar, and yet another part finds it unfathomable.
In high school French class, I had the same problems with grammar in that language.
For example, to teach plus-que-parfait my teacher used English language analogies and they were all useless for me. Again, I failed that part of the course but my grades were high enough to pass without it.
This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.
My learning finally picked up speed again when I started using CCI (Compelling Comprehensive Input). How easy it is to find material differs a lot between languages. Way way back in time I learned English that way, though I didn't think of it as "learning" back then - I was so focused on what is now called "compelling input".
However, you'll need some kind of foundation, otherwise it'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach" in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I talked to had never heard about the guy.
When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge mistake was to switch to Duolingo.
As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to instead build a foundation first, and many other little things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term learning.
I was under the (possibly incorrect) impression that Renshuu was very beginner unfriendly and WaniKani skips the most basic stuff (hiragana et al) and is “just” to learn kanji which ofc is important. Was I wrong?
On WaniKani: that’s correct. In their FAQ (I think?) they link out to an article on Tofugu (aiui run by the same people) which gives you a couple good anki decks to learn hiragana and katakana. I started wanikani without knowing either, and found it manageable at the start by referring back to a hiragana chart. At some point I went through the decks, and after about two weeks I could read hiragana well enough to leave them behind.
Certainly not a complete resource for learning the language, but very effective for learning (to read) the kanji.
It focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary through listening comprehension. The creator has put an immense amount of effort into it, to a point where I cannot believe its free. I highly recommend it.
Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet.
Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.
Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.
Because duolingo is designed for addiction (that's how they make money), not actual learning (learning would mean you'd stop using the thing, no good for stakeholders).
There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.
For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not treating you like a toddler and not resorting to emotional manipulation.
I have to disagree in that you would stop using the app if you learn a language. Learning is a lifelong task and becoming proficient in a language does not mean you will stay proficient in a language. It takes constant refreshing in order to keep sharp.
Is Duo the best thing on the planet? No, does it serve a purpose? Yes. The reality is that, if people see their skills improving as a result of using the app (gamification etc included) then it doing its job.
> There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.
This I strongly disagree with. Nothing can _make_ you learn other than your own willingness to do so. If you have the desire to learn, you will. If you do not, you won't. It is that simple and that is applicable to any subject.
For people who have trouble keeping up hobbies, that's a feature. Even if duolingo isn't the ideal way to learn, it's a lot better than something I give up on or forget about after a week.
There are a lot of things an app can do for you. Spaced repetition is the easiest one. However there are a lot of other options if you get creative. Most of them are a lot more work though. (though chatbots should now be easy as well to implement)
I agree i can speak passable spanish with my wife's family. i learnt exclusively on duolingo.
I don't know if its the best way but it kept me motivated to come back and put in some work in a fun environment. which i belive is the biggest problem to solve for any sort of learning.
Schools vary a lot. Some schools are really good, but a lot of them are bad. Schools are typically held back by those who don't care and so disrupt the class. (this isn't always bad, for kids learning how to deal with other kids is itself an important lesson - home school kids tend to do well on tests with much less time spent in study, but they always show a lack of meeting diverse people in my experience)
Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much.
Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.
Many language learning books used to come with audio media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with cassette tapes.
Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.
People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine.
If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.
To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.
You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.
Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.
> but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.
Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort.
That is just not how it works.
Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.
You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.
There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want, and are fine at translation, but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience.
I and my wife used an LLM to translate something she had written, she could have done that herself but she doesn't feel up to a task like that yet (due to the target audience). And I myself am far away from being able to translate that kind of text to my native language.
In general the translation was good, but the wording felt a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and also using pronouns where a native never would - where it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a better translation, and after that refreshing the translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).
The two sentences do not contradict. Using LLMs alone would be bad. However they can be used with other things. Most people are get fluent in a language use several different methods to learn.
It isn't clear if LLMs are good. The formal studies cannot possibly be done so don't bother looking. (a few early studies might be done, but not enough to draw conclusions). And of course LLMs may well change in the future so even if you have a conclusion it may not apply to what we see next year.
I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output. Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.
This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.
> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)
If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.
Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.
I'm not sure exactly what method they're using, but inference costs for speech to speech models are pretty significant so it does make some sense to charge more. The LLM-based text explanations for translation problems are also in the super premium tier though, and those can't be that expensive, so maybe it's just an attempt at market segmentation.
Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point.
It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.
Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.
Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).
One thing duolingo should he is after every 5 ten minute sessions it should be a ten minute "slow news in the target language" session. There are lots of other options on this line. Really every duolingo style app needs to tell people sooner "you are done, go find something else", either do that by refusing to let them use the app (that will make the VC's unhappy), or give them a different style of study that is more useful than flashcards.
It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall
> what's to back up they're better?
Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")
In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)
It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books.
Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed.
It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org
Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.
is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?
I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time.
Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.
My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English.
Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried.
Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)
I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.
unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.
Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.
That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end up only translating words in always the same sentences.
That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.
You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation.
Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it all for the first time and looks for "app I can download and use" will do.
They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher.
Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here.
To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card.
More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.
Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification.
I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.
I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more.
I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.
Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language.
And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro.
Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).
No, it is because Duolingo is an addictive trap optimized for "engagement" (not learning) that requires you an absurd amount of time to progress very little, because it is explicitly designed to be ineffective with the looks of being effective (that's how they make money).
Want alternatives? Among apps, LingQ, for example, or LanguageTransfer. Among not apps, Lonely Planet phrasebooks and StoryLearning graded readers.
There are really many good options if one bothers to search.
That was simply an example of what's actually used in schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo. (Though it must be said that this particular school I mentioned has a very good track record in churning out able speakers, though this is not something a casual learner would want to try. It's basically full time. Very, very hard.)
For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources.
Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.
I just wrote this in another comment, but the hardest part of language learning is the daily practice.
Learning how the language works is the easy part. But only through the daily practice part do you develop the skills to read, write, and speak on the fly.
So the question comes down to: what are you willing to do every day to get that practice in? Especially when you're a noob well under the level needed to do (or stay interested in) more interesting things like read the news.
That's what Duolingo helps people with. And it's already compatible with the things you mention, like reading comics.
You might be falling into the trap of looking at people who aren't motivated to do anything but use one app on their phone and then pretending they'd otherwise have the motivation to learn through an ideal you have that requires more motivation.
When I started Duolingo I didn't even see myself as someone who would or could learn a language, so trying to read comics in Spanish was never on the table (much less a phrasebook, ugh), not an alternative that Duolingo was shutting down. Yet after months I realized I could incidentally read BBC Mundo. I'd wager most people are in this camp since Duolingo is such a "might as well" opportunity very much unlike your proposed alternatives where you assume everyone is super motivated.
Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM. Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can run locally totally trash Norwegian grammar. And they even claim it (both written forms!) as one of the languages they explicitly trained on.
One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language.
For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.
I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.
Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.
There is nothing wrong with learning via translation.
What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.
> Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages
No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.
While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:
- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials
> but that they do not communicate two things clearly:
> this alone won't make you a fluent speaker
Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.
> at what point you should move on from Duolingo
I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.
> Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.
Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the app. If critical information about how to use the product effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's poor communication.
Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-learning app for people all over the world, many of whom don't speak English well enough to even understand their blog.
> I won't blame them for assuming common sense.
It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers (who their target audience are by the way). Many users assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are "done."
It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then it is absolutely productive.
I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages in such a lazy way.
My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless.
Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.
The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).
So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.
Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language.
Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.
It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space
been using Duolingo in the 10s and last year, I gave up because the course seems very repetitive. Even if I got the answer right 10 out of 10 times, the same question kept coming. It almost looks like the app is trying very hard to make me stay as long as possible, instead of study as effecient as possible.
So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?
The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".
In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).
> In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).
They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.
Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually learning.
Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.
For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.
That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.
I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.
Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.
It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.
The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.
You can skip ahead full units by passing a test, and I recommend always doing it if you can.
I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30 minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often able to skip two or three units in a row.
Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an easy, gamified supplement to serious study.
I was under the same impression, but later the problem disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of sentences that you should already understand.
I used the app for 6 months (granted this was around 5 years ago) and the problem never disappeared for me.
To answer the question, it depends on which language you're learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most resources for English-speaking learners.
I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.
I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.
For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.
I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on. Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking a class.
Hope this takes off! Early Duolingo was very community focused and lots of fun, and proves people are really motivated to participate if you make the UI easy enough.
So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?
Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.
Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.
Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.
The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.
up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I wish there would have been more content though
> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your
progress, and listen with your phone locked.
> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings
I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.
I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project in particular.
But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.
Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]
---
[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.
[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.
Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?
It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.
It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.
Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.
Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
The reason is the App Store (and Play Store) value things like DAU (as a proxy for "quality"), IAPs (because they get a cut), no real interaction (too risky), etc. The end result is "real language learning" doesn't align with "launching a top mobile app". This is also the reason none of games are hard (can't let people uninstall) and nothing unique shows up anymore (it's impossible to compete)
Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store
It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any meaningful way whatsoever.
Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.
A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.
Completely agree, when Duolingo started, I took the Spanish course and actually got something out of it. The lessons, comments were super helpful. I've tried it again last year and I couldn't believe my eyes that most of it is gone. It feels exactly like an addictive game, making you focus on the game part of it, not learning. And the fact that you can buy out of failures is just WTF.
Same, I now speak fluent Spanish and have lived in Spain but I started with Duolingo (although just watching loads of films was by far the best way to learn once you get that far!).
The problem is that Duolingo optimises for time spent on the app, not for progress in the language. The majority of experienced language learners do not recommend it.
I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.
Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);
- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.
- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;
- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.
- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.
Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about language learning would consider great. If you are going to pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't about language learning, but it has native content in your language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your money.
There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.
Anyone have any suggestions for learning Korean? I have Hangul characters down and know some words/phrases from my partner, but would like to dive in a bit more.
I disagree, the old HelloChinese course was great for covering Chinese character writing, as well as exercises with Pinyin and only Chinese characters, etc.
Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.
old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer app is alternative that right now is better for Asian languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while learning.
Sadly the authors of LibreLingo were last seen being lead into the back of a white van by an enormous green owl
I have to say Duolingo has some of the best corporate humor I've seen.
Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in. Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good offers.
That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?
Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.
Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach? I tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which of these is The Sun?".
Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".
Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners, you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a listening-first approach and contextual translations with vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other contexts.
[0] https://www.latudio.com/
Do they have a version that's not a mobile app? Or will it at least work on the desktop/web browser? I'm not going to use something like that on my phone.
for Chinese (which duolingo is garbage) study stroke order, then get children books and the Pleco app.
Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.
Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).
If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.
I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.
First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.
With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
From my experience, Duolingo teaches you the vocabulary and the set sentences very well. But this is by far not enough. I use regular textbooks that describe the structure of the language, the grammar, the syntax, etc, so as to gain some analytical understanding of it. On top of that, Duolingo helps to get used to recognize these structures and flesh them out with various words. Also, unlike a book, it forces you to listen, and, crucially, to speak. It's a very important step from being able to read written language only to being able to actually talk.
I think Duolingo does an okay job of teaching structure, but it probably comes around the 2nd year or so (I've been using it about 3 years, but I did have a few years in high school of Spanish a long time ago)
Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5 years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site works.
It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started German with it before doing more traditional classes and live speaking with a partner Annoyances (in particular, ads disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth paying for as a quick daily refresher.
The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary
Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are rather aligned.
However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.
Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.
I find Duolingo is pretty good for vocabulary in a "slow" context.
The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.
Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.
I think you're mistaken?
The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.
If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.
People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.
The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.
And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.
And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...
Duolingo is sorta like flashcards and I think it makes a good easy entry into learning
But flashcards that connect words and concepts are still much better than flashcards where you merely translate.
Cool... but nothing will ever beat Anki + Immersion. Here's one guide most Japanese learners follow: https://learnjapanese.moe/
For the curious, here's an article from the developer on why they built LibreLingo https://dev.to/kantord/why-i-built-librelingo-280o
who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and learn a foreign language ... :D
The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.
> some of the things that you prioritize
watching reels first thing in the morning in bed
In bed?! You gotta multitask if you want to get things done, try on the toilet next time.
on the toilet ? I only go to the toilet on company time
I read Hacker News on the toilet.
If you are spending 30 minutes on the toilet, language fluency is not your biggest problem
But learning how to ask the chemist for proctosydol in French may pay off dividends
if i spend 30 minutes on the toilet, standing up again is my biggest problem
But your nearest proctologist is going to have a new client soon.
10x more effective than coffee
Sorry—TikTok FTW
who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and develop software to learn a foreign language
This space seems like one of those areas where it would be really hard to break in because their whole selling point is having had hundreds or thousands of people record and annotate an enormous amount of voice input, which I assume has to be hand polished for every single exercise?
I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience not to be very janky in the end.
Nice to see this pop up, not that I mind giving Duo money every month for my kids account.
Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out there... Im getting closer...
I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!
Please Duo hear my prayers...
There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".
I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.
Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.
On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.
Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.
(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.
You've twice written about what is the wrong way to learn a new language -- what's your right way? Why did you use Duo' instead of 'the right way'? Perhaps that explains why one might create a OSS version of Duo.
Comprehesible input. find something basic you can understand and immerse your self in it. Often this is childrens books/shows or similar level designed for adults.
at the start you use a translation dictionary to look up ever word which is boring - which is why approaches like duolingo where they give you around 2000 common words to memorize quickly are useful. However the goal is to learn just enough of that list that you can find something you understand to start the real learning on.
Maybe “immersion” works if you already know the language and are going for fluency, but I don’t see how it can get you from zero to one. I’ve tried as an adult and failed to learn my wife’s native language and no amount of “input” at any speed or level helps. It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.
I'm like three days from my one year Duo streak. I've gone from understanding none of my wife's native language to being able to eavesdrop on phone conversations a bit, and to have short exchanges. I've probably spent half an hour daily on average. Sometimes a lot more.
I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.
Comprehensible input works really well and was popularized by a video that went viral a few years ago entitled “How to acquire any language NOT learn it!” [0]
The method described in the video involves focusing on listening for the first year by having someone read magazines and books to you in the target language, pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning of words you don’t understand. This method works quite well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will consistently meet with you and practice like this before you have reached a certain level of understanding, and very few people want to learn this way because they see it as a waste of time.
One of the key aspects of this model is that you should not be translating between your native and your target language, which is what you usually do on apps like Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo doesn’t work. The reality is that the method that works is the method you use consistently over time. Once you get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illApgaLgGA
The method that worked for me: A 90 day course for learning the basic of the grammar and some thematic vocabulary (better than duolingo as it has whole conversation, both written and spoken). An awful lot of reading book, listening to shows, sporadic speaking and writing. Learned English that way without ever travelling to an English speaking country.
I've learned English by scrolling endless memes on Imgur (back when it used to be an image storage for Reddit), and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the topics that interested me (tech and car reviews - like LTT and Doug DeMuro). But that only developed my passive vocabulary (reading and listening). I only really learned speaking English once I started working remotely for an australian company, and further improved the fluency after moving abroad (to the Netherlands).
I'm currently doing German lessons on Duolingo, and what I dislike the most is that it keeps shoving "useless" words into my face (the words that are irrelevant for me and that I'll most likely never use) - I wish there was an option to choose the topics that I find interesting so that it'd mix the words that more relevant with the everyday use words to better taylor the vocab for me. Another shortcoming is that it never actually explains the grammar rules, you can only try to analyze the examples yourself, trying to notice any patterns. Some are good in that, others are bad - so why don't they spare us that mental gymnastics and provide at least minimal explanation?
Using AI for conversations is really interesting approach - it generally speaks the language correctly (not like classmates).
Next time pay enough for a class or have a good private tutor and all you've said becomes true.
But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.
No, private tutors are definitely better but they are no silver bullet. Having a great private tutors often and long enough to exercise sporadic conversation and gain confidence in language use - a class a few times a week at least - is also a prohibitively expensive solution suggestion for most people, making it a non-solution.
You also end in a false dichotomy.
This site is full of web developers telling people they get what they pay for but then call tutors "prohibitively expensive".
You want that education, invest in it. With time and money. Of course, the "a few minutes per day in the commute for 9.99" feels attractive and it even gets you to a basic stage but then it's what we already discussed.
> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages
I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.
The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.
> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach
That's not better than Duolingo, no.
Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to
* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)
* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)
* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly
* lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons that give more control over subtitles, eventually only foreign subtitles or none)
* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now
You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.
A big shootout and kuddos to Language Transfer. I love their method (since I loved Michel Thomas, we see the influence).
"Don't try to remember, don't do homework, but repeat with the two other students. It is of our responsibility [the teacher] to make you understand the language. What you know, you don't forget" (para-phrasing)
And it works (for me© and surely for more software engineers).
https://www.michelthomas.com/
Translated stories are sometimes called Graded Readers, you can buy them aligned with most common language levels (CEFR, JLPT, etc)
Subtitles though, tricky. The sites that sync with Netflix are probably better than whatever Netflix offers, or whatever you can get that comes with your video files. Subtitles for entertainment are often abbreviated, which is fine for your native language, but it doesn't help if you want to look up a sentence. You need the crowdsourced ones. YouTube can be better in this regard, especially if they're automatically generated. There are also lists of video games floating around that rank games based on the availability of a script, replayable dialogue, that sort of thing. See Game Gengo for a Japanese example [1] (great channel, he also does lessons with all the vocab + grammar in context using games).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXICXCSIfrQ
I've used Pimsleur on and off for a while and it's great, because even with sporadic usage I can still more or less remember what I learned and most of the time I just need a bit of a refresher in terms of using the right case or conjugation so I don't get I/you/they/it mixed up.
Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with Pimsleur, after the same amount of time, it's right into practical stuff like "I would like something to eat" or "I don't understand X but I do speak Y."
Having an extensive vocabulary of random words isn't particulary helpful except to extrapolate meaning out of conversations you don't fully understand, and almost certainly cannot contribute to.
You need very little grammar in the first place. And if you learned your native one, it becomes easier to just store the difference (leaks may still happen). Coherent input where previous words are repeated while you learned new one are best (watch subtitled movies, and you can pick a lot if you’re focused on that).
Probably especially with a related language. I remember high school French (vaguely) abd it was probably a pretty good 4 years of high school French. But I also remember memorizing a ton of complex tenses and the like, many of which I probably rarely use in English, couldn't name, and would probably be hard for a lot of people to parse if I did, especially conversationally and mixed with negation.
Yep, French has a lot of rules! But they are grammar rules only. So while rote memorization is hard, a good tutor can hel you with the basic understanding. At the end of the day, it’s just practice. With english, you have to practice spelling and pronunciation, with French you have to practice grammar.
I see people say they get nonsense phrases in Duolingo a lot but I never seem to get them. For example, a lesson I'm doing right now has phrases like "Quand est-ce que vous partez aux Etas-Unis?" (When are you leaving for the United States?), "Tu as ton ticket? (Do you have your ticket?), "Nous cherchons un bon hôtel à Paris." (We are looking for a good hotel in Paris).
How are these nonsense phrases? Seems like some useful things to know as a traveler.
Maybe it's the different language courses. But I also did a lot of Esperanto and it had similar quality phrases to learn as this French course.
Adding one more:
* https://www.latudio.com/ - listening first approach, pause and show sentence if you don't understand, practice words you didn't get later, 4 types of exercises, scripted conversations being one of them
And a possibility of a one-time purchase.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder
This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.
If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.
The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.
> This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.
I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar".
In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.
You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language!
Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network.
Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.
A very interesting point, I stand corrected. When I think about it, my brain usually does strongly prefer to consciously create a set of "rules" about a knowledge base rather than unconsciously memorize a set of ready-made samples. But that might be just me.
Good luck learning Finnish without understanding the grammar.
I feel like it's the opposite. Most people who speak languages with complex grammar natively can not clearly explain the grammar to you, because they use the correct grammar intuitively, and they have learned to do so by having a ton of input in that language.
This is a bad example because it's probably more wordy/complex than it needs to be but I couldn't begin to name the various grammar being used in: "I would not have gone to Paris except that a friend decided to give me a free ticket."
Good luck getting a 3 year old Finnish person lecturing you on Finnish grammar - Even though the kid can easily ask for a ice cream in both past, present, and future.
> I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar"
In this claim you implicitly say that you are focusing on "learning by memorizing grammar" if you do not are focusing on "learning by example" - hence the dichotomy, that is false.
The parent commenter never talked about grammar.
> 2) speech from day one.
.. is something I can't fully agree with. The exception being if the target language only has sounds which you are familiar with already (as in _really_ familiar - your native language already have them). Otherwise you'll simply train your brain to pronounce badly, because in the beginning you can't hear the differences. That's something which will be hard to fix later. And it takes time to hear the differences, your brain literally needs to grow new connections. There are other reasons too for doing a lot (a lot) of listening when you start a new language.
> ... target language ...
> your native language already have them
It seems like there is a strong underlying understanding that learning a new language is done from a source language towards a target language.
The book I am referring to argues that learning a language is about embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task.
The most natural embodiment og a language is speech.
This is fundamentally another way of looking at language learning than what most people think about having had Spanish in high school or what not.
It might not be for all.
I did not at all in any way mean to say that learning a language should be from a source language towards a target language. Quite the opposite really. I completely agree with the statement ".. embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task". That matches my own anecdotal experiences, at least.
What I wanted to say was that even though babies can hear and differentiate between all the sounds of every language on earth (and yes they can), and young children too - what then happens is that the brain will after a time simply keep what's needed for the child's language and discard the rest. Which is why adults will have problems hearing certain sounds of a target language, unless those sounds already exist in that person's language(s). That takes time. Native English speakers, for example, are in my experience generally unable to hear the difference between certain vowels in my native language even though said vowels are as different as night and day for me. It seems to take up to two years for that to get fixed, depending on the person and also age. And in the meantime the pronunciation will be wrong and the person is unable to hear it and thus can't fix it. And later it's so hard that it won't, as a rule, get fixed.
My wife can't hear the difference between certain consonants in my language even though she's fully fluent otherwise. She has to watch my lips. After all these years. The reason is simply that those differences don't exist in her native language. On the other hand, very young people can easily do it and will get the pronunciation right at first try.
Does it really matter? You can always take a diction course later if it is that important. I’ve never bothered myself to learn the different sound for ‘th’ in English, nor the exact spanish flow.
Ah yes, I agree. There are biases from previous language experience.
I am learning Polish currently, that has "complex consonant clusters". I come from a vowel heavy language, and I use a lot of time with my partner to learn to pronounce these sounds.
The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion.
My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a level of conversations with native speakers or being able to engage with media.
Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not speaking a language but moreso learning about it academically.
There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial. It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and barely be able to speak the language at all with someone... which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?
I love the hobby of studying languages and things like Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they can't speak very much even after a long time investment, which is damn shame.
My point is neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods.
That's interesting to me. From my perspective, I didn't find Duolingo great, but it did give me some vocab and basic sentences, and left me feeling more competent than I actually ended up being once I was living where they speak the language I was learning.
Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to the point where I was having short conversations in that second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.
However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can do things like play D&D in my second language. I still don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still, though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational, and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.
Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature of yours?
> and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people
Is this really how language lessons are taught in US high schools? I've learned English and French in high school, and we were forced to speak all the time.
* Read a story together (who's reading aloud is frequently switched), then the teacher asks questions about the story and picks students to answer. The student answers, if there's errors the teacher fixes them, and the student repeats the corrected answer.
* When you learn new grammar, the teacher starts a sentence, and a student has to finish it using the new grammatical structure (or similar exercises). This was followed by homework, where all those exercises happened again, in writing.
By year 3, we also did lots of essay-style writing, which is where you really drill down into learning the language. Essays were graded and discussed.
In my opinion, this is the best (and also most expensive) way to thoroughly learn a language, it can only really be improved by cutting down the size of the class to ideally 2-3 students - which, of course, makes it even more expensive.
We did do those kinds of things. For example, speaking with a partner or having to give a 5 minute talk to the teacher on something.
The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise, and the content of "conversations" was always very, very simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.
I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our essays.
It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or another environment to speak/practice the language will yield much greater results much faster. You can study the same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at times to fill in gaps.
I think if you're a college student it's fine since you have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of any language), but as an adult where time is significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a sibling comment I went over what I do use.
> "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation.
That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.
We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think our teachers realized that most students will learn little from that. It was always student teacher interactions, but in a way that required everybody to pay attention/participate. The teacher would ask a question, waited a few seconds so everybody could begin forming a response, and then pick a student to answer.
Not listening and mentally preparing an answer risked getting picked, failing, and getting admonished/ridiculed - and the teachers were (naturally) pretty good at calling on students who had drifted off. If you were paying attention, you also constantly compared your prepared response with what other students were answering, which made you think about correct grammar, ect.
I think if you have the resources to do 5 hours of language lessons a week, this is the best way. If you're learning independently, your way is probably more effective in terms of time and money. I've saved your other comment, I really should get back into Spanish...
> That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.
After trying for years to learn my wife’s native language, I haven’t really gotten past the “my name is _” and a few other key phrases. I’ve got maybe 10 phrases memorized and I think that’s all my brain can hold at this point. Language learning is not for everyone.
> Language learning is not for everyone.
That's certainly true, but there's probably another effect at play here: language learning is extremely time intensive, and you don't progress if you're not practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even lose progress again.
You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of maintenance effort.
In my four years of US high school Spanish in South Florida, I don't recall a single time we read complete stories or newspaper articles. It was entirely grammar and vocabulary in isolation. When there was speaking exercises the teachers did not make an effort to have the native speakers speak with the non-native speakers.
The only thing close to what I'd now call "Compelling Comprehensive Input" that I recall is a single week where we watched a Friends-style miniseries about an English speaker moving to Spain.
You would not be surprised ik spreek geen spaans.
> It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
Yup. Motivated students learn the language in the classroom (+ self-study) just fine. Unmotivated students don't, but they are not motivated anyway.
> neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods
What should one do instead?
I can only tell you what worked for me: it's input. Read. Start using any brute-force method to learn the basics, like the 100 most common words. Then start reading stories aimed at toddlers (or especially written for language learners, there are apps), and keep going to more complex input as you progress.
Do not worry about grammar; you will learn it intuitively as you move from simple sentences to more complex blocks of text. Do not worry about learning word lists after you have the basics; learn words in the context of the text you're reading.
(I have no qualifications besides being a self-taught English and Chinese speaker, so take my input for what it's worth.)
internet_points posted good advice a comment or two above. Duolingo _is_ ok as a starting point, but (as was said before), move on as soon as possible. As a poster above did, I also spent way way too long on Duolingo, chasing the 'streak'. And got nowhere. I already had a foundation when I started, but I got no farther in a year or more of daily Duo. All progress stopped. When I finally switched to graded input instead, and deleted everything Duo from my devices, things finally picked up again. I could have used the time I wasted on Duo to get input instead, it's something which actually works (when the input is compelling and something which can be mostly understood).
Post critical comments on HN obviously.
There is no one magic solution. Every person I know who has learned a language to an advanced degree has used a variety of methods, diligently, over a long period of time, depending on their current needs. I can give a brief overview of some tools that I find to be efficient in terms of time and payoff, in no particular order.
1. SRS - Spaced Repetition Software, for flashcards. Anki is the gold standard. It's open source and free on every pc/android/etc except iphone where it's $20 I think. I recommend finding a good starting deck with about 3k to 6k words to help build your core vocabulary. In my case it was "Evita's 5k Korean". For about 6-8 months I grinded 20 new words per day, which means about 30-50 minutes of Anki depending on if you missed a day or not and thus had a backlog. If you have less time I recommend 5 or 10 new words per day.
2. Find trusted resources for grammar and structured learning. You might have to hunt around but for Korean, I found some excellent websites, Youtubers, and textbooks like Korean Grammar in Use I-III. These materials really are the core of your studying. Vocab doesn't help much if you don't know grammar and you certainly can't say anything without vocab. These are how you get to output, i.e. writing and speaking correctly.
3. Find graded readers if possible. Roughly, these are texts designed around 90% comprehension which is a sweetspot for learning new words naturally through context. Unfortunately at the time I couldnt find any for Korean, but I've watched friends use them for e.g. Mandarin Chinese and learn quite a lot of vocabulary in a short time.
4. Find someone who can correct your writing in some form. Whether that's a private tutor or a friend who's native language is your target language and their target language is your native language. In the past I found some dedicated learners through HelloTalk who would trade journal entries with me. I would correct their English and they would correct my Korean. It goes without saying that you need to practice output in your target language when possible, both in writing and in speech.
5. Find a good language exchange and/or friends who speak your target language. By good, I mean a structured language exchange that enforces pairings and language usage. In Seoul I find that most "language exchanges" are excuses to drink and and chat, mostly in English. There was one language exchange that 1:1 Korean language-only pairings for 1 hour, then I repaid that with 2-3 30minute pairings of 2-3 people in English. This is where you put your textbook/solo studies to practice by actually speaking (and hopefully getting corrections). Eventually I hit a plateau and got tired of having similar conversations, plus paying $10 per event. I also found a few lifelong friends who are studying English and thus we can ping each other for random questions.
6. Find some spaces or groups that are -only- in your target language. With the internet it's easier than ever now with Discord. For example, my friend learned a lot of French by hanging out in French speaking gaming servers on discord. There are also apps like Hilokal and HelloTalk, but I haven't used them in a while so I can't speak to their quality anymore. Lastly there are offline options depending on your area. In the US I used Meetup to find language groups and in Korea I use, well, a korean equivalent to find groups in niches I enjoy.
7. Lastly, and this isn't a tool, but "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus. In learning a language, you will make mistakes and you will say things that sound stupid. It's okay. It's unavoidable and you make good progress by learning from these mistakes, so long as you reflect on them and understand why the mistake occurred. The people who focus on being perfect and making zero mistakes in learning a language, in my experience, do not go very far.
These are some great tips. Having consistent daily exposure to your target language I think is important. Compelling graded readers can make spending that time every day enjoyable and not feel like a chore. A stress-free positive learning environment helps quite a bit with the subconscious process of language acquisition; it's what Krashen calls the "Affective Filter Hypothesis".
> recently started to learn another language with Duolingo
Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.
>the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"
Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.
Research has figured out that grammar is the wrong thing to focus on in a classroom. There are better ways to teach in a classroom that work. However many schools are not following the latest research so you need to find a good one.
grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have had around 50 hours in the classroom.
English grammar (my native language) has always been a mystery to me. Any time I hear about participles or present perfect or infinitives or passive voice etc… my eyes glaze over and I have no idea what any of it means. In school I failed those units.
Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn’t be a very effective path for me…
It's funny, but I always found English grammar (also my native language) to be completely pointless, but I find myself really enjoying learning about Latin grammar, and as a result marveling about how weird English is. It's fascinating that one subsystem in our brain can completely understand our native language's grammar, and yet another part finds it unfathomable.
In high school French class, I had the same problems with grammar in that language.
For example, to teach plus-que-parfait my teacher used English language analogies and they were all useless for me. Again, I failed that part of the course but my grades were high enough to pass without it.
This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.
My learning finally picked up speed again when I started using CCI (Compelling Comprehensive Input). How easy it is to find material differs a lot between languages. Way way back in time I learned English that way, though I didn't think of it as "learning" back then - I was so focused on what is now called "compelling input".
However, you'll need some kind of foundation, otherwise it'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach" in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I talked to had never heard about the guy.
When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge mistake was to switch to Duolingo.
As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to instead build a foundation first, and many other little things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term learning.
I was under the (possibly incorrect) impression that Renshuu was very beginner unfriendly and WaniKani skips the most basic stuff (hiragana et al) and is “just” to learn kanji which ofc is important. Was I wrong?
On WaniKani: that’s correct. In their FAQ (I think?) they link out to an article on Tofugu (aiui run by the same people) which gives you a couple good anki decks to learn hiragana and katakana. I started wanikani without knowing either, and found it manageable at the start by referring back to a hiragana chart. At some point I went through the decks, and after about two weeks I could read hiragana well enough to leave them behind.
Certainly not a complete resource for learning the language, but very effective for learning (to read) the kanji.
I’ve always wanted to learn Japanese, thanks for the tips!
I have started learning japanese roughly 6 months ago, and I luckily stumbled upon this fantastic Anki deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782
It focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary through listening comprehension. The creator has put an immense amount of effort into it, to a point where I cannot believe its free. I highly recommend it.
Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet.
Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.
Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.
Because duolingo is designed for addiction (that's how they make money), not actual learning (learning would mean you'd stop using the thing, no good for stakeholders).
There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.
For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not treating you like a toddler and not resorting to emotional manipulation.
I have to disagree in that you would stop using the app if you learn a language. Learning is a lifelong task and becoming proficient in a language does not mean you will stay proficient in a language. It takes constant refreshing in order to keep sharp.
Is Duo the best thing on the planet? No, does it serve a purpose? Yes. The reality is that, if people see their skills improving as a result of using the app (gamification etc included) then it doing its job.
> There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.
This I strongly disagree with. Nothing can _make_ you learn other than your own willingness to do so. If you have the desire to learn, you will. If you do not, you won't. It is that simple and that is applicable to any subject.
> Because duolingo is designed for addiction
For people who have trouble keeping up hobbies, that's a feature. Even if duolingo isn't the ideal way to learn, it's a lot better than something I give up on or forget about after a week.
Looking to apps to learn language outside of spaced repetition and talking to someone over video seems pretty naïve to begin with.
There are a lot of things an app can do for you. Spaced repetition is the easiest one. However there are a lot of other options if you get creative. Most of them are a lot more work though. (though chatbots should now be easy as well to implement)
I agree, for me Duolingo was great to learn the basics of Spanish, enough so that I could move on and practice in real life.
I agree i can speak passable spanish with my wife's family. i learnt exclusively on duolingo.
I don't know if its the best way but it kept me motivated to come back and put in some work in a fun environment. which i belive is the biggest problem to solve for any sort of learning.
I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners.
With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though.
You can also sign up to in-person classes.
I think books are probably the worst way to learn a language
I learned French and my experience from best to worst ways to learn were:
1. 1-1 lessons with language teacher (by far the most effective way to learn)
2. audio lessons (Michel Thomas Method)
3. Visiting France a lot, interacting with French people (my wife is french) (and yes, for me this was less impactful than listening to audio lessons)
4. Duolingo (did a year of doing it daily, did almost nothing for me except a bit of vocab)
5. School (3 years of French in school was about equivalent to listening to 5 hours of Michel Thomas audio lessons)
Schools vary a lot. Some schools are really good, but a lot of them are bad. Schools are typically held back by those who don't care and so disrupt the class. (this isn't always bad, for kids learning how to deal with other kids is itself an important lesson - home school kids tend to do well on tests with much less time spent in study, but they always show a lack of meeting diverse people in my experience)
Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much.
Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.
Many language learning books used to come with audio media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with cassette tapes.
Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.
Italki, LingQ, Languagetransfer, StoryLearning...
People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine.
If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.
To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.
You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.
Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.
> but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.
Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort.
That is just not how it works.
Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.
You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.
> and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.
If you have that, you don't need the other things.
One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language.
(You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)
There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want, and are fine at translation, but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience.
I and my wife used an LLM to translate something she had written, she could have done that herself but she doesn't feel up to a task like that yet (due to the target audience). And I myself am far away from being able to translate that kind of text to my native language.
In general the translation was good, but the wording felt a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and also using pronouns where a native never would - where it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a better translation, and after that refreshing the translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).
> LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning.
> They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want
These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you want for language learning.
> but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience
Doesn't matter.
The two sentences do not contradict. Using LLMs alone would be bad. However they can be used with other things. Most people are get fluent in a language use several different methods to learn.
It isn't clear if LLMs are good. The formal studies cannot possibly be done so don't bother looking. (a few early studies might be done, but not enough to draw conclusions). And of course LLMs may well change in the future so even if you have a conclusion it may not apply to what we see next year.
I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output. Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
There are two things to say here:
> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.
This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.
> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)
If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.
Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.
I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.
I'm not sure exactly what method they're using, but inference costs for speech to speech models are pretty significant so it does make some sense to charge more. The LLM-based text explanations for translation problems are also in the super premium tier though, and those can't be that expensive, so maybe it's just an attempt at market segmentation.
Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point.
It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.
Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.
I like how this type of critique pops up when someone sits down and makes a free/libre version of an app with a flawed premise.
Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).
One thing duolingo should he is after every 5 ten minute sessions it should be a ten minute "slow news in the target language" session. There are lots of other options on this line. Really every duolingo style app needs to tell people sooner "you are done, go find something else", either do that by refusing to let them use the app (that will make the VC's unhappy), or give them a different style of study that is more useful than flashcards.
What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?
> What are the modern methods
It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall
> what's to back up they're better?
Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")
In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach.
One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau...
It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books.
Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed.
It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org
Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.
is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?
I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time.
Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.
I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.
My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English.
Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried.
Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)
I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.
unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.
I wrote https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.
Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.
That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end up only translating words in always the same sentences.
That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.
You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation.
Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it all for the first time and looks for "app I can download and use" will do.
They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher.
Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here.
To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card.
More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.
Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification.
I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.
> Duolingo is obsolete.
I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more.
I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.
Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language.
And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro.
Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).
No, it is because Duolingo is an addictive trap optimized for "engagement" (not learning) that requires you an absurd amount of time to progress very little, because it is explicitly designed to be ineffective with the looks of being effective (that's how they make money).
Want alternatives? Among apps, LingQ, for example, or LanguageTransfer. Among not apps, Lonely Planet phrasebooks and StoryLearning graded readers.
There are really many good options if one bothers to search.
That was simply an example of what's actually used in schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo. (Though it must be said that this particular school I mentioned has a very good track record in churning out able speakers, though this is not something a casual learner would want to try. It's basically full time. Very, very hard.)
For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources.
Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.
I just wrote this in another comment, but the hardest part of language learning is the daily practice.
Learning how the language works is the easy part. But only through the daily practice part do you develop the skills to read, write, and speak on the fly.
So the question comes down to: what are you willing to do every day to get that practice in? Especially when you're a noob well under the level needed to do (or stay interested in) more interesting things like read the news.
That's what Duolingo helps people with. And it's already compatible with the things you mention, like reading comics.
You might be falling into the trap of looking at people who aren't motivated to do anything but use one app on their phone and then pretending they'd otherwise have the motivation to learn through an ideal you have that requires more motivation.
When I started Duolingo I didn't even see myself as someone who would or could learn a language, so trying to read comics in Spanish was never on the table (much less a phrasebook, ugh), not an alternative that Duolingo was shutting down. Yet after months I realized I could incidentally read BBC Mundo. I'd wager most people are in this camp since Duolingo is such a "might as well" opportunity very much unlike your proposed alternatives where you assume everyone is super motivated.
Daily practice is very important, yes, but languages are genuinely difficult beasts on their own.
Thousands of words and grammar rules that you need to grasp real time. Just mindless or Duolingo-ish daily practice doesn't take you nearly there.
Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM. Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can run locally totally trash Norwegian grammar. And they even claim it (both written forms!) as one of the languages they explicitly trained on.
One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language.
For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.
I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.
Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.
There is nothing wrong with learning via translation.
What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.
> Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages
No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.
While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:
- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials
- at what point you should move on from Duolingo
> but that they do not communicate two things clearly: > this alone won't make you a fluent speaker
Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.
> at what point you should move on from Duolingo
I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.
> Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.
Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the app. If critical information about how to use the product effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's poor communication.
Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-learning app for people all over the world, many of whom don't speak English well enough to even understand their blog.
> I won't blame them for assuming common sense.
It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers (who their target audience are by the way). Many users assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are "done."
It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then it is absolutely productive.
I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages in such a lazy way.
TFA might work for my use case.
My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless.
Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.
The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).
So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.
Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language.
Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.
It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space
been using Duolingo in the 10s and last year, I gave up because the course seems very repetitive. Even if I got the answer right 10 out of 10 times, the same question kept coming. It almost looks like the app is trying very hard to make me stay as long as possible, instead of study as effecient as possible.
So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?
Which course?
The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".
In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).
> In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).
They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.
German and Arabic course.
So in other words, the course is programmed by a human?
Well I hope with today's AI tech the course should be highly customizable. I don't want to learn "The cat is a viking" 100 times.
Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually learning.
Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.
For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.
That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.
I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.
Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.
It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.
The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.
0: https://www.wanikani.com/
1: https://www.tofugu.com/
You can skip ahead full units by passing a test, and I recommend always doing it if you can.
I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30 minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often able to skip two or three units in a row.
Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an easy, gamified supplement to serious study.
> the same question kept coming
I was under the same impression, but later the problem disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of sentences that you should already understand.
I used the app for 6 months (granted this was around 5 years ago) and the problem never disappeared for me.
To answer the question, it depends on which language you're learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most resources for English-speaking learners.
Anyone as experience with feedback on https://www.rocketlanguages.com/ and https://babbel.com/ ?
I’m mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two have voice recognition it seems.
I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.
I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.
For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.
I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on. Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking a class.
Hope this takes off! Early Duolingo was very community focused and lots of fun, and proves people are really motivated to participate if you make the UI easy enough.
it's interesting how they had a huge community when they wanted everyone contributing new lessons and fixes.
Going to plug Language Transfer again, an excellent free app that is a much better way to learn a language than the DuoLingo approach.
So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?
Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.
Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.
Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.
The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.
up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I wish there would have been more content though
Thank you! Is there any advantage to using the app instead of just playing the audio files directly?
I found this in the app’s description:
> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone locked.
> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings
I can recommend https://polski.info for Polish. Not FOSS, but at least non-commercial.
Has anyone tried both LibreLingo and Duolingo? I'm curious if the open-source approach makes learning feel more natural?
I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.
I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
But overall, great work !
I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project in particular.
But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.
Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]
---
[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.
[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.
Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?
But why? These apps are ineffective. If you want to learn a language, don't waste your time on Duolingo or this...
It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.
It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.
Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.
Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
The reason is the App Store (and Play Store) value things like DAU (as a proxy for "quality"), IAPs (because they get a cut), no real interaction (too risky), etc. The end result is "real language learning" doesn't align with "launching a top mobile app". This is also the reason none of games are hard (can't let people uninstall) and nothing unique shows up anymore (it's impossible to compete)
Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store
It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any meaningful way whatsoever.
Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.
A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.
Completely agree, when Duolingo started, I took the Spanish course and actually got something out of it. The lessons, comments were super helpful. I've tried it again last year and I couldn't believe my eyes that most of it is gone. It feels exactly like an addictive game, making you focus on the game part of it, not learning. And the fact that you can buy out of failures is just WTF.
Same, I now speak fluent Spanish and have lived in Spain but I started with Duolingo (although just watching loads of films was by far the best way to learn once you get that far!).
Agree. Duolingo lost most of its appeal when the discussion forums were taken offline.
It was really nice to discuss the sentences with other learners and the creator of the course.
And it was always fun to open the thread for the sentence "I love you" in the language that you were learning.
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978
The problem is that Duolingo optimises for time spent on the app, not for progress in the language. The majority of experienced language learners do not recommend it.
I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.
Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);
- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.
- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;
- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.
- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.
Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
If I’m going to spend a thousand hours learning a new language, I’m willing to pay for professional study material.
>professional study material
What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent dictionary app
App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about language learning would consider great. If you are going to pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't about language learning, but it has native content in your language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your money.
There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.
I would probably include duo lingo when I started - but I wouldn’t say “hmm I wish there was something worse but free”.
something like https://michelthomas.com/landing-page/mt-spanish/#start-span...
or https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin-american/
I am personally quite happy with the Teach Yourself study materials as first step when picking up a new language.
Anyone have any suggestions for learning Korean? I have Hangul characters down and know some words/phrases from my partner, but would like to dive in a bit more.
The signup button just spins indefinitely :(
All language apps are destined to become essentially an SRS app, which at that point you might as well just use an anki.
I disagree, the old HelloChinese course was great for covering Chinese character writing, as well as exercises with Pinyin and only Chinese characters, etc.
Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.
old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer app is alternative that right now is better for Asian languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while learning.
How is it different from SRS? If you need to learn the strokes for thousands of characters you will need something like SRS.
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Having trouble understanding why you thought it was acceptable to steal their business name, and concept, and software application design.
Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?
Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add the word libre?
A lot of FOSS projects were sued for these things, see GAIM/Pidgin, etc. Newcomers should understand that is a copyright violation.
>Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?
You don't know about LibreOffice, really? Your post is so ridiculously ironic I'm having trouble determining if it's satire.
How about "Google Word", "GoogleWord", or "Rosetta Stones"?
They call the package LibreOffice though... So... Yeah?