[HN Gopher] Duolingo's language notes all on one page
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Duolingo's language notes all on one page
Author : rococode
Score : 119 points
Date : 2021-03-11 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duome.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (duome.eu)
| agluszak wrote:
| Not that I love Duolingo, but isn't that copyright infringement?
| Are this "notes" simply copied from the app?
| rococode wrote:
| Technically yes, but they've been in touch with Duolingo's CTO
| and it seems like Duolingo is OK with it for now.
|
| https://duome.eu/copyright
|
| https://duome.eu/blog/16.04.2018
|
| > Durung the past few weeks I have been talking to Severin
| Hacker, the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo. To make a long
| story short: they do like the idea, but they need to own the
| domain [context for HN: original domain was duolingo.eu] and
| they're going to redirect it to duolingo.com so the old forum
| links will stop working in a couple of weeks from now.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| Volunteers do free work to make all of the language content so
| it shouldn't be.
| mannerheim wrote:
| That doesn't make it not copyright infringement. Either the
| volunteers retained ownership of the content they produced,
| in which case this is infringing on their copyright, or they
| assigned it to Duolingo, in which case, Duolingo's.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| > so it shouldn't be.
|
| I specifically framed it that way so that the WELL
| AKSHUALLY crowd wouldn't say what you just said.
| kgin wrote:
| Amazing how much clearer it is having this all in one place and
| not just sprinkled like bacon bits across a million screens.
| quattrofan wrote:
| I love Duolingo but they really drop the ball it making it great
| and not just good. Why can't I bookmark useful info, see it all
| in one place, share stuff etc. This solves onr of those.
| rolandog wrote:
| I'm a bit pessimistic that it might become a public company.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Not a bad idea to skim through the appropriate page when you're
| starting a program to avoid the inevitable gotchas. The Spanish
| one would have instantly solved my confusion over the idiomatic
| "buenos dias".
| InitialLastName wrote:
| For me it just now clarified the accent marker homophone thing
| in Spanish in a way that Duolingo didn't (My only other
| language experience was high school Latin, where accent markers
| are more likely to be declension/conjugation indicators).
| DC-3 wrote:
| Cool, I guess. But you're probably better off just downloading a
| real textbook. The PDFs aren't hard to find.
| showerst wrote:
| Duolingo is a lousy way to learn a language, but it's great for
| vocabulary practice. It also teaches typing on a phone
| keyboard, which is a great skill for languages that use a non-
| latin charset.
|
| Having these handy might help with some of the gotchas if you
| forget while using it.
| ben_w wrote:
| It has some strengths as well as some weaknesses.
|
| I've used it to teach myself the equivalent of GCSE grade B
| (but sadly not a useful CEFR level) in German several years
| ago, yet after reaching that level of total effort in Greek
| and Esperanto a little more recently I feel almost useless in
| the former and only slightly better in the latter (and
| Esperanto is the easy one!)
|
| I've also been doing at least one Duo Arabic lesson per day
| since 24 September last year, and still don't know that
| alphabet. (Doesn't help that particular course renders some
| of the pronunciation guide symbols as "2" and "3", but this
| is _definitely not_ the only thing holding me back).
| showerst wrote:
| Yeah, I've finished Arabic and I'm on the fence if I'd do
| it again, Arabic just doesn't work that well in their
| model.
|
| I came into it already knowing how to read and write, and
| just wanting vocab, grammar, and typing practice. It was
| pretty decent for that, although the early lessons were
| absolutely jam packed with errors. I think that may have
| been fixed now. The later lessons they released were much
| better, so I assume they've improved the earlier ones.
|
| As a side note, https://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Alphabet-How-
| Read-Write/dp/081... is really excellent, and not very
| pricey. If you do a few letters a day and really practice
| you'll be able to transliterate in a couple of weeks.
| simias wrote:
| I think Duolingo is fine for reading comprehension and basic
| sentence-building skills, but I think there are many better
| apps for vocabulary learning, such as Anki, Memrise and
| Closemaster.
|
| The problem with Duolingo is that it doesn't really implement
| spaced repetition if you go down the tree in sequence. If you
| do a lesson about, say, technology you'll end up being
| prompted for "file", "mouse", "website" etc... over and over
| again, then you'll move on and basically never meet these
| words until you decide to redo this lesson.
|
| I've just ended my 1200+ days Duoling streak literally two
| days ago, so I won't pretend that I hate it, but I must say
| that finally reaching my objective of getting a fully gilded
| Russian tree was a relief. I was getting really annoyed at
| the owl and its idiosyncrasies towards the end.
| jfengel wrote:
| How well would you say you know Russian after a fully-
| gilded tree?
|
| I was in the process of pushing French up to level 2 when
| they introduced a ton of new content. So I'm projecting my
| way back up to a full level 1. (I had boostrapped that with
| Pimsleur.)
|
| That, plus reading, a few podcasts, and Netflix has gotten
| me to the point where I can push my way through a young
| adult novel (with a dictionary) or watch a kid's show
| (usually with the subtitles, since French is a terrible,
| terrible language to listen to).
|
| So I'm curious what it's like after 1200 days. (My current
| streak is about 400. Early in the pandemic I'd do a dozen
| lessons a day; now I do the bare minimum.) How would you
| describe your familiarity with the language?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I have 760+ streak in Spanish, 6 milestones fully done,
| 7th is done to level 3. I can understand about 75% of
| what is spoken in youtube videos, and about 90% if the
| video is slowed down to 75% speed.
|
| Weakest skill is speaking, but I'd do mostly ok renting a
| hotel or ordering food.
| tmountain wrote:
| It's lousy in a vacuum, but it's a good tool for a subset of
| the problems associated with learning a language. There's no
| singular tool that solves all of the issues, so success in
| learning any language unfortunately relies on a certain level
| of self-guided learning (and perseverance more than
| anything).
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yep, complaining about Duolingo suggests to me that someone
| thinks any single resource is going to be a silver bullet.
| Otherwise it's meaningless to complain that a single
| resource isn't a silver bullet.
|
| I used Duolingo to reach a place where I could read books
| in Spanish, and then I switched to books. It can't be that
| bad.
|
| The best tools are the ones you use. If Duolingo is the
| tool that compels you to advance your practice, then it's
| de facto better than the ones that don't compel you that
| you never use.
| showerst wrote:
| I didn't mean to criticize Duolingo for not being a
| silver bullet, but they definitely do market it as one.
| They literally say right on their homepage that using it
| for 34 hours is equal to a semester of university
| language class. When googling it I got an ad with the
| text "All you need to learn your next language".
|
| FWIW I like duolingo, but I wish they were clearer about
| their strengths and weaknesses. I've maxed out Arabic,
| and am halfway through French. I got about 1/3 through
| Japanese before giving up because their approach just
| doesn't work for it. It clearly works much better for
| latin languages, and even in Arabic it's great for vocab
| but lousy for grammar and idioms. As I said in my top
| post, I think phone typing is an underrated skill,
| particularly for a foreigner in a new country.
|
| Nothing short of time and immersion are going to solidly
| teach just about anybody a language, but I have some
| friends who've tried it and then got discouraged on
| language learning all together because of the frustrating
| parts of the app, and the fake sense of progress that's
| inherent in some of their marketing =(. On the other hand
| I'm on a 600+ day streak and have gained a ton from the
| app pressuring me to come back every single day.
| cassepipe wrote:
| And I am glad it exists because of that. I can read any
| language grammar book and maybe even try some exercises but
| what only Duolingo offers is what's missing when you are not
| in the country : practicing the language every day. (The site
| is better than the app I think)
| cassepipe wrote:
| And I am glad it exists because of that. I can read any
| language grammar book and maybe even try some exercises but
| what only Duolingo offers is what's missing when you are not
| in the country : practicing the language every day. (The
| website is better than the app where you just have to tap the
| right word in a list of words, you actually have to remember)
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| A lot of textbooks are group based or not test friendly
| johnasmith wrote:
| Different programs present content in different ways. If you're
| learning with Duolingo, it's convenient to have the content
| organized in the same way.
| Const-me wrote:
| The CSS is less than ideal. I clicked "Japanese", and despite I
| have a 4k display with 150% DPI scaling, difference between su
| and zu is barely visible.
|
| It's totally OK here on HN because 99.9% is English, but I think
| this is quite important for language learners.
| jtvjan wrote:
| Looks fine for me, but I'm using a 1080p display. Maybe change
| the font settings in your browser?
| gpantazes wrote:
| As a Duolingo user, I am pleasantly surprised to find this site
| today. This site seems to ~~solve~~ mitigate problems I've been
| having with tips (or more accurately, lack of tip accessibility
| on the iOS app for certain languages).
|
| To be honest, I've never really thought about viewing all tips on
| the same page, although that is very convenient. A fine feature
| that should probably be adopted by Duolingo as well.
|
| The convenient one-page format ~~solves~~ mitigates a different
| issue I've been having lately though. Duolingo doesn't
| consistently publish (existing!) tips to all Duolingo
| frontends/apps. Well-supported languages get the best tip-content
| support, but languages that aren't as supported sometimes don't
| have tip present even if the tip content exists.
|
| For example:
|
| - Duolingo Web always has tips if tip content exists. This acts
| like a source of truth, as far as I'm aware.
|
| - Spanish is a language which has tip content both on Web and
| iOS. I believe this is because Spanish is popular and well-
| supported.
|
| - Greek is a language where tip content is not accessible via the
| iOS app, but is present on the web site. I believe this is
| because incorporating the presentation of tips is probably some
| hardcoded markup thing (React?) and nobody has gotten around to
| doing it yet. Also, there's a possibility that the underlying
| documents need different rendering treatment or style
| enforcement, and have been omitted from the mobile app on
| purpose. Still, this is a thorn in my side.
|
| So for me, a one-page-tips fills a gap in the Duolingo UX (which
| should probably probably be fixed on Duolingo's end since this
| simply seems to be a prioritization/maintenance/time/effort
| problem).
|
| As a user, I'd like an easy way to refer to the tips before each
| lesson without pulling up the actual Duolingo web app -
| otherwise, why don't I just do my actual lessons on the web app
| as well? Usually I'm doing lessons on my phone, not my computer,
| because the phone is not only more convenient (small) but it's
| easier to change keyboards and type in non-latin alphabets.
| dominotw wrote:
| You can do bunch of cool stuff on there too like view your
| profile
|
| https://duome.eu/<profile-name>
|
| compare yourself to other profiles ect.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| When I was learning Swahili while living in Tanzania, I used the
| Teach Yourself series and it really helped me. I loved how it had
| such a strong focus on grammar.
|
| Similarly, I think I will love this link. I didn't like having to
| click through Duolingo's gamified structure to get at the
| grammatical rules, and I've also struggled to find such coherent
| sets of grammar on other websites. Maybe Duolingo is less
| gamified than it was before, and yet, I still think I will love
| having all of the grammar lessons in one spot.
|
| Thank you for building this!
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(page generated 2021-03-11 23:01 UTC)