[HN Gopher] Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
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Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
Author : doppp
Score : 302 points
Date : 2021-07-29 03:31 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| holoduke wrote:
| My biggest issue with apps like Duolingo is that they pretend
| learning a language is like a game. Effortless and easy. In
| reality you need to have quite some motivation to learn every day
| for a few hours. You need to learn words and grammar by writing
| them down. Lots of times. You need to talk with people at least a
| few times per week. You need to repeat a lot. It's very hard
| work. And even then it takes most regular people about 2 to 4
| years to get yourself to a level like my English (not fluent, but
| enough)
| rafaelero wrote:
| A lot of my English I acquired reading Reddit. Sure, I did have
| a previous background at school, but I would say that it can be
| painless.
| rafaelero wrote:
| I don't understand all these comments saying that Duolingo is
| useless? Maybe your brain is not very fit for acquiring a new
| language, but the app is nothing more than an easy way to do
| small exercises. That can be pretty useful by itself, if you
| really have the motivation to do it a lot.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Kind of tangential, but Paul at Langfocus has a potentially
| interesting video about his observations of Duolingo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbmXSR_QiP8
| asoneth wrote:
| It makes sense that fifteen minutes a day of Duolingo isn't as
| effective as spending two hours a day studying, going to meetups,
| traveling to a foreign country, etc.
|
| I recall similar criticism for the "seven-minute workout" from
| people who pointed out that joining a gym and hiring a personal
| trainer is a more effective way of getting in shape.
|
| But those are not very helpful. If I have fifteen minutes before
| the kids wake up my only decision is how to spend that time.
| Duolingo? Meditate? Pushups? Half an episode of something?
| Daydream?
| jeofken wrote:
| For any language learners out there, my method of learning to
| communicate quite freely in two foreign languages in adulthood
| has been going to bars, and asking tipsy strangers in very
| friendly ways about words, such as on the menu, or something
| you're wondering about. Let them be the expert they are. You must
| enjoy learning and sounding like an idiot for a couple of years.
|
| I've done courses, Duolingo etc, self study books, spaced
| repetition cards, and watched a lot of TV. But nothing has beat
| bars, or having roommates who don't speak English (or my native
| language).
| mabub24 wrote:
| This is similar for me, though with language meetups or
| literally just paying someone to talk with me in the language I
| want to learn.
|
| Nothing beats seeing the language used as a living thing, as a
| part of human behavior within a form of life. Immersion, in
| person, is also essential for understanding the ways that
| people speak in a language, all the different connotations and
| tricks to words. Also, jokes. Attempting to tell jokes in a 2nd
| language, and also getting a laugh out of people (perhaps at
| you, but same feeling) is really rewarding feeling. I often
| tell people to start trying to tell jokes in a 2nd language
| right away. It immediately gives you a sense of play in the
| language and jokes are often direct references to common human
| experience. In a way, a lot of jokes are universal.
| deadcoder0904 wrote:
| Duolingo story is fascinating. The guy created a software which
| then became Google Captcha.
|
| He is a legend in crowdsourcing 2 startups. The best part about
| crowdsourced startups are they inherently create MOAT.
| studentrob wrote:
| And still no traditional chinese characters which means you need
| a desktop extension and can't learn it on mobile.
| j45 wrote:
| I remember hearing an academic rail and rant against Duolingo at
| a prominent global online learning conference a few year ago.
|
| What struck me was the negativity in the face of a simple problem
| being solved - people want to learn to speak a language before
| they learn to read and write it for many valid reasons.
|
| Conversational fluency is a thing that has existed for a very
| long time.
|
| Duolingos superpower is that it can create beginners in languages
| new to them, at scale, something which most systems to date can't
| do as well.
|
| It's true a phone might not give you a full education, but we do
| search for plenty of things every day to learn to use knowledge.
|
| The esteemed academic did not present any alternatives to this
| desire among learners to start to learn a new language.. and
| instead went back to the theory of learning language through
| reading and writing first.
| dep_b wrote:
| Some of it's statistics were pretty interesting, like the huge
| amount of Arabic speaking people that wanted to learn Swedish.
| vr46 wrote:
| Driven by many refugees that sought asylum in Sweden, I
| believe.
|
| https://blog.duolingo.com/our-commitments-to-helping-refugee...
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Duolingo's loading screen regularly highlights that:
|
| "Did you know that most people learning Swedish on Duolingo
| are in Sweden (refugees)?" (quote from memory)
| uniqueid wrote:
| I don't know how recent that statistic is, but the statistics
| Duolingo released a few years back were misleading. I believe
| Duolingo claimed, for example, that Swedish speakers were most
| interested in learning Arabic, but they left out the fact that
| they only offered _one_ course for Swedish-speakers aside from
| Arabic.
| locallost wrote:
| The gamification part of the app works well, until you make a
| break. For me it was when I stopped using it because it basically
| felt like breaking off an addiction, and I didn't want to go
| back. So it kept me using it for a while, but ultimately it
| pushed me away from it. My motivation was a trip to a foreign
| country, and maybe I would've kept at it after it was over, but
| as it is, I didn't. From my experience then it seems their goal
| is less language learning, and more engagement in a typical
| social network kind of way.
|
| I think the app is technically also really good, and in general
| pleasant to use. And I think it's not a bad way to learn because
| you can immerse yourself more than by going to a school where a
| teacher tries to explain things to you. Doing homework is really
| important, and Duolingo is basically all homework.
|
| How much did I learn in about a month and a half of 30mins per
| day? Can't say after two years of not using the language at all,
| but at the time it was enough to get a sense of something if the
| menu was not in english etc. And when I was in the countryside
| (in Italy), I was looking for somebody and the mother of the
| person said just "ape", and I knew that they're taking care of
| the bees. And recently I walked next to a new Italian restaurant
| in town, and at the entrance it said "la nostra cucina ________
| (forgot what)" and I was like, oh, I know what that means. So
| it's not much, but it's not nothing.
| fy20 wrote:
| Reading the comments here gives me the impression that Duolingo
| is more of a game than a language learning ressource.
| Interestingly Zynga, makers of Farmville, targeted a $7B
| valuation on the day of their IPO nearly 10 years ago [0], it
| quickly dropped after though [1].
|
| [0]
| https://money.cnn.com/2011/12/14/technology/zynga_ipo_price/...
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/16/zynga-
| ipo-...
| rainydaybook wrote:
| I've always found Duolingo too boring and it didn't help me at
| all.
|
| I was able to learn 7 languages using different routes. I already
| knew Russian, I've learned English the usual school + moving to
| the country route, and I've learned Spanish, French, German,
| Italian and Latin by mostly reading books and watching online
| videos and movies.
|
| Having bookstores nearby (especially the Strand) with a lot of
| interesting books in Spanish, French, German and Italian were key
| for me. I completely switch 100% of all book reading to the
| language I'm learning.
|
| I would not be able to learn anything without a steady supply of
| interesting books.
|
| For Spanish, most movies on netflix and disney will have
| subtitles and dubs.
|
| For French, there's Arte Karambolage and the newer Disney films
| are available in french.
|
| For German, there's also Arte Karambolage and newer Disney films
| and 'Dark' on netflix.
|
| For Italian, there's a great youtube channel by Iliana Zodiaco
| with interesting book discussions and reviews. Again newer Disney
| plus films have Italian. And italian is just very easy in itself.
|
| Latin is a lot tougher because there's not as many books in it,
| and they tend to be not as easy. I've only read Caesar's Gallic
| wars and Winnie the Pooh. And the grammar is hard. I recommend
| checking out Lingua Latina Per Se, and youtube channels on Latin
| Grammar (there's one really good one, 'latintutorial'). Still,
| this is by far my weakest language. I've started Cicero orations
| against Catiline, but it's tough going!
|
| I didn't learn to speak in any of these because I don't have
| daily contact with native speakers, but once I do, it will be
| fairly easy.
| cerved wrote:
| huh, I've learnt 8 languages, mostly through conversation
| rainydaybook wrote:
| Which languages and how well did it work for you to
| transition into reading books?
| zild3d wrote:
| At what point do you start reading a book in a new language? Do
| you already know say 500 words? Otherwise I'd imagine you have
| to look up almost every word on the page
| TheFreim wrote:
| I only know English but am in the middle of studying Latin
| and I've found that the pain of having to look up works makes
| them stick in my mind pretty well. Once you can understand a
| decent number of words you can construct the meaning
| surprisingly quickly just based on context and the endings of
| words.
| rainydaybook wrote:
| I really recommend interlinear editions for Latin. And also
| again want to mention Lingua Latina Per Se. If you are ever
| in NYC there's East Village bookstore that has a lot of
| interlinear editions in Latin at affordable price. Other
| than that, you can also get Winnie the pooh in latin on
| amazon and another edition in english and read them in
| parallel.
|
| There's also wizard of oz in latin which is a lot longer
| than Winnie the pooh (and more interesting), but it's hard
| to find and expensive, alas.
| rainydaybook wrote:
| Depends on the book. I usually used Alice in wonderland,
| through the looking glass, and wizard of Oz as my first books
| in these languages, (except latin), and though I don't know
| the exact starting word count, I think a couple of hundred +
| familiarity with the book is enough for me. Some other easy
| and interesting books to consider are Tom Sawyer and The
| Hobbit, and Peter Pan.
| least wrote:
| I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16
| month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F,
| native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple
| hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly
| knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless
| your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't
| achieve any sort of fluency in your target language from taking a
| course in it, either.
|
| Language learning is _hard_ and a multifaceted _thing_ that no
| single application is going to adequately prepare you for.
| Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much
| harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for
| the vast majority of languages). Rote memorization is necessary.
| Immersion is necessary. Comprehensible input is necessary.
|
| Language learning apps like Duolingo sell the idea of learning a
| language which is an extremely attractive idea to a lot of
| people. They also make it a fun activity and incentivize
| engagement with humor and gamification. The problem is that you
| can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it
| and there isn't any single app that will.
|
| I suppose in the end Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of
| people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually
| learning a language, though.
| lbriner wrote:
| The immersion is definitely the most valuable. Very few
| language apps can help you learn idioms or slang, even if they
| are in common usage.
|
| Even if you were learning English, you are more likely to learn
| "that is very good" rather than "that is amazing" or "sweet!".
|
| I think we also underestimate how much immersion forces us into
| thinking in the other language when we are surrounded by it,
| even passively. If you use English all the time and learn
| German for 2 hours per day, it's not even close to what it
| would be like living in Germany, even if you were speaking
| English there.
| holoduke wrote:
| Exactly. I learned russian to B2 level without any paid
| material. I used Google translate to learn about 50 words per
| day. I went for couple of months to the country. Took me about
| 10 months to get to B2. Advancing further now is harder.
| Guidance needed from a professional.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a
| language with an app like it and there isn't any single app
| that will.
|
| I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that
| Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language.
|
| It is an amazingly powerful tool to bootstrap you from "I
| cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can
| pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're
| talking about", though.
|
| I cannot think of a single more effective method than Duolingo
| to get over this first hurdle.
| smallerfish wrote:
| DuoLingo is great as a first hurdle (better than e.g. Babbel,
| as it's friendly and eases you in gradually) - but there are
| diminishing returns. I found it useful to jump ship partway
| through the course and move to LingQ (which has a
| comparatively crude UX but exposes you to much more context.)
| dorchadas wrote:
| > I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that
| Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language.
|
| I'm active in various Facebook/Reddit groups dealing with
| language learning. The average user, who's never learned a
| language before, _does_ think DL will make them fluent. And
| DL advertises themselves in this manner as well. It 's a
| common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I
| understand natives?"
|
| > I cannot think of a single more effective method than
| Duolingo to get over this first hurdle.
|
| I think an actual coursebook is more useful, but it also
| likely depends on person. DL doesn't really teach language
| skills for most the courses. It has you translate, you never
| practice reading for comprehension, listening for
| comprehension (or listening to natives at all, in the courses
| with TTS), or writing. And not to mention the default of
| 'click the words' in the mobile app doesn't force recall at
| all.
| tgb wrote:
| Audio is the most important and hardest component of
| learning a language so apps have a huge advantage over
| textbooks any day. I really don't think recommending
| textbooks is at all relevant these days. Graded readers are
| better for simulating immersion. Apps are better for
| getting your feet wet. Textbooks can teach grammar but so
| can apps and really you have to be pretty far along for
| grammar to be the main stumbling block (over listening,
| pronunciation, and vocabulary).
| dorchadas wrote:
| > Audio is the most important and hardest component of
| learning a language so apps have a huge advantage over
| textbooks any day.
|
| Assuming the apps actually use native speaker audio.
| Which Duolingo doesn't do.
|
| > I really don't think recommending textbooks is at all
| relevant these days.
|
| I disagree completely. Textbooks are still, in my opinion
| and experience, the most efficient way to start learning
| a language.
|
| > really you have to be pretty far along for grammar to
| be the main stumbling block (over listening,
| pronunciation, and vocabulary).
|
| I wouldn't agree you have to be "pretty far along".
| Grammar becomes a huge stumbling block as soon as you get
| outside the pleasantries section of learning. Once you
| start trying to talk about your day and what you'll do
| and did, then the grammar really starts to matter.
| barney54 wrote:
| Why do you say Duolingo doesn't use native speakers?
| Their Spanish speakers for example are either native or
| indistinguishable from native speakers.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Then that's an update. For the longest time it was simply
| TTS, with all the downsides that contains.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I use newsinslowfrench.com for this very reason. They
| have a whole library of grammer lessons and language
| learning courses, but the main product really is that
| every week they produce 4 "news broadcasts" actually
| talking about news of the week by native speakers. In
| addition to the general listening reenforcement, each
| weeks script emphasizes a particular element of grammer
| and comes along with that topics lesson. They product
| both a speaking slow and speaking at a normal speed
| version so you can start with the slow one to get an
| understanding of what is happening, then listen to the
| actual speed lesson and have a chance. It's an awesome
| program, but it doesn't scale to other languages in the
| way that some general-purpsoe learn all the languages
| startup can.
| wildfire wrote:
| >= you never practice reading for comprehension
|
| This has existed for at least two years:
| https://www.duolingo.com/stories
|
| Yes, it does not cover every language but the intent is to
| address that ( perceived ) complaint.
|
| I disagree that an actual coursebook is more helpful.
|
| I used Duo for 6 months prior to moving to a Germany. It
| gave me an incredible confidence boost to be able to at
| least understand what was going on around me.
|
| After living in Berlin for 6 months I did a course and I
| was far ahead of others who had taken formal courses
| before.
|
| It has been 2 years since I left Germany, I still do my Duo
| daily and have continued doing German courses.
|
| It has helped maintain my minimal ability.
|
| > it also likely depends on person
|
| Indeed. My partner at the time did the same as me and Duo
| did not work for her at all.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > This has existed for at least two years:
| https://www.duolingo.com/stories
|
| I'm aware of stories, but given that it's only available
| in a small minority of languages, I'd say it's fair to
| say DL doesn't offer it when the majority of their
| languages don't (and likely won't ever) have stories.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| they used to have you read wiki articles like, 6 years
| ago? I feel that over the years, Duolingo started
| focusing way more on the game aspect than learning.
|
| The spaced repetition is also mostly gone, only somewhat
| available on desktop.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| > It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why
| can't I understand natives?"
|
| As an alternative anecdote, I've been using Duolingo for
| years and spend some time in the forums + different Spanish
| learning communities whose users frequently use Duolingo
| and I have never seen anyone ever ask this.
|
| It's always struck me as obvious to everyone that you would
| need multiple resources to become fluent, but Duolingo is
| useful as a good quality free resource that can be done
| anywhere at any time.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong, as we probably come across
| different posts or groups, just an another experience to
| share.
| [deleted]
| saiya-jin wrote:
| There are definitely more effective methods, just mostly not
| free and more time demanding.
|
| I have a mission to get B1 French, tried Duolingo with some
| basic level for cca 6 months in past year. You get into the
| bubble that you think you are progressing but reality is, its
| a very narrow and not-so-useful progress if whole language
| knowledge is your goal - mostly passive skills and certain
| type of language usage that goes along with the type of
| exercises in Duolingo.
|
| If you want real language knowledge, as OP mentions speaking
| is the hardest part (active & rapid usage of all that you
| know), and Duolingo doesn't prepare you for this, at all. If
| your goal is purely passive reading newspapers/articles, then
| its helpful a bit, but I would still use at least 2-3 other
| methods if you are even a bit serious about it.
|
| Try talking to people after using just Duolingo, heck try
| writing an official letter on whatever topic. You will not
| just struggle, you will fail if you don't use any external
| help.
|
| I've made tremendous progress with zoom meetings with
| professional teacher over shorter period of time. But its
| because I made it a priority and dedicated my time to it. And
| it costs quite a bit (doesn't have to, but my case is quite
| specific).
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in
| past year
|
| To be honest with you, I think you spent too much time on
| Duolingo. It's definitely not a suitable tool for learning
| new things after the first 8-12 weeks (assuming you put in
| around 30-60 minutes a day).
|
| To be fair, though, in that short initial period you can
| pretty easily learn close to 1000 common words, as well as
| basic sentence structure in your target langauge.
|
| This is immensely useful if you want to start communicating
| with others online or reading texts in your target
| language; you're looking up the few words you don't know
| rather than staring at a wall of gibberish.
| jfengel wrote:
| Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even
| if it were, it would take more than six months to get
| there.
|
| A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a
| classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster
| than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that
| number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't
| realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months.
|
| Duolingo could at best help you reach an A3, and even then
| you'd have to supplement it with reading and (ideally)
| conversation. Duolingo plus outside reading and listening
| could get you to a B1 level in a year if you really put
| your mind to it.
|
| They even make a podcast available, to help the listening
| part. I happen to listen to the French one myself, and
| highly recommend it. The stories are interesting and well
| produced, and bring stories (and accents) from all around
| the Francophonie.
|
| Doing it with a personal teacher will always be better than
| an app, but Duolingo gives a huge jump start on that. For
| free.
| splonk wrote:
| They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago,
| although I agree with the overall point that it's
| probably not going to get you there on its own.
|
| https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-
| evolving/
| jfengel wrote:
| I just completed all of that content up to French level
| 1. It's helpful in introducing a lot of important-but-
| uncommon verb cases (conditional, subjunctive), but at
| least at level 1 I still wouldn't really be able to
| follow them in context.
|
| It sure as hell doesn't help that in French they all
| sound the same. They're clear enough in written form, but
| French in particular requires close attention to context.
| Even other Romance languages draw the same distinctions
| more clearly.
| splonk wrote:
| One of the problems with the Spanish course is that all
| the later content (past checkpoint 5 or so) just stops
| explaining things at all, so it's up to the user to
| figure out things like how the negative imperative uses
| the subjunctive case. It's okay if you've taken a more
| structured language course in the past but I can imagine
| people starting from scratch just getting completely lost
| at that point.
| rjsw wrote:
| I found watching French TV helped get the equivalent of
| language immersion.
|
| One source that isn't region locked is TV5Monde [1], you
| can view programmes online if it isn't available as a
| broadcast channel where you are.
|
| [1] http://www.tv5monde.com/
| brushfoot wrote:
| The old FSI language courses are very effective. And free and
| in the public domain.
|
| FSI combines hundreds of pages of print materials with
| hundreds of verbal audio drills. I used it to supplement a
| French course in college and my professor asked me how I
| advanced so quickly. The course materials were doing very
| little for the rest of the class because they didn't force
| natural language thinking. FSI grammar drills make you think
| on your feet in conversations with different roles and
| grammatical rules.
|
| I had also tried Rosetta and Pimsleur at the time. Years
| later I tried Duolingo for another language. To me they all
| feel like fun toys, but only toys compared to FSI. If I
| wanted to learn another language, I'd check if it had an FSI
| course.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Surely there are updates to the FSI courses, right? Like
| what does our state department today use? Have they
| entirely farmed the job out to private institutions like
| Rosetta Stone and community colleges?
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I've not heard of FSI before. Thanks for the recommend.
| [deleted]
| minton wrote:
| If you search, you'll find plenty of people willing to sell
| you some "FSI" courses for hundreds of dollars. Is there an
| official source for FSI courses?
| harblcat wrote:
| It looks like https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/ is
| what you want.
| BossingAround wrote:
| > from "I cannot understand a single word of this language"
| to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what
| they're talking about", though.
|
| I think this too vastly oversells what Duolingo can do.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| This. Duolingo is a great introduction to a language and can
| get you from not knowing a word to being able to understand
| something and maybe have basic tourist-level conversational
| skills.
|
| Nothing gets you to fluency without actually just immersing
| yourself in a language for awhile.
| plainnoodles wrote:
| I agree. I feel like there's 3 phases to learning a new
| language.
|
| Background: English first language, French second, and I've
| been trying to learn Japanese.
|
| The three phases are:
|
| 1. Learning basic alphabet (if different from your own),
| basic grammar. Unlocks: being able to access more learning
| material and more rapid progress. Progress on these first
| building blocks is slow and can be discouraging.
|
| 2. Learning full grammar control. Even the most basic prose
| uses ~all of the tenses and conjugation rules. Unlocks:
| reading/watching non-educational native material.
|
| 3. Learning the culture and filling out vocab. Lots of
| languages are idiomatic, and understanding real-world usage
| can require just as much that you read Candide as that you
| memorize flashcards of more-obscure vocab (more-obscure
| meaning things like "chandelier". It's not an uncommon word,
| but a second-language learner probably won't run into it in
| wordbanks or anything.)
|
| I think Duolingo is good for doing 1, and like, half of 2. I
| don't think it can get you to 3.
| dnautics wrote:
| Duo is pretty good if your are a second language learner,
| with some courses/living experience under your belt and
| want to make sure you've covered all of the basic
| vocabulary. Like, maybe you never learned the word for
| "turkey" and it never came up.
| st1ck wrote:
| For 2, how often do you see Future Perfect Continuous or
| just Future Perfect anywhere outside of literary works?
|
| I'd put grammar at much lower priority than vocabulary &
| common phrases, since knowing just a bunch of words (at
| least in most languages) can get you very far.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Every foreign language that I've learned (4 in total) I felt
| it's necessary to get basic vocabulary and grammar and then
| just try communicating it in. Obviously living with people
| surrounded by the language helps, I don't even know if 'remote'
| is possible. For that purpose duolingo is pretty good.
| jamil7 wrote:
| This was the only way I could do it as well, formal courses
| didn't really help me after the basics. It's the same way I
| learned to program and I think some people are just wired
| that way.
| pedroaraujo wrote:
| A 16 month course of 6 to 7 hours per day with a lot of
| exercise and you didn't learn the language at all?
|
| I don't think Duolingo is a good solution but in your case you
| had all the opportunity to become fully fluent with that kind
| of regime, it starts to be your fault.
| least wrote:
| Obviously I knew my language well enough to perform a job
| which required some amount of proficiency in it. I'd imagine
| that some people might describe my level of proficiency as
| fluent. If you were to compare it against university, it'd be
| around the level of a four year degree, but undoubtedly worse
| than someone with a master's degree in the language.
|
| I think this is more a case of your definition of being
| "fully fluent" is vastly different from mine.
| pedroaraujo wrote:
| At this point, we are talking about a really high education
| of a certain language on a thread about a tool to help
| people going from zero to say basic sentences on another
| language.
|
| They are two different things. I mean, I am sure that there
| are academics with superior knowledge than me on my own
| native language.
| darkerside wrote:
| I think this is more of a Dunning-Kruger situation. The more
| you know a language, the more nuance you recognize and the
| more you see there is to learn. I only speak English, and I
| still feel my command of the language could grow.
| kirel33 wrote:
| Duolingo is a great example of gamification done well, I'd
| argue that's the whole selling point of it!
|
| I'll also say it was useful for me to learn basic German for a
| trip to Germany, 6 months of Duolingo + a few extra (beginner)
| books do wonders
| yobbo wrote:
| > won't achieve any sort of fluency in your target language
| from taking a course in it
|
| For a randomly picked person, yes, but it doesn't matter to
| apps that specifically cater to motivated language learners.
| It's like saying "new training shoes will not make a random
| person run better or become healthier".
|
| Obviously talent and motivation are mandatory.
|
| However, any stock-market valuation right now is divorced from
| the success potential of the business. That's a separate issue.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement
| with humor and gamification.
|
| That's the part I hated the most and the main reason I stopped
| using it. I wasted more time in front of "achievement"
| animations and shiny rewards than on actually learning the
| language
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yep. I studied French on the side while I was at uni. It was
| incredibly valuable as I learnt a lot about English and
| language in general, and a little French. I got to the stage I
| could actually read books in French, and write a little (I had
| a pen pal). But when I went to France, I could barely ask for a
| baguette in a shop and, once the reality set in, I prayed they
| didn't ask me any follow up questions because I just couldn't
| understand.
|
| Duolingo was the new kid on the block at the time, but there
| were still some people recommending Rosetta Stone at the time.
| They used to say it was "used by the US military" or some
| rubbish. All of these language learning things are the same:
| they claim to be easy and painless. They tell you it will be
| like acquiring your first language as a child. Nobody seems to
| remember the years of babbling and years of schooling that were
| required to become fluent in their native language.
|
| The good news is, learning a language as an adult is _easier_
| than learning your first language. The reason is simple: you
| already have language! You can learn about your second language
| using your first language. Immersion is still absolutely
| necessary, but learning grammar and vocabulary using your
| native language will greatly accelerate the whole process. But,
| bizarrely, Duolingo etc. actually refuse to use the most
| powerful tool you 'll ever have. It's completely the opposite
| way you should be learning a language as an adult.
| volta83 wrote:
| When learning a new language, one uses a lot of tools.
|
| Duolingo is just another tool at your disposal.
|
| Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo -
| will make you proficient in a language.
|
| If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement
| / scamming.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less
| Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language.
|
| Lots seem to have that belief, though. As I said in another
| comment, it's something you can see quite often in various
| language learning forums in Reddit (/r/duolingo) and
| Facebook, as well as on the DL forums themselves.
|
| > If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false
| advertisement / scamming.
|
| They might not explicitly _claim_ it, but they certainly
| imply it in my opinion.
| soperj wrote:
| It's free and it certainly isn't worse for you than watching
| tv.
| least wrote:
| If you're watching TV in your target language it can actually
| be very productive for your language learning and definitely
| better than Duolingo. Granted, you have to get to a point in
| your language learning for that to be the case. Perhaps
| Duolingo can get you over that first hurdle, though there are
| probably better resources for that.
| websites2023 wrote:
| Everything you say is true, which is why when I talk about
| language learning, I discourage people from setting fluency as
| their goal. Just knowledge of another language is good for the
| brain, and the fact that you can't become a native speaker
| should not deter anyone from trying it for fun.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Duolingo is great for producing a cursory introduction to a
| language. But yes, there is no substitute for immersion. For
| example I spent some time in Spain after learning the language
| basically on Duolingo. I'm sure I spoke like a 2 year old, but
| at least I wasn't totally helpless (I was even able to give
| someone directions to the airport!). Contrast that with my
| experience in France where I barely knew anything, and felt
| totally out of place and awkward.
| duo_comment wrote:
| > I suppose in the end Duolingo's valuation is more a
| reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than
| people actually learning a language, though.
|
| > Language learning is hard and a multifaceted thing that no
| single application is going to adequately prepare you for.
|
| Why do you sound disillusioned with Duolingo? It's just an app.
| I think the hacker news community undervalues it for no reason
| bawolff wrote:
| People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people
| just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom
| is and read a menu at a resturant.
| globular-toast wrote:
| For which the best tool is a phrasebook and learning enough
| pronunciation. Duolingo won't help with that.
| least wrote:
| That's fair, though I think in the case of wanting to be able
| to be a tourist in a place with a foreign language, you'd be
| better suited using phrasebooks and a translation app.
| Duolingo isn't going to really prepare you to have those
| kinds of conversations and isn't really a reference book, so
| being able to look up the few phrases you need to get around
| isn't practical. It's designed to teach you the language in a
| structured way and while the ordering of it and most language
| courses does attempt to get people proficient at very basic
| touristy things, depending on what it is you're doing, you
| might not even get to the point where you can do that.
|
| Reading a menu requires cultural context along with reading
| comprehension. Unless you're intimately familiar with the
| culture, being able to read it (as in sound it out by reading
| the characters) is pretty useless. nn (naan) is probably
| something you could understand because it's a loanword we use
| in English from Arabic but without cultural context could
| someone guess what qbly plw' (Kabuli Pilau) means? Probably
| not. If you're in Japan and China, learning to read a menu is
| in itself a huge barrier.
| ben_w wrote:
| > qbly plw'
|
| I've spent most of the last year struggling to learn the
| Arabic alphabet with Duolingo, yet FWIW my guess for what
| sort of dish Kabuli Pilau might be was fairly close.
|
| I wonder if anyone outside the UK knows, or can guess, what
| sort of dish a "spotted dick" or a "toad in the hole" is?
| Symbiote wrote:
| I presumably made the same guess (spiced rice grains
| mixed with meat/veg), but British people have the
| cultural context to know what pilau means. They even a
| section in Tesco (not just a search, an actual _section_
| ).
|
| From Denmark, I can suggest braendende kaerlighed
| (burning love, which for Danes is mashed potatoes and
| bacon), dyrlaegens natmad (vet's night snack, rye bread
| with pate, beef and meat jelly etc), aebleskiver (apple
| slices, round pancakes with zero apple).
|
| https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/food-
| cupboard/dri...
| ben_w wrote:
| > aebleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero
| apple)
|
| That reminds me that the regional name for deep fried
| rectangular potato prisms in Berlin is "Pommes", which is
| the French for apple, because everything else was dropped
| from the bowed French "pommes de terre friets".
|
| It's a _Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel_ situation ;)
| csa wrote:
| American here:
|
| 1. I have had some incredible Kabuli pilau. I hope
| everyone gets the chance to have some. There are quite a
| few restaurants in the Bay Area that serve it, but
| homemade is best in my experience.
|
| 2. Spotted dick is a cake (steamed?) with currants... at
| least the stuff I had. Delicious.
|
| 3. No idea about toad in the hole. It better be good with
| that name.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| More people learn languages to feel good and for bragging
| rights than for any actual use.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Bollocks. In Europe you learn languages to be able to go
| abroad and to at least try to meet strangers halfway.
| Knowing just your own tongue is rude.
| Ihatelifebutwe wrote:
| In America, plenty learn for fun and status. You can
| travel thousands of miles in the US and still speak to
| someone in English making language learning extremely
| rare.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| This is pretty valid, but sometimes people with limited
| knowledge will do something seemingly innocuous like ask
| where the 'toilet' is rather than the more polite reference
| and totally freak a complete stranger out. I think it's not a
| bad idea to do your best to try and learn at least a little
| bit beyond this before dropping into a foreign country, at
| the least because it makes the whole meeting new friends
| thing a lot easier.
| realityking wrote:
| Cultural context is difficult but it also can't be learned
| unless you already have some language skills. It's not
| helpful to expect 2nd language speakers never to make
| mistakes Like the foreign exchange student asking for a
| rubber instead of an eraser, those mistakes can be great
| learning points.
| tasogare wrote:
| Except you won't be able to do that with Duolingo. I'll go as
| far as saying that Duolingo is (very) negative for learners:
| it sells them the idea they are learning a language and
| progressing when they are in fact not.
|
| A good example of that is a comment I read here on HN from a
| user defending Duolingo since it allowed him to master
| hiragana (one script of Japanese) after two years and half.
| This is normally taking a week, for a slow learner, and the
| rest is practicing for fluency.
|
| Source: myself; learned and learning multiple languages, at
| university and by myself. Working in edtech research.
| tasogare wrote:
| Replying to deleted post:
|
| First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000
| depending on what you read is enough. Then count 400-500
| kanji per year if learning at university and being
| motivated (lot of people stops).
|
| For conversation count two intensive years for the bare
| minimum, add one for more fluency. Actually all depends on
| how much effort you spend on it, I know a guy who was JLPT
| N2 or so after it's first university year (needless to say,
| he spent an aweful amount of time practicing, especially
| with natives). Then add at least one year in Japan to
| really get a good grasp (I went from N3 to N2 in a year
| while basically partying).
| csa wrote:
| > First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About
| 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough.
|
| You're still _grossly_ over-representing what is needed
| to read Japanese.
|
| 1. 10k _characters_ is utter nonsense. I assume that
| people conflate the 10k _words_ needed for JLPT N1 with
| characters. They are totally different, since words are
| often combinations of characters.
|
| 2. Joyo kanji has 2,136 characters. _All_ government
| documents and pretty much all mainstream media use only
| these characters plus some kanji specific to names. Any
| kanji outside of joyo (e.g., an unusual name or a
| stylistic word) typically have a phonetic reading
| (furigana) next to or over the character(s). Joyo is what
| is tested for the JLPT 1 (the top level).
|
| 3. Hundreds of joyo kanji are very context-specific --
| that is, they are relatively low utility.
|
| 4. There are a few additional kanji outside of joyo that
| are widely known. Educated folks also know more than joyo
| that are specialist terms or stylistic words. It would be
| like an English speaker knowing words like
| "deoxyribonucleic acid" (DNA) or "ceteris paribus".
|
| 5. Lastly, for anyone reading Classical Japanese or
| historical documents... well, much of the above is not
| relevant due to changes in the language (mostly
| simplification over time). It depends on what is being
| studied or read.
|
| 6. 3000 kanji nets someone "highly educated native
| speaker" status -- think teacher, doctor, lawyer. 5000
| kanji gets you nerd status -- think professor or
| logomaniac.
| sova wrote:
| While it's been posted before, with just under 800 kanji
| you can have coverage of 90% of kanji in the wild. Of
| course, one still needs to learn all the clustered terms
| that these kanji can play together to create, but it
| reduces the barrier to native media substantially. [0]
|
| [0] https://japanesecomplete.com/777
| tasogare wrote:
| Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that
| I'm right. I chatted as soon as yesterday with someone
| studying Vietnamese dictionaries written in kanbun and
| nom, so indeed that person need to know a lot of kanji.
| That's not representative of the whole society, but you
| can't rule out the existence of those people. It's also
| telling that the biggest dictionary of Chinese characters
| is the Daikanwa Jiten, compiled by a Japanese.
| csa wrote:
| > Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that
| I'm right.
|
| We might be talking past each other. I'm speaking
| specifically of non-native learners of Japanese.
|
| I think you overrepresented for non-native learners of
| Japanese (who don't get the benefit of 9 years of joyo
| kanji education), but you were closer to "right" than
| most.
|
| Most learners of Japanese should focus on about 1000
| kanji (roughly kyouiku kanji). This is easily learnable
| in a year for most people, and that amount will get them
| over 90% of text coverage that general learners will be
| reading.
|
| Pretty much no learner should have an initial goal of
| learning 3000 kanji. Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass
| N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan,
| then _maybe_ they can choose to move that direction,
| especially if they plan on being a professional in Japan.
| Unless they find it to be a fun hobby, I would ask them
| why they are choosing to reach that level as a goal. The
| 2000th to 3000th most frequently used characters have
| very low utility, and this knowledge is far beyond "need
| this to survive /thrive" level. Some people who answer
| the "how many kanji" question in English-speaking forums
| (not you) seem to treat 3000 characters as almost semi-
| literate, and this couldn't be further from the truth.
|
| For a learner of Japanese, I would never recommend that
| anyone start with an initial goal of 5000 kanji. For
| anyone who ends up there, it would usually just come
| naturally over time to anyone being an academic (most
| likely in some sort of language or linguistics field)...
| and the masochists who try to take kanken 1.
|
| Finally, to address your initial comment about 3000-5000
| kanji being enough depending on what someone reads, I
| would put that number at more like 1200-1300 being enough
| with very mild use of a dictionary or lookup function on
| a computer/phone for learners. This will get folks though
| the vast majority of kanji in newspapers, magazines, and
| general audience books. At that point, just reading and
| looking stuff up will add to their kanji knowledge base
| organically.
| redthrow wrote:
| > Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do
| some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can
| choose to move that direction
|
| For the vast majority of people (including native
| speakers), knowing a few extra kanji outside of joyo
| brings very little benefit.
|
| Most natives get by just fine by having a very rough
| understanding of even joyo [1], thanks to smartphones and
| computers.
|
| Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change
| how you are perceived by natives [2], so it may be worth
| a try if your goal is to get closer to native speakers.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHQcHSaj-c4
| csa wrote:
| > Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change
| how you are perceived by natives
|
| 100% agree. Nailing accent helps smooth some wrinkles as
| a foreigner.
| [deleted]
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Can you talk about the resources you used to learn in the
| classroom? I learned German using the Foreign Service Institute
| handbook and I thought it was great introduction to the
| language. I'd love to know what's in use nowadays.
| least wrote:
| The language resources were largely designed in house as the
| other comment mentions, so unfortunately unless you attend
| DLI, you probably won't get to see them. I don't think
| there's much in terms of content that you can't find in
| civilian courses, just that it's designed specifically around
| being in class for 6-7 hours a day rather than the 3 hours
| per week you'd be attending at University.
|
| There were audio recordings made specifically for the course
| and there is some deal with Transparent language to provide
| language software to the military like Rapid Rote, though
| Anki is just as capable as Rapid Rote is.
|
| Big things are access to native speakers (most of the
| instructors) and non-native "military language instructors"
| who can help navigate difficult to understand concepts for
| non-natives. Also the whole spending every day doing it over
| and over again part.
|
| Sorry if this isn't as helpful as you were hoping.
| csa wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this person was learning Pashto or Dari.
|
| The materials were mostly (all?) developed in-house.
|
| If they were learning Dari, they would have been better off
| just using externally-produced Farsi textbooks since they
| have a more robust history of development.
|
| The specific recommended materials for an introduction to a
| language depend on what your goals are for learning the
| language.
| least wrote:
| Yeah, the Dari course was notoriously bad quality and rife
| with controversy with some of the highest failure rates in
| the entire Presidio at the time. Not sure if anything's
| changed at this point?
| csa wrote:
| Things improved slightly, then the program got reduced
| and then cut due to less demand.
|
| Somewhere in there, they got creative and had folks who
| passed Farsi take a 3-month Dari course to bridge the gap
| between Farsi and Dari, and those folks had a lot of
| success.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I imagine it's helpful for their valuation as well that there's
| no accountability on Duolingo's part whether anybody actually
| learns or not, which makes think you're spot on. They don't
| have graduation rates like a school would, or job placement
| rates or any meaningful metric. There's no measure of success
| they can track apart from how many people finish the "course"
| which means nothing with regard to whether they actually
| learned anything or not.
| wpietri wrote:
| As a general rule, modern-day capitalism produces products
| based on whether you can market it to somebody with money, not
| on actual results. For a lot of markets, the revenue is nearly
| as good and it's much cheaper to make something that doesn't
| work well, or doesn't work at all.
|
| The most obvious example here is make-money-fast schemes. Those
| things never work; if they did, they wouldn't be offered for
| sale to randos. But there are a ton of others.
| bamboozled wrote:
| But Duolingo makes people happy because you can sit on your
| ass, or in bed, not really _try_ and feel like you 're putting
| in the hard yards.
|
| Kind of like watching sport instead of playing / training.
|
| 10/10 satisfaction score.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is
| much harder than listening
|
| Listening is much harder for me. I find it easy to mimic/parrot
| sounds, but not distinguish them when listening.
| least wrote:
| Speaking in this case isn't simply speaking words out loud
| intelligibly, but the entire process of thinking and
| communicating ideas in a foreign language. There is almost
| always a gap in your knowledge with regards to what you can
| understand being said and what you can actually say which is
| why I say it is harder, even if you can say everything that
| you _can say_ fluently.
| watwut wrote:
| > The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a
| language with an app like it and there isn't any single app
| that will.
|
| It still improves you way more then anything else you can do
| alone with low effort.
|
| Being fluent is absurdly high goal. At first, remembering basic
| structure of sentence and vocabulary is already achievement.
| bobwaycott wrote:
| > * Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is
| much harder than listening, and both are much harder than
| reading (for the vast majority of languages).*
|
| I've always found speaking and reading to be _far_ easier than
| listening--especially keeping up with native speakers of a
| foreign language.
| zarzavat wrote:
| > Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is
| much harder than listening, and both are much harder than
| reading (for the vast majority of languages).
|
| In my opinion it's the other way around.
|
| Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both
| intrinsically and to teach.
|
| Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text
| at whatever pace you want.
|
| Reading instruction is strongly amenable to automation. You can
| just sit and do exercises on an SRS until the cows come home
| and you will eventually learn to read. _Not_ on duolingo
| through.
|
| Speaking is the next easiest, you can't go at any speed but you
| can at least go slowly. Plus you only have to deal with one
| accent when speaking, your own.
|
| Most languages have more consistent spelling than English, so
| if you know how to read an IPA phonology chart (and if you are
| embarking on the multi-year journey of learning a language then
| spending a time to learn IPA is a no-brainer) then you can
| probably figure out how to speak in a way that is understood.
|
| Listening is the hardest because you don't control either the
| content, the pace, nor the accent. If someone is throwing words
| out like a gattling gun or in a non-standard dialect then tough
| luck. The learning curve for listening is a cliff in most
| circumstances.
|
| Neither speaking nor listening are amenable to automation. TTS
| is no substitute for native speakers, and automatic speech
| recognition is a joke. So the only way to pick up these skills
| is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.
| least wrote:
| I in fact did indicate that reading is the easiest in my
| post.
|
| Speaking is harder than listening because it requires you to
| produce language and convey ideas from your own mind, with
| proficiency in pronouncing it in such a way that a native
| speaker might understand you. Things like idioms you may be
| able to infer meaning from interpretation when you are
| listening or reading but you will never use them in speaking
| unless you really truly know them. You're correct that the
| variables of listening are out of your control (which is what
| makes it so difficult as compared to reading), but that does
| not make it harder than speaking.
|
| In the military where the DLPT actually tests all three
| categories for proficiency, speaking is consistently and
| universally, regardless of target language, the one language
| learners are least proficient at.
| tapland wrote:
| According to the test specifications.
|
| You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such
| limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or
| using words you have no knowledge of.
|
| Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much
| easier than accurately understanding others in my two
| secondary languages, and the same for my fiancee who is a
| native English speaker with one secondary language.
| consilla wrote:
| I'm surpised this is getting downvoted. The OPs assertion
| that listening is easier than speaking makes sense in the
| context he describes, a closed testing environment. In a
| more practical setting, as someone who is living in
| another country and learning the language, it is far
| easier for me to convey my meaning with limited
| vocabulary, than to listen and interpret another speaker,
| and especially a group conversation.
|
| Certainly listening is easier than me speaking at the
| same proficiency as the other speaker, but in terms of
| what matters for using the language on a day to day
| basis, it is the other way around.
| least wrote:
| When we're speaking of proficiency and comparing them
| between reading, listening, and speaking, you look at
| them through a similar lens. How well can you understand
| or communicate ideas in the language? Can you convey
| complicated and nuanced thoughts in your target language?
| Can you understand those? How would your speaking ability
| compare to a well educated native speaker? How does it
| compare against a less educated native speaker?
|
| You feel more fluent in speaking because you're only
| working within your own ability while listening you'll
| encounter things you don't understand or situations where
| it's difficult to understand things all the time. That
| doesn't mean you're more proficient at speaking and in
| most cases you aren't going to be nearly as proficient at
| speaking as you think.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I'm a native Russian speaker but have forgotten most of
| it since I moved away from there. One thing that makes
| listening so much easier than speaking is that I can
| often infer context of a sentence based on just a few
| words, even if I don't know what the other 5 are. With
| speaking, I might know what I want to say but I get stuck
| on the one or two words that I just don't have in my
| vocabulary, and it crushes my ability to communicate(in
| Russian).
|
| Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an
| anecdote :)
| least wrote:
| > According to the test specifications.
|
| ...Which define proficiency nearly identically between
| the different skill sets. Your relative proficiency for
| speaking is expected to be worse until you reach native
| proficiency, where you are still worse at speaking than
| reading or listening, but it doesn't very much matter in
| most situations.
|
| > You will not speak what you don't know.
|
| Yes, and what you don't know with speaking is invariably
| greater than what you don't know with listening and
| reading, hence why everyone scores lower in proficiency
| with speaking relative to their ability in listening or
| reading.
|
| > Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much
| easier than accurately understanding others in my two
| secondary languages
|
| If all my utterances in English were "I go school," "I
| eat pie," "I clean teeth," native speakers will easily
| understand what I'm saying. That doesn't mean I'm
| proficient or that it's easier to speak than it is to
| listen, just that I can create coherent and correctly
| understood sentences in English.
| eythian wrote:
| As someone learning a second language through classes,
| immersion, and - when I remember - apps, I don't really
| agree.
|
| Certainly early on speaking is easy because you have a
| handful of words and know how to put them together, and
| listening is very hard because you can barely make out the
| sounds.
|
| However, in my experience and I've noticed this in others
| too, after a while you get better and better at listening and
| it quite handily overtakes your ability to speak as now
| you're wanting to construct sentences more complex than "a
| table for four please", but you can't necessarily pull out
| the words and put them in the order you need in any useful
| timeframe.
| cpursley wrote:
| Yes, this right here! Not being able to reply to something
| you understand because you can't express yourself quite yet
| (but almost)...
| hnhamdani2 wrote:
| In this case I agree with OP. Yeah, you have much more
| control in the output when you speak. However, most of the
| case, it'll take forever to brute force your brain to compose
| the right words/sentences and even found no result most of
| the times when you're not fluent. On the other hand, in
| listening, you've built the pattern recognition during your
| study and easier to spot the speech pattern.
|
| In my country, lots of people are bilingual due to the nature
| of the ethnic composition. I know way more people whose much
| better at listening than speaking with the language that
| they're not fluent with.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _So the only way to pick up these skills is with real
| native speakers which is expensive and slow._
|
| TV, movies, anime etc can fulfill the listening purpose. But
| you have to do it in copious amounts and turn off subtitles.
| danuker wrote:
| Or turn on subtitles in the language of the audio; it might
| let you discover the writing of new words you hear.
| kelnos wrote:
| The parent _did_ claim that reading is easiest (you 've even
| quoted that), so I don't think you're disagreeing there.
|
| I do agree with the parent that listening is easier than
| speaking. When you're speaking, you have to know the right
| words, and know what order to put them in. Sure, there's some
| leeway: if you put words in the wrong order, or incorrectly
| conjugate a verb, or forget some types of words, your meaning
| will probably still go through. But if you forget other types
| of words, you just can't be understood. And sometimes
| conjugating a verb incorrectly does completely change the
| meaning of your sentence, which can confuse the listener.
|
| I agree that the things you mention -- accents, pace, content
| -- are somewhat out of your control. But you can always ask
| the speaker to speak slower, and that will often lessen the
| impact of the accent on your ability to understand. The
| content problem is still there, just as it is with speaking,
| but I've found that I can usually understand more words than
| I can think of to speak on my own. And often you can get the
| meaning based on context even if you don't understand a word
| here or there.
|
| I'm just a single data point, but... I took Spanish way back
| in primary school, for 5 years. I'm terrible at speaking it
| nowadays (over 20 years later). When I hear others speak
| Spanish, however, I can usually understand things that I'd
| never be able to speak on my own, even if I had all the time
| in the world to think about it.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen
| to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have
| things repeated.
|
| Speaking is hard, but those native in the language is more
| likely to understand slow and broken speech with a little
| effort than a learner is to understand fast and unclear
| speech that takes shortcuts.
|
| This is my experience with learning Mandarin at least, both
| using classroom teaching and Duolingo.
| least wrote:
| > Listening is easier than speaking only when what you
| listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you
| can have things repeated.
|
| This is definitely not the case. Yes, listening to
| difficult audio is really hard to interpret. Your
| proficiency in listening isn't defined simply by how well
| you can listen to people in a perfect scenario, but also
| your capacity to understand the language.
|
| Reading is usually easier than listening because it
| provides a ton of context clues, a visual indication of
| what is being said (as in... writing), and essentially no
| time limit. If you can work out what is going on
| surrounding unfamiliar words, you can, at least
| sometimes, figure out through the context of the entire
| piece of writing what the meaning is. With listening, you
| are constrained because you are listening at the pace of
| the speaker, but there's still plenty of advantages that
| exists to help you interpret the meaning.
|
| With speaking there's none of that. It's entirely
| dependent on your own mastery and because of this people
| will almost always speak at lower proficiency than they
| can read or write. It might not be apparent to you
| because you're the one doing the speaking, but I can
| almost guarantee you that your level of proficiency is
| greater in listening than it is speaking, because you
| can't convey the same level of complexity in your speech
| that you can understand from someone speaking it.
| arghwhat wrote:
| My ability to succeed in approximately deciphering an
| _arbitrary_ sentence conveying meaning A is lower than my
| ability to communicate that approximate meaning myself.
| The odds are made much lower if communicating with a new
| person not already aware of my exact vocabulary.
|
| Of course, I can decipher much fancier sentences than I
| can produce (especially in a controlled environment as I
| originally mentioned). My produced sentence will be much
| more awkward than the sentences I can decipher, but it
| will work.
|
| From my perspective, this makes listening harder than
| speaking - I will not be fluent in a language until a
| decade of practical use, so the only metric that matters
| to me is whether something had practical application and
| acceptable understanding. In that sense, removing parts
| of a sentence you can't produce before you say it still
| passes as a success, but not understanding anything or
| most what a person is trying to say to you is not. Most
| people are not able to sufficiently simplify their speech
| as they do not know what or how you have been taught. If
| you are already able to have the meta-conversation needed
| to inquire about and discuss meanings of words and
| sentences comfortably, then you are already an advanced
| speaker.
|
| Note that this is very subjective. I am expressing my
| current state of learning as it is, and claiming that
| this is wrong is silly. On the other hand claiming that
| you will experience the same would also be silly, but
| it's none tell less worth sharing experiences.
| LanceH wrote:
| If there are multiple ways to say something, I only need
| to know one of them to speak clearly. For listening I
| need to be ready for anything.
| JoeyBananas wrote:
| Duolingo is such a joke. They don't have even a single
| textbooks worth of content for the languages that I've tried.
| high_byte wrote:
| the problem isn't that it's hard to do. the problem is that
| their business model relies on their app not achieving it's
| portrayed purpose - learning. success means losing your
| customers. that's why I don't use it anymore and I'm baffled by
| how good they are at being bad. or rather - staying on the
| exact thin border between "not good enough" and "not bad
| enough".
| mym1990 wrote:
| This just isn't true. Duolingo's mission is 'to make
| education free, fun, and accessible to all'. And for the most
| part they have succeeded at(or are striving towards) doing
| those things and have left the learning part to you. Maybe it
| is not working out for you, and that is likely the case for
| many people, but to say that their model is to create an
| unsuccessful learning environment sounds a little bitter.
| Fernicia wrote:
| Such a silly way to think about it. You could frame every
| service as having this conflict. Does Google want to
| obfuscate results so I'll spend longer looking for results?
|
| Duolingo is extremely popular because people get use out of
| it and like it. You've taken a tiny perverse incentive and
| jumped to the conclusion that it trumps all the other more
| important incentives.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's not perfect but I found that it was the easiest way to
| just get started. Japanese is intimidating but Duolingo got me
| started. Immersion and other material such as detailed books on
| the subject are still absolutely necessary but without Duolingo
| I'd still be planning to learn japanese instead of doing it.
| Reason077 wrote:
| I think Duolingo's valuation says more about the current stock
| market than it does about Duolingo.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Can I just say that 'cryptologic linguist for the army' sounds
| like an incredibly far out occupation, and also that 16 months
| of 7 hours a day of linguistics _training_ sounds like a very
| daunting undertaking. Kudos to you!
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| I got huge value out of Duolingo as a first step. I live in a
| German speaking country where it's entirely possible to speak
| no German. Duolingo and textbooks got me far enough to enroll
| in a B1 course and find some speaking partners. The alternative
| would probably have been paying for a year of A-Level courses,
| and to be honest I may not have found the time. For absolute
| beginners, Duolingo has a lot of value.
| JCharante wrote:
| The alternative could be a $40 textbook and an open source
| flashcard / srs program.
| rafaelero wrote:
| Ok, boomer.
| neurotrace wrote:
| The problem with just textbooks is you don't get to hear or
| speak the language at all. There's also very little
| structure so you're expecting a novice to know how to
| effectively test themselves.
| JCharante wrote:
| The beginner textbooks I've used have accompanying CDs,
| and also audio available on their websites. The best
| beginner listening practice is to focus on minimal pairs
| so that you can start to hear the difference between
| different sounds that originally sounded the same. Some
| textbooks include this (I remember having to combine
| initials and finals in Chinese with my teacher)
|
| For speaking, Duolingo speech recognition isn't very good
| and is not going to provide specific feedback for
| improving your pronunciation. I'm not even a fan of
| practicing pronunciation virtually with a live tutor. I
| have found in person pronunciation practice to be very
| valuable compared to doing the same thing but online. A
| textbook doesn't solve this and neither does Duolingo.
| least wrote:
| I'm glad that it worked out for you! I can't comment on the
| quality of every individual course, but if it propels you
| towards your language learning goals, then it's definitely
| doing its job.
|
| I do think that for many languages there are more _effective_
| ways to learn in a given time period than Duolingo, but if
| Duolingo helps you stay motivated and keeps you practicing in
| a way that other methods couldn 't, that in itself has a ton
| of value.
| end0r wrote:
| I have been learning languages on Duolingo and Babbel for
| years now. None of them I can speak well, but certainly
| well enough to have a good base of knowledge to start with.
| Duolingo has the advantage that you can do it whenever you
| want, while commuting, quickly a lesson before lunch, or on
| the loo. It just sums up if you consequently keep doing it.
|
| I totally agree with your point, though, that some
| languages are better suited for Duolingo style of learning
| than others. For example with Russian it was quite
| difficult without any grammar basics explained so I needed
| to additionally read about it, while with Danish it was
| much easier to grasp the mechanics. Not quite so with the
| pronunciation...
| dlahoda wrote:
| duolingo is A2 which is very good to continue own to B2
| jraby3 wrote:
| In theory their valuation is based on expected future returns.
| There are a lot of apps that have no or limited benefits that
| still drive traffic and revenue (all the brain training apps
| come to mind).
| least wrote:
| Yes, I agree. I think that there's a lot of value to be
| extracted from people's desire to learn a language, whether
| or not the product is actually effective at creating that
| environment to do so. That's kind of what I meant in my
| original comment.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I find it really useful for practice, but it's obviously not
| the best thing to be using solely if you think that's going to
| reach you to proficiency.
|
| It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably
| the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game
| these days yet 100x more productive. I've got books for
| learning Russian and German to go through along with using
| Duolingo as a pretty good option for practicing basically
| everything else. It's fun to compare how I got Spanish down via
| immersion without really practicing too hard on anything
| outside of rosetta stone (Didn't teach me a damn thing, was a
| very bad tool back in the day)... Just reading a book from the
| 1950s (Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish -- highly recommended)
| and sinking myself into that world for a while took so many
| years. I'm pretty sure I would have done better off with some
| better programs and proper study instead, but it definitely
| gave perspective to where tools like Duolingo have their place
| and where they're the most useful in pretty much giving you
| gameified drills and tests.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's
| probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a
| video game these days yet 100x more productive.
|
| I've tried to use Duolingo to learn a new language. I found
| it very effective for a few weeks (of daily exercise).
|
| I remember though, that at some point the questions were
| repeated frequently, went off the intended theme, and
| overall, they were not intended to make users think or
| remember.
|
| Getting off track was something that irritated me the most,
| as I couldn't focus on a subject.
|
| Essentially, after the initial phase, it's completely useless
| as a learning tool. It's a shame because it could be
| effective and fun at the same, but I have the suspicion that
| mid/long-term learning effectiveness is not their target.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah, that's kind of the point where I reached with German
| on it and I think I'd have to agree with you. The only
| problem with German is that practicing in-person outside of
| that country and the conversation usually veers into
| English much too easily as their English is often quite
| good.
|
| I'm surprised how much I get now between translating words
| I don't know on leo.org and just reading what I know
| already on news articles which is how I'm keeping up
| casually on that. The journalism in that country is top
| notch and it is probably worth learning the language for
| this alone.
| ffffwe3rq352y3 wrote:
| First if you enjoy learning new languages and you find it
| useful thats great! Not trying to put you down in any way.
| However, you say:
|
| > it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's
| like a video game these days yet 100x more productive
|
| This makes it sound like video games are useless and learning
| a new language is super useful. In your situation this could
| totally be true but for some people (like me!) learning a new
| language isn't super useful! If your a video game dev playing
| games would be 100x more productive than learning a new
| language and if you travel around the world then learning a
| language would be 100x better than a video game! I feel like
| its almost impossible to know whats more "productive" in
| general.
| [deleted]
| candyman wrote:
| I feel the same way about Duolingo. I used to be able to
| speak a moderate amount of German and let it lapse. I picked
| up Duolingo because it substituted for some other casual
| activity I might do on my phone (crossword, read hackernews,
| etc.) And learning some conversational German feels like a
| better use of time. However it is pretty basic. I know there
| are hundreds or thousands of units and spending 10 minutes a
| day probably won't get me very far. Still if I keep it up and
| take a trip to German I'll at least know some of the basics.
| I practice with my long-suffering family who has to listen to
| me say Mein sohn is sehr klug! and other stuff like that all
| the time.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Pick up a book or two to round out your formal
| understanding of grammar, and make some German friends,
| maybe even just online if that's easiest to help you with
| your pronunciation.
| gambiting wrote:
| I've learnt both English and German at school, for pretty much
| equal amounts of time - about 12 years each. And well, I can
| speak fluent English, but barely any German, despite usually
| having at least ~2 hours of lessons a week, plenty of homework,
| oral exercises.....
|
| For me, it has everything to do with actually using the languge
| in practice. English was and is everywhere - it's much easier
| to practice when all your favourite movies, games and books are
| in English - but my real life experience with German was
| limited to those few times we went to Germany or Austria.;
|
| I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much you
| "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can
| practice somewhere in the real world.
| akudha wrote:
| Language learning is like Math, without consistent practice
| nobody is going to get anywhere. In some ways, languages are
| harder than Math - Math is logical, languages are often not
| (tons of arbitrary rules on spelling, grammar and especially
| pronunciation). More and more languages are going to die,
| despite best efforts from linguists to preserve them. English
| is going to be the dominant language for the foreseeable
| future, and we'll soon have apps (if we don't already have
| them) interpreting in real time. Given the long time
| commitment needed to even get to a basic fluency in a
| language, most people are going to give up quickly, except a
| tiny percentage of population that genuinely loves learning
| new languages.
|
| If everyone learned at least one foreign language, the world
| would be a much better place.
| least wrote:
| Immersion is absolutely essential to language learning and
| English has an _abundant_ amount of resources, as you say.
|
| I understand the difficulties you've had with getting
| immersed with German, given that my target language while in
| the military had very little content period, let alone things
| I was particularly interested in. It might be worthwhile to
| look for German translations of works you've read/watched in
| your native language or English, though, if you're still
| interested in learning it.
|
| > I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much
| you "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can
| practice somewhere in the real world.
|
| Yeah, there's too many methods you need to use to facilitate
| language learning and while Duolingo can potentially fill a
| lot of these holes, I don't think it can be your holistic one
| stop shop.
| itronitron wrote:
| If you use Netflix and VPN into Germany or Austria to watch
| movies then many of them have closed captioning offered
| only in German.
| davidzweig wrote:
| We're expanding LLN into this:
| https://www.languagereactor.com/ "Language Reactor ...
| helps you to discover, understand, and learn from native
| materials." It's still rough. TurtleTV is kind of useful
| already. (P.S. looking for a good mobile dev in Europe).
| least wrote:
| Learning Language with Netflix is a great resource and
| I'm really happy to see you're expanding! This looks
| awesome!
|
| And yeah, anyone that's trying to learn a language should
| definitely try immersing with a tool like this.
| Connecting words with things on screen and hearing
| different people speak are really useful, and your
| retention of vocabulary is going to be better when you
| can see it in different contexts.
| [deleted]
| dubeye wrote:
| I find it fun to learn language on Duolingo as a kind of
| game. But unless I have a need to regularly use the learning,
| I know for sure it won't stick.
|
| And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much
| impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your
| native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good,
| has a couple of flags.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's fine, because I only need 90%. I have no interest in
| passing for native, my intention is to communicate.
| j45 wrote:
| I think a lot of people miss this point.
|
| Conversational literacy is a huge step on its own.
| rtpg wrote:
| There are plenty of people effectively native in multiple
| languages. It's not guaranteed (I have that missing part
| for one language despite having done all of High School and
| college in it), but i know people who speak perfectly in
| two languages (usually English+their parents native tongue)
|
| I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need
| obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute
| well, so it's easier to spot non-native speakers.
| bojan wrote:
| > I have found that English is a bit weird in that you
| need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to
| execute well, so it's easier to spot non-native speakers.
|
| This applies to every language out there, English is
| certainly not an exception in this aspect.
| FabHK wrote:
| > I have found that English is a bit weird in that you
| need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to
| execute well
|
| I'd think that English is not unique there.
|
| To speak Chinese at the level of an educated native, I'd
| say you have learn not only the language, but also the
| country's history, and have some familiarity with
| canonical Chinese texts such as the "Four Books and Five
| Classics" (Confucius, Mencius, etc.), "The Dream of the
| Red Chamber", etc., to understand idioms such as "Si Mian
| Chu Ge " (four sides of Chu song = facing insurmountable
| difficulty, defeat [1]).
|
| As another example, Hong Kong has its own lingo (a
| variety of Cantonese) that evolves so rapidly that HK
| people that have been abroad a few years tell me that
| they note that the language has evolved and shifted when
| they come back.
|
| I'm fairly certain that it is easy to spot non-native
| speakers in many languages, maybe even easier than in
| English.
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Si Mian Chu Ge
| chki wrote:
| > And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty
| much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon
| your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly
| good, has a couple of flags
|
| But those last .1 % are not very useful anyway if you're
| not living abroad. You want to be able to communicate
| fluently and not make noticeable mistakes, but it's not
| necessary to seem like a native speaker. Unless you want to
| become a spy maybe.
| konschubert wrote:
| It works if you're learning the language while you're in a
| place where it's spoken.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| But then one got to wonder why not spend that time learning
| in the wild. People have forgotten how it works I suppose.
| It would take less energy.
|
| There are a few options to learn a language. Some say
| immersion. What's most effective for the brain to capture
| and memories is _needs_.
|
| We tend to learn languages out of a desire to add them to
| our skill belt. Or out of fun. And we are having a hell of
| a time this way. Duolingo innovates and will happily
| monetize their effort.
|
| Learn a language? Move to the country where it's spoken.
| Get a job where interactions are a necessity, but where one
| would perform to some level without even the basics. Think
| kitchen porter in a buzzing restaurant. 6 months later you
| are fluent, and have actually learnt local expressions and
| the way people actually communicate. From there you can
| read books and ramp up your vocab to proper fluency.
|
| I took English, by force, for 12y , 4h per week. I could
| still barely read, and in no way get a face to face
| conversation even started other than hello, what time is
| it.
|
| Months in an environment where communication was a need,
| and suddenly I found myself nearly fluent. Never having to
| open a grammar manual or do extra effort for the sake of
| learning.
|
| The teaching models are flawed. They are designed to
| extract a profit, at the detriment of the learners.
| ghaff wrote:
| For the vast vast majority of people, if learning a
| language is "immersion or bust," their entirely rational
| response will be bust.
|
| That said, relatively casual language learning isn't
| likely to yield a lot outside of essentially
| entertainment value. I had four years of high school
| French which likely tops the relatively casual bar. On
| the one hand, I classify my French as pretty terrible. On
| the other hand, I've traveled to Paris with a friend who
| doesn't know _any_ French and it makes me realize I
| actually do have a bit of working knowledge especially
| when it comes to reading.
| orky56 wrote:
| Totally echo all of this. I'm one of the owners at the Orange
| County Lingual Institute (oclanguages.com) and we see Duolingo
| as the gateway for people to tap into their language learning
| interest but then get serious with in-person or online language
| learning classes. We have seen firsthand hundreds of students
| unsuccessful with apps since they are not practicing live
| conversations and not understanding grammar. With 80+%
| retention of our 2 month/once a week classes, adult
| professionals get through a college textbook in a year and can
| become fluent enough to travel to those countries, speak with
| relatives, and read novels & newspapers with high levels of
| profiency. Language learning is hard work with no shortcuts but
| can still be accessible without apps that overpromise and
| underdeliver. Ping me privately or check out our site for more
| info.
| yosito wrote:
| You're not going to become a triathlete thanks to training
| wheels either, but if you don't know how to ride a bike, the
| training wheels give you a good start. I've learned two
| languages using Duo Lingo as a supporting tool early in the
| process. I don't think I would have been able to have
| conversations so early without it. And for me, having
| conversations (even poorly) in my target language is the single
| most important factor for achieving fluency. Yeah, you're not
| going to become fluent from Duo Lingo alone, but early on in
| the process it's an essential tool.
| JCharante wrote:
| but you see people still using Duolingo after 6 months or 1
| year. If you saw someone still using training wheels after 1
| year, you would tell them to stop because it's handicapping
| them. Duolingo is the same, it's a terrible investment of
| time after 1 month.
| asoneth wrote:
| As someone who has used Duolingo and spaced repetition apps
| for ~10m/day for the last four or five years, is there
| something specific you recommend transitioning to?
|
| I've started with some Netflix and podcasts, but they're a
| little more awkward in 10m chunks.
| JCharante wrote:
| If I only had 10 minutes a day, I would go to an online
| newspaper and go to the advice column. There are people
| who write in for advice/discuss and people in the
| comments will reply. They're going to be using native
| expressions and idioms, making references to shared
| knowledge that everyone there knows. It's also going to
| be about a wide variety of problems (although a lot tend
| to be relationship based) which means you'll be able to
| naturally recall a large variety of words.
|
| Try to read it. If you don't get some words or sentence,
| skip the sentence for now. Then once you're done with the
| first read lookup in a dictionary or glosbe and then
| finally text someone for an explanation to that phrase.
| (It can be hard to find those friends without visiting a
| country that speaks your TL and befriending people
| there).
|
| And then feel free to enter that phrase in your SRS.
|
| ---
|
| I went abroad for 6 months to study my TL (target
| language) at a foreign language school and would roam
| campus finding (local) people who don't look busy to help
| me accomplish this task in real time.
| asoneth wrote:
| Thank you, I'll look for some newspaper columns.
| yosito wrote:
| Not the commenter you're responding to but I recommend
| switching to your own custom set of cards using Anki
| after you've done the basics of Duo Lingo. I use Anki
| Droid almost every day, and there's also an iOS, desktop
| and web version that all sync.
| jwmoz wrote:
| I can't believe there is so much money in this app, it's
| basically flashcards. There are so many mistakes in it when I was
| using it for Indonesian.
|
| Something like HelloChinese is such a better app.
| JCharante wrote:
| I like HelloChinese (spent $100 on it and then forgot to unsub
| which cost another $100) but stopped using it after realizing
| that because they only go to HSK 4, I might as well stick to
| Anki so I can go HSK 6 & beyond. (I don't want to use 2 apps
| for my srs reviews everyday).
|
| Also if you want to use SRS for any words you learn outside the
| app, you'll need to use another app anyways.
| lbriner wrote:
| I think it is worse than flashcards because you usually use
| flashcards after a tutor who can give you some context around
| what you are learning. I found two big problems with Duo:
|
| 1) You are not given any input as to why or how e.g. German
| words are conjugated, not just verbs but adjectives as well,
| you are just expected to learn them. If you don't know what
| gender is, as an English speaker, then trying to learn der, das
| and die won't make any sense whereas if they said, "German uses
| different words for 'the' so make sure you learn the article
| with the word to remember which it is", it would be more
| useful.
|
| 2) The insistence on being text-based makes learning things
| like Japanese especially hard. Many people only want to speak
| and understand a language so forcing them to also learn an
| alphabet just makes it even harder, especially since in Japan,
| you won't see everything in Hirigana anyway! If you want to
| help with pronunciation then you could use a pinyin to do so.
|
| I also thought it was quite funny that the premium version gave
| you tutoring, in which case, I might as well attend a college
| class?
| nathancahill wrote:
| Because it hasn't been mentioned here, this is another incredible
| success story from Luis von Ahn. He is the first Guatemalan
| founder of a unicorn startup.
| maliker wrote:
| As an English speaker, DuoLingo didn't seem that interesting to
| me. Then I listened to a podcast where the found Luis von Ahn
| explained why he started the company [1]. He grew up in
| Guatemala, and he noticed that learning English would essentially
| triple anyone's earning potential in his country. Sure, I might
| never learn Chinese in DuoLingo, but if I could triple my income
| by doing it I bet I'd be much more motivated. English speakers
| that think this app is a toy aren't the target market.
|
| Luis also invented the captcha and used it to digitize the full
| archive of the New York Times. I can't speak to the quality of
| the instruction in DuoLingo, but I'm willing to bet that if
| there's a computer-assisted approach to language learning that
| works, Luis is one of the people most likely to invent it.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/05/22/860884062/recaptcha-and-
| duoli...
| jfoster wrote:
| What is the big opportunity in Duolingo? Are there lots of people
| learning languages who haven't heard of it already? Is it so
| essential & useful to language learning that they have a lot of
| room for ARPU growth? Do they have some way of inspiring a lot
| more people to begin learning another language?
| lbriner wrote:
| The most obvious answer would be that many people who can
| afford basic internet but cannot afford a college class can
| learn at least the basics of another language.
|
| I guess they only need to upsell a small percentage to the
| premium version to get a large ROI.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I would short this stock.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Count me as severely skeptical. I don't exactly feel like digging
| through the entire prospectus since it's too late to matter, but
| a quick search seems to indicate their user and revenue growth
| was fairly flat for years until last year, which just happened to
| be the year everyone in the world was forced to stay home and
| find somewhat productive things to do. Investing in this doesn't
| feel any saner than investing in a startup for people making
| sourdough at home.
|
| I can at least squint at something like Zoom and say sure,
| single-year growth like this is never going to happen again, but
| at least remote multimedia collaboration is _probably_ here to
| stay, even though Zoom specifically isn 't necessarily going to
| monopolize it just because they were first. But that has a clear
| business use case that isn't going anywhere. Duolingo is relying
| entirely on the whims of the general public.
| hirad wrote:
| I need to take exception with many of the comments here. Does
| Duolingo make you fluent in any language? No. But if that's what
| you're looking for (from any language learning tool), you need to
| readjust your expectations. The only thing that teaches you a
| language is immersion in a society that speaks it, in my
| experience. All language-learning exercises are just prep work
| for that. And on that front, Duolingo is exemplary.
|
| I've been doing Spanish with it for the whole pandemic. I'm far
| from fluent but my retention is high and the learning process is
| easy and fun. Couldn't ask for more.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Reminder that Duolingo's IPO is very accessible to the public via
| Robinhood. I am very surprised to see the high valuation for them
| but it may also be because an uneducated public is trying to get
| in on something they feel is attractive only because they
| recognize the name. They may be in for a shock if the stock
| plummets soon after, especially since there are disincentives for
| flipping the stock if you bought into the IPO.
| rvz wrote:
| > but it may also be because an uneducated public is trying to
| get in on something they feel is attractive only because they
| recognize the name.
|
| That sounds like a form of FOMO and they always think of only
| one way of trading this stock and that is buying it and holding
| it. Especially at these prices on the day of IPO.
|
| There are larger investors and VCs that have participated in
| funding rounds that have more than 10x'ed their fundraising
| round before the IPO. Somebody has got to sell and take profit
| at some point.
|
| I won't be surprised to see a small push higher then followed
| by some selling from the larger investors to contribute to the
| selling pressure of this stock.
|
| It's the larger early investors and VCs that have the advantage
| of manipulating this stock on day 1 of IPO day, not a group of
| retail traders and they will end up holding the bag at a high
| price.
| Tepix wrote:
| I'm using DuoLingo (unpaid) successfully to learn French. It is
| only good for building vocabulary. My advice:
|
| a) Use the "tips" (not available for all languages) on the
| DuoLingo website client for every exercise. They are very well
| written and give you crucial insights.
|
| b) Use Tandem every day to chat with/talk to native speakers as
| soon as you have some basic vocabulary. Spend some time to find
| people who are eager to learn. You can often spot them because
| they only want to learn one language and not seven...
|
| c) Buy a grammar book with exercises. Learn conjugations. Learn
| the grammar to ask questions. Learn prepositions. DuoLingo will
| not teach you grammar.
|
| I went from A1.1 to A2.3 in 6 months doing this and I'm super
| motivated to keep going.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I can see duo being worth something but since they don't really
| sell anything... I'm not knowledgeable about advertising to know
| whether the 6.5b makes sense or not
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months,
| lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before.
|
| How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable?
|
| How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
| trainsplanes wrote:
| I think we're closing in on a point where you can't reach a
| multi-billion dollar valuation if your company is profitable.
|
| Just keep burning through investor cash until you're acquired
| by a bigger corporation. Then a year later they announce that
| they're killing your company because, surprise, it couldn't
| turn a profit.
|
| Somewhere a rich stock owner makes a huge profit. Everyone's
| happy.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Those are pretty small numbers in an absolute sense. Growth is
| all I would worry about.
| candyman wrote:
| Duolingo is already cash flow positive and if you back out some
| non-cash costs can say they are profitable. However some of
| these non-cash costs should be included but that's another
| story. Their target model is for 35% adjusted earnings margins
| which is aggressive. I did publish a post with our "present
| future value" model that goes out to 2026 and discounts things
| back. I only see them getting to 22% operating margins at this
| point but there are some areas like testing fees that could
| push that higher. Using the model I get to a $145 stock price
| that I'd say puts a full value on the next several years of
| growth. It's just a preliminary model now. After they report a
| few quarters we can put a finer point on it. Details here:
| https://ipocandy.com/2021/07/making-sense-of-duolingo-duol/
| paxys wrote:
| Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is
| discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses
| money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue
| growth. They have 40 million monthly active users.
| Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single
| quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M
| cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.
| lsiebert wrote:
| In 2008 Myspace had 110 million monthly active users
| worldwide, 74 million in the US.
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2008/04/24/one-small-step-for-
| myspac...
| urda wrote:
| > Every company at this stage loses money.
|
| ... why are companies still getting a pass with this 10 years
| in? No, this isn't an acceptable excuse here.
| bawolff wrote:
| Because investors are interested in making money in the
| end, not some arbitrary metric over if a company is
| behaving as they should.
|
| Whether or not this company makes sense, there are plenty
| of companies that have been losing money at this stage and
| ended up working out. (Plenty that didn't too)
| mlac wrote:
| Making money "In the end" (in this case) seems like a
| cash grab at the IPO.
|
| And the question is whether those "plenty of companies"
| were valued at 6.5 BN.
| selectodude wrote:
| >Every company at this stage loses money
|
| The company is ten years old. I would have to imagine almost
| _zero_ companies lose money ten years in because they
| literally do not exist anymore.
| paxys wrote:
| Average time to IPO for tech companies is 7-8 years, so ten
| years without a profit for a VC-backed company is not at
| all unusual. Palantir is coming up on 20.
| selectodude wrote:
| >Palantir is coming up on 20.
|
| Palantir is a dumb shitty company that will file for
| bankruptcy. Unfortunately the VCs have already dumped it
| on to the dopes on Wall Street bets.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/PLTR/Probability-
| Of-B... says
|
| Current Palantir Technologies Probability Of Bankruptcy =
| 24%
| jpgvm wrote:
| That analysis seems to be full of shit. When plugging in
| companies with much better financials than PLTR I end up
| with higher % of bankruptcy.
| onemiketwelve wrote:
| Then short it for free money
| selectodude wrote:
| Shorted it down from $40 to $30. Bought a watch with my
| proceeds.
| nIHOPp6MQw0f5ut wrote:
| "Markets can remain irrational for longer than you can
| remain solvent"
| fma wrote:
| I'd guess...this is just a way for the VCs to exit and pass
| the bag to someone else.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There's a ton of companies which exists solely to burn
| other peoples cash.
|
| I think VC funding makes IPOs a bit more confusing. It
| makes sense to IPO, if you need to money to boost your
| business. Duolingo needs money to update their app, so they
| can use the IPO to fund it.
|
| The problem is that if you're VC funded it now looks like
| the VCs have lost faith in the company. They paid for the
| bill for ten years and now they won't help push the company
| into profitability? That makes an IPO look like an exist
| strategy.
| patentatt wrote:
| I think it was a typo, but I agree that the IPO is their
| "exist" strategy as in the purpose of the companies
| existence is to IPO, lol.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > That makes an IPO look like an exit strategy.
|
| Every IPO is an exit strategy or a refusal to run a
| balanced budget. If you have cash flow you can invest for
| free and compound the growth internally. If you have
| responsible financial management you can tap the bond
| markets for basically free.
|
| VC's want a 10 bagger - they have had it and more - is
| Duolingo going to be valued at $65B in a couple of years?
| I doubt it.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The IRS tells small business owners that it's a hobby if
| they aren't profitable by year three.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I agree with you that focusing on profitability for
| valuation at this stage doesn't make much sense, I still
| don't understand how a 6.5 billion valuation is ever
| something they can live up to. That amount is 40 times their
| _revenue_ for 2020, and even for a fast growing stock that 's
| a huge multiple, especially for a 10 year old company.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Because this site is mostly used by software developers who
| have no clue about finance.
|
| "Balance sheet is red" is about the only thing they can
| understand about an IPO, and thus they comment about it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO
| is discussed on this site?_
|
| Because a lot of these companies seem to be doing the
| underpants gnomes business strategy, as in 1) Register a
| bunch of users 2) ??? 3) Profit
| shapefrog wrote:
| >Every company at this stage loses money
|
| This is the most retarded silicon valley vc tech bubble
| comment I have ever. There are 11million companies in the US,
| many will fail making money let alone being 'strong'
| companies that drop $10 mil a year.
|
| If the numbers are so great and they have so much money at
| hand why are the people who run the business selling some of
| their share? Possibly due to high market valuations of all
| kinds and a very attractive price to dump a well established
| business that you have milked the most out of to date?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This is a liquidity event. Why are you surprised that
| people are selling?
|
| Even if the IPO didn't pop as much people would still
| probably be selling because their equity has likely been
| illiquid for years, especially if they were a founder,
| early investor or early employee.
| Sightline wrote:
| He didn't say anything about being surprised.
| shapefrog wrote:
| No shock at all this is how the game works! You slap out
| a float, ideally small enough so that the supply and
| demand inbalance pushes the price up.
|
| So 3.7mil shares were issued at $102, and opened at $140,
| so that is a 'cost' to the company of $140 million +
| underwriting fees etc (probably another $30mil + the 700k
| shares they have options on at issue price). Additionally
| insiders dumped out 1.4mil shares at the issue price.
|
| Now execs + VC's have a 'liquid' market to sell or short
| against without paying the high costs for goldmans to
| price you up a private hedge which is the whole point of
| an IPO.
|
| Its litterally writting into the offering - 'The
| principal purposes of this offering are to increase our
| capitalization and financial flexibility and to create a
| public market for our Class A common stock.'
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| What I meant is that regardless of the financial
| situation of the company or whether shareholders still
| believe in it, don't you think insiders would be selling
| at IPO because it is probably the first major liquidity
| event ever?
|
| Even if you completely believe in the future of the
| company, locking in returns and getting some liquidity
| (Even if the stock didn't pop heaps) would be nice for
| people who have been illiquid for years.
| shapefrog wrote:
| And this is why the IPO market is broken. VC's are riding
| startups through multiple rounds of funding for way
| longer than before then dumping the late stage mature
| companies onto the public markets.
|
| Those that locked in their returns, recieved the proceeds
| of thier 1.4million shares of $142.8 million into their
| accounts just before the bell rang for the market open.
| The bell rang everyone cheered and the shares they just
| sold are worth $196 million. Regular joe with a robin
| hood account makes the money and the CEO/VC loses money
| ... who knows more about the company though?
|
| > Even if you completely believe in the future of the
| company, locking in returns and getting some liquidity
|
| Worth it if you get $10 a share instead of $100? All
| about value. Why not dump some out in the previous 8
| funding rounds? The reason is not many VCs would be in
| there cashing out the guys from the previous rounds, or
| would only do so at a heavy discount or to gain control
| over the company.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| You're right. The notion of "if they believe in the
| company so much why are they selling?" implied to me that
| it was unexpected for people to be selling their shares.
|
| That is what I meant by "surprised", though in hindsight
| my choice of wording was poor.
| yobbo wrote:
| > How is a $6.5B valuation justified?
|
| The hope is to make a locked-in user base and a captive
| audience.
|
| They are probably hoping to create various sorts of
| "attachments" between users and their "achievements" to drip
| revenue from users through either premium accounts or ads.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| growth rate. low customer acquisition cost. the expenses
| weren't from marketing, which is good.
|
| My biggest concern would be how much of the growth was from
| people having free time at home due to covid. And if deep
| learning will make language learning less relevant in the
| future. You may be less likely to learn a new language if audio
| can be translated in real time almost perfectly
| dstick wrote:
| Babelfish! Sign me up
| jonas21 wrote:
| 1. So it looks like they lost $14M on revenue of $71M in 2019,
| and $16M on revenue of $162M in 2020. Revenue more than doubled
| YoY, which is impressive. Costs also grew (by a smaller
| percentage), but they're presumably spending a lot to chase
| after the growth opportunity and can dial back later.
|
| 2. They had positive free cash flow of $14M in 2020, which may
| be a better metric to look at when assessing their financial
| health.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| 40X 2020 (Covid bump revenues). That's a pretty healthy
| valuation--bordering on extreme. But with so much cash
| washing around, it's really hard to say what is correctly
| priced these days.
| thiscatis wrote:
| You can just put a variable where you mention duolingo based on
| the recent market.
| sudhirj wrote:
| "lost $25M" doesn't necessarily mean they set it on fire. If
| the wording is changed to "invested all their revenues and a
| further $25M of raised or borrowed capital", wouldn't that make
| more sense?
|
| The way these arguments are usually phrased doesn't do the
| company justice. Amazon "lost" money for decades because they
| were building giant and ambitious infrastructure, not setting
| burning in on executive parties.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| They are pushing 'plus' HARD. Plus is basically the feature set
| everyone had for years, so it's basically, "Pay to keep
| features or we'll take them one by one". I have an > 2000 day
| streak, so I have seen it change a lot over the years and I
| have 0 urge to pay, I will just stop playing.
| fny wrote:
| Discounted cashflows to infinity and beyond plus a massive user
| base. Add zirp to the mix and I'm surprised they're not worth
| $65B.
|
| I'm sure they'll be profitable in a decade...
|
| Also don't forget this is an IPO: ideally you want to overstate
| your value.
| dazc wrote:
| 'Following the IPO, the company will focus on improving its
| flagship app and getting more active users to switch to paying
| subscribers, von Ahn said.'
|
| I switched to being a paying subscriber once and the experience
| was more or less the same as being a free user with the aid of
| an ad-blocker. Enough said.
| tumblewit wrote:
| Based on their IPO filing I would say their biggest asset is the
| number of users. Other than that their model still results in a
| net loss every year so if you are looking at it from a value
| investing standpoint I think it's overvalued at least 5x.
| marpayne wrote:
| I have tried Duolingo (Premium user), and I can say that it is
| not an effective app if you're going to learn a language
| effectively. Instead, it is better if you're going to have a
| bite-sized time to have some mini quiz or something like that. It
| is more of memorization, and there's no immersion or anything
| that makes you feel you're making significant progress
| arihant wrote:
| I've been learning Russian for a year (currently at around
| B1-B2). None of these new age language learning apps are actually
| useful, even to get your feet wet. The old is still gold when it
| comes to language learning. You think you're learning with these
| apps, but in my experience you're not. They just don't seem to
| put anything in long term memory well. There is spaced repetition
| in some of them, but not enough repetition.
|
| Good old audio course Pimsleur is better than all of them
| combined. Cortina Method is best resource to learn grammar and
| the book is so old it looks like a smudged typewriter print. All
| old methods are based on learning and repeating sentences after
| sentences rather than learning individual words. You really end
| up learning like a child. Pattern recognition is where it's at.
|
| I can't recall anything I studied on Duolingo for Russian. I
| can't forget anything I learned on Pimsleur. And I finished the
| last module in January.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > The old is still gold when it comes to language learning.
|
| Absolutely. Maybe I'm just inclined to the grammar-translation
| model, but I've found the older editions of books like Teach
| Yourself so much more helpful to me. Couple that with self-
| created immersion and it goes a lot quicker.
| vncecartersknee wrote:
| Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of
| years, attending language classes and doing my own individual
| study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives
| one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| Their business model isn't to teach you languages, it is to
| make money off the millions of people who want to learn a new
| language.
| colordrops wrote:
| I'm learning tons of grammar and vocabulary through Duolingo.
| Are you not learning these things, or do you find them useless?
|
| BTW the quality of the language programs differs vastly.
| Spanish, which I'm studying, is very fleshed out. Tried Arabic
| and it was anemic and even broken in parts.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| The problem is that language learning is inherently about
| putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations. You
| have to decipher confusing sentences, handle unfamiliar words
| and wrestle your brain into thinking in a different language.
|
| You can't really make a fun game that does this. Therefore
| Duolingo makes a game that focuses on translating the foreign
| language to your native one. That's great for starting out, but
| eventually you gotta start composing sentences and ideas in the
| foreign language.
| okwubodu wrote:
| > The problem is that language learning is inherently about
| putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations
|
| Immersion is the only way you'll ever truly learn a language.
| All the classes, flash cards, etc., in the world can't teach
| you how to clear up a misunderstanding with the manager at
| hotel in Spanish.
|
| I remember at some point we did Duolingo in Spanish, and the
| Spanish speaking kids were shocked how fast we (black) tested
| out of topics and progressed. The reason was pretty obvious;
| we're around y'all _a lot_ lol.
|
| My recommendation is even if you don't have many people
| speaking the language you want to learn near you, immerse
| yourself. Read popular modern authors in the language, listen
| to podcasts in the language, join a game server and practice
| in-game interaction in the language (hard mode).
|
| Maybe it is useless. But you may find that those encounters
| take place on a foundation built by some little green bird
| named Duo.
| okwubodu wrote:
| Also, native languages are weird. The last sentence above,
| for instance. If I had said "green little bird" or even
| "little cute green bird" you would have clocked it as wrong
| immediately. Apps alone aren't sufficient to learn these
| nuances; every language has tons.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| >The problem is that language learning is inherently about
| putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations.
|
| I think that's a really good description of learning in
| general.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Growth in general really. Stretching and building muscle,
| for instance, or training endurance.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| having just returned from mexico for 2 wks i can say the pace
| of duolingo is waaaay to slow compared to conversation.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Its UX is good enough to gamify the starting language learning
| process, but that is where it stops - novice excitement
| Areading314 wrote:
| I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to
| find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a
| native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is
| still an unsolved problem.
| greesil wrote:
| I took foreign language courses in high school and college. I
| couldn't actually communicate until moving to the country
| where they spoke it and living there for six months. Then I
| had to go back home :(
| wyxuan wrote:
| I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that
| Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach
| tasogare wrote:
| No, Japanese phonology and therefore pronunciation (what
| the grand parent post is complaining about) is one of the
| easiest out there. There are very few consonants, only 5
| vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. I don't
| understand how pronunciation could be remotely a problem
| with Japanese.
|
| There are also some other easy things like grammar (very
| few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and
| some basic sentence pattern (heck you can make full
| sentences, sometimes conversations, with a single word [the
| predicative adjectives]).
| bsder wrote:
| > There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone
| and accent is irrelevant.
|
| Except that l/r is pronounced differently than most
| English speakers, the vowels aren't always pronounced yet
| take up time ("Nan desu ka" is almost always pronounced
| like "Nan dess ka", for example), and syllable accent is
| tone rather than volume for emphasis.
|
| Other than that, it's completely easy. </s>
| tinco wrote:
| You say that sarcastically, but those are all easy things
| you can master in a week, and they are the sort of thing
| you might find in the English language or even a dialect.
| It doesn't compare to learning Chinese or Arabic it seems
| to me.
|
| Just the fact that you can write out romanji and get
| reasonably understandable Japanese makes it easier than a
| significant amount of languages out there.
|
| In my opinion the only thing that makes Japanese truly
| hard is that they decided for some insane reason to
| borrow the Chinese writing system, which is the most
| insane writing system in the world, for half (why half!?)
| of their writing.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| A guess as a beginning Japanese learner: Japanese has a
| lot of homophones because it has so few syllables. It is
| also almost always written without spaces. Kanji is
| actually pretty helpful in reading because it provides
| semantic meaning that disambiguates homophones as well
| being more terse and breaking up the writing along
| grammatical boundaries.
|
| I'm approaching this from the angle of wanting to
| understand video-game Japanese, and when I am trying to
| parse some 8-bit era all-katakana chunk of text I find
| myself wishing it included kanji even though I can only
| recognize a few dozen just so the grammar is more clear.
| tasogare wrote:
| Imagine thinking learning ONE phoneme is a hard task...
| Please never have a look at Arabic or you'll have a
| stroke.
|
| Moreover [r] can be replaced by [l] perfectly fine and
| the vowel devoicing is not something you need to do
| anyway (it's not even occurring in all dialects). So even
| searching really hard for "difficulties" you can't find
| even one thing that is remotely difficult which just
| proves my point.
| bawolff wrote:
| If your native language is english, surely romance
| languages are going to be easier than something like
| japanese
| meepmorp wrote:
| even though english is a germanic language?
| gen220 wrote:
| The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to
| Romance languages than Germanic languages.
|
| You can convert many English sentences into a sensible
| (if not idiomatic) Spanish sentence by translating one
| word at a time.
|
| German has not so forgiving been :)
| meepmorp wrote:
| > The grammatical structure of modern English is closer
| to Romance languages than Germanic languages.
|
| I'm pretty sure that's not true.
| bagacrap wrote:
| from Wikipedia: "Of the Germanic family, English is
| exceptional in having predominantly SVO order instead of
| V2, although there are vestiges of the V2 phenomenon."
|
| Romance languages like French and Spanish use SVO so I
| think it's correct to say English is like them.
|
| An example given by wiki of German sentence structure
| translated directly to English:
|
| "Before school played the children in the park soccer."
| lostcolony wrote:
| The wording you quote, "Of the Germanic family, English
| is exceptional", implies English is a Germanic language.
| One that borrows heavily from Latin, but still, a
| Germanic language.
|
| Also from wikipedia -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
| "English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a
| core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. However, a
| significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from
| Romance and Latinate sources."
|
| English borrows from both quite heavily (for historical
| reasons listed there), to where I don't know that
| classifying it makes a lot of sense, but having dabbled
| with both, just from a language learning perspective, I'd
| say German definitely feels closer. Some simple
| counterexamples -
|
| "What is that?" - "Was ist das?" vs "Que es eso". Same
| grammatic structure, but obviously very similiar words
| between German and English. Not so much Spanish. The
| Latin is "quid est".
|
| "I see him" - "Ich sehe ihn" vs "Lo veo". English and
| German are very similar in both grammar and word; Spanish
| is very different from both, putting the direct object
| before the verb as it does, and not requiring the subject
| (yo). The Latin is "i videre eum".
| [deleted]
| meepmorp wrote:
| I'm familiar with V2 and how English doesn't exhibit it.
| Look at the following weird deviations from how you'd say
| things in English
|
| * I am hungry
|
| * Ich bin hungrig
|
| * It is raining today
|
| * Es regnet heute
|
| * Where is your house?
|
| * Wo ist dein Haus?
|
| It turns out that Germanic V2 is SVO in the case of
| simple declarative sentences! But what about other kinds
| of ordering, below the full sentence level?
|
| Look at this, about the ordering of attributive
| adjectives and nouns in Spanish vs. German:
|
| * un hombre alto
|
| * una chica muy bonita
|
| * ein grosser mensch
|
| * eine sehr schones Madchen
|
| Like German, English places attributive adjectives before
| the nouns they modify.
|
| Consider the possibility of eliding pronouns:
|
| * Yo tengo hambre
|
| * Tengo hambre
|
| both are fine in Spanish.
|
| * I am hungry
|
| * Am hungry
|
| Dropping the pronoun in English isn't ok in English,
| unless you're going to produce a fairly contrived context
| - like a text message, etc. It's not normal speech. In
| case you're curious, you can't drop the pronoun in
| German, either.
|
| Language has lots of tiny facts that fit together in
| interesting ways.V
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I've had some success with talking to the Apple Translate
| app (formulating my own sentences) while learning Arabic
| using Duolingo. Arabic people could actually understand my
| simple, mostly nonsense sentences
| stephen_g wrote:
| Yeah, I've gone through not quite half the introductory Spanish
| audio course from Language Transfer [1], and it feels like I've
| made massively more progress than Duolingo, even though I'd
| spent at least twice as long on the Duolingo courses over the
| year. All the Language Transfer is available free too so that's
| nice.
|
| It's a shame, because Duolingo is fun, the art style is cool
| and the gamified stuff is potentially useful for keeping people
| coming back and doing the lessons. It just really hasn't felt
| very effective to me at language learning at all...
|
| 1. https://www.languagetransfer.org/
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| I find their approach of "drag and drop these 6 words to form a
| sentence" or "fill in the missing word in this sentence" was
| just leading me to recognize correct patterns of letters, not
| words or meaning.
|
| "aog" always goes after "Lor" and before "san" (obviously made
| up example) - I couldn't tell you what the individual words
| meant or what the full sentence said; but I knew that those
| groups of letters belonged in that order.
|
| I'm also a lapsed B2 in German and played around with that
| course a few years ago. 3 or 4 weeks ago I got an email that
| they finally accepted my correction on a blatantly incorrect
| translation, which had apparently been unfixed in one of their
| most popular courses for years.
| this_is_not_you wrote:
| I wouldn't call it "pretty useless". I think it has two
| distinct places in a language learning process.
|
| 1) They make learning a new language very accessible and fun to
| get started. Books and courses do not have such a low level of
| entry. 2) It's good for learning new words in a context.
| Memrise for example often just gives you a single word and
| translation. But I think it's much more effective to then put
| words into sentences.
|
| That said, if you really want to learn a language past the "I
| can manage for a few days as a tourist" you need to add other
| methods to it. Read books, listen to audio content, watch TV,
| have lessons (speak the language!), study grammar etc.
|
| Then not everybody is alike. So try different methods. See what
| works for you. Some might have more success with Duolingo, some
| will have less.
| gokhan wrote:
| For Duolingo, you might mix it with other materials for a much
| better experience. I told our kids' experience learning foreign
| languages here [1]. My wife used the same technique to learn
| some French, Duolingo reinforced with audio and visual
| materials, songs with lyrics, regular learning books, podcasts
| etc.
|
| Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not
| seeing ads.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408576
| devin wrote:
| This proves the OP's point. Duolingo is trash if you aspire
| to fluency. It's only useful in fluency as an additive to a
| robust training program. You don't get fluent by following
| Duolingo alone.
| gokhan wrote:
| I disagree. Duolingo is not trash as the op suggests, it's
| a great fire starter and makes you able to use other
| materials by handling the intro well. Peppa Pig is a
| sustainable language learning tool if you did something
| before to learn the basics and Duolingo handles that part
| well for free. How is that trash?
| rtpg wrote:
| My partner is doing a "cocktail" of Duolingo, Memrise, and a
| grammar textbook for French. They are progressing a lot in just
| a month (and given the early learning curve from the grammar,
| I've found it good)
|
| I think that these language tools work best when you have a
| mixture, because they can complement each other and keep on
| feeding into the novelty factor.
|
| (In particular Memrise and Duolingo operate on different sort
| of teaching strategies so just those two together is really
| interesting)
| BooneJS wrote:
| I moved on to Babbel.
| jansan wrote:
| Babbel is great and they also have shorter subscription
| plans. I only needed a quick fresh up of my French skills and
| did not see why I should subscribe to a full twelve months
| plan, which was the shortest that I could find on Duolingo.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Yeah I used Babbel to pick up some basic Italian a few years
| ago and thought that while a bit more "boring" than Duolingo,
| I felt like I was learning more useful stuff. It's structured
| more like a language class at school.
|
| Memrise is worth a look as a Duolingo alternative. It's
| similar but feels a bit more "serious", there are some nice
| features like you get videos of native speakers saying
| phrases with a variety of accents.
| rtpg wrote:
| Memrise also has fun sketches that offer something most
| language tools miss: entertainment. They're dumb but can
| cause a little chuckle (extra satisfying when it's in an
| unknown language)
| achow wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer.
|
| Quick search gave this review: _The main differences between
| Babbel vs Duolingo are: Babbel is best for learnings looking
| to completely master a language, whereas Duolingo is better
| for sporadic learners who want to dabble. Babbel offers
| lessons with conversational practice and cultural immersion,
| whereas Duolingo offers adaptive learning lessons._
| vncecartersknee wrote:
| yeah babbel seems better although iirc the interface was a
| bit clunky.
|
| I also found busuu and linq to be okay as well.
| dazc wrote:
| It serves as a useful tool for learning some fairly basic words
| and phrases, not much else. Languages have many subtle nuances
| that simply can not be taught via spaced repetition.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's useless for properly learning a language. For getting the
| basics of a language in a game-y way that doesn't feel like
| studying, it's great. My wife managed to pass her German A1
| (CEFR [0]) exam almost completely by just using Duolingo. She
| took some free Deutsche Welle exam prep courses in the week
| before, but to even get to the level to understand those, she
| used Duolingo.
|
| If you need to learn a language quickly, I'd call it the wrong
| tool. If you are okay spending time properly studying a
| language, I'd say that will be better. But for certain cases,
| Duolingo is great.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
| vr46 wrote:
| So I am using Duolingo as I will have to take the sane exam
| at some point over the next year or two. I think it works ok
| for being able to consume simple German but less well for
| understanding spoken German, or constructing one's own ideas.
|
| In other words, it doesn't make the hard things easy or
| easier.
|
| It is a great alternative to wasting time on social media or
| news sites, however.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The A1 exam is a pretty simple test ;)
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| My personal experience leads me to disagree. I've been using
| Duolingo to learn Chinese for about 400 days now. I recently
| took another step and started taking private zoom lessons and
| my tutor said a few of her students have come from the same
| path. Duo has given me a good understanding of sentence
| structure and raw vocabulary. Even though my pronunciation
| needs work, Duo has given me so much for watching a few ads and
| I hope to continue with it. Given everything, my tutor said I
| would pass HSK 1 and maybe level 2.
| dorchadas wrote:
| If it took you 400 days to pass the HSK level 1, I would
| argue that you're absolutely doing something wrong or
| extremely inefficient.
| caddemon wrote:
| It depends how much time he spends per day, no? I always
| thought of Duolingo as something you do in 15 minutes of
| downtime here or there. Nowhere near the level of time
| commitment that a class would be.
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| I averaged about 10 minutes a day for ~20xp.
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| Hrm maybe you're right. I was doing 50 lessons a day, spent
| thousands of hours on the app. Quit my job even. Maybe I
| just suck and am a horrible person. Thanks for bringing
| this to my attention.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I learned Chinese in college and then lived in China for a
| year and a half. Personally, I think sentence structure and
| basic (spoken) vocabulary are the easiest parts of Chinese
| since there's no real conjugation and particles do all the
| heavy lifting instead of messing with word forms [1]. The
| hard parts are memorizing a decent number of hanzi and
| properly pronouncing with tones. I tried duo to learn some
| Japanese and found it... not great.
|
| [1] Note: Personally, I find Chinese superior to romance
| languages in this regard - it was actually really refreshing
| as a learner.
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| I agree, building the mental map of written
| characters->translation was certainly difficult early on.
|
| Duo is not going to be as good as institutional schooling
| or immersion but I don't think it has to be to be
| considered a net positive for all of us. It has lowered the
| barrier enough to allow people to get started for what is
| essentially free. I remember 10 years ago I saw rosetta
| stone cds being sold in barnes and noble for $179+ for just
| a single level. Sacrificing the time of just 170 SWEs for
| something like this just seems like a no brainer to me,
| valuation aside.
| ngokevin wrote:
| I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of
| people. The response is universal that everyone's tried
| Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning,
| despite monster streaks.
|
| I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing
| habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for
| people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful
| enough to look beyond Duolingo.
| vncecartersknee wrote:
| That's cool I'd love to hear more about it, I've actually
| been thinking about ways that a language app could work
| better. Seems like all the current research is that
| "immersion" in the target language is critical, an app that
| just played me conversations, had me read text, etc and
| 'creatively' formulate responses, not just simply fill in the
| missing word, obviously in increasing difficulty would be
| ideal.
| jcranberry wrote:
| My "theory" is that learning a language is like learning
| any other discipline to a high degree of fluency. If you
| study a couple hours a week even if you don't forget what
| you learned in short order it's something which requires a
| period of immersion for you to be able to recall it as well
| as the day you learned it. To be able to expound at length
| on a topic at the drop of a hat you essentially need to
| dedicate a few hours a day every day. I think languages
| work the same way.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Seems like all the current research is that "immersion"
| in the target language is critical
|
| This, a hundred times this. Immersion is not only effective
| in getting you used to the language, but also really helps
| you solidify what you've learned, and is extremely
| motivating.
|
| Virtually all of the people that I know in the Japanese
| learning community who learned the language really fast
| heavily immersed in a lot of content.
|
| In my own language learning app that I'm making I'm
| explicitly targeting a feedback loop which looks something
| like this:
|
| 1) You pick an easy show/book/etc. to consume. (I have a
| list ranked according to difficulty, generated through
| machine learning.)
|
| 2) You prelearn the vocabulary used within using an SRS.
|
| 3) You consume it.
|
| 4) You continue maintaining your vocabulary through SRS, so
| the app knows which words you're supposed to know.
|
| 5) The app recommends you the next show/book/etc. to
| consume based on what you've already learned.
|
| 6) Rinse and repeat. Gradually the whole thing snowballs
| and you have to learn less and less for each new work you
| consume.
|
| I personally believe this to be the most effective way of
| learning a language, and I'm already seeing some of my
| users having a lot of success with it.
| k__ wrote:
| I had a somewhat similar idea once.
|
| You share Twitter accounts with a service, and it would
| use the tweets of that account to generate a language
| course.
|
| I was hoping that this would lead to learning something
| that I could use right away.
| davidzweig wrote:
| We are moving 'Language Learning with Netflix' in this
| direction. There's some stuff to see already:
| https://www.languagereactor.com/ (my email is in my
| profile, I'd be happy to hear from you :)
| dorchadas wrote:
| If you could do step one that wasn't based entirely on
| anime I'd love it. That's always been my biggest hurdle
| with the Japanese learning community -- almost all
| recommendations seem to be anime, and I'm just not that
| interested.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| I also have Japanese dramas, light novels, a few normal
| novels, visual novels and I recently started adding
| YouTube videos, so it's definitely not only anime.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Perfect, thank you! Please let me know when you release,
| I'd definitely be interested in it.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| Well, it's already publicly available. (:
|
| Here's the link in case you want to take a look:
| https://jpdb.io
|
| Just a fair bit of warning: it still has ways go to, so
| don't expect a perfectly polished experienced. That said,
| in spite of its rough edges I do already have users who
| use it do hundreds of cards per week and successfully
| immerse, so it is usable.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Immersion provides the strongest motivation to learn and to
| try. When you want something or have a problem that needs
| to be solved and the other party doesn't speak English,
| you're going to be very motivated. The 'dopamine hit' from
| getting it right and communicating successfully in another
| language is also way better than from an app/game. The
| results are just so much more real and tangible.
| Jare wrote:
| Immersion also creates connections between the language
| and other stimuli (visual, emotional, etc). Connections
| are powerful for creating reliable memories.
| ngokevin wrote:
| I'm targeting couples that are bilingual that want to learn
| each other's languages. Immersion is difficult to achieve
| alone. So I'm trying to channel a native speaking resource
| that is around you all the time.
|
| Right now the system is a mixture of SRS on your own,
| sourcing vocabulary from songs and podcasts, and combined
| with immersive multiplayer mini-games with the native
| speaking partner.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Duolingo has worked great for me. I had learned Spanish a
| decade ago and completely forgotten it. In a few months of
| consistent practice, I learned enough to get around. And
| after 6-9 months, I could have basic conversations.
|
| I was never good at learning languages and Duolingo has been
| the best system for me. I like the paced repetition it does.
| Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and
| listening.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely
| forgotten it.
|
| I would argue this is why it worked well for you. You
| already knew the language and just needed to revise, which
| is something I would argue DL does do good at, especially
| the web version.
|
| > Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying,
| and listening.
|
| The thing is, in most courses (the home-developed ones with
| stories might be exceptions), you _don 't_ practice those
| skills. You learn to translate stuff from the target
| language to English; that's not reading. You don't learn to
| read texts and interpret them _in the language_. The
| writing is awful as well, since it 's just reverse
| translation, not actually responding to a prompt or natural
| conversation.
|
| The speaking leaves a lot to be desired, unless it's
| massively improved since I last tried it. I once said
| "blah" on the Spanish course and it was accepted as
| correct; I've also had it accept background noise before
| too. And the same with listening -- it's a TTS, you don't
| actually practice listening to native speakers and
| understanding what's being said with comprehension
| questions, etc.
|
| It doesn't really teach the four skills as they would be
| applied in the real world at all. Not to mention that
| default on the app has you _click_ words in the proper
| order instead of actually recalling them. That 's another
| huge negative.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >You don't learn to read texts and interpret them in the
| language.
|
| Are you sure? I regularly come across questions that
| involve a few sentences, a question, and a multi-choice
| answer. All in language, and some of them are somewhat
| tricky. Something along the lines of: "Juan's is with his
| girlfriend. Her name is Antonia. She is buying a green
| dress. Where is Antonia?" "A: A restaurant. B: A clothes
| store C: A party."
|
| There are also questions that are a few sentences and you
| have to fill in the blank, which often require
| understanding the context, in language: If Juan is
| speaking to waiter, then the place he is at is a
| restaurant...
|
| >Not to mention that default on the app has you click
| words in the proper order instead of actually recalling
| them.
|
| Not at all true. I've been using DuoLingo for less than a
| month and I regularly see questions that are an English
| sentence and a free form text box for you to type the
| translation into. And one of the questions for the second
| "Checkpoint" is: Here is a sentence in language, and a
| free form text box to type the response.
|
| As far as the clicking words, I'll say I really like that
| as one of the components of learning, because it lets me
| focus on the structure of sentences without getting
| frustrated by typos or misremembering words or even in
| some cases forgetting words. The prompts of the bubbles
| are good and still make me remember the differences
| between the conjugations and the like.
|
| I spent a semester in a class in Jr HS, and was much more
| frustrated and less educated than I feel after 3 weeks of
| solid DuoLingo. For me, it's a fun tool for establishing
| some confidence and understanding.
| trwired wrote:
| > The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo,
| and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite
| monster streaks.
|
| I think this is an issue of mismatched expectations. For
| actually getting to know a language a tool like Duolingo is
| too limited, as knowing a language is an umbrella term
| comprising multiple skills and Duo helps with only
| vocabulary, a bit of grammar and pronunciation to some extent
| (but I have no experience with that aspect). If someone
| starts a course thinking they'll be able to speak the
| language once it's over, no wonder they eventually end up
| disappointed. What Duolingo is excellent at, however, is
| kickstarting the process of learning a language you're
| interested in. Hard to find a better tool for that.
| orky56 wrote:
| Totally echo all of this. I'm one of the owners at the Orange
| County Lingual Institute (oclanguages.com) and we see Duolingo
| as the gateway for people to tap into their language learning
| interest but then get serious with in-person or online language
| learning classes. We have seen firsthand hundreds of students
| unsuccessful with apps since they are not practicing live
| conversations and not understanding grammar. With 80+%
| retention of our 2 month/once a week classes, adult
| professionals get through a college textbook in a year and can
| become fluent enough to travel to those countries, speak with
| relatives, and read novels & newspapers with high levels of
| profiency. Language learning is hard work with no shortcuts but
| can still be accessible without apps that overpromise and
| underdeliver. Ping me privately or check out our site for more
| info.
| ALotOfBees wrote:
| I find that Duolingo is to human languages what Codecademy is
| to programming languages. It's gamefied and fun but will only
| scratch the surface teaching you the very basics. In order to
| truly learn the language you have to put in the much harder
| work elsewhere. That's not to say that both platforms dont have
| a place, they still can be pretty valuable tools for beginners.
| baby wrote:
| Same here. This valuation makes no sense to me. I've spent a
| LOT of time optimizing ways in which I learn languages, and
| duolingo doesn't do much.
|
| Here's what I can recommend:
|
| - follow as many instagram account as possible to teach you the
| language. There's so many "teaching chinese" instagram account
| for example. Every day when I check instagram I learn a few
| chinese words.
|
| - check browser plugins to display subs in different languages
| simultaneously on netflix
|
| - use memrise or anki or other app or real world flash cards.
| There's a reason people always go back to the flashcards.
|
| It's all about input. You need to learn a lot of vocab, fast.
| Don't even focus on grammar at first, and even less on output.
| Output will come naturally after a while.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Can only agree. Duolingo gives some basic vocabulary but after
| that basically is useless, especially as the way it teaches
| grammar forms (and on the mobile app barely any explicit rules)
| is 100% useless. Native speakers looking at example sentences
| in the target language are often shocked at the nonsense that
| is provided.
|
| But worst for me is that it wastes time. The unnecessarily
| ineffective repetitions, all the features and ads intended to
| upsell 'Pro', etc. There are dozens of other apps that do it
| better for free (e.g. good old Anki, or newcomers like
| Clozemaster) and when on a desktop a whole wealth of
| professional learning resources are available, both old ones
| that are now public domain, the world of wikis and
| collaborative learning and flashcards, and no-profit materials.
| For instance lots of organizations fund free courses, e.g. the
| EU funded a bunch of sites for learning languages, like
| https://deutsch.info, and national broadcasters like RF1
| (French), DW (German) provide great professional and current
| materials. Podcasts and youtubers teach any language
| imaginable, etc.
|
| Try Duolingo to get a taste, but after a few lessons look for
| your language online and you'll find much better stuff.
| kaiwen1 wrote:
| For me Duolingo is woefully ineffective. A far better method is
| Pimsleur plus Anki. Ankify the Pimsleur audio, make your own Anki
| cards with most of your vocabulary in cloze phrases. Ankify the
| audio on as many of those cloze phrases as you can using native
| speakers. Work at it daily. Use a textbook to learn the grammar.
| This is a system that works. It's the fastest way I know of to
| begin understanding languages intuitively. No need for mental
| translation. No difference in how your mind responds to "What do
| you want to eat?" and "Ni Yao Chi Shi Yao ?"
|
| Of course, Duolingo's valuation isn't connected to success in
| learning language. It's connected to success in convincing people
| that they can and should learn a language.
| radres wrote:
| If you want to learn a language you are supposed to feel
| emotions. I speak OK English now (not my mother tongue obv.) and
| I still remember the silly mistakes I made while I was playing
| online games 10-12 years ago and people made fun of me. Never
| made those mistakes again.
|
| Now I am learning a 3rd language in a new country. I started with
| Duolingo and never believed in "Paid courses". I have used it
| close to a year with little impact on my skills. But I have made
| most of my progress when I actually talked to someone. There is a
| feeling of embarrassment and defenselessness when you put
| yourself in uncomfortable situations like that and that is what
| you need to make it stay.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| lol
| meerita wrote:
| Duolingo helped me to understand Kanji and Hiragana.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It hasn't been mentioned yet, but give Lingvist a try, they take
| a (much) more serious attitude towards the same material.
| ibudiallo wrote:
| Here is one thing that happened to me after using Duolingo every
| day, multiple times a day for more than a year. I became
| extremely good at it. Throw any language at me, I'll complete it
| in record time. Sometimes I played it without even the sound on.
|
| Do I speak any of the languages in the game? Hardly. This
| realization came to me after I completed the Japanese class and
| my sister asked me to count to ten. I knew all the numbers, their
| symbols, and the placement in a sentence. But I could not count
| to ten.
|
| Duolingo is a game before being a learning tool. It is fun to use
| and I'm almost jealous that they are going to IPO. But it's kinda
| like farmville. You become good at the game, but you probably
| won't become a farmer after playing.
| saladuh wrote:
| If anyone's planning on learning Japanese with Duolingo: don't.
| Did that for a few weeks, basically learnt nothing. I soon found
| out from experienced learners that it was terrible [0]. I then
| discovered the AJATT/MIA[1] methods of learning Japanese, which
| prioritize immersion/sentence mining of the target language and
| learning vocab/kanji and sentence structure through Anki decks
| (you can use any SRS system but Anki is by far the best with a
| rich ecosystem of Japanese integrations such as the Yomichan
| dictionary).
|
| I used the foss app Kakugo (available on Fdroid, not sure about
| the play store) to learn the hiragana and katakana writing
| scripts in 3 or 4 days, and have now moved on to reading Tae
| Kim's Grammar Guide[2] for learning grammar and using Refold
| JP1K[3][4] style anki decks to learn my first 1000 kanji.
|
| However this method is more of a 'grind', you need to set aside
| at least 2 hours a day so that you can read Tae's textbook, learn
| new vocab and do your reviews through Anki. In your free time,
| once you have a decent amount of grammar understanding and vocab,
| you need to be immersing in Japanese, so anime, J-dramas, etc.
| (Jap music isn't very helpful here).
|
| [0] Review of Duolingo Japanese course from a 2+ year user of
| Anki/immersion based learning: https://youtu.be/jf-SbSfiXn4 [1]
| The AJATT method has been around for a long time, it means All
| Japanese All The Time. It basically promoted SRS and immersion
| based learning. MIA is basically the same thing, mass immersion,
| started mainly by MattVsJapan. However I use the guides and tools
| created by AJATT-Tools, whos contributors focus on tools for
| Linux, such as MPV scripts for sentence mining (creating Anki
| cards with unknown vocabulary semi automatically while watching
| subtitled content, with audio and visual cues). Their guide
| builds on top of MIA and AJATT style methods:
| https://github.com/ajatt-tools [2] The defacto grammar guide for
| Japanese that isn't afraid to teach you Kanji from the start:
| http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar [3] Explanation of
| the JP1K style Anki deck: https://youtu.be/53qKsYxVhoM [4] Deck
| system is created by https://refold.la, however I use AJATT-
| Tools's version of the deck because it includes example sentences
| (and Kanji have different meanings in context).
| esrh wrote:
| I did this for just about a year, and i can confirm this works
| if you put in the time. I'm at around 3000 recognizable kanji
| and can watch/read pretty much anything that's not particularly
| hard.
| thanksforfish wrote:
| I'll add my (32/M/USA) perspective as someone who subscribed to
| duolingo plus last month. I'm learning Arabic ahead of a
| _potential_ move with my spouse to an Arabic speaking country.
|
| First Duolingo is fun to use. I didn't enjoy classroom based
| learning in high school. Duo gamifies the process really well,
| it's on my schedule, and I have a concrete reason to want to
| learn. Duo has been reducing my time on social media as well,
| always a bonus when picking up a good habit.
|
| The $7/month premium subscription was worth it. I'm investing 30
| minutes a day in the app, and ad-free means I can get through
| more lessons. I have unlimited lives so my learning isn't
| interrupted if I struggle on a hard lesson.
|
| I'm not expecting to become fluent on Duo alone. But I think I'll
| get a great handle on some basics. My wife is already fluent, so
| that's helped me speak and figure out some things I struggled
| with.
|
| I also tried the Rosetta Stone app. I didn't think that one was
| fun, it throws you into hard content quickly, so I haven't been
| using it. If our move happens, I'll enroll in a more traditional
| environment, and I may take a second look at the Rosetta Stone
| app. For now I'm happy that I have something that's making me
| increasingly comfortable with the idea of speaking Arabic.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Everytine Duolingo is in the news here, I find the anecdotes and
| suggestions of alternative solutions interesting, but we rarely
| discuss what is making Duolingo so successful.
|
| They have become a household name. Almost all non-tech people
| around me know what Duolingo is. Kind of like Tinder, they may
| not use it, but they know it.
|
| I also view Duolingo as a game that provides a bit of exposure to
| a new language, but won't get you very far unless combined to
| other resources. I wonder where the IPO will lead them. They did
| encourage a ton of people to be curious about new languages. It
| worked for me. I hope they can help them get to the next level,
| and not become, as someone else mentioned here, the next
| Farmville.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| I use Duolingo to learn Spanish and it's pretty good if you take
| it seriously and add on research outside of Duo (mostly on
| grammar). I'm hoping to reach a level where I can read things in
| the language which are interesting to me (with the aid of a
| dictionary of course), so I'll probably replace HN with some
| Spanish variant for example.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Of all the tools I've tried to begin learning a language,
| Pimsleur audio lessons have been the most effective.
|
| They're entirely auditory. They teach you a relatively small
| vocabulary using spaced repetition, and if you do the lessons,
| you really learn that vocab well. They challenge you to speak
| (under time pressure) from the first lesson onwards, and because
| you're only learning words by ear, you can avoid pronunciation
| pitfalls that people who learn from written sources fall into.
|
| You can't get to fluency with Pimsleur, but you can build a very
| good initial base.
|
| I don't think Duolingo is really a very effective way to begin
| learning a language. In my opinion, early on, language learning
| should be intensely focused on auditory and speaking skills, and
| only later on branch out into writing, formal grammar, etc.
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Duolingo is great to get your feet wet, but its teaching model
| doesn't scale past A2/B1 levels (and in speaking/listening even
| less so). This valuation is enormous for a company that's
| virtually been for 10 years in losses.
|
| So far Duolingo has made the experience more painful to free
| users to push them to pay, and yet hasn't managed to get out of
| the red. I think the main that most learners are from developing
| countries learning English, so Duolingo Plus can be a hard sell.
|
| I bet the money influx will help push whatever projects they have
| in mind, but while private, and I say this as a language learning
| ethusiast, their approaches have been completely misdirected.
| Personally I'd be wary to throw my money there, but will
| certainly reevaluate it next quarter.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I was a paid user for some time. It's inexpensive and fun. I
| mostly paid to encourage them, and to be able to use it offline
| in the plane (it's a fun game). However, as most people, I
| haven't flown in a long time, so I cancelled it.
|
| I wonder what are the main types of paid users.
|
| Otherwise, when not paying, I use the web version, and never
| noticed any advertising.
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Last time I checked, the ads on the web were alright, but the
| experience on mobile was extremely hostile, with constant ads
| and deliberately sssssllllooooowwwllllyy
| aaanniimmmaaaattteeeeddd reminders to push you to pay for
| Duolingo Plus.
|
| When reviewing lessons you're already familiar with, you tend
| to spend more time watching ads and Plus reminders than
| actually learning anything.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Imagine the number and quality of textbooks you could commission
| from world experts in any and all languages for $300M, a single
| year at 20:1 price-to-earnings.
|
| Is the app obviously better? More engaging, to some, perhaps.
| More profitable? I guess that remains to be seen.
| anyfactor wrote:
| They have a name recognition and that's about it. I really
| wonder what kind of people actually buy IPOs. Except PLTR I
| can't name one stock that went public in the last 2 years that
| didn't dip below their IPO.
| dude4you wrote:
| Please try the clozemaster app
|
| I found it much more useful and less playful
| frankzander wrote:
| yeah and you don't got banned if you have done something wrong
| in a row. i hate this concept of duolingo and it doesn't help
| in any way but their income
| [deleted]
| ipnon wrote:
| I was a Duolingo launch user, when revenue was driven by
| crowdsourced translations. I used Duolingo to learn basic phrases
| in some languages over many years, but I had to stop using the
| app. There were too many basic mistakes in grammar and
| vocabulary. Duolingo innovated by bringing a structured language
| course with spaced repetition to mobile early in the previous
| decade. It seems they will need another burst of innovation, this
| time in novel language apprehension techniques, in order to stay
| relevant beyond this initial public offering.
|
| Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker brought language learning to the
| global, mobile masses. I hope they will succeed again in the next
| phase of language technology.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I'm not sure they innovated much. Other apps like Babbel are
| older and had the same features, if not more and better.
| Duolingo rode the 'free' and 'hip startup' publicity wave and
| had an interesting idea that they'd use the users to
| crowdsource translations. But that didn't pan out - everything
| afterwards seems to have been just scaling with no innovation
| whatsoever.
| patentatt wrote:
| The innovation is the publicity and public image. I'll get
| downvotes for it, but it's the same innovation that Uber,
| Tesla, GoPro, Facebook, and countless others have rode to
| billions. Our economy is post-materialism and values public
| image and publicity greater than innovation and value. If you
| want to get rich, don't do something innovative, focus on how
| you will make a good story to grab free publicity and cement
| an image as being 'cool' and 'hip.' Then you don't ever have
| to make money or innovate anything. Investors will pour money
| on you because you're cool and hip. I'm a little salty about
| it, but there's something important there.
|
| One more I just thought of, even if it's not the same scale:
| Rap Genius. They took what's pretty much a weekend project
| and turned it into a business and careers for themselves. The
| fawning press at their launch was overwhelming and
| impressive.
|
| One small counter example: weebly. They made something
| actually innovative that provided real value to people. Grew
| quietly and made (by all outward appearances) a fantastic
| business. But since you didn't/don't see tons of gushing
| press about them, they (again, just by outward appearances)
| didn't launch into the stratosphere like they absolutely
| could and maybe even should have.
| bleverse wrote:
| I've been using it on a daily basis for 2 years now and when I
| switched to 'completely type the answer' instead of 'clicking on
| words', it made a big difference in learning.
|
| I think a big factor in its usefulness depends on the user. If
| you make it hard for yourself, you will get much more out of it.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| First set of crowns on the phone, move fast. Second set on
| desktop, completely type the answer. Weave in stories once you
| feel like you have a foundation. Add immersion from live
| streams/Netflix. This takes you to at least B2.
|
| There's an unsurprising amount of ignorant responses and
| strawmen in the thread, kind of sad.
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