[HN Gopher] LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
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LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
Author : hyperific
Score : 659 points
Date : 2025-04-29 05:45 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (librelingo.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (librelingo.app)
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| For the curious, here's an article from the developer on why they
| built LibreLingo https://dev.to/kantord/why-i-built-
| librelingo-280o
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make
| a smoothie and learn a foreign language ... :D
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over
| some of the things that you prioritize.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > some of the things that you prioritize
|
| watching reels first thing in the morning in bed
| aquariusDue wrote:
| In bed?! You gotta multitask if you want to get things
| done, try on the toilet next time.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| If you are spending 30 minutes on the toilet, language
| fluency is not your biggest problem
| reddalo wrote:
| But your nearest proctologist is going to have a new
| client soon.
| ix101 wrote:
| But learning how to ask the chemist for proctosydol in
| French may pay off dividends
| stefs wrote:
| if i spend 30 minutes on the toilet, standing up again is
| my biggest problem
| poulpy123 wrote:
| on the toilet ? I only go to the toilet on company time
| eigenman wrote:
| "Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I shit on
| company time."
| glitchc wrote:
| I read Hacker News on the toilet.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Sorry--TikTok FTW
| octocop wrote:
| 10x more effective than coffee
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Exactly, and I just happen to prioritize sleep until I have
| to go to work!
| brewdad wrote:
| Is their something in your evening routine you'd be
| willing to sacrifice in order to free up your morning?
| fleischhauf wrote:
| who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to
| make a smoothie and develop software to learn a foreign
| language
| sschueller wrote:
| Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978
| Tor3 wrote:
| There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an
| alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on
| learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name:
| "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning
| languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting
| just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation
| like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I
| read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".
| devrandoom wrote:
| What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're
| better?
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university,
| preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages
| have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.
| watwut wrote:
| That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about
| translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end
| up only translating words in always the same sentences.
|
| That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where
| those sentences warry and that has you do variety of
| exercises.
| yorwba wrote:
| You can do Anki without translation. My preferred
| approach is to have "type answer" cards where the
| question side just plays a recording and then you type in
| what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side
| to let me check whether I understood the sentence
| correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in
| the target language, not translation.
|
| Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are
| Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or
| less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
| watwut wrote:
| You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it
| all for the first time and looks for "app I can download
| and use" will do.
|
| They will download a dect with single words translations
| rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with
| special features. That is done by people who primarily
| learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher.
|
| Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was
| asked here.
|
| To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per
| day. Even if you have many different sentences on many
| different cards, they will graduate independently from
| each other. So, you will still see the exact same
| sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence
| each time you see the card.
|
| More important is that practically Duolingo did not
| caused me to have any particular sentence or translation
| super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety,
| maybe something else, but practical result was just not
| that.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > What are the modern methods
|
| It depends on the community, but the current meta among
| serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible
| input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced
| repetition + active recall
|
| > what's to back up they're better?
|
| Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by
| these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful
| language learners who reached actual fluency using these
| methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many
| people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not
| technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have
| to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the
| field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we
| will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're
| interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the
| book "Key questions in second language acquistion")
|
| In general, my advice to any serious language learner is
| you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency.
| Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours
| and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for
| functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you
| only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math
| on this way too many times)
| laurentlb wrote:
| I've been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing
| on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems
| like a solid approach.
|
| One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is:
| https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
|
| One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's
| "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?":
| https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-
| resources/pau...
|
| It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he
| recommends reading graded readers books.
|
| Inspired by that, I've also been building a free (open-
| source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website
| for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own
| Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories,
| make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only
| when needed.
|
| It's still early (just a couple of stories so far) and
| definitely not a full language learning solution, but the
| goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love
| your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations
| are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for
| getting people good at a new language.
| froh wrote:
| is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where
| you learn target language basics during the first and only
| bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the
| target language with the help of a printed booklet?
| bluGill wrote:
| I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially
| it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the
| very first day the military puts you in a history class
| taught in the language with no local language allowed for
| an hour. And you still get to use your first language in
| the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you
| to not most of the time.
|
| Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time
| plus homework. That by the time you are done with that
| first week you already have most of a semester of regular
| classroom behind you.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have
| started picking up the local language. There might be faster
| methods.
| bluGill wrote:
| My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an
| exchange student) before the family told her that was
| enough and refused to use English.
|
| Your experience is common. However it is mostly a
| reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked
| the language up much faster if you tried.
|
| Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you
| have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you
| can figure out what is the right time balance for you
| (though once in a while something happens that would make
| you regret your decision)
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| No worries - I was exaggerating for comic effect. I don't
| speak the local language like a local, but I do do it all
| day at work.
|
| I often wish the locals here would refuse to use English,
| but I enjoy speaking other foreign languages when I get
| the chance, so I understand when they want to do the
| same.
| jamager wrote:
| I wrote https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it
| helps.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a
| language is to spend all you effort learning all the
| different ways to learn trying to find what is best.
|
| unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people
| are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let
| it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine
| your research to the language you are trying to learn.
| mobtrain wrote:
| This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to
| your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo
| it'd supply some of the _good_ alternatives.
| sudahtigabulan wrote:
| I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks,
| phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-
| learners.
|
| With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive,
| though.
|
| You can also sign up to in-person classes.
| watwut wrote:
| Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often.
| Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you
| could not not understand anything people say, because you
| imagined the language to sound much differently then it
| does for months and months while learning. That was the
| most common result of language learning attempts - not
| much.
|
| Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely
| made much more effective by the internet and streaming
| services. The input based learning methods were basically
| impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very
| effective.
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Many language learning books used to come with audio
| media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with
| cassette tapes.
|
| Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they
| provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free
| resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by
| choice.
| watwut wrote:
| I am old enough to remember them. Comparably, you got
| maybe 4 hours of media - meaning sentences from the book
| being read and short boring dialogs. You cant compare it
| to what is currently available. It is like comparing a
| puddle of mud to Atlantic Ocean. And I mean it in a
| positive way - those audio tapes were almost nothing
| comparably.
|
| Beyond projects like Dreaming Spanish, you have around
| infinite amount of French, Italian, Spanish or German
| Youtube about whatever topic you want to. There are even
| dedicated playlists for total beginners you can start to
| consume with zero knowledge. You have thousands of shows
| on Netflix in foreign language with various difficulty -
| some actually suitable for beginners. Some you have
| already seen in own language, so you can understand them
| more easily.
|
| For major languages, there are dozens if not hundreds of
| podcasts with simplified news, "for beginner"
| discussions. Some of them are useable with literally
| miniscule amount of knowledge.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I think books are probably the worst way to learn a
| language
|
| I learned French and my experience from best to worst ways
| to learn were:
|
| 1. 1-1 lessons with language teacher (by far the most
| effective way to learn)
|
| 2. audio lessons (Michel Thomas Method)
|
| 3. Visiting France a lot, interacting with French people
| (my wife is french) (and yes, for me this was less
| impactful than listening to audio lessons)
|
| 4. Duolingo (did a year of doing it daily, did almost
| nothing for me except a bit of vocab)
|
| 5. School (3 years of French in school was about equivalent
| to listening to 5 hours of Michel Thomas audio lessons)
| bluGill wrote:
| Schools vary a lot. Some schools are really good, but a
| lot of them are bad. Schools are typically held back by
| those who don't care and so disrupt the class. (this
| isn't always bad, for kids learning how to deal with
| other kids is itself an important lesson - home school
| kids tend to do well on tests with much less time spent
| in study, but they always show a lack of meeting diverse
| people in my experience)
| Hamcha wrote:
| As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools
| built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS
| (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time
| actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid
| starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to
| instead build a foundation first, and many other little
| things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo
| who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises
| small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term
| learning.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I've always wanted to learn Japanese, thanks for the tips!
| doubleblind wrote:
| I have started learning japanese roughly 6 months ago,
| and I luckily stumbled upon this fantastic Anki deck:
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782
|
| It focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary through
| listening comprehension. The creator has put an immense
| amount of effort into it, to a point where I cannot
| believe its free. I highly recommend it.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Did you create an account just to shill this?
| mobtrain wrote:
| I was under the (possibly incorrect) impression that
| Renshuu was very beginner unfriendly and WaniKani skips the
| most basic stuff (hiragana et al) and is "just" to learn
| kanji which ofc is important. Was I wrong?
| shibbidybop wrote:
| On WaniKani: that's correct. In their FAQ (I think?) they
| link out to an article on Tofugu (aiui run by the same
| people) which gives you a couple good anki decks to learn
| hiragana and katakana. I started wanikani without knowing
| either, and found it manageable at the start by referring
| back to a hiragana chart. At some point I went through
| the decks, and after about two weeks I could read
| hiragana well enough to leave them behind.
|
| Certainly not a complete resource for learning the
| language, but very effective for learning (to read) the
| kanji.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| Yeah, I really don't get all the hate towards DuoLingo on
| this site. Granted, it isn't going to make you fluent alone
| but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your
| feet wet.
|
| Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely
| everything there is to know about a given subject. There are
| none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be
| effective.
|
| Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you
| to practice out of the course and in your own time.
| Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in
| getting the basics of Hindi down.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| I agree, for me Duolingo was great to learn the basics of
| Spanish, enough so that I could move on and practice in
| real life.
| apwell23 wrote:
| I agree i can speak passable spanish with my wife's family.
| i learnt exclusively on duolingo.
|
| I don't know if its the best way but it kept me motivated
| to come back and put in some work in a fun environment.
| which i belive is the biggest problem to solve for any sort
| of learning.
| degamad wrote:
| The suggestion is that it's likely that you did much of
| your learning from speaking to your wife's family, with
| duolingo giving you a kickstart and the confidence to do
| so.
|
| Having conversation partner(s) to practice with generally
| trumps any other learning method for languages.
| frank20022 wrote:
| Because duolingo is designed for addiction (that's how they
| make money), not actual learning (learning would mean you'd
| stop using the thing, no good for stakeholders).
|
| There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but
| there are infinitely superior tools that actually _make you
| learn_ , and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning
| pastime that duo is.
|
| For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not
| treating you like a toddler and not resorting to emotional
| manipulation.
| deeThrow94 wrote:
| Looking to apps to learn language outside of spaced
| repetition and talking to someone over video seems pretty
| naive to begin with.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a lot of things an app can do for you. Spaced
| repetition is the easiest one. However there are a lot of
| other options if you get creative. Most of them are a lot
| more work though. (though chatbots should now be easy as
| well to implement)
| makingstuffs wrote:
| I have to disagree in that you would stop using the app
| if you learn a language. Learning is a lifelong task and
| becoming proficient in a language does not mean you will
| stay proficient in a language. It takes constant
| refreshing in order to keep sharp.
|
| Is Duo the best thing on the planet? No, does it serve a
| purpose? Yes. The reality is that, if people see their
| skills improving as a result of using the app
| (gamification etc included) then it doing its job.
|
| > There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2,
| but there are infinitely superior tools that actually
| make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-
| learning pastime that duo is.
|
| This I strongly disagree with. Nothing can _make_ you
| learn other than your own willingness to do so. If you
| have the desire to learn, you will. If you do not, you
| won't. It is that simple and that is applicable to any
| subject.
| cillian64 wrote:
| > Because duolingo is designed for addiction
|
| For people who have trouble keeping up hobbies, that's a
| feature. Even if duolingo isn't the ideal way to learn,
| it's a lot better than something I give up on or forget
| about after a week.
| Tor3 wrote:
| My learning finally picked up speed again when I started
| using CCI (Compelling Comprehensive Input). How easy it is to
| find material differs a lot between languages. Way way back
| in time I learned English that way, though I didn't think of
| it as "learning" back then - I was so focused on what is now
| called "compelling input".
|
| However, you'll need _some_ kind of foundation, otherwise it
| 'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the
| language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for
| that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach"
| in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a
| table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The
| Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I
| talked to had never heard about the guy.
|
| When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I
| used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure
| and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No
| conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives
| you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge
| mistake was to switch to Duolingo.
| Aachen wrote:
| I'm trying to look up what this CCI thing is, but I don't
| seem to get further than simply "use the language". Do you
| have a good resource that explains how to apply the method
| or, if applicable, an example of a CCI course?
| jamager wrote:
| Italki, LingQ, Languagetransfer, StoryLearning...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some
| translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from
| prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and
| even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.
|
| If you have that, you don't need the other things.
|
| One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using
| language.
|
| (You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll
| still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)
| broodbucket wrote:
| There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to
| tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but
| I've been trying to use several different flagship models
| for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial
| to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs
| are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for
| language learning. They seem perfectly competent at
| communicating in whatever language you want, and are fine
| at translation, but for example, explaining grammatical
| concepts of one language in another language they have been
| surprisingly incompetent at in my experience.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source
| for language learning.
|
| > They seem perfectly competent at communicating in
| whatever language you want
|
| These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you
| want for language learning.
|
| > but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one
| language in another language they have been surprisingly
| incompetent at in my experience
|
| Doesn't matter.
| deeThrow94 wrote:
| I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african
| language, but one with tens of millions of speakers
| worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but
| grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output. Is this
| better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There are two things to say here:
|
| > I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african
| language, but one with tens of millions of speakers
| worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but
| grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.
|
| This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to
| observe that it doesn't happen with better-known
| languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model
| for your target language.
|
| > Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd
| argue worse.
|
| My first instincts go that way too. But note that
| language classes consider it desirable for the students
| to try to speak with each other in the target language.
| (And not just where they can be supervised - the more
| they do it, in any context, the better.)
|
| If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect,
| your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle
| _a lot_ of your input being incorrect without major
| problems.
| bluGill wrote:
| The two sentences do not contradict. Using LLMs alone
| would be bad. However they can be used with other things.
| Most people are get fluent in a language use several
| different methods to learn.
|
| It isn't clear if LLMs are good. The formal studies
| cannot possibly be done so don't bother looking. (a few
| early studies might be done, but not enough to draw
| conclusions). And of course LLMs may well change in the
| future so even if you have a conclusion it may not apply
| to what we see next year.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I and my wife used an LLM to translate something she had
| written, she could have done that herself but she doesn't
| feel up to a task like that yet (due to the target
| audience). And I myself am far away from being able to
| translate that kind of text to my native language.
|
| In general the translation was good, but the wording felt
| a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic
| grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical
| gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid
| variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and
| also using pronouns where a native never would - where
| it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers
| to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before
| it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output
| was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a
| better translation, and after that refreshing the
| translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and
| as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).
| gary17the wrote:
| > [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to
| learning languages
|
| I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a
| traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently
| started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually
| find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier
| (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep
| learning all the different grammar combinations first"
| approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning
| video courses.
|
| The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar
| summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the
| first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are
| way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an
| explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be
| different from what you would expect.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the
| opposite.
|
| If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel
| Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day
| one.
|
| The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning
| _translation_ but learn the _language_. Ie. It is not
| important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What
| is important is that you know how communicate the concept of
| "I want to ride a horse" in German.
| gary17the wrote:
| > This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the
| opposite.
|
| I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on
| grammar was a literal _opposite_ of anything. I claimed
| that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned
| out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by
| memorizing grammar".
|
| In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen
| before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to
| another you have to understand the grammar in order to
| create a valid combination of words for your translation.
| frabcus wrote:
| You don't have to consciously and rationally understand
| the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak
| your first language!
|
| Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the
| summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g.
| 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the
| critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of
| your brain's neural network.
|
| Some people _like_ understanding the grammar and
| structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a
| mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn 't necessary, or the
| critical process.
| gary17the wrote:
| A very interesting point, I stand corrected. When I think
| about it, my brain usually does strongly prefer to
| consciously create a set of "rules" about a knowledge
| base rather than unconsciously memorize a set of ready-
| made samples. But that might be just me.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Good luck learning Finnish without understanding the
| grammar.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Good luck getting a 3 year old Finnish person lecturing
| you on Finnish grammar - Even though the kid can easily
| ask for a ice cream in both past, present, and future.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I feel like it's the opposite. Most people who speak
| languages with complex grammar natively can not clearly
| explain the grammar to you, because they use the correct
| grammar intuitively, and they have learned to do so by
| having a ton of input in that language.
| ghaff wrote:
| This is a bad example because it's probably more
| wordy/complex than it needs to be but I couldn't begin to
| name the various grammar being used in: "I would not have
| gone to Paris except that a friend decided to give me a
| free ticket."
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Some people like understanding the grammar and
| structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a
| mnemonic aid for anyone.
|
| Also, if you're looking for entertaining reading in your
| target language, grammar books are going to be
| interesting to you. The goal during language learning is
| to find interesting content that you understand, and your
| target language's grammar is a known hobby of yours.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| > I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by
| example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive
| learning by memorizing grammar"
|
| In this claim you implicitly say that you are focusing on
| "learning by memorizing grammar" if you do not are
| focusing on "learning by example" - hence the dichotomy,
| that is false.
|
| The parent commenter never talked about grammar.
| Tor3 wrote:
| > 2) speech from day one.
|
| .. is something I can't fully agree with. The exception
| being if the target language only has sounds which you are
| familiar with already (as in _really_ familiar - your
| native language already have them). Otherwise you'll simply
| train your brain to pronounce badly, because in the
| beginning you can't hear the differences. That's something
| which will be hard to fix later. And it takes time to hear
| the differences, your brain literally needs to grow new
| connections. There are other reasons too for doing a lot (a
| _lot_ ) of listening when you start a new language.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| > ... target language ...
|
| > your native language already have them
|
| It seems like there is a strong underlying understanding
| that learning a new language is done from a source
| language towards a target language.
|
| The book I am referring to argues that learning a
| language is about _embodying that language_ - ie. it is
| not an intellectual task.
|
| The most natural embodiment og a language is speech.
|
| This is fundamentally another way of looking at language
| learning than what most people think about having had
| Spanish in high school or what not.
|
| It might not be for all.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I did not at all in any way mean to say that learning a
| language should be from a source language towards a
| target language. Quite the opposite really. I completely
| agree with the statement ".. _embodying that language_ -
| ie. it is not an intellectual task ". That matches my own
| anecdotal experiences, at least.
|
| What I wanted to say was that even though babies can hear
| and differentiate between all the sounds of every
| language on earth (and yes they can), and young children
| too - what then happens is that the brain will after a
| time simply keep what's needed for the child's language
| and discard the rest. Which is why adults will have
| problems hearing certain sounds of a target language,
| _unless_ those sounds already exist in that person 's
| language(s). That takes _time_. Native English speakers,
| for example, are in my experience generally unable to
| hear the difference between certain vowels in my native
| language even though said vowels are as different as
| night and day for me. It seems to take up to two years
| for that to get fixed, depending on the person and also
| age. And in the meantime the pronunciation will be wrong
| and the person is unable to hear it and thus can 't fix
| it. And later it's so hard that it _won 't_, as a rule,
| get fixed.
|
| My wife can't hear the difference between certain
| consonants in my language even though she's fully fluent
| otherwise. She has to watch my lips. After all these
| years. The reason is simply that those differences don't
| exist in her native language. On the other hand, very
| young people can easily do it and will get the
| pronunciation right at first try.
| skydhash wrote:
| Does it really matter? You can always take a diction
| course later if it is that important. I've never bothered
| myself to learn the different sound for 'th' in English,
| nor the exact spanish flow.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Ah yes, I agree. There are biases from previous language
| experience.
|
| I am learning Polish currently, that has "complex
| consonant clusters". I come from a vowel heavy language,
| and I use a lot of time with my partner to learn to
| pronounce these sounds.
| jeltz wrote:
| But you have to start speaking at some point. Very few
| non-natives can differentiate between some sounds in my
| language and if they waited with speaking until they
| could they would never get there.
| internet_points wrote:
| > traditional "keep learning all the different grammar
| combinations first" approach
|
| That's not better than Duolingo, no.
|
| Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a
| new alphabet), but then quickly move on to
|
| * https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good
| understanding of the principles of the language but without
| feeling like a grammar book)
|
| * https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses
| (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced
| repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)
|
| * and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts
| or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding
| greatly
|
| * lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-
| NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons
| that give more control over subtitles, eventually only
| foreign subtitles or none)
|
| * simple translated stories (I don't know what these are
| called, but you'll typically have first a story with
| translations interspersed, then the full story without any
| guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this
| for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now
|
| You want _lots_ of input. You also want some deliberate
| practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than
| the input.
| joshvm wrote:
| Translated stories are sometimes called Graded Readers, you
| can buy them aligned with most common language levels
| (CEFR, JLPT, etc)
|
| Subtitles though, tricky. The sites that sync with Netflix
| are probably better than whatever Netflix offers, or
| whatever you can get that comes with your video files.
| Subtitles for entertainment are often abbreviated, which is
| fine for your native language, but it doesn't help if you
| want to look up a sentence. You need the crowdsourced ones.
| YouTube can be better in this regard, especially if they're
| automatically generated. There are also lists of video
| games floating around that rank games based on the
| availability of a script, replayable dialogue, that sort of
| thing. See Game Gengo for a Japanese example [1] (great
| channel, he also does lessons with all the vocab + grammar
| in context using games).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXICXCSIfrQ
| ljm wrote:
| I've used Pimsleur on and off for a while and it's great,
| because even with sporadic usage I can still more or less
| remember what I learned and most of the time I just need a
| bit of a refresher in terms of using the right case or
| conjugation so I don't get I/you/they/it mixed up.
|
| Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the
| man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with
| Pimsleur, after the same amount of time, it's right into
| practical stuff like "I would like something to eat" or "I
| don't understand X but I do speak Y."
|
| Having an extensive vocabulary of random words isn't
| particulary helpful except to extrapolate meaning out of
| conversations you don't fully understand, and almost
| certainly cannot contribute to.
| skydhash wrote:
| You need very little grammar in the first place. And if
| you learned your native one, it becomes easier to just
| store the difference (leaks may still happen). Coherent
| input where previous words are repeated while you learned
| new one are best (watch subtitled movies, and you can
| pick a lot if you're focused on that).
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably especially with a related language. I remember
| high school French (vaguely) abd it was probably a pretty
| good 4 years of high school French. But I also remember
| memorizing a ton of complex tenses and the like, many of
| which I probably rarely use in English, couldn't name,
| and would probably be hard for a lot of people to parse
| if I did, especially conversationally and mixed with
| negation.
| skydhash wrote:
| Yep, French has a lot of rules! But they are grammar
| rules only. So while rote memorization is hard, a good
| tutor can hel you with the basic understanding. At the
| end of the day, it's just practice. With english, you
| have to practice spelling and pronunciation, with French
| you have to practice grammar.
| vel0city wrote:
| I see people say they get nonsense phrases in Duolingo a
| lot but I never seem to get them. For example, a lesson
| I'm doing right now has phrases like "Quand est-ce que
| vous partez aux Etas-Unis?" (When are you leaving for the
| United States?), "Tu as ton ticket? (Do you have your
| ticket?), "Nous cherchons un bon hotel a Paris." (We are
| looking for a good hotel in Paris).
|
| How are these nonsense phrases? Seems like some useful
| things to know as a traveler.
|
| Maybe it's the different language courses. But I also did
| a lot of Esperanto and it had similar quality phrases to
| learn as this French course.
| vindarel wrote:
| A big shootout and kuddos to Language Transfer. I love
| their method (since I loved Michel Thomas, we see the
| influence).
|
| "Don't try to remember, don't do homework, but repeat with
| the two other students. It is of our responsibility [the
| teacher] to make you understand the language. What you
| know, you don't forget" (para-phrasing)
|
| And it works (for me(c) and surely for more software
| engineers).
|
| https://www.michelthomas.com/
| vitro wrote:
| Adding one more:
|
| * https://www.latudio.com/ - listening first approach,
| pause and show sentence if you don't understand, practice
| words you didn't get later, 4 types of exercises, scripted
| conversations being one of them
|
| And a possibility of a one-time purchase.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder
| huimang wrote:
| The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is
| possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion.
|
| My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now,
| as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took
| Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the
| traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in
| college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from
| some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a
| level of conversations with native speakers or being able to
| engage with media.
|
| Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional
| curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to
| actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within
| their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not
| speaking a language but moreso learning about it
| academically.
|
| There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to
| recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and
| replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with
| regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial.
| It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and
| barely be able to speak the language at all with someone...
| which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?
|
| I love the hobby of studying languages and things like
| Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they
| can't speak very much even after a long time investment,
| which is damn shame.
|
| My point is neither should really be looked towards for
| substantial language learning methods.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > neither should really be looked towards for substantial
| language learning methods
|
| What should one do instead?
| N_Lens wrote:
| Post critical comments on HN obviously.
| Tor3 wrote:
| internet_points posted good advice a comment or two
| above. Duolingo _is_ ok as a starting point, but (as was
| said before), move on as soon as possible. As a poster
| above did, I also spent way way too long on Duolingo,
| chasing the 'streak'. And got nowhere. I already had a
| foundation when I started, but I got no farther in a year
| or more of daily Duo. All progress stopped. When I
| finally switched to graded input instead, and deleted
| everything Duo from my devices, things finally picked up
| again. I could have used the time I wasted on Duo to get
| input instead, it's something which actually works (when
| the input is compelling and something which can be mostly
| understood).
| huimang wrote:
| There is no one magic solution. Every person I know who
| has learned a language to an advanced degree has used a
| variety of methods, diligently, over a long period of
| time, depending on their current needs. I can give a
| brief overview of some tools that I find to be efficient
| in terms of time and payoff, in no particular order.
|
| 1. SRS - Spaced Repetition Software, for flashcards. Anki
| is the gold standard. It's open source and free on every
| pc/android/etc except iphone where it's $20 I think. I
| recommend finding a good starting deck with about 3k to
| 6k words to help build your core vocabulary. In my case
| it was "Evita's 5k Korean". For about 6-8 months I
| grinded 20 new words per day, which means about 30-50
| minutes of Anki depending on if you missed a day or not
| and thus had a backlog. If you have less time I recommend
| 5 or 10 new words per day.
|
| 2. Find trusted resources for grammar and structured
| learning. You might have to hunt around but for Korean, I
| found some excellent websites, Youtubers, and textbooks
| like Korean Grammar in Use I-III. These materials really
| are the core of your studying. Vocab doesn't help much if
| you don't know grammar and you certainly can't say
| anything without vocab. These are how you get to output,
| i.e. writing and speaking correctly.
|
| 3. Find graded readers if possible. Roughly, these are
| texts designed around 90% comprehension which is a
| sweetspot for learning new words naturally through
| context. Unfortunately at the time I couldnt find any for
| Korean, but I've watched friends use them for e.g.
| Mandarin Chinese and learn quite a lot of vocabulary in a
| short time.
|
| 4. Find someone who can correct your writing in some
| form. Whether that's a private tutor or a friend who's
| native language is your target language and their target
| language is your native language. In the past I found
| some dedicated learners through HelloTalk who would trade
| journal entries with me. I would correct their English
| and they would correct my Korean. It goes without saying
| that you need to practice output in your target language
| when possible, both in writing and in speech.
|
| 5. Find a _good_ language exchange and /or friends who
| speak your target language. By good, I mean a structured
| language exchange that enforces pairings and language
| usage. In Seoul I find that most "language exchanges" are
| excuses to drink and and chat, mostly in English. There
| was one language exchange that 1:1 Korean language-only
| pairings for 1 hour, then I repaid that with 2-3 30minute
| pairings of 2-3 people in English. This is where you put
| your textbook/solo studies to practice by actually
| speaking (and hopefully getting corrections). Eventually
| I hit a plateau and got tired of having similar
| conversations, plus paying $10 per event. I also found a
| few lifelong friends who are studying English and thus we
| can ping each other for random questions.
|
| 6. Find some spaces or groups that are -only- in your
| target language. With the internet it's easier than ever
| now with Discord. For example, my friend learned a lot of
| French by hanging out in French speaking gaming servers
| on discord. There are also apps like Hilokal and
| HelloTalk, but I haven't used them in a while so I can't
| speak to their quality anymore. Lastly there are offline
| options depending on your area. In the US I used Meetup
| to find language groups and in Korea I use, well, a
| korean equivalent to find groups in niches I enjoy.
|
| 7. Lastly, and this isn't a tool, but "If you want to
| improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." -
| Epictetus. In learning a language, you _will_ make
| mistakes and you _will_ say things that sound stupid. It
| 's okay. It's unavoidable and you make good progress by
| learning from these mistakes, so long as you reflect on
| them and understand why the mistake occurred. The people
| who focus on being perfect and making zero mistakes in
| learning a language, in my experience, do not go very
| far.
| spudlyo wrote:
| These are some great tips. Having consistent daily
| exposure to your target language I think is important.
| Compelling graded readers can make spending that time
| every day enjoyable and not feel like a chore. A stress-
| free positive learning environment helps quite a bit with
| the subconscious process of language acquisition; it's
| what Krashen calls the "Affective Filter Hypothesis".
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I can only tell you what worked for me: it's input. Read.
| Start using any brute-force method to learn the basics,
| like the 100 most common words. Then start reading
| stories aimed at toddlers (or especially written for
| language learners, there are apps), and keep going to
| more complex input as you progress.
|
| Do not worry about grammar; you will learn it intuitively
| as you move from simple sentences to more complex blocks
| of text. Do not worry about learning word lists after you
| have the basics; learn words in the context of the text
| you're reading.
|
| (I have no qualifications besides being a self-taught
| English and Chinese speaker, so take my input for what
| it's worth.)
| pbmonster wrote:
| > and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional
| curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to
| actually speak to people
|
| Is this really how language lessons are taught in US high
| schools? I've learned English and French in high school,
| and we were forced to speak all the time.
|
| * Read a story together (who's reading aloud is frequently
| switched), then the teacher asks questions about the story
| and picks students to answer. The student answers, if
| there's errors the teacher fixes them, and the student
| repeats the corrected answer.
|
| * When you learn new grammar, the teacher starts a
| sentence, and a student has to finish it using the new
| grammatical structure (or similar exercises). This was
| followed by homework, where all those exercises happened
| again, in writing.
|
| By year 3, we also did lots of essay-style writing, which
| is where you really drill down into learning the language.
| Essays were graded and discussed.
|
| In my opinion, this is the best (and also most expensive)
| way to thoroughly learn a language, it can only really be
| improved by cutting down the size of the class to ideally
| 2-3 students - which, of course, makes it even more
| expensive.
| huimang wrote:
| We did do those kinds of things. For example, speaking
| with a partner or having to give a 5 minute talk to the
| teacher on something.
|
| The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise,
| and the content of "conversations" was always very, very
| simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown
| is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation.
| It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the
| upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.
|
| I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to
| pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly
| given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our
| essays.
|
| It's probable that small classes would help because the
| teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with
| 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who
| already study/watch media outside of school will excel.
| So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
|
| Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or
| another environment to speak/practice the language will
| yield much greater results much faster. You can study the
| same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional
| material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at
| times to fill in gaps.
|
| I think if you're a college student it's fine since you
| have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of
| any language), but as an adult where time is
| significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a
| sibling comment I went over what I do use.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in
| _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation.
|
| That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons,
| right? No reason not to progress to children's stories
| and newspaper articles in time.
|
| We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think
| our teachers realized that most students will learn
| little from that. It was always student teacher
| interactions, but in a way that required everybody to pay
| attention/participate. The teacher would ask a question,
| waited a few seconds so everybody could begin forming a
| response, and then pick a student to answer.
|
| Not listening and mentally preparing an answer risked
| getting picked, failing, and getting admonished/ridiculed
| - and the teachers were (naturally) pretty good at
| calling on students who had drifted off. If you were
| paying attention, you also constantly compared your
| prepared response with what other students were
| answering, which made you think about correct grammar,
| ect.
|
| I think if you have the resources to do 5 hours of
| language lessons a week, this is the best way. If you're
| learning independently, your way is probably more
| effective in terms of time and money. I've saved your
| other comment, I really should get back into Spanish...
| terinjokes wrote:
| In my four years of US high school Spanish in South
| Florida, I don't recall a single time we read complete
| stories or newspaper articles. It was entirely grammar
| and vocabulary in isolation. When there was speaking
| exercises the teachers did not make an effort to have the
| native speakers speak with the non-native speakers.
|
| The only thing close to what I'd now call "Compelling
| Comprehensive Input" that I recall is a single week where
| we watched a Friends-style miniseries about an English
| speaker moving to Spain.
|
| You would not be surprised ik spreek geen spaans.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons,
| right? No reason not to progress to children's stories
| and newspaper articles in time.
|
| After trying for years to learn my wife's native
| language, I haven't really gotten past the "my name is _"
| and a few other key phrases. I've got _maybe_ 10 phrases
| memorized and I think that's all my brain can hold at
| this point. Language learning is not for everyone.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Language learning is not for everyone.
|
| That's certainly true, but there's probably another
| effect at play here: language learning is extremely time
| intensive, and you don't progress if you're not
| practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even
| lose progress again.
|
| You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases
| with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated
| effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires
| almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of
| maintenance effort.
| bmacho wrote:
| > It's probable that small classes would help because the
| teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with
| 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who
| already study/watch media outside of school will excel.
| So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.
|
| Yup. Motivated students learn the language in the
| classroom (+ self-study) just fine. Unmotivated students
| don't, but they are not motivated anyway.
| eythian wrote:
| That's interesting to me. From my perspective, I didn't
| find Duolingo great, but it did give me some vocab and
| basic sentences, and left me feeling more competent than I
| actually ended up being once I was living where they speak
| the language I was learning.
|
| Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can
| really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to
| the point where I was having short conversations in that
| second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still
| reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely
| feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.
|
| However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can
| do things like play D&D in my second language. I still
| don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time
| which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still,
| though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational,
| and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.
|
| Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are
| classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature
| of yours?
| criddell wrote:
| English grammar (my native language) has always been a
| mystery to me. Any time I hear about participles or present
| perfect or infinitives or passive voice etc... my eyes glaze
| over and I have no idea what any of it means. In school I
| failed those units.
|
| Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn't be a
| very effective path for me...
| spudlyo wrote:
| It's funny, but I always found English grammar (also my
| native language) to be completely pointless, but I find
| myself really enjoying learning about Latin grammar, and as
| a result marveling about how weird English is. It's
| fascinating that one subsystem in our brain can completely
| understand our native language's grammar, and yet another
| part finds it unfathomable.
| criddell wrote:
| In high school French class, I had the same problems with
| grammar in that language.
|
| For example, to teach plus-que-parfait my teacher used
| English language analogies and they were all useless for
| me. Again, I failed that part of the course but my grades
| were high enough to pass without it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Research has figured out that grammar is the wrong thing to
| focus on in a classroom. There are better ways to teach in a
| classroom that work. However many schools are not following
| the latest research so you need to find a good one.
|
| grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson
| gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used
| to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have
| had around 50 hours in the classroom.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> recently started to learn another language with Duolingo_
|
| Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you
| make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it
| every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a
| year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that
| you've learned very little.
|
| _> the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar
| combinations first"_
|
| Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.
| mawadev wrote:
| I like how this type of critique pops up when someone sits down
| and makes a free/libre version of an app with a flawed premise.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it,
| maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?".
| DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at
| learning - not so much (in my experience).
| bluGill wrote:
| One thing duolingo should he is after every 5 ten minute
| sessions it should be a ten minute "slow news in the target
| language" session. There are lots of other options on this
| line. Really every duolingo style app needs to tell people
| sooner "you are done, go find something else", either do
| that by refusing to let them use the app (that will make
| the VC's unhappy), or give them a different style of study
| that is more useful than flashcards.
| switch007 wrote:
| Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app
| for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about
| it. It's not for learning a language.
|
| Intermediate and advanced language learning requires
| interaction with humans.
|
| It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or
| feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| > Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ...
| It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages
|
| No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to
| improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with
| other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.
|
| While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for
| language learning, but it's not because of the "translation",
| but that they do not communicate two things clearly:
|
| - this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your
| goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with
| other methods/materials
|
| - at what point you should move on from Duolingo
| palata wrote:
| > but that they do not communicate two things clearly: > this
| alone won't make you a fluent speaker
|
| Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I
| only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one
| mentioned it.
|
| > at what point you should move on from Duolingo
|
| I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't
| reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language
| you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while
| waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do
| 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| > Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog.
| I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one
| mentioned it.
|
| Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the
| app. If critical information about how to use the product
| effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's
| poor communication.
|
| Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-
| learning app for people all over the world, many of whom
| don't speak English well enough to even understand their
| blog.
|
| > I won't blame them for assuming common sense.
|
| It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is
| not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers
| (who their target audience are by the way). Many users
| assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are
| "done."
| znpy wrote:
| My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo
| in the past and I agree, it's completely useless.
|
| Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice.
| Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words,
| duolingo is teaching a few more words.
|
| The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid
| subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be
| getting).
|
| So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company
| stays afloat at all.
| luotuoshangdui wrote:
| Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language
| learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to
| Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying
| to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb
| gamification.
|
| I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me
| language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't
| get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.
| gary17the wrote:
| > Duolingo is obsolete.
|
| I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of
| short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming
| valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the
| bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly
| presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not
| memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask
| for anything more.
|
| I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you
| can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints
| provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise
| answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your
| brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as
| opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm
| usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously
| bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird
| standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's
| useless. Which applies to literally every method for
| learning a language.
|
| And when you press someone on their alternatives to
| Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's
| pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points
| down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with
| an app I'm using on the metro.
|
| Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in
| the language, something I was able to do after using
| Duolingo (read the news).
| Tor3 wrote:
| That was simply an example of what's actually used in
| schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not
| something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo.
| (Though it must be said that this particular school I
| mentioned has a very good track record in churning out
| able speakers, though this is not something a casual
| learner would want to try. It's basically full time.
| Very, very hard.)
|
| For language learning there are more good options now
| than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for
| everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example,
| have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing
| stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing
| the exact same who can actually transfer that to active
| use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at
| learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I
| can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival
| level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book
| hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to
| people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the
| time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came
| across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian.
| Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you
| understand what they're most probably saying, and after a
| shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian
| grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native
| language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books,
| with text in addition to the actual comics, and then
| newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and
| speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an
| approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube
| and net resources.
|
| Now there are so many options.. at least for popular
| languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's
| more important than anything is that it's interesting.
| And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning
| _about_ a language instead of actually learning the
| language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won
| 't teach you the language.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I just wrote this in another comment, but the hardest
| part of language learning is the daily practice.
|
| Learning how the language works is the easy part. But
| only through the daily practice part do you develop the
| skills to read, write, and speak on the fly.
|
| So the question comes down to: what are you willing to do
| every day to get that practice in? Especially when you're
| a noob well under the level needed to do (or stay
| interested in) more interesting things like read the
| news.
|
| That's what Duolingo helps people with. And it's already
| compatible with the things you mention, like reading
| comics.
|
| You might be falling into the trap of looking at people
| who aren't motivated to do anything but use one app on
| their phone and then pretending they'd otherwise have the
| motivation to learn through an ideal you have that
| requires more motivation.
|
| When I started Duolingo I didn't even see myself as
| someone who would or could learn a language, so trying to
| read comics in Spanish was never on the table (much less
| a phrasebook, ugh), not an alternative that Duolingo was
| shutting down. Yet after months I realized I could
| incidentally read BBC Mundo. I'd wager most people are in
| this camp since Duolingo is such a "might as well"
| opportunity very much unlike your proposed alternatives
| where you assume everyone is super motivated.
| jamager wrote:
| Daily practice is very important, yes, but languages are
| genuinely difficult beasts on their own.
|
| Thousands of words and grammar rules that you need to
| grasp real time. Just mindless or Duolingo-ish daily
| practice doesn't take you nearly there.
| jamager wrote:
| No, it is because Duolingo is an addictive trap optimized
| for "engagement" (not learning) that requires you an
| absurd amount of time to progress very little, because it
| is explicitly designed to be ineffective with the looks
| of being effective (that's how they make money).
|
| Want alternatives? Among apps, LingQ, for example, or
| LanguageTransfer. Among not apps, Lonely Planet
| phrasebooks and StoryLearning graded readers.
|
| There are really many good options if one bothers to
| search.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Also every time Duolingo comes up people criticize it
| based on where the free tier was years ago.
| vintermann wrote:
| Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM.
| Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even
| at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English
| (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems
| to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is
| quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take
| the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can run
| locally totally trash Norwegian grammar. And they even claim
| it (both written forms!) as one of the languages they
| explicitly trained on.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh yeah good point but I'm doing English to Spanish and
| these languages are well represented in the big models.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything
| is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese
| are often the south American ones even though they (including
| duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as
| no one will take you serious.
| arghwhat wrote:
| I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is
| suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd
| say that language classes themselves is no better.
|
| Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow
| achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and
| sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language
| class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As
| is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying
| to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and
| disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every
| conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully)
| fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present,
| some might be uncomfortable with it.
|
| On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and
| means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a
| language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent
| vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on
| flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals,
| so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and
| listening comprehension tests.
|
| Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end
| up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-
| fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model,
| and arguably the task that large _language_ models are _most_
| suited for.
|
| (Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my
| experience is from Mandarin.)
| Tor3 wrote:
| I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that
| Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually _learn_ a language
| (even though there are differences between the various
| languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat
| successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level
| Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe
| various grammatically different sentences), after having been
| away from the language for fifteen years. This was some
| twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the
| last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still
| wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don 't
| know the state of the Italian course now.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| You've twice written about what is the wrong way to learn a
| new language -- what's your right way? Why did you use Duo'
| instead of 'the right way'? Perhaps that explains why one
| might create a OSS version of Duo.
| skydhash wrote:
| The method that worked for me: A 90 day course for
| learning the basic of the grammar and some thematic
| vocabulary (better than duolingo as it has whole
| conversation, both written and spoken). An awful lot of
| reading book, listening to shows, sporadic speaking and
| writing. Learned English that way without ever travelling
| to an English speaking country.
| dkarbayev wrote:
| I've learned English by scrolling endless memes on Imgur
| (back when it used to be an image storage for Reddit),
| and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the topics that
| interested me (tech and car reviews - like LTT and Doug
| DeMuro). But that only developed my passive vocabulary
| (reading and listening). I only really learned speaking
| English once I started working remotely for an australian
| company, and further improved the fluency after moving
| abroad (to the Netherlands).
|
| I'm currently doing German lessons on Duolingo, and what
| I dislike the most is that it keeps shoving "useless"
| words into my face (the words that are irrelevant for me
| and that I'll most likely never use) - I wish there was
| an option to choose the topics that I find interesting so
| that it'd mix the words that more relevant with the
| everyday use words to better taylor the vocab for me.
| Another shortcoming is that it never actually explains
| the grammar rules, you can only try to analyze the
| examples yourself, trying to notice any patterns. Some
| are good in that, others are bad - so why don't they
| spare us that mental gymnastics and provide at least
| minimal explanation?
| bluGill wrote:
| Comprehesible input. find something basic you can
| understand and immerse your self in it. Often this is
| childrens books/shows or similar level designed for
| adults.
|
| at the start you use a translation dictionary to look up
| ever word which is boring - which is why approaches like
| duolingo where they give you around 2000 common words to
| memorize quickly are useful. However the goal is to learn
| just enough of that list that you can find something you
| understand to start the real learning on.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe "immersion" works if you already know the language
| and are going for fluency, but I don't see how it can get
| you from zero to one. I've tried as an adult and failed
| to learn my wife's native language and no amount of
| "input" at any speed or level helps. It just washes over
| me and I don't understand anything.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I'm like three days from my one year Duo streak. I've
| gone from understanding none of my wife's native language
| to being able to eavesdrop on phone conversations a bit,
| and to have short exchanges. I've probably spent half an
| hour daily on average. Sometimes a lot more.
|
| I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the
| comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Comprehensible input works really well and was
| popularized by a video that went viral a few years ago
| entitled "How to acquire any language NOT learn it!" [0]
|
| The method described in the video involves focusing on
| listening for the first year by having someone read
| magazines and books to you in the target language,
| pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning
| of words you don't understand. This method works quite
| well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will
| consistently meet with you and practice like this before
| you have reached a certain level of understanding, and
| very few people want to learn this way because they see
| it as a waste of time.
|
| One of the key aspects of this model is that you should
| not be translating between your native and your target
| language, which is what you usually do on apps like
| Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible
| input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo
| doesn't work. The reality is that the method that works
| is the method you use consistently over time. Once you
| get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual
| conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point
| drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while
| exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be
| useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illApgaLgGA
| pessimizer wrote:
| Comprehensible input is not immersion.
|
| > It just washes over me and I don't understand anything.
|
| Things you don't understand are not comprehensible to
| you, so this was not experience with comprehensible
| input. If you don't know anything at all, you can at
| least collect words.
|
| Look into "graded readers." They're basically children's
| books, except native children are fluent and would find
| them primitive.
|
| What you're looking for is a situation where you
| understand 98% of what is going on, and you're baffled by
| the last 2%. If that situation is two- and three-word
| sentences spoken slowly, then that's the input you should
| be looking for (and which Duolingo isn't bad for.) The
| goal is to walk away from that thing you knew 98% of, but
| now with the last 2%.
|
| Anecdotally, download comic books in your target
| language. The pictures help enormously in getting you to
| that 98%.
| runarberg wrote:
| I've been studying Japanese for over a year now with the
| ultimate goal of being able to have basic conversations,
| and have been using the immersion method.
|
| My way of dealing with the fact that hardly any input is
| actually comprehensible is to actually translate, at leas
| in the beginning. I got a couple of vocabulary books and
| a grammar book (aimed at passing the N5 and N4 [A1 and A2
| equivalent] language exams), and drilled the vocabulary
| and grammar with a redsheet and an anki deck. The thing
| is though, that I only need to translate the word/grammar
| concept the first couple of times I see it, after that it
| is much quicker (and better for remembering) to judge if
| how well you intuitively know the word/grammar concept
| from the anki deck (or if you are able to fill in the
| blank with a red sheet). Over time you can build up your
| vocabulary and grammar and the input gets gradually more
| comprehensible.
|
| While drilling vocab and grammar I also listen to pod-
| casts, usually while walking my dog, or at the gym. It is
| helpful even if you don't understand most of it. Usually
| --at the beginning--I am able to pick up a couple of
| words I know, which reinforces them, but also I get used
| to the pronunciation and the rhythm of the language.
| After a year I am able to comprehend maybe 60-70% (on a
| good day) of some pod-cast episodes aimed at beginners.
| But at the beginning it was maybe 5%.
|
| I think what Duolingo gets wrong is that after you are
| introduced to the word or a grammar concept, you keep
| translating it. This is at best a waste of time, and at
| worst, prevents you from getting an intuitive
| understanding of the word/grammar. I think another
| mistake of Duolingo is the fact they spend too much time
| on learning a single word or grammar, repeating it too
| many times at the beginning. What I prefer is to dedicate
| some time with the word/grammar, find connections (also
| with the kanji spelling of it), and then move on. Most
| likely I will remember it after a couple of exposures
| that session, and if not, SRS should do the trick the
| following weeks.
| rvba wrote:
| Using AI for conversations is really interesting approach -
| it generally speaks the language correctly (not like
| classmates).
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Next time pay enough for a class or have a good private tutor
| and all you've said becomes true.
|
| But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better
| than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.
| arghwhat wrote:
| No, private tutors are definitely better but they are no
| silver bullet. Having a great private tutors often and long
| enough to exercise sporadic conversation and gain
| confidence in language use - a class a few times a week at
| least - is also a prohibitively expensive solution
| suggestion for most people, making it a non-solution.
|
| You also end in a false dichotomy.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| This site is full of web developers telling people they
| get what they pay for but then call tutors "prohibitively
| expensive".
|
| You want that education, invest in it. With time and
| money. Of course, the "a few minutes per day in the
| commute for 9.99" feels attractive and it even gets you
| to a basic stage but then it's what we already discussed.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Private tutoring for 1 hour, 3 times a week at the
| current rates offered by local freelancers where I live
| would be ballpark 1000 USD per month for a long time. If
| you start nitpicking about quality and put in some more
| serious hours I wouldn't be surprised if you hit two
| grand.
|
| Language should not be reserved for people that can throw
| that kind of money monthly at their random hobbies, and
| suggesting that this is " _the_ solution " is grotesque
| at best.
| cess11 wrote:
| I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been
| looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and
| still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages
| in such a lazy way.
|
| TFA might work for my use case.
| trueismywork wrote:
| One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure
| out the parts in language that you already know which are
| missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new
| language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being
| limited by the limitations of the new language.
|
| For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can
| seamlessly now move between languages without having to
| translate concepts.
|
| I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are
| absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the
| academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to
| be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which
| is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then
| it is absolutely productive.
| jamager wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with learning via translation.
|
| What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional
| manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless
| distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But
| translation is OK.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| People have vastly different needs when learning a second
| language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual
| beginner" and that's perfectly fine.
|
| If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn
| some key things about the language and freshen up on
| vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food,
| etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put
| yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what
| duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't
| matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.
|
| To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of
| regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern
| methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than
| classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will
| depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact
| method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn
| is total immersion.
| dilap wrote:
| You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the
| very, very beginning, but people sink a _ton_ of time into it
| which could 've been used to actually learn the language.
|
| Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually
| teaches you the language is an open problem.
| watwut wrote:
| > but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been
| used to actually learn the language.
|
| Or it would be used to do something completely different
| that is nor language learning at all. There is this
| hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep
| with some binging here and there is the only thing to
| prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more
| effort (and time) if a more serious effort.
|
| That is just not how it works.
|
| Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things.
| Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly
| progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki
| deck or graded reader you find boring or even language
| transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.
|
| You can make an app with different trade off or more fun
| app. But you will have to choose between causual and
| intensive.
| dilap wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair -- you can view Duolingo as just,
| basically, a fun game, and you do learn _something_.
|
| But I do think there's space for something equally
| entertaining (not anki decks!) and more effective.
|
| I learned Spanish decently well, and I think one of the
| most helpful things I did for that was just hanging out
| with people, speaking Spanish, and drinking -- not
| grueling at all, very fun!
|
| What's the app equivalent of that?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better
| than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian,
| I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs.
| I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this
| point.
|
| It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the
| finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers
| speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also
| motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That
| wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like
| duolingo.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an
| AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a
| "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier
| doesn't include it.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see
| DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that
| service.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what method they're using, but
| inference costs for speech to speech models are pretty
| significant so it does make some sense to charge more. The
| LLM-based text explanations for translation problems are
| also in the super premium tier though, and those can't be
| _that_ expensive, so maybe it 's just an attempt at market
| segmentation.
| ben7799 wrote:
| The LLM based explanations actually explain what is wrong
| with the user's specific answer, not a generic
| explanation. They are of the form:
|
| "You entered X, because of Y grammar rule you should
| instead enter Z".
|
| So they aren't something that can be pre-generated for
| all possible inputs. Some of these questions are free-
| form input.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's fair. I've just been screenshotting the page and
| asking Gemini what I did wrong for free but I guess
| Google has deeper pockets than Duolingo so they can eat
| the cost of that for longer.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Going to plug Language Transfer again, an excellent free app that
| is a much better way to learn a language than the DuoLingo
| approach.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Thank you! Is there any advantage to using the app instead of
| just playing the audio files directly?
| AnonC wrote:
| I found this in the app's description:
|
| > This app provides the same audio available for free on
| languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in
| advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone
| locked.
|
| > We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the
| app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons.
| You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn
| off this data collection in the Settings
| detectivestory wrote:
| I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find
| something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better
| for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I
| would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like
| LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better
| for daily exercises.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely
| in English?
|
| Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote
| practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is
| good at.
|
| Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener
| means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather
| practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on
| the fly.
|
| Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because
| you need the practice.
|
| The whole question of language learning basically is: what
| daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to
| do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but
| what you'll actually do.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Language transfer _is_ rather good. I 'm not quite sure what
| it does differently, but there's a reason people recommend
| it.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| No, it's a series of audio activities framed as a
| conversation between someone who knows the new language and
| someone learning. You pause the audio and play the part of
| the student when required and it focusses on the positive
| language transfer aspects between languages and how they can
| be used to build up sentences and phrases.
|
| Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and comprehension are all
| practiced and developed through the courses and, for me, it
| has been the most effective way to learn Spanish.
|
| After just a handful of lessons I was able to structure many
| useful sentences based on the teachings that we weren't
| taught directly but that I was able to create a fresh as
| needed in the moment.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to
| communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding
| is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I
| wish there would have been more content though
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| My wife and I used it for Spanish as well and it's a game
| changer for sure. I can now have a surpassingly decent (if
| simple) conversation with Spanish speakers based on this app
| and some supporting vocab learning
| est wrote:
| been using Duolingo in the 10s and last year, I gave up because
| the course seems very repetitive. Even if I got the answer right
| 10 out of 10 times, the same question kept coming. It almost
| looks like the app is trying very _hard_ to make me stay as long
| as possible, instead of study as effecient as possible.
|
| So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I
| can adapt to?
| freetonik wrote:
| Which course?
|
| The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a
| lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full
| of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a
| viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be
| the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of
| phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in,
| Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat
| is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold
| water" and "Emma wants a pizza".
|
| In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and
| some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where
| you have to read something into the microphone).
| est wrote:
| German and Arabic course.
|
| So in other words, the course is programmed by a human?
|
| Well I hope with today's AI tech the course should be highly
| customizable. I don't want to learn "The cat is a viking" 100
| times.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish
| and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises
| (where you have to read something into the microphone).
|
| They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are
| ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to
| say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a
| word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.
| gary17the wrote:
| > the same question kept coming
|
| I was under the same impression, but later the problem
| disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of
| learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of
| sentences that you should already understand.
| npinsker wrote:
| I used the app for 6 months (granted this was around 5 years
| ago) and the problem never disappeared for me.
|
| To answer the question, it depends on which language you're
| learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most
| resources for English-speaking learners.
| xandrius wrote:
| Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually
| learning.
|
| Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.
|
| For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most
| basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a
| week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words
| you encounter.
|
| That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is
| for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.
| rmnwski wrote:
| Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking
| into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the
| Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.
| K0nserv wrote:
| It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good
| success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind
| it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.
|
| The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji.
| 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very
| optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It
| might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to
| put in a lot of work.
|
| 0: https://www.wanikani.com/
|
| 1: https://www.tofugu.com/
| d332 wrote:
| I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all
| dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can
| expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's
| difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| You can skip ahead full units by passing a test, and I
| recommend always doing it if you can.
|
| I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30
| minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after
| completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often
| able to skip two or three units in a row.
|
| Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an
| easy, gamified supplement to serious study.
| i_am_a_squirrel wrote:
| The signup button just spins indefinitely :(
| neofight78 wrote:
| The problem is that Duolingo optimises for time spent on the app,
| not for progress in the language. The majority of experienced
| language learners do not recommend it.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| If I'm going to spend a thousand hours learning a new language,
| I'm willing to pay for professional study material.
| oguz-ismail wrote:
| >professional study material
|
| What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent
| dictionary app
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| something like https://michelthomas.com/landing-page/mt-
| spanish/#start-span...
|
| or https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin-american/
| yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote:
| I am personally quite happy with the Teach Yourself study
| materials as first step when picking up a new language.
| bluGill wrote:
| App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about
| language learning would consider great. If you are going to
| pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't
| about language learning, but it has native content in your
| language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your
| money.
|
| There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly
| good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but
| most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you
| should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or
| subscription) to a larger language learning system not the
| app itself.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| I would probably include duo lingo when I started - but I
| wouldn't say "hmm I wish there was something worse but free".
| charcircuit wrote:
| All language apps are destined to become essentially an SRS app,
| which at that point you might as well just use an anki.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| I disagree, the old HelloChinese course was great for covering
| Chinese character writing, as well as exercises with Pinyin and
| only Chinese characters, etc.
|
| Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also
| become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer
| grammar notes.
| Zmajche wrote:
| old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one
| in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer
| app is alternative that right now is better for Asian
| languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while
| learning.
| charcircuit wrote:
| How is it different from SRS? If you need to learn the
| strokes for thousands of characters you will need something
| like SRS.
| Zmajche wrote:
| Spaced repetition is a highly effective method for learning
| languages, particularly for vocabulary/character
| acquisition, but it is not the only method and particular
| implementation of it in the software, really matters.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It is the only method in that it is a generic term.
| Without spacing there will be too many words to review at
| once. Without repetition it will be hard for people to
| learn things in one try. Spaced reputation is required to
| scale. But do language learning apps need to scale to
| handle a lot of information? Technically no, but the
| incentives around making apps make it so that SRS will
| added and dominate the product.
|
| I will agree with you that the implementation matters,
| but ultimately anki will cover one's needs for SRS and
| open source efforts should go towards improving anki.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.
|
| It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion
| forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and
| have some recognition.
|
| Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining
| streaks rather than learning.
|
| Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too
| like HelloChinese.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| Completely agree, when Duolingo started, I took the Spanish
| course and actually got something out of it. The lessons,
| comments were super helpful. I've tried it again last year and
| I couldn't believe my eyes that most of it is gone. It feels
| exactly like an addictive game, making you focus on the game
| part of it, not learning. And the fact that you can buy out of
| failures is just WTF.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Same, I now speak fluent Spanish and have lived in Spain but
| I started with Duolingo (although just watching loads of
| films was by far the best way to learn once you get that
| far!).
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| The reason is the App Store (and Play Store) value things like
| DAU (as a proxy for "quality"), IAPs (because they get a cut),
| no real interaction (too risky), etc. The end result is "real
| language learning" doesn't align with "launching a top mobile
| app". This is also the reason none of games are hard (can't let
| people uninstall) and nothing unique shows up anymore (it's
| impossible to compete)
|
| Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that
| gives data on how to game the Play Store
| PennRobotics wrote:
| It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to
| browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any
| meaningful way whatsoever.
|
| Couple that with the _Indiana Jones boulder chase_ known as
| the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every
| six months or risk getting your Google Dev account
| permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of
| your apps under a new namespace.
|
| A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40
| employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on
| their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they
| don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be
| updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just
| pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge
| users for worse functioning redesigns.
| vaylian wrote:
| Agree. Duolingo lost most of its appeal when the discussion
| forums were taken offline.
|
| It was really nice to discuss the sentences with other learners
| and the creator of the course.
|
| And it was always fun to open the thread for the sentence "I
| love you" in the language that you were learning.
| mentalgear wrote:
| I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard
| navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.
|
| I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack
| flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more
| "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
|
| But overall, great work !
| unbleaveable wrote:
| Having trouble understanding why you thought it was acceptable to
| steal their business name, and concept, and software application
| design.
|
| Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?
|
| Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add
| the word libre?
| Funes- wrote:
| >Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?
|
| You don't know about LibreOffice, really? Your post is so
| ridiculously ironic I'm having trouble determining if it's
| satire.
| unbleaveable wrote:
| How about "Google Word", "GoogleWord", or "Rosetta Stones"?
| jeffhuys wrote:
| They call the package LibreOffice though... So... Yeah?
| thedumbname wrote:
| A lot of FOSS projects were sued for these things, see
| GAIM/Pidgin, etc. Newcomers should understand that is a
| copyright violation.
| ReflectedImage wrote:
| Sadly the authors of LibreLingo were last seen being lead into
| the back of a white van by an enormous green owl
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I have to say Duolingo has some of the best corporate humor
| I've seen.
| krick wrote:
| Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it
| when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I
| neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's
| just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I
| would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I
| wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose
| customers over stupid jokes.
|
| That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should
| have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to
| himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study
| material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have
| an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a
| interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly,
| most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality.
| They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon
| uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on.
| After a couple of years you start really wondering what are
| they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have
| paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's
| just community?
| pergadad wrote:
| Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with
| commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in.
| Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good
| offers.
|
| That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one
| thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and
| pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away
| - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have
| this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or
| something else?
|
| Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree
| to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in
| and get carried along.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach? I
| tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which
| of these is The Sun?".
|
| Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as
| "?Que significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When
| you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El
| Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".
| vitro wrote:
| Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners,
| you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding
| immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a
| listening-first approach and contextual translations with
| vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other
| contexts.
|
| [0] https://www.latudio.com/
| jghn wrote:
| Do they have a version that's not a mobile app? Or will it
| at least work on the desktop/web browser? I'm not going to
| use something like that on my phone.
| vitro wrote:
| Not at the moment.
| jghn wrote:
| Too bad. I'll see if the mobile app works on my desktop
| but otherwise that's a nonstarter.
| jeltz wrote:
| I feel that Duolingo has the same issue. Not enough
| immersion.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I built https://nuenki.app, which follows a fully immersive
| approach by immersing you while you browse the web. It
| translates entire sentences at your knowledge level into the
| target language, and you hover for definitions/the original
| sentence/etc.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| for Chinese (which duolingo is garbage) study stroke order,
| then get children books and the Pleco app.
| ximeng wrote:
| Skritter is good for stroke order
| anothereng wrote:
| The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not
| the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a
| connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone
| does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for
| learning vocabulary
| tempest_ wrote:
| Duolingo is sorta like flashcards and I think it makes a good
| easy entry into learning
| codethief wrote:
| But flashcards that connect words and concepts are still much
| better than flashcards where you merely translate.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I find Duolingo is pretty good for vocabulary in a "slow"
| context.
|
| The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by
| translation apps.
|
| Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is
| the thing you actually need in today's world of translation
| apps.
| zdc1 wrote:
| Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that
| I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep
| people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests
| and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are
| rather aligned.
|
| However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel
| quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content.
| You'd think an app with their market presence would have some
| amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get
| through half of the course and still not know how to count past
| four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points
| that are simply missing.
|
| Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven
| approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better
| content.
| wisty wrote:
| I think you're mistaken?
|
| The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo
| isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise
| explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the
| past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then
| apply them.
|
| If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just
| gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about
| the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.
|
| People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense"
| sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar
| categories which is actually the right way. You learn one
| fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah
| occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple
| apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.
|
| The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on
| listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and
| writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of
| bad IMO.
|
| And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And
| that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn
| enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's
| fine.
|
| And there's people who complain that they spend so much time
| metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they
| actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon
| owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't
| blame the app ...
| anothereng wrote:
| duolingo doesnt do grammar but it does translation. Unless
| you want to become a translator then theres no point in
| learning how to translate from language A to B. What most
| people want is to understand and speak which is a different
| skill than translation
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No, the best way to learn a language is comprehensible input.
| Every other language acquisition method is bootstrapping that
| eventually needs to segue into actually using your target
| language to read or listen to things, unaided.
|
| What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike,
| say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't
| so much building an understanding of language as much as
| they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into
| sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human
| language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use
| _programming_ languages, even though those _do_ have formal
| specifications.
|
| If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is
| Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited
| to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping.
| Personally, if you wanted to build a _good_ language
| acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some
| kind of large language model in there powering it.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind
| it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project
| in particular.
|
| But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's
| Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the
| selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather
| than a better version of something. The only people who are going
| to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free
| and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0].
| Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal
| is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.
|
| Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been
| eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use
| time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of
| online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than
| copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile.
| [1]
|
| ---
|
| [0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's
| built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than
| they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience.
| The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for
| the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.
|
| [1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The
| desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop
| died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux
| desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and
| effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right
| (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions
| of macOS or Windows.
|
| Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new
| ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor
| still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first
| invented?
| shayway wrote:
| I agree with your overall point - I'd also like to see more
| novel FOSS projects rather than knockoffs of proprietary
| software - but at the same time, there's a lot of value in FOSS
| clones for a few reasons.
|
| The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over
| time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better.
| Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while
| Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past
| couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral
| since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually
| less janky overall than Win11.
|
| Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does
| because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are
| another good example of my point, the former being largely
| superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity,
| and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the
| blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly
| less of a risk with FOSS.
|
| Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there
| are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie,
| not to mention tiling window managers.
|
| I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in
| point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps
| out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS
| Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front
| page.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Anyone have any suggestions for learning Korean? I have Hangul
| characters down and know some words/phrases from my partner, but
| would like to dive in a bit more.
| jiffygist wrote:
| I can recommend https://polski.info for Polish. Not FOSS, but at
| least non-commercial.
| Pavilion2095 wrote:
| But why? These apps are ineffective. If you want to learn a
| language, don't waste your time on Duolingo or this...
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I
| recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.
|
| First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary
| but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I
| realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches
| you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the
| "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place
| where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation
| because you don't know how to form sentences.
|
| With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for
| their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning
| though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost
| me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started
| German with it before doing more traditional classes and live
| speaking with a partner Annoyances (in particular, ads
| disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth
| paying for as a quick daily refresher.
| nine_k wrote:
| From my experience, Duolingo teaches you the vocabulary and the
| set sentences very well. But this is by far not enough. I use
| regular textbooks that describe the structure of the language,
| the grammar, the syntax, etc, so as to gain some analytical
| understanding of it. On top of that, Duolingo helps to get used
| to recognize these structures and flesh them out with various
| words. Also, unlike a book, it forces you to listen, and,
| crucially, to speak. It's a very important step from being able
| to read written language only to being able to actually talk.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I think Duolingo does an okay job of teaching structure, but it
| probably comes around the 2nd year or so (I've been using it
| about 3 years, but I did have a few years in high school of
| Spanish a long time ago)
| jghn wrote:
| Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5
| years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read
| Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work
| out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of
| Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for
| listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for
| speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site
| works.
| leke wrote:
| I never thought to check Udemy to learn my target language
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Words without structure are generally comprehensible,
| especially if you are in an interactive situation where you can
| generally catch cases where there is a coherent but wrong
| meaning. (No, you do not want the microwave, you want what's in
| the microwave!)
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants
| to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.
|
| Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a
| skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test
| knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
|
| - Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
|
| - Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a
| different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being
| asked about elsewhere);
|
| - Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might
| have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another
| question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in
| the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
|
| - Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if
| you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less
| likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can
| intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost
| nobody does.
|
| - For other topics like math you often get marks for each step.
| Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks
| writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong
| answer;
|
| - When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice
| and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that
| deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it
| beforehand.
|
| - Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple
| choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer,
| you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating
| obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
|
| My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it
| so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions
| and that means I don't learn anything.
|
| Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer
| is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other
| languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
|
| I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and
| remember none of it.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Anyone as experience with feedback on
| https://www.rocketlanguages.com/ and https://babbel.com/ ?
|
| I'm mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two
| have voice recognition it seems.
| tarentel wrote:
| I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language
| although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a
| conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but
| I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo
| for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on.
| Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for
| speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking
| a class.
| angry_moose wrote:
| I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their
| speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty
| flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound
| you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.
|
| I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur
| (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for
| conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to
| dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.
|
| For conversational though you might be better off just finding
| an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is
| probably more effective than any of the apps.
| joaohaas wrote:
| Cool... but nothing will ever beat Anki + Immersion. Here's one
| guide most Japanese learners follow: https://learnjapanese.moe/
| masijo wrote:
| Wish there were similar pages for other languages, I want to
| learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this
| quality.
|
| You could give Refold a shot! https://refold.la/how-to-learn-
| russian/
|
| (disclosure: I also used to work there.)
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Hope this takes off! Early Duolingo was very community focused
| and lots of fun, and proves people are really motivated to
| participate if you make the UI easy enough.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| it's interesting how they had a huge community when they wanted
| everyone contributing new lessons and fixes.
| kamatour wrote:
| Has anyone tried both LibreLingo and Duolingo? I'm curious if the
| open-source approach makes learning feel more natural?
| pkdpic wrote:
| Nice to see this pop up, not that I mind giving Duo money every
| month for my kids account.
|
| Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python
| etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out
| there... Im getting closer...
|
| I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for
| DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!
|
| Please Duo hear my prayers...
| alkonaut wrote:
| This space seems like one of those areas where it would be really
| hard to break in because their whole selling point is having had
| hundreds or thousands of people record and annotate an enormous
| amount of voice input, which I assume has to be hand polished for
| every single exercise?
|
| I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some
| parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take
| basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience
| not to be very janky in the end.
| salimmadjd wrote:
| Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.
|
| Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It's a
| gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
|
| Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it
| just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from
| Zynga).
|
| If you're on free version, just look at the ads you're getting.
| Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
|
| I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo's streak
| gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials
| to actually learn.
| otherayden wrote:
| I actually really like this take. Despite the fact that most
| language learners hate on it, Duolingo has great product market
| fit, and I think it's for this reason. It's in the toilet time
| distraction/edutainment market as much as it is in the language
| market
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Have a friend, who is on his 7th or 8th year of every day using
| DuoLingo (DL) "learning" German. His German is still terrible.
| Phrase structure goes all overboard, verbs are not adapted to
| time, person and whatever else. It is a bit painful to see.
| People also say that some languages just have terrible lessons
| on DL. Maybe German is one of those.
|
| I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently
| classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like
| the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game
| of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads.
| It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I
| stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic
| Chinese is better learned elsewhere.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| An even basic Chinese is better learned from a Chinese-
| specific app like Lingodeer or HelloChinese.
|
| I tried all three when I was first getting started. I didn't
| end up going with any of them (I bought a textbook instead -
| gamification just isn't my jam), but I was at least fairly
| impressed with Lingodeer and HelloChinese. Both were clearly
| made with love. And I've met several more advanced learners
| who got started with them. By contrast, for all its users,
| I've yet to meet a single person who went with Duolingo and
| subsequently made it to an intermediate level in Chinese. I'm
| sure there's someone out there somewhere, but overall it
| seems that people's success rate with that app is _bleak_.
| tylersmith wrote:
| The gamification is what made it work for me. I had 2 months to
| learn some Turkish before a trip and once I realized it was a
| game I beat everyone else in my cohort every day. When someone
| would come up on my heels I'd make sure to spend 30-60 extra
| minutes that day. I still know Turkish better than any other
| language and I've been immersed in Spanish for 3 years.
| shemtay wrote:
| If I could change one thing about Duolingo, it would be to allow
| the user to turn off all the gamification completely. I don't
| care about fake internet gems, knowing how to speak Chinese (or
| whatever) is it's own reward, so stop wasting my time with bs!
|
| Nevertheless, Duolingo is an amazing and convenient starting
| point for unlocking the learning of new languages.
|
| Make your way through the entire course as fast as you can, while
| also listening to music, talking to people, talking to chatGPT,
| reading books, etc in the target language as soon as you can
| manage.
|
| Protip: learn your 3rd language using your second as the language
| of instruction.
| damjon wrote:
| How about gamification in LibreLingo ? It's number one Duolingo
| feature.
| sieve wrote:
| As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one
| up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have
| to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina
| is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an
| adult.
|
| The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and
| generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz.
| English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It
| might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of
| the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood
| after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of
| dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and
| translating it from one language to another.
|
| After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a
| couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is
| maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing
| patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like
|
| sarve janah karyam kurvanti
|
| sarve janah gacchanti
|
| sarve janah namanti
|
| and you automatically associate sarve (all) with janah (people)
| without needing to know the declension of those words. This
| applies to the cases as well.
|
| To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of
| topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to
| restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result
| of the nature of the material. But that is doable.
|
| [1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know
| four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues
| and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries
| were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)
| luqtas wrote:
| i don't know why people are taking Duolinguo and relatives as
| the definitive course to learn a language... they even cite at
| their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want
| 'fluency'
|
| some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases
| to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among
| humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss
| their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
|
| [0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/
|
| edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive
| joke) if you are using something like uBlock!
| djeastm wrote:
| >they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside
| the app if you want 'fluency
|
| Sure, they've got that fig leaf covering them.
| sieve wrote:
| Frankly, people do not have the time to deeply research this
| topic. You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo
| claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days
| and give up.
|
| This happened to me about ten years ago.
|
| I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only
| when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that
| I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking
| around. There are some people on YT who talk about this
| stuff:
|
| - Alexander Arguelles
|
| - Steve Kaufmann
|
| - Luke Ranieri
|
| I might be missing a few others.
|
| You first have to know what your problem is, before you can
| solve it.
|
| > no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4
| different languages
|
| True. In culturally homogeneous countries, you don't need
| four languages to make yourself understood.
|
| It becomes somewhat necessary in places like mine where
| different groups of acquaintances/relatives/friends speak
| different languages and finding a single language at the
| intersection of those groups can be hard.
| luqtas wrote:
| > You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo
| claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few
| days and give up.
|
| is that Duolingo fault or users? because that happen in any
| hobby. heck, take indie gamedev.! hundreds give ups for a
| single released game. we could also say that there are
| people who tried Duolingo and years later they are fluent
| because the app was the kickstart
|
| you have to be quite naive/lazy to stick ONLY with Duolingo
| for a year or 2 and expect that you will be fluent. there's
| also different ways of approaching the app... like each
| lesson allowing one to read or discuss it with the
| community; meta-thinking stuff like "am i learning or just
| rushing through lessons?" etc.
|
| i heard podcasts about psychologists suggesting that
| fluency is subjective and it happens at +4 years time span
| of active engagement after mastering the basics
|
| i think Niklas Luhmann's essay on communication is quite
| relevant here;
| https://www.unisalento.it/documents/20152/2157613/LUHMANN-
| Wh...
| sieve wrote:
| Fluency is a different topic. In the initial stages, I am
| more concerned about the size of my vocabulary and my
| ability to understand what is written than trying to
| speak or listen. This is where reading lots and lots of
| material in the target language helps.
|
| I have seen lifelong scholars of the Sanskrit language
| struggling to speak in Sanskrit because they are simply
| not used to it.
| adastra22 wrote:
| My own experience mirrors yours. My first thought in seeing
| this was "...why?" Duolingo is a gamified app that feels like
| learning a language but actually teaches you next to nothing
| while driving engagement. I get why they got stuck on that
| path, but why copy it?
| sieve wrote:
| They might have found it useful enough to attempt their own
| spin on it, I guess.
|
| I don't think that Duolino is absolutely useless. But my
| reason for learning languages might be different from those
| of others. Some people want to be able to say a few words in
| the language they are learning. I want to read novels, poetry
| and philosophical texts.
|
| The approach you take and the kind of vocabulary you want to
| acquire will differ accordingly.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah, I've seen my wife's time with the owl not translate
| into understanding much of the Spanish she sees around town.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I built a tool[0] that gives you constant input at your level
| as you browse the web, so you don't need to take time out of
| your day. You can just learn a little as you browse, and let it
| compound over time.
|
| It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences,
| then translating ones at your level into your target language.
|
| [0] https://nuenki.app
| czbond wrote:
| I like your approach here, thanks for posting
| koreth1 wrote:
| This looks really useful! Wish I'd had something like this
| when I was learning Mandarin.
|
| I'm curious what determines whether or not you add a given
| language to the list. DeepL and Claude, at least, have usable
| translation ability in more languages than the app currently
| supports. Is there a lot of manual effort required for each
| language, or do you want to keep the list limited just to
| avoid overwhelming users?
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Thanks! I'm glad people like it; I'm hopeless at marketing
| it to Language Learners:tm:, but programmers seem to love
| it and it's nice to get some positive feedback.
|
| DeepL is actually pretty limited in what it supports.
| Unless I've missed a new language, Nuenki supports all of
| DeepL's languages.
|
| Some of the additional ones are supported via Claude only
| and, where permitting, Groq. Groq is far faster than
| Claude; in languages that DeepL supports, DeepL handles
| visible text and Claude handles text that you haven't
| scrolled to yet. Claude-only languages are a bit of a worse
| experience.
|
| It's pretty easy for me to add a language. It's all stored
| in a centralised toml file, which happens to be open source
| - https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-
| languages/blob/maste... - and it's about a 20 minute job to
| add a language, test it, etc. Then it's about half an hour
| and 5 USD to benchmark whether Llama is any good at it, and
| if so enable Groq and make the experience a bit more
| pleasant. I'm currently working on improving the
| translation quality benchmark (https://nuenki.app/blog/the_
| best_translator_is_a_hybrid_tran...), because people seem
| to like it and there's definitely a lot of room for
| improvement.
|
| That 20 minute number is without updating the big language
| cloud on the website, which is a bit finicky; iirc I
| haven't added Vietnamese to it yet.
|
| If anyone here has any requests, I'd gladly add them!
| boriselec wrote:
| Good tool, I like it so far.
|
| My biggest progress in English was when I started to read the
| English internet (HN, Reddit, etc.). I used an browser
| extension to translate words that I didn't know.
|
| I'm learning Spanish now, but there is no content that
| interests me. Maybe the Spanish Wikipedia sometimes.
|
| So this extension gives me that language exposure.
| syndeo wrote:
| Ah, is Lingva Latina the one with Caecilius and his family? I
| had a Latin class in 7th grade and remember having a book of
| that same name, and I somehow remember the main father
| character's name. They had a dog too, I want to say his name
| was Cerberus, haha. "Cave canem"--"beware of dog"
|
| Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete,
| discipuli!" to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"
|
| The fact that all these years later I still remember some
| things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.
|
| In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other
| languages), which is a similar "get actual language input
| rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method,
| and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!
| sieve wrote:
| I am not sure about the names of the characters. But a Roman
| family is definitely involved in the first part (Familia
| Romana).
|
| > I like to think it's worked
|
| It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I
| don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days
| every few months, read something, and then disappear.
|
| You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we
| want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences
| in the applicable context.
| aleffert wrote:
| Caecilius who, _spoiler for a decades old Latin textbook_ ,
| dies when Vesuvius erupts, is from the Cambridge Latin
| Course. The dog, who survives, is in fact named Cerberus.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yikes. How many others grew up with Caecilius? He has lived
| rent free in my head for 35 years lol. Him and his damned
| _canus_.
| gary17the wrote:
| > I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random
| sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to
| another.
|
| I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation
| exercises in a foreign language learning course such as
| Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less
| memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or
| later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to
| the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.
|
| From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a
| learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep
| sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly,
| without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs
| from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are
| likely to fail.
|
| However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for
| example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each
| new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen
| (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to
| build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.
|
| I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as
| you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words"
| and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an
| answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head.
| That forces your brain to understand what is really going on
| and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to
| only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.
|
| I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process:
| it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by
| watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise
| currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency,
| by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers
| through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least,
| by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her
| running "learning streak".
|
| Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of
| yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign
| language learning course. Effortless, magical learning
| processes simply do not exist.
| sieve wrote:
| > If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a
| sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new
| sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen,
| then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.
|
| This is where comprehensible input shines.
|
| - you start reading actual long form content from day one
| instead of practice sentences
|
| - the content maintains the context across its length,
| letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus
|
| This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You
| lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped
| to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.
|
| I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I
| can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed
| to recognize the patterns in the language and store the
| sequence information somewhere.
|
| If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might
| find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful.
| However, I believe if you are capable of doing that,
| comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck.
| It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better
| vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts
| at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days
| of CI-based learning than the previous six months of
| memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating
| random sentences.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| It's also just a hell of a lot more fun.
| sieve wrote:
| Yep!
| hintymad wrote:
| Duolinguo tries to follow the input hypothesis. For instance,
| it barely teaches any grammar but simply asks its users to
| translate sentences. Unfortunately that's very ineffective.
| Compared to reading or watching live conversations, the amount
| of input in unit time on Duolingo is too little. In the
| meantime the sentences lack sufficient context for Duolingo
| users to build up intuitive understanding of phrases. Take
| Duolingo Japanese for English speakers, for instance, it's
| really hard to learn the meaning and usage of Hiragana words in
| those short sentences.
|
| That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day,
| just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine.
| It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words
| on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to
| do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or
| reading some readers.
| sieve wrote:
| I completely agree with everything you have mentioned in the
| first paragraph.
|
| You NEED to consume tens of thousands of words repeatedly
| used in different contexts for the brain to make those
| automatic connections. Random sentences do not maintain the
| context which would have otherwise helped you figure out the
| possible meaning of some words in the following
| sentences/paras. That is one of the biggest flaws of any
| translation method.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| The thing is, the input hypothesis all by itself is not
| enough. It's arguably close to where the modern paradigm of
| second language acquisition _started_ , but it's not where we
| still are nearly 50 years later.
|
| For example, one big thing that Duolingo's method completely
| misses out on is the importance of a rich communicative
| context. This was implicitly there in Krashen's original
| monitor model, but wasn't fully appreciated until closer to
| the turn of the century.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| I learned Sanskrit by translating the Bhagavad Gita
| (https://gita.pub), and I experienced a similar jump in
| comprehension to what you described. At first I needed to look
| up every word, even the ones I'd seen many times, but
| eventually (after many many repetitions) I finally started
| having an intuitive idea of what the words and sounds meant.
|
| It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition
| by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.
| sieve wrote:
| I have seen some people do this successfully. But I find the
| BG to be too complex as a learning tool. It is too dense for
| me to concentrate on the words rather than the content.
|
| I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of
| laghukatha collections over the last couple of years and read
| from them as time permits.
|
| I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:
|
| - a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from
| scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama
|
| - a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda
| Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to
| construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized
| chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of
| Lingva Latina.
| Tycho wrote:
| I read a story by Roberto Bolano recently where the Spanish-
| speaking protagonist reads novels in French, a language he
| cannot speak. He said that even though he couldn't understand
| most of the words, he usually understood the plot. For some
| reason your comment made me think of this.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Orbeg's Lingva Latina is so good, especially if you use the
| supplemental exercises and stories as well. It's a shame it
| didn't catch on as much, the material for modern languages is
| now outdated and it seems no one is working on newer editions.
| Deutsch Nach der Naturmethode, Francais par la Methode Nature
| and English by the Nature Method are excelent at teaching the
| basics, but I hear criticism over the vocabulary often.
| sieve wrote:
| Things are much better today, I feel. If the publishers do
| not feel that there is a market, then the gap must be filled
| by enthusiasts. Some time for creating the content and $6/m
| on DO, and hundreds/thousands of people can benefit.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| It's pretty hard to do it with as much quality as Orberg
| did. He deliberately wrote each chapter to use the most
| universal vocabulary and grammar possible, and built upon
| that foundation, so much so that pretty much any speaker
| familiar with the latin alphabet can just pick it up and
| read start to finish. It's not a coincidence that all of
| these books start with a chapter on family: "father" is
| notoriously consistent among all languages descended from
| Proto Indo European
| barrell wrote:
| I'm very interested in Sanskrit, and working on an application
| to learn it (and many other languages).
|
| If you have any interest in app based review (not courses - I
| specifically try to work with input) I would love to get
| feedback on the Sanskrit experience.
|
| I posted a bunch of comments about it in the past few days, I
| don't want to take over another apps thread, but there are so
| many cool languages being learned here
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's a bad idea to imitate Duolingo, which has become VC without
| a purpose.
|
| The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things
| online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training
| people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win.
| We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore
| (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business
| model for that anyway.
|
| Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning
| app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive
| spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since
| Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from
| reCaptcha, it zombies on.
|
| I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good
| because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in
| their target language which they will hopefully roll around in
| their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language.
| Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn
| Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their
| competitors both online and traditional.
|
| Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly
| (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff),
| but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and
| plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch
| everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets
| outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes
| were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users
| rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
|
| So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand
| name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than
| those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other
| Spanish-learning website.
| hyperific wrote:
| I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the recent
| announcement that Duolingo is replacing contractors with AI.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...
| brewdad wrote:
| I'm guessing that's why this hit the front page today.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The app could use some spinners, when actions lead to a delay. I
| clicked on the landing page on the only available purple action
| button and nothing seemed to happen. I already checked my uBlock
| Origin, whether it is blocking something, but it does not.
| Already wanted to reload the page, when finally something
| visually changed, and the course was loaded. Simply a little
| spinner/animation would make this way less confusing.
|
| I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as
| buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English
| keyboard layout.
|
| One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning
| material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to
| "Good morning".
| valbaca wrote:
| > For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good
| morning".
|
| buenos dias does mean good morning. it literally means good day
| and can be used as such but most often used as "good morning"
| sh3rl0ck wrote:
| Really hope they can do something about the UX; well built OSS
| generally lacks good UI/UX.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Great to see a FOSS app for language learning! Kudos.
|
| However, I think apps that focus on one particular language and
| how to learn that language are better than a one-size-fits-all
| approach like Duolingo. The structure and grammar of languages
| like Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and French (I've learned all 4)
| are all significantly different from each other. Or at least
| different approaches for language groups (French and Spanish,
| which I also speak, are similar enough to warrant the same
| approach).
| brewdad wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a solid resource for learning Tagalog?
|
| Being a far less popular language than the standard "big boys"
| that most apps, web sites, books etc tend to offer, it's been a
| lot of false starts for me or simply feeling a bit lost when a
| resource throws me directly into a scene to learn dialog without
| having any of the foundational knowledge first.
|
| I plan to spend a year or two (at least) in the Philippines in
| the not too distant future. While most Filipinos understand
| English, I feel like learning at least some Tagalog would go a
| long way in fitting in and feeling less like an outsider.
| barrell wrote:
| I really don't want to be doing self promotion in someone
| else's thread, but I have Tagalog support on
| https://phrasing.app. I just posted some demo videos this
| morning in comments if you check out my profile
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 - April 2025 (43
| comments)
| alganet wrote:
| This language thing reminds me of Willian James Sidis.
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