Duolingo

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-04-15, 4:15

Apparently, now Indonesian is at 99% (this is what it says on my computer, at least).

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Re: Duolingo

Postby aaakknu » 2018-04-18, 5:18

vijayjohn wrote:Apparently, now Indonesian is at 99% (this is what it says on my computer, at least).

It's now at 100%. I hope it'll be available soon.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby kevin » 2018-04-18, 10:26

Some other courses were stuck at 100% for months, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby OldBoring » 2018-04-18, 11:18

Maybe they are at 99.9% :silly:

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Re: Duolingo

Postby ceid donn » 2018-06-11, 17:33

The Duolingo Indonesian course has a launch date now: August 17, 2019. I've been waiting for this one for like 4 years. LOL.

I just returned to Duolingo after almost 2 years. I am finding the new "crown" system to be pretty loathsome, unintuitive and unhelpful. Sadly, resources for Indonesian learning here in the US are still pretty scarce so we may be stuck with this for a while. :?

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Re: Duolingo

Postby aaakknu » 2018-06-24, 10:03

They started creating a Hawaiian course! :whoo: :whoo: :woohoo: :whoo: :whoo: :woohoo:
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Re: Duolingo

Postby ceid donn » 2018-06-28, 15:16

Yeah, I am quite interested in seeing what happens with that. It just started in the incubator, and depending on the team, it'll be months if not years before it's released for everyone. I think the Indonesian course for English speakers has been in the incubator for at least 3 years, if not longer.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby ceid donn » 2018-07-21, 16:38

Duolingo just changed the display numbers of total users for each courses on their websites to "active users" which in Duolingo-ese, means anyone who's earned 10XP in any course in the past year. That alone is ridiculous, but even with that exceedingly generous definition for an "active" users, some of the courses' total dropped exponentially. I don't recall all the stats, but I do know that when I started my SAC at the end of last May, I was looking at that stats and noticed Irish had just over 4 million users. I remember that because I laughed then to myself over how many of those 4 million got through the first lesson and then quit. It now lists just over 1 million "active" users. That's a huge drop, even with very lenient measures.

A few years ago, Duolingo released some partial data about the number of people who actually completed course and Irish had one of the worst ratios of users who started the course to users who completed the course. So I can only imagine how tiny that number of "active" users for the Irish course would be if they had defined "active" more astringently. :lol:

Ciarán12 wrote:I don’t know if this is really the right thread, but it’s close enough.
I’d like to hear from anyone who’s actually completed one of the Duolingo courses - how good does it actually make you at the language (supposing Duolingo was your only (or at least primary) method of learning the language)? Are there differences between the courses? (like some take you to B1 level, others as far as B2 etc…)


Kind of late reply so I doubt this will be that useful for you now, but if anyone else is curious...

I've completed 4 of their courses: German, French, Spanish and Irish. And because I'm a masochist, I hope to complete the Welsh course by the end of this year. I've completed the other four twice, in fact--for French, German and Spanish, the second time was due to the courses being updated. For Irish, it was just for review (and because I'm masochist and I just had to remind myself of just how very awful the Duolingo Irish course is).

How good does it makes you at the target language? *heavy sigh* Because of my own personal learning style I only find Duolingo good as a supplement, but as a primary resource, I think it's sorely lacking. Duolingo claims to get you to the A2-B1 threshold, but whether you are actually there at the end of a course really depends on other variables, like whether you've studied the language at all before and if you have been using other resources that deepen your learning. But if you're brand new to learning languages and Duolingo is your only source. I suspect you'd be a very confused A1, maybe A2 learner by the end. While some of the courses cover more intermediate level grammar, they just don't teach enough of the language to get a pure beginner out of what's typically considered A1-A2 range. Sure you do some lessons on the subjunctive in the French course, but by the end of the course you will not have learned enough vocabulary alone from the course itself to read intermediate level reading materials. This is a big problem with their model.

Is this the same for all courses? Duolingo will want to tell you yes, but in practice, clearly it's not. One huge flaw with Duolingo is it was designed around learning Romance languages (namely Spanish and Portuguese) from English, and now it's expanded to applying that model to any other language in the world. It doesn't take a PhD in linguistics to know how that's a problem. For languages like Irish, these means some of the allotted lessons have to be committed to teaching grammar and syntax that isn't like English or Romance languages. For languages like Russian or Japanese, some of those lessons have to be committed to teaching the scripts as well as new grammar concepts and new syntax.

Likewise, for languages like Russian or Japanese, how far do you expect your typical English speaker to get with those languages compared to Spanish or Portuguese, if given the same amount of time to learn each? You see, Duolingo's model doesn't allow for indefinitely long courses, so it's left largely up to the unpaid, volunteer contributors to cram languages like Russian and Japanese into a framework that was designed to teach English speakers X amount of Spanish or Portuguese in X amount of lessons. So naturally, you will not be as advanced in Russian by the end of that course as you probably would be in Spanish by the end of its respective course.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby OldBoring » 2018-07-22, 8:19

Duolingo is a useless app.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-07-23, 21:36

OMG! They have Hindi! :bounce:

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Re: Duolingo

Postby kevin » 2018-07-24, 8:57

ceid donn wrote:I remember that because I laughed then to myself over how many of those 4 million got through the first lesson and then quit. It now lists just over 1 million "active" users. That's a huge drop, even with very lenient measures.

I'm surprised, 1 million users left isn't that bad. I would have expected that most people just started the course for fun, did a few lessons and then quit a few days later. Most of these people should be filtered out with the new numbers. The metric might still not be perfect, but I think what you described is at least somewhat meaningful and higher than I thought it would be.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Iván » 2018-07-24, 9:25

Well, I must admit I wasn't a huge fan of Duolingo before, but now that I've started learning Dutch, I find it very useful in terms of motivation. I try to finish one lesson per day and I'm progressively learning a lot. I also consume media in Dutch i.e newspapers, television, Youtube videos, etc. And I do use other apps such as Anki to keep up my vocabulary.
Minkä nuorena oppii, sen vanhana taitaa.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Luís » 2018-07-31, 8:06

I just got a mail from them saying Hindi is now available :D
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Re: Duolingo

Postby OldBoring » 2018-07-31, 10:38

Duolingo bhenchod

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-09, 4:56

OldBoring wrote:Duolingo bhenchod

"Bhen...!" (2:07-2:18)

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Re: Duolingo

Postby linguoboy » 2018-08-09, 17:21

I took their placement test and after a couple false starts (I don't know why I mix up याह and वाह so easily) tested out of 26 skills, which is almost the full complement they offer. So I guess I won't be making much use of it after all.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-09, 23:51

You mean यह and वह?

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Re: Duolingo

Postby ceid donn » 2018-08-23, 19:27

In additional to the new Hindi for English speakers course, Duolingo has released the Indonesian for English speakers (on August 17--Indonesia's Independence Day) and then just yesterday, Spanish for Italian speakers. All three of these courses are currently in beta, which means they are still being worked on by the contributors to correct errors and other issues, and to add more vocabulary and sentences. Courses in beta aren't available on the mobile apps yet, just via the website.

Unfortunately at this time there does not appear to be any other courses (there are roughly 10 courses in the incubator right now) close to be released, and no new courses aside from Hawaiian that have been added to the incubator in the past few months. My personal suspicion is they are making changes to the language course incubator which may or may not be related to their partnership with Pearson (boo, hiss. Pearson is bad, OK?) to develop Duolingo's Classrooms, which is a branch of Duolingo separate from the main website/app.

There is also some rumors that Duolingo might be considering approving a Navajo for English speaker course. If this happens, I suspect they will have it set up like the Japanese course, where you can largely do the course without typing in the script if you opt to. Most OSs do not have the Navajo keyboard as a native option--you have to install it yourself.

Another rumor is they are trying to find a way to re-introduce spaced repetition, which was very popular with a lot of users, but I can't say I was one of them. My main beef with the old spaced repetition mechanic was you could never graduate or opt out of a skill, so even if you were B1 or higher in a language and you really needed of focus on more advanced skills, the course would still think you needed to review how to say "The man and the woman" or "The girl is eating apple." In fact, I think as a user that's been around since Duo's first year, that I should get an award for how many times I've translated "A girl is eating an apple."

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Re: Duolingo

Postby ceid donn » 2018-08-23, 23:17

ceid donn wrote:There is also some rumors that Duolingo might be considering approving a Navajo for English speaker course. If this happens, I suspect they will have it set up like the Japanese course, where you can largely do the course without typing in the script if you opt to. Most OSs do not have the Navajo keyboard as a native option--you have to install it yourself.


Well, it's no longer a rumor: Duolingo has put a Navajo course in the incubator this afternoon. But with only one contributor, I don't think it will be done any time soon, although I suspect they are looking to get more contributors.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-26, 3:28

Maybe I'll try using Duolingo again once my contract ends, if I'm in Gudalur or something and have more free time.


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