Duolingo

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Ciarán12
Re: Duolingo

Postby Ciarán12 » 2019-11-02, 21:21

I started working my way through Duolingo German, just to see how much it actually teaches. I see they've just recently updated the app. I've been doing it for 16 days, putting in about an hour or so a day I'd say. I'm more than half way through the course. I Googled "finished Duolingo German" just to see what people recommend to move on to after finishing, mainly because I want to see what level people who have finished it feel they have. I saw blog articles of people saying they finally finished it after over 200 days, in one case over 2 years! My question is, has the app changed so radically to reduce the amount of content or did these people really struggle so much with this that it took them that long to finish what I'm on track to finish within about a month of starting? And I'm not trying to brag here, it's not like I'm some kind of German genious, I'm just completing the lessons one after another, spending no more than an hour a day on it (maybe two hours at a push). What's going on here?

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Saim » 2019-11-03, 5:21

I think back in the day some people would try and “keep the trees gold” and would do the same lessons again and again. Also some people spent less than an hour a day I think, certainly less than two. I’m sure that you’re getting far above the “insane” XP option at that rate.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-11-08, 20:25

I hate Duolingo, at least in its old form, too much to have ever actually completed a tree except for Spanish, which was relatively easy for some reason (I think it had fewer lessons or whatever). I just don't have the patience to spend the whole damn day translating sentences without even getting paid for it.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Osias » 2019-11-10, 13:35

But but... What we do instead is not paid either.
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-11-10, 23:19

No, but what we do instead is more fun, and you can get paid for translation.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Osias » 2019-11-11, 2:15

#joker
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Problem with Duolingo, Your thoughts?

Postby BronYamisha » 2019-11-27, 12:37

Hi,
I have just read and want to share with you:
https://www.optilingo.com/blog/general/ ... -duolingo/

My First Thought after reading :shock: :

Honestly, it's pretty easy to dunk on Duolingo for not being a perfect language learning platform, but it goes too far to say that Duolingo is turning people off of language learning or is profiteering from people's language learning pain.

Duolingo gives us a product for FREE. It teaches vocabulary and grammar for more than 30 languages and makes it fun (for most people). For beginners, it is more approachable than a textbook or a class. It's not perfect, but I don't agree it is a net negative for language learners. If anything, I think it inspires more people to give a new language a shot.

Are you using Duolingo :?:

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Re: Problem with Duolingo, Your thoughts?

Postby kevin » 2019-11-30, 10:17

Well, he obviously wants to sell his own thing. So this is not exactly an impartial source.

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Re: Problem with Duolingo, Your thoughts?

Postby Saim » 2019-11-30, 13:09

Welcome to the forum, BronYashima. :)

BronYamisha wrote:Honestly, it's pretty easy to dunk on Duolingo for not being a perfect language learning platform,


The point isn’t that it’s “not perfect”, but that it’s mediocre and lots of it is fundamentally broken.

Duolingo gives us a product for FREE.


Duolingo is a for-profit business. They used the “start-up” model of building a business funded entirely by investment and then only later trying to figure out what their “product” actually is. The original idea was to crowdsource translations from language learners and use the fact that the courses themselves weren’t their actual product (but a way to get free labour) to generate goodwill and free publicity (for the same reason they rushed out Hawaiian, Navajo, etc. courses for the media to report on), when that didn’t pan out for obvious reasons they switched to the same advertising + premium subscription model as everyone else.

There’s no reason to congratulate them on how “free” the courses are, since their business model was never to sell courses, but to use publicity to get more and more investor money while they figure out what they’re actually going to sell.

Of course if I was a programmer or salesperson (and I mention these two job descriptions specifically because they hardly have a pedagogical team and all the courses are made by volunteers) working for Duolingo I wouldn’t care where my wage is coming from. But as a consumer I think it pays to be a little bit more discerning.

It teaches vocabulary and grammar for more than 30 languages


This is a somewhat misleading statement because the quality and amount of content is quite variable depending on the language. As I said above some of the courses were rushed out for publicity.

If anything, I think it inspires more people to give a new language a shot.


What happens when they take Duolingo’s advertising and presented pedagogical model seriously and keep repeating the same lessons for years rather than moving on to more serious materials or authentic content?

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Re: Problem with Duolingo, Your thoughts?

Postby Linguaphile » 2019-11-30, 18:17

kevin wrote:Well, he obviously wants to sell his own thing. So this is not exactly an impartial source.

This is definitely true. The article is basically taking shots at his own competition, and his product is not free, so it's not surprising that he would criticize the free competition.
Having said that, Duolingo definitely has its flaws (as do almost any other similar learning platform). If I remember correctly some Duolingo courses are much better than others. I remember the repetition in some courses being rather maddening, but for others the level of repetition and new material being about right. I don't really remember if that was due to differences in the courses themselves or differences in my ability levels in the respective languages; it was probably a combination of both. I think it depends a lot on a person's learning styles, reasons for learning, access to other resources and so on, along with the quality of Duolingo's content for the specific language pair. Generally it's not bad for practice if you want to spend a few minutes at a time brushing up on something you'd studied in the past or to learn something new while passing time in a doctor's waiting room or during a subway commute. It's true that translation is not a good way to learn a language, but on the other hand most language learners will end up translating for other people sometimes, so training your brain to do that is not a bad thing. Translation uses different mental pathways than monolingual study, but honestly that means that both should be developed (unless you are learning a language entirely for yourself with no expectations of interpreting/translating for others, even in informal contexts). I say that because when I've studied languages in entirely monolingual contexts, and then been faced with a translation task, I've found it very jarring - my brain was truly not used to trying to access both languages at once, and I had to work at developing those translation pathways too.
On its own a platform like Duolingo will definitely not lead to fluency, but there is very little out there that will lead to fluency "on its own" (there's no lack of materials that make that claim, but in my opinion none of them truly do.) And since fluency is almost certainly going to take multiple resources and formats, then for anyone whose learning styles (and language levels) are a good match with what Duolingo offers, it might as well part of the mix.

xBlackHeartx

Re: Problem with Duolingo, Your thoughts?

Postby xBlackHeartx » 2019-12-02, 3:47

Honestly, I dislike Duolingo, for reasons this video kindly demonstrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbmXSR_QiP8

And yes, I'm serious when I say I don't like duolingo for the kinds of sentences it brings up. I've never actually completed one duolingo course, not even the German one even though I was able to breeze through it (I was once an upper intermediate, not sure where I would fall now though).

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Re: Duolingo

Postby magsnus » 2019-12-06, 15:52

I think Duolingo is a really cool concept but I never felt I really got much out of it. Maybe because I focus more on spoken then written language?

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Sarabi » 2020-01-09, 8:03

lol, personne d'ici n'aime Duolingo? Moi, je l'adore. J'étais soupçonneuse avant de l'essayer, mais c'est tout. J'étudie 13 langues avec le fameux hibou depuis 2.5 semaines et j'utilise ce site depuis environ 5 ans. Duo ne m'a pas trop aidé avec le français, puisque je le parlais déjà plutôt couramment, mais pour les autres il était merveilleux. Comme vous verrez dans ma signature, j'y ai terminé 4 arbres: français, norvégien, espagnole, et italien. Et il m'a beaucoup aidé avec le chinois. Sans Duolingo, je n'étudierais peut-être plus des langues. J'ai 30 ans et je n'ai plus de temps pour chercher des ressources linguistiques par-ci par-là. Avec Duo, il est très très facile. On économise son énergie mentale de cette façon, juste pour étudier des langues.

Et en générale, les exercices sont assez efficaces par rapport à d'autres cours.

J'ai terminé l'arbre norvégien dans 2 mois, italien dans 4 mois. Ceux qui exige 1-2 ans n'étudie pas chaque jour, ou ils ne font qu'une ou deux leçons par jour. Ou bien peut-être que c'est leur première langue étrangère, donc il serait plus difficile pour eux que pour nous.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby Synalepha » 2020-01-09, 18:52

My opinion is that it is boring af. I never got past the first few sentences, but that's just my opinion. However what perplexes me is that, these days, it seems duolinguo has become the primary go-to resource for new language learners, and I don't know whether that's a good thing.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Sarabi » 2020-01-09, 20:01

Synalepha wrote:My opinion is that it is boring af. I never got past the first few sentences, but that's just my opinion. However what perplexes me is that, these days, it seems duolinguo has become the primary go-to resource for new language learners, and I don't know whether that's a good thing.


Tu as raison, il est souvent plutôt ennuyant. Cependant, c'est pareil pour tous les cours sur internet. Ce qui est plus intéressant c'est "Duolingo Stories." Je adore les histoires. Mais le problème là c'est que les histoires sont les mêmes dans toutes les langues. Et j'ai aimé le cours norvégien en particulier parce que les phrases sont souvent drôles, progressistes, ou lié à la culture pop. Par exemple, on parle des relations gaies, de la féminisme, de Harry Potter et Le Seigneur des anneaux. J'ai entendu dire que le cours suédois est pareil ! Malheureusement, ça dépend des contributeurs de chaque langue.

Ou as-tu trouvé des cours qui sont plus intéressants et pourtant efficaces?
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Synalepha

Re: Duolingo

Postby Synalepha » 2020-01-09, 20:53

Sarabi wrote:
Ou as-tu trouvé des cours qui sont plus intéressants et pourtant efficaces?


I haven't. I like grammar books.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby linguoboy » 2021-02-19, 22:12

I've been Duolingoing pretty hard this past year. It started as a bit of a time-waster and now it's...a bit more of a time-waster? I wouldn't quite call it a "hobby". I surprised myself by latching onto the Indonesian lessons. I've only ever dabbled with Indonesian/Malay before and was simply curious to see how much I remembered. More than I expected! But I think I stuck with it because the lessons are actually half-decently designed for Duolingo.

One of the issues I have with the basic structure of Duolingo lessons is that it makes the answers too easily guessable much of the time. For instance, using the word bank is often less about properly parsing and translating the sentence you're given and more about finding what acceptable sentence you can make with the words in the word bank. (I've repeatedly been able to produce correct answers without even looking at the sentence I'm supposed to be translating.) However, the Indonesian lessons seem to be better about including enough words that there are several equally-grammatical possibilities and you really do have to know the individual meanings of all the words to chose the correct one.

Similarly, there's a very obvious pattern to the matching exercises where you have three sentences and have to choose the correct one. Generally, the content word you're supposed to be learning is used twice whereas a substitution is used once. So once you eliminate any obviously wrong sentences (and Duolingo tends to be generous about including sentences which pretty obviously have some random common word stuck in them--"brokoli" shows up often in the Indonesian tree), it's usually clear which one is the right answer. Only in the Indonesian tree do I regularly recall seeing three grammatically-correct sentences each differing only in one content word; if you don't know the word, your chance of guessing it is only one in three.

There's the usual Duolingo foolishness, of course. Some of the sentences are hilariously rude (I just learned "You are trash") and some are just hilarious. The English-language equivalents are often clearly the work of a non-native speaker of English. Fortunately, the lessons have been around long enough that most of these have more colloquial alternatives now. (This was a major issue with the Finnish tree, which is still in beta.) I get the feeling that I'm learning a particularly stilted version of Standard Indonesian ("Anda", for instance, shows up a lot) that no one actually speaks, but as I don't have any immediate plans to use the language, this doesn't bother me much.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby linguoboy » 2021-04-05, 17:55

I'm exciting about the Duolingo Yiddish course hatching tomorrow. Here's a brief article about the challenges of reconciling secular and Hasidic varieties of the language: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-secular-scholar-and-some-ny-hasidic-jews-set-up-duolingos-yiddish-course/.

And here's a more in-depth look from a Yiddish-speaker who was allowed to preview the course: https://forward.com/culture/467106/i-took-duolingos-new-yiddish-course-for-a-test-drive-heres-what-i-found/

Of course this also intersects with regional dialect issues, which are at least as significant for Yiddish as they are for other "smaller" languages I've learned. It sounds like they're aiming for a compromise of Northern/YIVO spelling but Southern pronunciation and it will be interesting to see how that works. My primary exposure is to materials which make use of the YIVO standard (and, to a much lesser extent, Poylish) so I'll be interested to see how well I can understand what seems to be a mostly Galitsianer pronunciation.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-04-05, 21:41

I honestly haven't even touched Duolingo in ages now.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Sarabi » 2021-04-06, 11:11

Det jiddische kurset er tilgengelig nå. Jeg er ikke interessert i det, men det er alltid kult å se nye språk på Duolingo. Det gir meg glede. Også har det vært altfor lenge siden siste gang.

Jeg er helt ferdig med det norske kurset og det tok meg nesten 3 år. Uten Duolingo ville jeg ha sluttet å lære nye språk, spesielt et upraktisk språk som norsk. Takk til Duo kan jeg nå snakke norsk på nivå B1. Det er mitt favoritt språk og det gir meg så mye glede! :P
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