Minuit wrote:Why arent they teaching the language using real life sentences? I know I can learn to understand the patterns with sentences such as: "We are showing the strawberries to the mice" , but why put these there in the first place?
The explanation I've heard is to make it harder to guess. As I often say, the chief flaw with Duolingo is that it's more game than language learning app. If you're using the word bank to translate sentences into English, it can be almost trivially easy to suss out equivalents even if you only recognise a few words of the target language. Take this example from the Imperative lesson for Czech:
Podivej se na Měsic.
[the] [be] [Look] [never] [Moon]
[time] [at] [beginning]
I'm willing to bet that most of you can find the correct translation (
Look at the Moon) with minimal effort, whether you know any Czech (or any other Slavic language!) at all. There's only so many reasonable sentences you can make in English with these eight words. Plus there are some quirks to Duolingo that make it even easier. For instance, the program often inserts the same "random" word into the word bank for all sentences in a given lesson. That is, one of those English words (perhaps "beginning") will show up in the word bank every time despite never being used to complete any of the answers, and once you recognise this, you're down to only seven words to choose from.
(I'm not defending the practice, btw, just trying to explain where it comes from. If you say they're creating a new flaw in the course in order to try to fix an existing flaw, I wouldn't argue. I too much prefer it when a course includes sentences which sound drawn from real life rather than textbookese like "These strawberries are red" or "Which is the house of your aunt?")
I've been using Duolingo for a couple years now and only very recently got around to installing the app. It certainly looks slicker, but almost everything else about it annoys me, starting with the use of "hearts". I realise that they're only imitating a common feature of video games, but it feels deeply counterproductive. Learning a language means making a lot of mistakes; if you aren't, you probably aren't learning that much. I find worrying about losing hearts makes me more risk-adverse. Of course, you can purchase more hearts by using in-game currency or actual currency, which makes this feel more like a money-grubbing manoeuvre than anything else.
The other thing I've discovered is that the app is
much more geared toward competition than the browser version. It has all sorts of gimmicks to increase your score and constantly tells you when you move up in the rankings. When I use the app rather than the browser version, I find myself playing longer but enjoying it less. It's particularly stressful when you unlock a double-points bonus round which has to be used immediately (and because of the penalties for losing hearts, I usually spend those rounds on languages I already know rather than pushing myself further on the ones I'm actively learning).
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons