Duolingo

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Car » 2021-11-12, 17:30

aaakknu wrote:I wish there were some other apps with these aspects:

1. competitiveness (leaderboards, achievements etc.);
2. puzzle (figure the grammar on your own);
3. accessibility (practice anywhere, anytime with no additional preparatory effort: just open an app on your phone with one click)
4. more serious, advanced level then Duolingo (with real writing, reading, listening practice - like lang-8 / langcorrect for writing, but with the added competition in the Duolingo style, for example)


LingQ has competitiveness and since most courses are just text + audio, you can figure out things on your own, too. It has apps, too, but is lacking in the active aspects. Sure, you can write on there, but I don't think it's really used. You can speak, but it costs extra to book lessons with tutors. But it can be so frustrating. Their new update was supposed to be released in summer last year and now it looks as if it might take until the start of the next year. Also, while a free version exists, it doesn't make much sense to only use that one unless you really are looking for texts and audio only.

There are grammar guides or whatever they're called, but I have no idea where to find those. It is slow, messy and buggy, but I've been using it for years since I've yet to find something else. The streaks, the number of learnt "words" are motivating to me and it makes it easier to read harder texts.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Sarabi » 2021-11-15, 17:21

vijayjohn wrote:
Sarabi wrote:J'ai 30 ans et je n'ai plus de temps pour chercher des ressources linguistiques par-ci par-là.

Pourquoi pas ? J'ai 33 ans et je cherche toujours des ressources linguistiques par-ci par-là.


Selon ton profil, tu habites au Texas. Il n'y a rien d'autre à faire au Texas.

Je plaisante :P J'adore Austin. J'ai grandi près de Houston.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby Minuit » 2022-03-04, 8:16

So my friends and colleagues have been using duolingo on their phones to improve their English (the only language available for Czech speaking users) and I didnt really find it that amusing. However yesterday I started the Esperanto course (because there are not so many courses on it anyway) and Im on the fence about it. I mean its not so bad, but there are a few things I dont really like. Many spaced repetition programs dont explain the grammar and let you figure it out by yourself which is the natural way of acquiring a language but its not 100% bulletproof. Its weird that even a course for one of the easiest languages in the world is structured so weirdly. For example the pairing of the words will sometims give you the noun with the accusative sometimes without. That could be very confusing to people without any previous interaction with Esperanto. (a dog- hundo, a man- viron) Its also very slow and it gets irksome because all you do is click away like a maniac. The concept of leagues makes me think its more about doing as many lessons as possible and not retaining what one has learned throughout the day. I can see why its so popular but I bet you there are people who just want to flex their MAX lvl in a bunch of languages without actually being able to have a decent conversation in them.

Its like every program has their own problems. Pimsleur having more English than the actual language, Michel Thomas being spoken by a non native speaker.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby nijk » 2022-03-04, 10:44

Minuit wrote: Many spaced repetition programs dont explain the grammar and let you figure it out by yourself which is the natural way of acquiring a language


It's the natural way to acquire your L1, not sure it's the "natural" way to acquire an L2, whatever "natural" means anyway.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2022-03-04, 10:59

nijk wrote:
Minuit wrote: Many spaced repetition programs dont explain the grammar and let you figure it out by yourself which is the natural way of acquiring a language


It's the natural way to acquire your L1, not sure it's the "natural" way to acquire an L2, whatever "natural" means anyway.


I presume he means how humans normally learn languages in preliterate societies when put in contact with speakers of another language, which is usually not by explicit schooling in the grammatical concepts of the language.
Last edited by Rí.na.dTeangacha on 2022-03-04, 11:02, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby Minuit » 2022-03-04, 10:59

nijk wrote:
Minuit wrote: Many spaced repetition programs dont explain the grammar and let you figure it out by yourself which is the natural way of acquiring a language


It's the natural way to acquire your L1, not sure it's the "natural" way to acquire an L2, whatever "natural" means anyway.


I have met people who learned their language through immersion. I knew a Romany person who lived in Ireland and spoke fantastic English and these people dont usually spend their day leafing through grammar books. When I first saw all the Spansih tenses and verb forms I was taken aback and later I realized I only need like 6 tenses (hablo, hable, hablé, hablaba, hablaré, he hablado) for a successful communication and I can learn and use the others later (hube hablado, habría hablado, hablaría etc.) . I met a guy who spoke Spanish fluently and didnt know the names of the tenses. He just knew when to use which...

nijk

Re: Duolingo

Postby nijk » 2022-03-04, 12:30

Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:I presume he means how humans normally learn languages in preliterate societies when put in contact with speakers of another language, which is usually not by explicit schooling in the grammatical concepts of the language.


That's interesting you say this because I've been thinking exactly about this lately. How difficult it must've been to learn a language 100% orally, with no written support. Isn't it reasonable to assume they would have probably developed a pidgin rather than really learning the target language?

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2022-03-04, 13:20

nijk wrote:That's interesting you say this because I've been thinking exactly about this lately. How difficult it must've been to learn a language 100% orally, with no written support.


Honestly, I often wonder if the exact opposite isn't true. Especially for languages where the orthography is "deep" (i.e. opaque), I imagine the spelling often makes learning more challenging, and causes mispronunciations. Even where the orthography is shallow, focusing on the written form rather than the sounds themselves might have a negative effect (that's just my conjecture though).
I've seen plenty of people who have learned to read or write a language well, but cannot have a conversation in it, but few who can converse fluently but have trouble reading*. This leads me to assume the primacy of oral communication in language learning (which makes sense, as writing is a human invention that came along long after the evolution of language).
Anecdotally, in my own experience, the language I'm best at by far (despite it being the one I've most recently taken up) is the one I had least formal instruction in and the one I had most exposure to the spoken language in.

*Languages with logographic writing systems with thousands of characters to memorise like Japanese or Chinese are an exception perhaps.

nijk wrote:Isn't it reasonable to assume they would have probably developed a pidgin rather than really learning the target language?


That might have more to do with the purpose of learning the language though. If someone only needs a language for basic communication, they might not need more than a pidgin form of it. Viewing preliterate (or indeed modern, literate people) as all being language nerds whose goal is mastery so they can put it on their CVs or chat up natives in bars or brag on Unilang is probably a bit naïve (not accusing you of this, btw), most people who learn languages do so just because they need to communicate, and they learn it to the extent that they need to to serve those needs and probably don't really care if it meets our standards of correctness.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby Minuit » 2022-03-04, 14:43

Plus the majority of languages have no writing system. If it wasnt for various Christian missionaries who wanted to learn the local language (to get closer to the speaker) and their translation of the bible or at least the new testament we wouldnt have romanization for most Chinese dialects such as Fuzhounese (Min Dong).

Even today I sometimes go to jw.org to listen to various languages such as the different dialects of Romany. Its actually amazing to see the differences across Eastern Slovak, Albanian, German or Macedonian Romany. They do the same language switching the Indians do in their primary langauges except instead of English they switch between the core Romany vocab and the language of their host country. Words like samoobsluhos (Czech samoobsluha lit. self service - a small supermarket) are not understood in Romanian where they probably use a Romanified Romanian words for the establishment.

And as Ciaran has mentioned, ortography is sometimes interfering with the actual pronunciation. Thats why I dont like to learn languages without audio companions. For example его (his in Russian) is pronounced with a v sound, but г is normally pronounced as a hard G sound, so unless its specifically adressed in the workbook, you will have no clue on how to pronounce it. Even in English sometimes I struggle to correctly pronounce words such as photography because I may not remember correctly which of the Os is the schwa sound, which is o or ou... Learning the word before learning how to spell it would be much better.

Of course this brings other problems to the table as you know you may mishear a sound and so on. For example the song Panama by Van Halen. Before I found the name of the song I thought they were singing Enema... :D :D

nijk

Re: Duolingo

Postby nijk » 2022-03-04, 14:58

Not sure why you're framing it as an either-or thing. As if the oral and the written language can't be integrated.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2022-03-04, 15:09

Of course, they are integrated in reality, but I find that many language learners rely on written materials too much because they are easier to acquire and, of course, you can parse text at your own pace. The messy reality of spoken language, with its informal tone, non-standard grammar, phonetic sandhi and contractions etc. make real-time parsing of speech difficult, so people avoid it, and their language skills suffer as a result. This has been my experience, at least. Learning a language 100% orally, you wouldn't have that issue.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby nijk » 2022-03-04, 15:37

I don't want to look like the fanatic of the written language because I'm not, but I think that written material is a valuable crouch especially in the first stages of language learning. If many language learners overuse it, it's still not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Deep orthographies are a pain in the neck but there are ways to get around them, for example Hebrew has romanization and niqqud.

Learning a language 100% orally, you wouldn't have that issue.


I'm sure you'd have a host of other issues.

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-03-04, 15:47

(I think the last paragraph of this post is kind of stream of consciousness, sorry (not that sorry :twisted:) :lol:).
nijk wrote:That's interesting you say this because I've been thinking exactly about this lately. How difficult it must've been to learn a language 100% orally, with no written support. Isn't it reasonable to assume they would have probably developed a pidgin rather than really learning the target language?

What? Most people have always learned languages 100% orally in real life and continue to do so to this day. There are plenty of people in the world who cannot read or write in any language, including their own, but speak several languages fluently. I'm pretty sure I personally know people who learned languages like this. There are even resources for language learners that are geared specifically towards people who learn languages orally rather than in written form.
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:Honestly, I often wonder if the exact opposite isn't true.

I don't think that's quite what it is, either. There are different kinds of learners with different backgrounds. For example, I'm not really an oral learner, and I think that may have something to do with the fact that every single language I know (yes, that's right, every single language, including both English and Malayalam) is a language I had to learn as a foreign language through books at some point if I was going to learn it at all.

Thinking about all of this, I think I'm starting to think that the most privileged people in Indian society are also, ironically, the ones with the most abnormal and bizarre language development. Most people are much less privileged but also somewhat less likely to be pressured to learn English. Maybe I'm completely wrong; there is definitely language shift going on at some of the lowest levels in Indian society, after all, just towards locally dominant language varieties rather than towards English. But are the language attitudes that accompany such language shift really as odd as what you see among more privileged Indians? Wealthier Indians often insist on abandoning their own languages even when there are plenty of resources available for learning them, or sometimes because they think they can always use those resources to learn them later anyway. But for lower-resource languages, by definition, those resources don't exist...

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Re: Duolingo

Postby Minuit » 2022-03-06, 18:00

Day 4
Bronze League: 1st place (1000 exp)
Duolingo may actually be the worst place to learn languages. Esperanto is one of the easiest languages in the world and although I can finish a lesson in a breeze, it doesnt help me speaking the language whatsoever. I wouldnt even touch the non IE languages as their syntax can be quite difficult and I couldnt just rearrange it the way I can in Esperanto. 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?

I think Im going to keep using it for Esperanto until I burn out and maybe even use it someday when Ill feel like learning Klingon, but for natural languages I will use something faster with an accentuation on speaking. I know repeating sentences is great for pronunciation training and these Duolingo "lego" style constructions wear me out. :hmm:

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Re: Duolingo

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-03-07, 15:55

Minuit wrote:I think Im going to keep using it for Esperanto until I burn out

Why?

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Re: Duolingo

Postby linguoboy » 2022-03-07, 16:58

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).
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Re: Duolingo

Postby mōdgethanc » 2022-03-10, 13:25

I've mostly used the app and not the browser but I'm thinking it may be time to switch. I agree that the mechanism with hearts is frustrating and it makes me want to give up for the day when I run out. That's not helpful. Also, I don't care about the rankings or points. That doesn't motivate me.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby dEhiN » 2022-03-11, 3:34

mōdgethanc wrote:I've mostly used the app and not the browser but I'm thinking it may be time to switch. I agree that the mechanism with hearts is frustrating and it makes me want to give up for the day when I run out. That's not helpful. Also, I don't care about the rankings or points. That doesn't motivate me.

I forget if it was someone on here or on the Duolingo forums who suggested to just use the mobile browser. It worked well because I could still do Duo whenever I wanted to but with the benefit of using the web version over the app version. Goodbye hearts and gems, hello lingots.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby mōdgethanc » 2022-03-11, 12:09

And I just ran out of hearts for getting one word wrong in a translation exercise. Yeah, screw that. It's just a way to make you frustrated enough to buy the premium version.

It's nice they are forgiving of small typos, but all I did was leave out one small word. That's a bit much.
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Re: Duolingo

Postby linguoboy » 2022-03-11, 15:18

mōdgethanc wrote:It's nice they are forgiving of small typos, but all I did was leave out one small word. That's a bit much.

Yeah, last night I bombed a timed exercise because I accidentally swapped "you" and "your" in the translation and that was my last heart. Only the most hardass instructor would ding you on that.
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