Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.
I agree with that. I banged my head on Duolingo and Memrise for ages before I got a tutor, and things fell in to place within weeks.
Out of disgust for the solutions that existed, I went so far as to start working on my own Memrise style app which understands enough German grammar to generate English/German sentence pairs, so you can practice sentences with nouns/verbs/adjectives swapped around.
So it shows you the first sentence and you translate:
I lay the pen on a table.
Ich lege den Stift auf einen Tisch
The pens lay on the table.
Die Stifte lagen auf dem Tisch.
Or it shows you a present tense and you make it past:
Ich lese ein Buch.
Ich habe ein Buch gelesen.
It was really effective at hammering in the edge cases of grammar (you'd practice maybe 500 sentences an hour). Though I got kicked out of Germany due to visa trouble and life took a different direction, and haven't touched it since!
It's not that easy to get kicked out of Germany...
Duolingo is but a tool among many. For one thing it tends to not force you to repeat enough, and for another the grammatical explanations are not that elaborate and easily ignored.
But for basic drilling it's great and I would prefer it over most other tools. After a point, of course, other things like reading, listening and writing become more important and efficient.
The visa office made a typo in my email address when setting the appointment, and when I didn't show up, they sent me another email asking if I wanted to reschedule, and when I didn't reply to that, they closed my case.
As I was under a bridging visa that meant I was now there illegally.
When I contacted them to find out what the hold up was, they told me what happened and that I was now there illegally and needed to leave immediately, so I did.
After the mistake was found out the visa office were apologetic and offered to give me a visa again, and the criminal case against me for overstaying was dropped.
But it was such a disruption to my life I no longer have interest.
Interesting story. To avoid that to happen, I'd recommend to get a lawyer and to contest the authorities decision. You could have worked that out if you had looked into it. Sure, just letting it go is suboptimal, but in cases like this one things should still be able to be fixed if the mistake was on the authorities side.
For me it was a wake up call for how stupid I was being entrusting my welfare to a badly designed bureaucracy. All I'd be doing by fighting for the right to stay would be setting myself up for another messy situation that impacted my livelihood down the road.
Until I dealt with the German government and professionals that deal with the German government (taxes, visa etc), I had no idea how lucky I have it as an Australian.
I know other people from other countries in Germany. They use a similiar language as you do. Are the rules really that bad, or is it that they are unintuitive?
I would estimate as a freelancer that the paperwork and accounting involved was five times more difficult than in New Zealand where I was also a foreigner, growing from an annoyance to a substantial (and expensive) burden. That alone is enough that I would caution foreigners against moving to Germany to start a business or be self employed.
A lot of the stories I formed my opinion on were second hand, issues my friends were dealing with; such as the Kafkaesque situation of registering for residency in a city, but not being able to rent without residency paperwork, and not being able to get the paperwork without a fixed address.
In Australia, it's just not a thing at all. If the Government tried to make us register with the city we're living in, we'd tell them to fuck off. Albeit in less polite language than that.
In the eight years I lived in New Zealand (as an Australian) I interacted with the government once a year to file my taxes, filled out two census forms and had a ten minute appointment to convert my Australian drivers license to one from New Zealand. It's not just that the interactions were easier, there just weren't any.
> A lot of the stories I formed my opinion on were second hand, issues my friends were dealing with; such as the Kafkaesque situation of registering for residency in a city, but not being able to rent without residency paperwork, and not being able to get the paperwork without a fixed address.
This is the type of problems that come up. I don't understand, though. There are multiple ways to get an address in Germany without a residency permit. You can also rent places without a residency permit. Maybe the person that encountered the issue you describe wanted to rent one specific place which requires a residence permit, and didn't want to do any other (temporary) thing to get an address.
Right, with patience, persistence and a little bit of Googling you can always work through the issues.
But the issues don't exist in the first place in AU/NZ (and presumably UK/US though I can't speak first hand do that). Even if they did, they'd be solved in a much more straightforward manner. I guarantee a similar form here, even though it would never exist, would accept "address pending" as a valid answer.
I'm not trying to say the German way is wrong, but you have to understand how crazy it seems to a foreigner.
For me I was content that I could parse what other people were saying. I wanted to know the concepts and how people think, my own ability to synthesize sentences would have been a side effect.
Memrise was great for learning vocabulary. I greatly expanded my French vocabulary using it. But I later tried to use it for Afrikaans and found they had redesigned it and it was useless.
Duolingo is completely useless in my opinion. It doesn't teach you anything about grammar and doesn't teach you much vocabulary. It's more like having random conversations with a native who doesn't actually know much about their own language, except you will never ever be able to converse with a native after only using Duolingo.
It's a waste of time just like "Roseta Stone". Both try to tell you it's the "easy way" because it's how babies do it. Well babies spend years immersed and completely helpless without language until they finally get it. Even if you could go through with that, would you even want to? As an adult you would be stupid not to use the best tool you already have for learning things: your mother tongue.
If you're serious about learning a language you need some way to learn vocabulary, a good book or books in your language to teach you grammar, and lots and lots of material in the new language: books, news, films, radio etc. You will not be able to learn to speak without a sympathetic native, though.
Duolingo has notes explaining the grammar as it introduces it, for the most part, and the grammar gets reasonably sophisticated by the end. Not really what I'd call complex nuances, but probably equivalent to a year or two of university study. What second-week German grammar concepts do you think it doesn't brush on?
In my experience Duolingo does have good grammar notes. But they are easily ignored and the exercises don't force you enough to read and understand them. Which may be impossible for any such tool.
I think the problem is that these apps sell themselves as a one-stop shop to learn a language, but they're not. When they're effective, is when you treat them as tools, to target various areas.
