I used Duolingo to help me learn Spanish, and I was struck by how artificial it is. It may teach you to understand a language, but not to speak it.

Far superior, in my experience, is https://www.languagetransfer.org, which has free audio lessons to learn French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and Swahili (and English for Spanish speakers). This is the most natural method short of immersion I have ever experienced, and very effective. Amazingly, it is all done by one man, and runs on donations.

There is an app, which is delightfully clean and usable.

Mihalis also has an introduction to music theory, which gets excellent reviews!

Interestingly, when I was starting out, I was in Peru with a Spanish speaking significant other, and using Duolingo as well as taking private lessons. I found as a few others have mentioned that Duolingo actually got in the way. I liked the gamification. It helped me practice, but there were so many exercises for each set of vocabulary. Due to the way their system worked, I had to go through a lot of exercises that weren't useful for me because I had picked up the content with other learning methods. You can test out of things, but if I wasn't ready to test out of the whole block I still had to go through a lot of material that wasn't useful (i.e., even testing out skill by skill, was tedious and time-consuming and counter-productive).

So as discussed in the article and here, Duolingo can't get you even to a low intermediate level, just the basics. And I found that it doesn't pair well with more intensive learning. Maybe other people have had a different experience, but I think it's good for the light hobbyist until they are ready to move on to something more serious, but that's about it.

I also worry that it's promises and gamification trap and frustrate people who could have done more. Maybe it makes up for that by getting a large number of people started who then go on. Maybe.

I did the first 30+ Greek lessons (each a ~10 minute audio which takes 15-20 minutes to complete as you pause to think and complete the answer). Then was forced to take a short break. l and struggle to get back in so I will restart a few lessons back.

I have to say that I've never had so many "whoa, cool I figured this out" moments in a language course.

The method uses your native language to scaffold the target language using patterns and rules. They constantly discourage you from trying to memorize or remember the word and instead encourage you to use your principles to "find it" or "think your way there".

For example, they teach you that virtually any English word that end in 'ation' will correspond to a Spanish word that sounds virtually the same, so for example:

- salvation = salvacíon

And the Spanish verb will be the Spanish word minus the "acíon" plus "ar". Since this almost always works, you can often use this principle to find a lot of common verbs you need. So if, for example, you want to say "save", think of the english "ation" word that is related to saving, so "salvation", Spanish "salvacíon", which gives us the Spanish verb "salvar".

So with that rule, and some rules for present tense conjugation and word order, you can soon you can say a surprising amount very quickly by "thinking through it" rather than memorization. So they "build up" your Spanish from these sorts of building blocks, and there are a surprisingly large number of them. "Don't remember it, find it" is the guiding mantra. And it really works well. Even as my Spanish advances, learning new principles continues to be helpful and kind of magical.

I've had the same experience with Duolingo and long story short decided to experiment with what would be the best way to learn the language if you're not advanced enough to consume content for natives. I wanted to created something that would have the same value as content for natives (interesting and real), but would be comprehensible to non-advanced learners.

Just last week I opened up access to my app (with over 50 videos) to Beta testers. If anyone is learning Spanish and would like to try it out and give me feedback, I would appreciate it.

Obstino U is an app that mimics a real university where you take classes about the things you are interested in like climate change, the history of china, cognitive biases, diets, investing, etc, but you do it in the language you want to learn.

Simply put, you learn things you are interested in and in the process, you learn language mostly subconsciously.

We use simplified language, gesticulation, and drawings to convey powerful and rich stories so that even beginner students can understand them.

https://www.obstino.com

EDIT: This is an iOS app only for now.

EDIT 2: I just added a sample video we make on YouTube in case you don't want to install the app but want to take a look: https://youtu.be/N2fiVLUJGvM

Also, I’m not sure if this app has notifications yet, but notifications and badges are a good way to get people to come back to your app every day. I think websites can do push notifications now, but not badges.

https://3ears.com/

Also, Duolingos useless and constant notifications made the app worse then it already was.

Also, how can a website not have badges? It's just a table that gets updated with pictures when a user performs a task.

This gamification stuff is rather annoying because it seems to forget that the user has to want to learn the thing they want to learn.

Is this a serious question at all?

For starters, websites provide the lowest barriers to entry, and don't expect users to grant intrusive access to their personal systems.

It's not everybody's first thought. My sister was working with local university to build content to support access and awareness of accessibility resources (mostly for parents of disabled children) . She couldn't even parse the notion of making a website as opposed to an app. Who doesn't use an iPhone these days?? Who uses a computer to do stuff??? Ironically, it kills so many screen readers too. Plus you need specifically iOS developers instead of generic web developers. And redevelop multiple times if you want multiple platforms. Plus some people are wary of installing apps so there's an overhead loss there.

Just... A massive amount of unnecessary constraints if your goal is simply to get information out there. But apps are many people's default way of thinking, and certainly many companies are pushing it due to lock in benefits.

Edit : the original post now has a "here's a YouTube video if you can't / won't install an app", which, y'know, exemplifies it perfectly :).

Now, this looks like a labour of love so more power to author to use whatever method of getting it out there that they are comfortable with. But app has drawbacks over a website as well as benefits, is all :)

This is probably good for first time learners, but for me, it was painful

Maybe there could be a speed control? Of course it changes pitch of the sound, but aren’t we already used to listening podcasts on 2x speed anyway

"Consume more, faster!" - yeah, screw that. If I'm listening to something, it has my full and undivided attention, and I want to experience it at the pace it was created for.

If your goal is to actually understand others, then fwiw, my own thoughts: I personally normally far far prefer articles to podcasts. I can go at my own speed and enjoy the way I want to. If a video or podcast is the only way for me to learn something or experience something, variable speed is the price of entry for me. Podcast or video is NOT a quiet relaxing interesting night with friends, (and most of them are not precisely planned artistic endeavours whose brilliance will be missed at different pace:) . I don't get a say, I don't get to ask questions, to interrupt, to change topic, to go on a tangent. The very basic agency affordance therefore is speed - whether slower or faster. It's not about "consume more faster". It's about pace that works for me the consumer

For lessons specifically, typically they are recorded far slower than holds my attention. Think of all the udemy classes - at recorded pace, I mentally check out after 3 minutes on average :( . So for recorded lessons, if I don't have control over speed, I'm extremely unlikely to make it.

So that's precisely why variable speed is important - otherwise a recorded lessons will work for one type of learner only. It's crucial to recognize exactly what you mention - different people's experience and preferences differ :). Ability to vary speed doesn't remove your option to listen at default speed, all it does is provide options for others who may have different preferences and different natural pace of speech or listening :).

It sounds like you would be a good fit for advanced videos or perhaps you should start watching content made for natives (real podcasts, Netflix etc)?

I disagree with this dogma. I, like many, have heard this for years and took it as gospel. I tried it and didn't get great results. At the time I questioned where I had failed with a method so successful.

But the thing is, immersion only works if you're a relatively extroverted person (IMHO). Immersion turns language learning into a social activity. If you're more introverted, you won't get that social exposure. Worse, you may avoid that social exposure because way more because you have such difficulty communicating.

Immersion is not strictly the best way.

I could understand deliberately slow Spanish like "Español con Juan" (https://www.youtube.com/@espanolconjuan) but immersion did nothing for me because I just don't have the personality to make it matter. I would have done better using Italki or whatever from anywhere in the world.

Even my Mexican friends and Mexican girlfriends spoke English because, well, that's how I met them. Speaking in Spanish would last about 1 minute until we transitioned back to English because it was more effective.

Finally, I don't get the problem with Duolingo not teaching you how to speak. I learned how to read and write with Duolingo which is useful on its own. Now you can read articles and books in Spanish and at least partake in the culture. Duolingo just doesn't compete with, say, Zoom conversations because the latter is 1000x the effort.

Yet on HN people talk about Duolingo as if people would be spending their Duolingo time chatting to Spanish speakers if Duolingo didn't exist. Nah, they'd be doom scrolling.

Same here. I've spent years in school learning Spanish, a semester in Spain, a decade of passive learning with audio books and reading novels, and dozens of trips to Latin America.

I can read an adult novel in Spanish fine. I can speak well enough to accomplish any basic task. I can understand the news and very slow Spanish e.g. the link above.

But no matter how much I practice, my brain will not process regularly spoken Spanish well enough to understand it with more than 25% accuracy.

I used to think I needed more immersion. Maybe, but not likely as I don't think it's possible as an adult to teach my brain the "rhythm" of Spanish language.

I also lived in Germany for a year. And with no prior German lang. experience, I was able to understand spoken German after that year better than I can Spanish after 20 years of learning. The German language seems to flow in my brain the same as English, but Spanish is just on a different frequency.

"You need better friends, man".

Actually, what you need (for immersion to work) is friends who will meet you halfway. That is, who won't mind slowing down a bit and coaching you occasionally so that you can at least stretch 1 minute into 5 or 10.

That - and one simply needs to try harder to make it through at least normal everyday interactions (at a cafe, while shopping, etc). You definitely do not learn anything significant from a purely passive approach to immersion. You need to take literally everyday as a learning opportunity - and prep accordingly.

Nah, they'd be doom scrolling.

Agreed, that seems to be the market DL was designed to serve.

And hence, is about as useful as one would expect.

Just like any other prong of a language learning strategy, only a fraction of people are going to stick with it. Else language learning would be easy. I doubt people who couldn't stick to Duolingo would have stuck to the boring advice HNers have like reading grammar books and watching in-depth Youtube videos that require much more attention.

> "You need better friends, man".

Well, it depends on the friendship. Some if not most people want to be your friend and communicate with you, not be your error-correcting language teacher. You have to be pretty good at the language to be fun to talk to.

Until you're good enough to not be a burden, I think it's far better to pay for immersion than expect it from friends.

Fwiw, I am fluent in Spanish these days.

It seems that people just like ... different things. Some people actually look forward to curling up with a hot, meaty grammar book, for hours on end. And find that both apps and videos (unless done very, very well) just drain their batteries.

This observation might be good for Duolingo's stock price, but it doesn't fit reality. Duolingo is not the only way to learn languages online, nor is it known for being effective.

For example, to me Memrise was far superior to Duolingo to expand vocabulary, and pretty much any YouTube series on learning language X is far better than Duolingo. Even browsing newspapers in language X paired with Google Translate is a far more productive experience than grinding on Duolingo.

The only selling point of Duolingo is that it sells you a false sense of progress and provides you a positive feedback loop that keeps you optimizing on local optima that are awfully unproductive.

> pretty much any YouTube series on learning language X is far better than Duolingo. Even browsing newspapers in language X paired with Google Translate is a far more productive experience than grinding on Duolingo.

How do apps like Memrise/Duolingo compete with things that require far more effort like reading articles? How many people using Duolingo while they poop were ever going to open up BBC Mundo and look up every 3 words with Google Translate?

I don't see how that makes sense. It's like saying Duolingo is worse than enrolling in a 6-week immersion program. Okay.

That's not immersion then.

I'm a native English speaker, but I live in a country where the native language isn't English. This means I have to speak that other language every single day, not because I'm an extrovert, but because I have to if I want people to understand me.

To me, that's the incentive you're looking for.

And start shutting them down when they start switching to English on you -- by switching seamlessly back to your hobbled Swedish, no matter how bad it is.

Emigration is not an option on most people's plate, specially when discussing topics such as learning a new language. Also, some people try to pick up languages for fun, which would be ridiculous to format your whole life around.

It is not always necessary, but: are you planning to visit the country where this language is spoken? Immersion exercises may signal to you whether you are capable of making that leap.

I've been bilingual in Spanish since high school, but not until 2008 did I encounter a situation of immersion. I've worked in a bilingual office setting, and I found that it was often easy to communicate face-to-face with Spanish speakers, because I could lip-read, and make gestures, and fall back on occasional English expressions that they are capable of knowing.

But when I traveled to Catalonia and we went off the widely-travelled tourist areas, I was required to know Spanish, and even Catalan, for the road signs, businesses, menus, etc. So it was as much immersion as I could get, and even then, I had a native for my guide, and she was an English teacher, and so she was very good at whispering in my ear about when waiters were simply being rude or prejudiced about my silly Mexican dialect.

So yes, it depends on your use cases, and I can see why it would depend on introverted/extroverted personality whether you can handle it, but when learning foreign languages, consider whether immersion will be a foreseeable situation, and try to experience it beforehand, because it can be diagnostic, if not helpful.

Catalan independence is a bit of a ongoing issue there, and some rural areas might frown upon spanish (mexican or not), or whatever!

Hope it didn't make you don't want to comeback

I believe that mostly, the prejudice was from me being American, or accompanying a beautiful native woman. I also got dirty looks because of the prepaid debit card I was using for everything.

The rude waiter was in a little restaurant in Manresa, and not in Barcelona proper. So, definitely off the beaten path of tourism.

And as far as returning, I would definitely love to; I loved the Sagrada Família and other such shrines; the scenery was gorgeous, and I was struck by how much older it all was in comparison to American structures and institutions. Yet, it was high technology (I had always had this mistaken belief that Europe was behind the U.S. in computers and electronics) and I amazed my fiancée by photographing the back of the TV, the circuit breaker box, things like that.

I would definitely return to Europe, but outside the influence of my ex-fiancée, I am unlikely to return to Catalonia; I'd love to see Italy, the Holy Land, more of England, but especially Ireland. It's all on my "bucket list"!

In the Southwestern United States, we don't have any buildings that were built, let alone demolished, in the early 19th century.

However, immersion is often not available. When you want to study a language before going on a trip, you often can't find a suitable class, let alone a socio-cultural environment for that language. It might also be financially prohitive. Then you move on to the next best method.

Living in a place where the locals don't speak English you only have two options: 1) gesticulate and talk in English, 2) make loads of mistakes while trying to learn the language. I guess you chose option 1.

Not necessarily - it's the bombardment of the language on billboards, radio, television, the labels on products in shelves, about asking for a coffee or what time the bus leaves, that helps. You can still socialize or talk to your family or colleagues in your native language.

You may call it dogma, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t want to practice a high quantity of the language in a somewhat unpredictable setting and to be exposed to idioms you want to speak yourself. Whatever you can do to make yourself ready to take that step will help.

You don't get nearly enough practice or anything that. Nor enough of vocabulary. Like, it is great, but not replacement in any way and just like with duolingo, you need to supplement it with other resources.

I have a chemical engineering degree, but have worked as a software developer for the past 25 years. Yes, learning another language does take time and dedication, no way around that.

If you learn Japanese, forget about learning to read or write (except katakana and hiragana, which you can learn in a week) and concentrate on spoken language, which is not that difficult to get to a basic fluency in.

Good for rote memory training though

Duolingo has brief explanations of the grammar for each unit. It's not even close to a textbook by any means but it's not impossible to learn. Now that I think about it, my mental algorithm works like this:

  1. Observe the words
  2. Observe the order they were used in
  3. Have their meanings in english as reference
  4. Use this information to puzzle out the meaning of the sentence

It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

It was fun to start but now it’s become increasingly frustrating with its focus on remembering things without understanding them. I definitely don’t see myself renewing my subscription when it runs out later this year.

> It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

I agree with you there. I suppose that's a problem inherent to any "translation based" learning?

In any case I do make an effort to avoid that problem. I try to understand sentences mentally without translating them at all. I look up the words and kanji and study their etymology. I even tried to study the individual components of each kanji, figuring that there was some logic to them, but I'm told that's a dead end more often than not.

Last time I checked, those were only available through their website, not on mobile.

I don't think this is good advice. There are myriads of ways to get you started, so Duolingo doesn't provide additional value in that regard.

The question is: why use Duolingo at all instead of any conceivable alternative out there? What's the upside to Duolingo? Is there any, whatsoever?

Uh, it's easy? You install the app, select the course and just start learning pretty much immediately. It got me from "I want to learn japanese one day" to actually learning japanese.

I really have no idea why people are so skeptical about duolingo. Nobody's claiming it should be the only resource but claiming it provides no value whatsoever is just false.

FWIW, it looks like it also teaches German.

EDIT: I just noticed this comment: "Please note: Complete German remains unfinished. The course will be either continued or remade by a new teacher directed by Mihalis."

Duolingo treats humans like supervised large language models and only does the babbler stage. That is: they show you a bunch of data and labels and then do a loss function on that.

The problem is that humans aren't machine learning algorithms. Because of this, we need more. If you're an Latin based speaker, try Chinese, Japanese, or even Korean (especially Korean). If you haven't grown up around these characters you're going to really struggle with the introductory lessons. How do you resolve this? You get a book. ̶O̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶a̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶(̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶D̶u̶o̶l̶i̶n̶g̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶)̶.̶(see edit) The same is for grammar and even words.

It's amazing to me that in all this time Duolingo hasn't added a "supplementary materials" section. This is included in almost every single other app that's directed at these languages. I know they want to upset the market and do things differently, but that doesn't mean to throw the baby out too.

Duolingo is great for practicing and keeping motivated. It has successfully gamifyed language learning, getting users to practice frequently. I just wish they would put more focus on language learning, because it's common knowledge that Duolingo can't get you to even a conversational level. A years worth of studying shouldn't have that poor of a result.

Edit: it was wrong to claim that there isn't a letter learning lesson. There is a different tab for it and I made this claim off of prior experience. But the app drops you right into words without even knowing how words are constructed, and I think this is a grave mistake (I'm sure they have data that could test this: if there is a higher rate of struggling/dropouts when a new character system is introduced). I do not think this changes my thesis, but I want to call out my mistake. I'll have a followup comment in the replies.

I used it for 8 months or so, and came to the conclusion that the gamification was completely counter-productive.

One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation". There have been studies that show that kids who already enjoyed drawing, when given a reward for doing drawing, found drawing by itself less enjoyable afterwards.

Duolingo is all about external rewards: And the reward isn't for learning the language, but for completing lessons. I found myself always trying to race through as many lessons as possible; stopping to investigate a word or phrase, which should be rewarded, was actually discouraged by their system.

Because a learning app's KPI is not how much the user actually learned. It's how much the user feels they learned.

Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.

> Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.

The distinction between "learned" in the first paragraph and "earned" in the second is, IMO, crucial. At some point it becomes more about maintaining steaks and suchlike rather than actually learning a language. (Speaking as some who spent a lot of time on Duolingo.)

I also realized that while it wasn't bad for teaching some basic vocabulary it was terrible for grammar and completely fell apart when it started to get into some more complex sentence construction (in Spanish, in my case).

Something that boggles my mind when I look at spots like /r/duolingo are the people who care more about the gamification than actually learning. You'll see people talk about their 2 year streak, but they got there by doing the minimum amount of material per day plus many, many streak freezes.

But hey, congrats to them for winning some fake awards.

So I think for them it's great, they do learn something instead of nothing at all.

It sounds like you're the one missing the whole point.

The goal of learning a language is not grinding on an app, but to have progress. Duolingo's gamification pushes grinding behavior, and not actual progress. Duolingo does not reinforce pushing forward, but does prompt you repeatedly on how to say "I drink milk" regardless whether you're on the app for two weeks or two years. You can be on Duolingo for two years grinding stuff daily and still have nothing to show for. You are prompted to keep your streak up of answering things like "I eat bread" over and over again regardless of language, and if you fail to keep your steak up you're prompted to pay for something to artificially keep it up.

This is not educational. It's a waste of time.

You missed the whole point: people do not learn with this approach, regardless of speed.

The only benefit is keeping people engaged in a skinner box while watching ads, and selling them ways around keeping their track record engaged with said skinner box unbroken.

I did tried other apps here and there, but none of them stuck for more them two days. Overwhelming majority, like almost all of what I learned is from Duolingo.

The progress was actually very real, painless and fine. I did not expected to be fluent. I improved more then would be possible without it.

I get that, but I'm talking about a more extreme behavior. There exist people who appear to be in it for *only* the game. My eyes were opened when I saw someone on Reddit bragging about the length of their streak, but they'd done fewer lessons over 2 years than I had done in a month or so. And I'm not exactly speed running. In other words, they're going out of their way to *not* do any Dueling in the name of earning fake gold stars.

That said, I also agree that what you say is a thing. However I don't understand those people. Why anyone would care about earning a badge on a site is beyond me. If it works to get them to do something useful, great. But I still don't understand those people.

Obviously, for anyone who can learn faster, it's a lot of energy and time wasted, I agree.

I think this is a bit more complicated and what works for some doesn't work for others. But I think to be a successful language learning app (as in successfully teaching language) then they can't just rely on this "immersion" approach. There needs to be study tools too.

> Duolingo is all about external rewards

I definitely agree with this. It seems like a big alignment problem. But I think they could make more money if they better aligned their app with user goals. It could reduce attrition rate, get more paid signups, and more active users. They have "first mover" advantage, but the hype phase is over, there are more competitors in the space, and they need to adapt or fail. Momentum is a pain. It is the reason for a lot of companies' success but also the reason for many (including the same) companies' quick and "unexpected" decline. Hacking is a good early strategy. It can get you to the moon, but it won't keep you there.

The focus should be on developing an intuitive understanding of your target language. Besides making you think in your native language again, the translation drills become a frustrating game of guessing the correct phrasing Duolingo is looking for.

Reading, listening and having conversations with native speakers is how you learn. The language learning platform should be there to help you do that.

They have(had?) one on the web version, but I think they cut it.

I'll admit that I was a bit too critical on the Korean about letters. There is an existence of a specification of learning characters. It did explain the consonant-vowel relationship, but once through I don't see how to access these slide again. Humans are far from one-shot learners. It is good practice, but it seems like a weird way to start, especially given that Hangul can be picked up pretty quickly (part of why it is interesting linguistically). This makes Duolingo a good side app, but I still maintain the position that it is poor for learning and that there are clear additions that could greatly improve its utility. That's my main argument: Duolingo could do more and a small amount of effort would greatly increase the utility.

As for the learning notes, they are more thorough on French and Spanish and they could definitely be better. I believe the other languages are still using the original crowdsourced content and that is a major limitation to the app that I have a tendency to forget about (I’m leaning Spanish). I wouldn’t recommend the app for more than the very basics if you’re learning something other than French, Spanish or German.

My hunch from reading the blog posts they put out is that they’re using Spanish and French to try things out and perfect the course structure and content and once they’ve got something locked in they will then replicate that across the other less popular languages. They’ve moved the French and Spanish courses so that they’re now in line with the official EU educational framework guidelines and I reckon their long term strategy will be to offer an official certification on completing a course which holds equal value to one acquired a traditional college or university. They’ve already taken steps in this direction in that non English speakers can take the Duolingo English test and use it as an official qualification to study at English language universities.

Having done it for both Chinese and now Korean, I can say pretty well. I mean you'll have messy penmanship but it does translate. But I think the more important part is that it is forcing you to pay attention to the actual construction of the letters and believe that this is the main motivation for this practice. Similar to how it is good to take notes in a class even if you never reference them.

> My hunch from reading the blog posts they put out is that they’re using Spanish and French to try things out and perfect the course structure and content and once they’ve got something locked in they will then replicate that across the other less popular languages.

They have had a series H, ~200M in funding (over 12 years), a multi-billion dollar evaluation, over 500 employees, and over 10 years of experience. I think this argument would make sense in the first 5 years but past the 10 year mark things need to be better. Honestly, the app does not seem significantly better than when I first used it in 2013/2014.

At this point there isn't an excuse to hire top tier language teachers and have them generate material for the app. They ask for $7/mo and I'll admit I'm impressed that 25% of their daily active users (6.5% of monthly) subscribe when the main selling point is no ads. I'd put money down betting that there's a low renewal rate in subscriptions (probably why the ads have become so much more annoying). Annoying your users with ads is not a successful business model (disclaimer: I haven't started a company and am not a successful entrepreneur while the Duolingo founders are billionaires. So I could be way off base). I've paid for other learning apps, such as Hello Chinese, because those give you more tools and resources. Apps I have paid give you more material (and remove ads) for the service and I'm even willing to pay more for this. I think there's very good reasons why apps like Hello Chinese are more well loved than Duolingo. In comparison, look at Scritter[0]. This is the go to app for Chinese and Japanese, costs $100/yr ($14/mo; frequent discounts of 50% fwiw) and has significantly better learning outcomes while having under 10 employees. There's flashcards, lessons, videos, and lots of reading material. Like I said before, I'm not a successful founder (or even a founder) nor a VC, but I cannot understand how any rational person would continue to give Duolingo money as everything just screams extra fat to me. I can only assume that Goodhart's Law is going strong and there's a huge focus on DAU (something I think apps like Scritter could get were they to have half the marketing department). Forgive me, but I just don't get it (I'm known to be pretty dumb though)

Edit: also surprising to me is that there are things like Duolingo podcast, but that this is not accessible in-app. This is a phone app focused product, so why make your users use spotify to use a different part of your product? I clearly don't get businesses. Never make me a CEO.

[0] https://skritter.com/

I disagree with this. I have also been using it since this time frame and believe it is significantly better than it used to be, at least in Spanish and French. I do agree however that I think they should have covered more ground in ten years than what they have done and that they should have better coverage for other languages.

> I think there's very good reasons why apps like Hello Chinese are more well loved than Duolingo. In comparison, look at Scritter[0]. This is the go to app for Chinese and Japanese, costs $100/yr ($14/mo; frequent discounts of 50% fwiw) and has significantly better learning outcomes while having under 10 employees.

Do you have resources to back these claims up because they’re pretty bold. I imagine that if they are dedicated solely to Japanese and Chinese then they probably are more successful than Duolingo’s Chinese and Japanese courses but I think you’d still need to provide data to both confirm and you definitely need data if you’re going to say they’re more “well loved”.

> I cannot understand how any rational person would continue to give Duolingo money as everything just screams extra fat to me.

Well as someone who has given Duolingo money for two consecutive years, I am doing it because I have been seeing results, it has proven to be a sustainable long term practice (nearly 1000 day streak) and I enjoy the content. None of this seems particularly irrational to me.

I 100% agree that the podcast should be in the app along with dual language subtitles and it’s absurd that it isn’t. It used to be in the app although it didn’t have the transcriptions which are available online.

It's worse. It used to be that the iOS app, at least, had podcasts in it, and you could listen to them to get points. It was great, though they only added a limited number, and eventually just dropped it. I'm a fan of immersive learning, and they _removed_ out an immersive learning tool that was actually pretty effective.

Japanese used to have stuff like this, but they removed almost all of it when they redid the app to be more linear sometime within the past year (forget when exactly they did it).

Agreed, and I'd also add that unfortunately many, if not all, in-person language courses also focus on the babbler stage. My personal preference would be to learn all of the grammar rules with some common vocabulary first.

Comprehensible input is key to learning a language. Grammar is helpful only after you are getting to where you could almost guess those rules.

How will you map t-v distinction in romance and Slavic languages to English? Or Russian and German cases? Or French’s plus-que-parfait? Or English’s question order to Russian’s flexibility in word order?

This is without even getting into the more removed languages…

I'll bet you didn't catch a thing from that. Now granted I haven't done this since in decades so I probably got a lot wrong, but even if someone corrects it you wouldn't understand anything.

Here is what I wrote: 'The best way is to map words. You don't need the grammar until you understand something, and then you will figure out grammar from context.'

Research and people who actually learn languages both agree that you need lots of input to understand the language. Grammar is useful, but only as a small percent of study.

That is a terrible learning outcome. I guarentee you that if you spent the same time with Remembering {Traditional,Simplified} Hanzi [0,1] you would be able to read more than a handful of characters. You'd also have intuition for novel (zero-shot) characters.

But I do agree you should practice writing, though -- as I argued in another comment -- I think the finger tracing is more about learning character shape rather than focused on teaching to write. That part is even important for reading. Though I do think Scritter, which uses fingers, will result in decent writing skills.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-...

Without practice writing them by hand you'll have a hard time remembering how to write them. Reading them is a separate skill; a lack of ability to write the characters will not impede you from reading them.

In my experience, stopping writing practice has made me progress faster with Japanese, since I can now use the time for other things.

I do think that learning to write the first 400 or so did help with drilling down the basic shapes and developing an eye for the characters.

It still takes a lot of (just visual) repetition with Anki though to really remember new ones.

I've heard from people who have great difficulty learning the characters this way, and maybe for them practicing writing could be helpful.

If you're interested in my abilities in Chinese:

- I have been certified HSK4, which isn't much. That was a long time ago; I haven't tried to get a higher level of certification.

- I regularly correspond with Chinese people in Mandarin.

- I can communicate orally at a rudimentary level. I have managed tasks such as renting an apartment and negotiating the purchase of an empty box from a bakery.

- Several people have expressed shock, on meeting me in person, at my inability to speak fluently. (One person went the other way, meeting me in person first, observing that I couldn't really speak Chinese, and going out of her way to write to me in English, which she wasn't really comfortable in. She seemed fairly outraged when she saw that I wrote to other Chinese people in Chinese.)

- I can read material of the kind that regularly comes up in my conversations without problems. For other material, I need a dictionary. This means that my vocabulary is a mixture of quite a bit of basic daily-use stuff, some specialized terminology that no one (including native speakers) would really be expected to know, and some gaping holes that no native speaker would have.

- I like to watch Chinese karaoke videos. I am mostly unable to understand the lyrics by ear, except for particularly simple lyrics. But I can often get a good idea of the lyrics by watching them show up (as karaoke prompts) in real time.

- I can write maybe on the order of 20-50 characters. When I corresponded in handwriting, I would have to look up how to write more than 90% of what I wanted to write.

You have the skills you use. If you need to read, then you can read. If you don't need to write, you probably can't write. Character amnesia arises for the obvious reason that reading is an important skill in Japan and China, but writing isn't and therefore many people are unable to write common words.

I have no idea what twangist is thinking, but it's certainly not connected to reality. The two possibilities I see are

(1) He is a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, and "reading" means something very different to him than it does to a foreign speaker.

(2) He is not a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, he's barely able to read in one of those languages, and he is not aware that he'd learn to read more effectively by reading than he can by writing.

I could quickly, and effectively go through the course with no hurdles. But then my sister asked me to count to ten in Japanese. I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese. Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.

I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue. It's still up if you can find it.

How is this possible? You know the words but you can't use them? This hasn't been my experience at all. I think I'm learning a lot from Duolingo. I still need a bit of time to parse big numbers especially when listening but I can recognize and understand countdowns when they show up in anime.

I've been sort of tracking my progress by watching japanese content and it's been extremely motivating. It's like wow, they really do use those words I learned about.

Duolingo lessons generally fail to build up on each other sufficiently. Lesson 10 should regularly reuse the vocabulary of 1-9 (to help 'widen' the association). Instead, it tends to be lesson 10 vocabulary paired with extremely simple words to form grammatically correct sentences and learn the vocabulary of lesson 10, which is then almost entirely discarded in the lessons that follow.

I always thought this was a given though. I don't think it's possible to learn a language in a vacuum. Languages are also people and culture.

> Duolingo lessons generally fail to build up on each other sufficiently.

Agreed. There's plenty of lessons that don't seem to be getting reused later, like they're leaves in the tree of knowledge. Those are the ones I have the most difficulty with when reviewing past lessons.

This is why I really think shadowing is so important with language learning, because it trains you to actually put words next to another. Just sitting down learning vocabulary is of course better than nothing, but having set phrases where you use that vocab ends up actually giving you at least _some_ scenarios where you can use them.

And of course "recognize countdowns when they show up in anime" and "do the counting up to 10 yourself" is extremely different. It's so much easier to understand something than to say it yourself! Understanding is of course super satisfying, and a good target in itself, but self-production is pretty important in my opinion.

[0]: a fun exercise for people is to try and name 40 states, or 80 pokemon. Turns out that a lot of info is locked in our brains but is not easily accessible in a context-free environment

Duolingo does exactly that though. It introduces vocabulary first, then introduces complete sentences using the words and the complexity keeps ramping up from there. As I progress through the japanese course it's becoming increasingly difficult to remember all the kanji but it still surprises me that I can figure out the long sentences it throws at me, sometimes without even thinking.

> It's so much easier to understand something than to say it yourself!

I guess. I think I can confidently count to 20 in japanese though. No one's evaluating me on my pronunciation so I don't know how good it is. I like to imagine it's at least ok since japanese phonetics are close to portuguese.

Duolingo is absolutely habit forming. It's got positive and negative reinforcements timed at many frequencies: days, weeks, months and years. It's got all sorts of rewards: XP, badges, gems, daily tasks, weekly leaderboards, yearly progress reports. It's got all sorts of punishments: loss of streak, permanent loss of monthly badge, loss of position in leaderboars.

The only thing that excuses all this is the fact it's trying to instill a healthy learning habit which leads to positive results for the user. Unlike the many Skinner's box simulators out there with the reward buttons wired to the player's credit card.

Setting and context is really important in language learning. If you're only used to practicing in a very specific and limited setting then you're only going to be able to recall under those conditions. Some apps try to resolve this by using video conversations, allowing you to chat with other users of similar levels (extremely useful!) and canned conversations (Duolingo has this one). All these are important but you also need to practice "offline." It is also important to watch and listen to content (like you're doing), even if it is far above your level. You'll probably notice in your Japanese adventure that a big thing is that you're probably way better at parsing words and sounds (e.g. hearing differences in tones for Chinese) than when you first started. Even learning to parse words is a big step, but only unfortunately comes from exposure of longer form content, something Duolingo-like apps (not all apps) don't provide.

When I started it took me a week to read one story. Got that down to an evening, then one hour. Now I can read them as quickly as English unless there's something very unusual happening.

Agreed. I lurk in libera's japanese language channel in order to read the messages. It's been a big help.

> You'll probably notice in your Japanese adventure that a big thing is that you're probably way better at parsing words and sounds

Absolutely. I'm getting a lot better at parsing out the components of sentences, especially the particles, even in fast speech. My understanding is still pretty basic but this skill allows me to at least try to infer information from context. It's a great way to puzzle out meaning and it's amazing when I get it right.

> exposure of longer form content, something Duolingo-like apps (not all apps) don't provide

That's partially true. Duolingo has stories but I think they're somewhat basic. It's just not the same as really immersing oneself in another culture. I'm not supplementing Duolingo with japanese books or anything but I enjoy watching japanese stuff so I have at least some exposure.

The most important thing about Duolingo is it got me started. I've been progressing over 2 years now. Almost 1000 days.

It should be more than that. There needs to be a connection between each word and the actual abstract concept they represent. Otherwise we're memorizing the act of counting itself without actually knowing the numbers.

> the suffixes necessary for counting different types of objects

I thought it might be that too but OP specifically said counting from 1 to 10 so it's just the numbers. Ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyuu, juu. I just don't know how it's possible to finish duolingo's japanese course without being able to say those words. It's not like the course is easy.

I mean there's some complexity and inconsistency. Words seem to randomly use different pronunciations of the kanji like 17 which is juushichi instead of juunana. Makes no sense to me but I simply got used to it quickly after hearing it enough. Days of the month were the hardest numbers for me because of all the inconsistencies. The general pattern is simple enough: number + "nichi" (日) but unfortunately a third of the numbers are special cases which must be memorized. I hate memorizing special cases. None of this applies to counting from 1 to 10 though...

Unfortunately this is almost always the case in duolingo's japanese lessons due to the characters. It's less of a problem in other languages.

I installed japanese input methods on my phone so I could practice writing and it's still really hard.

From who, Duolingo? Why do they care that much about one person's opinion?

the principle of specificity.

Like, if you wanna get good at cycling, running will help an aerobic base, but will not help in terms of generative force (vs load bearing), handles, situational awareness with traffic and fellow riders and learning to pick lines, balance and weight distribution on a bike, pedaling techniques for various pitches, etc.

Shoot, not even running, but Zwift vs actual cycling on the roads very much demonstrates the principle of specificity to the T.

Just makes me think, if you wanna get good at a language, you gotta use it in actual real-life situations with weight and stakes, as opposed to a game where you learn incidental stuff that may or may not have bearing in the real world.

Speaking/listening and reading/writing have overlap but if you want to master a language you also have to be doing exercises with text and reading text. After you reach a certain level of proficiency you need to start reading books (start with children’s books)

As far as Duolingo goes I don’t think it’s particularly good, except as a 101 introduction to a language.

I've been using Duolingo daily for soon 3 years (pro user), approx. 30 min, learning Japanese. Although I also use other apps for deeper knowledge and understanding of the grammar, I would be lying if I said duo didn't work for me. I understand most of what I've learned so far although reading is still a challenge, especially text with more complex kanji in it.

You say you've gone through the course but is that still true? at least today there are 810 quests, each with a meter for you to fill up.

Id be shocked if you got through all that and still didn't know how to count to ten.

Duolingo is no silver bullet. You still need to be really interested in learning, practice as much as possible and last but not least, investigate and deep dive into the grammar.

In case you're interested, here are the other apps I use for learning Japanese. - KanjiGarden, for memorizing kanji - Takoboto, my favorite dictionary - Renshuu, good for deeper explanation of grammar

Agree to a point. I used Duolingo as a stepping stone to studying Mandarin, up until I got bored and switched to YouTube videos. I got bored mainly due to repetition and not much new words per level.

Apparently in order to get me back, Duolingo kept on giving me push notifications about how I'm gonna lose my streak, or how I'm gonna fall behind in the leaderboard. No, Duolingo. I do not care about those.

Fascinating. You might consider publishing those emails (with sender info redacted, perhaps).

Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.

This seems to nail it. And is exactly what repulsed me from the very start.

To learn a language, I think you really have to create a simulacrum of lived experience in that target language culture. Drilling morphology and vocabulary will never hurt, but it is not sufficient.

> Like all the teachers I spoke to, Zimotti sees Duolingo as supplemental to the kind of deep immersion that language learning requires. But, in his opinion, the time most people spend on Duolingo is time they would otherwise spend on TikTok or watching television, not learning a second language in some more optimal way.

Unfortunately, Duolingo doesn't market itself that way, preferring nonsense like "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language". Of course there are many more customers who can spend fifteen minutes a day on it than hours at a time in an immersive context, topped up with fifteen minutes of Duolingo.

Beyond that, I find it almost useless for learning grammar and vocabulary. But this is still an important niche, and Duolingo owns it completely.

But while it felt like I was starting from scratch, I didn't. I had 4 years of German in middle school. I can't tell if I just "unlocked" that part of my brain, but what I can comfortably say is that ~1 year of Duolingo+Netflix made me feel much more comfortable than a more formal learning method throughout middle school.

My view is that 800ish hours is the first point where you start to get a bit of reward for having studied the language & likely can keep your ability long term without forgetting it all. But it is more of a starting point for study if trying to get fluent/highly functional/professional.

I sux at learning foreign languages and did learned enough to converse and communicate everything needed with less then 480hours of learning. That was years ago, before Neflix and internet were available. And the other kids in the same school learned more then I did.

Moreover, English is quite close to Spanish, so any English speaker should learn much much faster. Many words are for free.

> Under nearly ideal circumstances where one's life is dedicated to the task.

It definitely was not and I would not even consider it ideal.

> So starting point for consideration with self study is over 768 hours to reach a Spanish level you'll be moderately pleased with.

Only if you have some kind of super great expectation.

I was able to communicate with French tho. We traveled there and everyone lived in host family for over a week. There was no issue communicating with French, whether adults or peers. Most books were unpleasant to read, but I generally understood most of the normal ones. It just took too much effort and there were some paragraphs I did not understood here or there.

Also, movies are much harder to understand then real people. I did not had any issue conversing with Americans for literally years and still can't understand movies fully. Maybe if you learn from movies entirely and watch them all the time it is different, but if the goal is actual communication it is not necessary benchmark.

The issue here is that you or many people put absurdly high requirements as a benchmark for "knowing language" or "knowing enough to be useful" for the sake of an argument. Like dramas - they use weird vocabulary, phrasing and sentence structure. You can literally discuss philosophy in a language and still not understand that.

FSI provides more than 800 courses—including up to 70 foreign languages—to more than 225,000 enrollees a year from the U.S. Department of State and more than 50 other government agencies and the military service branches.[3]

I think I'm going to take their estimate over yours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Service_Institute

Yet if DL maintains that "Fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language" (in addition to being "The world's best way to learn a language") -- then it would seem that its marketing quite definitely is at fault.

Being as it is (in part) from ad copy like this where these misconceptions originate.

tbf, the ad says "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language, what can fifteen minutes of social media do?"

4 hours of social media a day, on the other hand, might be excessive.

It might be the case that you pick things up quicker in tutoring because you have wide exposure from duolingo

All evidence I’ve seen says it is incredibly difficult to pick up a language from scratch. Anthropologists have entire protocols developed for learning languages from native speakers with no shared language and it takes years. Sounds grueling too.

Meanwhile farting around with Duolingo got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion.

But I don’t think a few months of immersion would get me far with zero baseline. Just lots of frustration.

Keep in mind about a third of the English language comes from Latin (the precursor to French) and another third from French itself (thanks to the Normans). See Anglish [0]

[0] https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish

English contains many words which roots come from french

But you'd like to say that William the Conqueror was speaking French and not speaking Latin. Why?

High-resolution image of the same page: https://opendomesday.org/media/images/bdf/01.png

(More accurately, he is intelligible in large part! But if you try reading one page of his work, you'll notice some serious problems.

http://www.sd-editions.com/CantApp/GP/ will even read it to you in reconstructed pronunciation.)

So I find it's still best to find someone who is a native speaker, has a language teaching certificate/degree, and to go from there. They'll spot your weaknesses and help you navigate them all while providing a customized ramp, for your learning speed, of all the language's components. Duolingo might spend two weeks on a verb tense that you understood right away or fly over some pronouns that you struggled integrating. This whole time you'll be picking up word choice, intonation, rhythm of speaking from the native tutor that will expedite your usage of the language conversationally.

If you are committed to learning a language you will naturally seek out the occasions to practice it outside the app. Duolingo doesn't need to 'force' you to do anything. It's not a parent, it's a helping tool. It seems that most critics of Duolingo have unrealistic expectations.

Got to the level in Dutch in 4 years that I was able to begin working fulltime using no English. I never thought I'd be able to really speak a second language. I'm nowhere near native level, feel like I'm still learning every day, but I can speak it, I can carry out my daily life in work and socially. Duolingo really got me started.

I'm not a fan of the gaimification but that's the way of the world. I'm not a fan of a lot of technology but it is certainly very helpful sometimes.

Duolingo is good, but it is not a fucking miracle worker. If you’re going in expecting to put in two or three lessons a day and then are disappointed that after a year you don’t speak Spanish, you’re completely fucking deluded and it is not Duolingo’s fault. It takes a lot of fucking effort to learn a language and you get what you put into it. I have been using Duolingo for two years to learn Spanish now, and the results have been wonderful. I can read a lot of Spanish texts, I can pick up on a lot of dialogue in tv and movies and I can express quite a few thoughts in Spanish. Am I completely proficient? Probably not - but if I lived in a Spanish speaking country for a few months I think I’d get pretty competent pretty quickly. And the learning I got has cost me a grand total of about £140. I can guarantee that as far as value for money goes, I have gotten way more learning for the money through Duolingo than if I’d have spent the equivalent on human one to one lessons (how many would I have been able to get realistically for the same amount of money - between five to ten 1 hour lessons?) and definitely better value for money than what I would get through my local college.

Duolingo is awesome. It’s made language learning possible for me where it used to be impossible. I wanted to pick another language up so casually that I wasn’t willing to put in the effort that other tools require, and Duolingo gives me a way to pick up the basics. I’m confident that in a couple of years I’ll be able to progress to more serious methods for developing conversational skills.

And it would never have been possible if I wasn’t able to use Duolingo to slowly but surely learn a new alphabet and basic present tense grammar.

I think the issue is the target audience. HN has a lot of educated global folk that have had to learn other languages. Duolingo is not the ticket when you need to learn a new language. It shines specifically when the language learning is not a requirement.

This makes several assumptions, namely:

1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics.

2. That an hour of Duolingo is equivalent to an hour of US Foreign Service Institute tuition. I don't have first-hand experience of the FSI. However, I have recent experience of learning a language (German) outside Duolingo. After watching ~40 short grammar videos and taking 65 hours of 1:1 tuition, my command of the language is WAY further along than that entire Duolingo French tree from a while back, which took many more hours.

Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

My point is that how many people here have put in the requisite time to even find out. I’d wager less than 0.01%. Duolingo have come out and said their long term aim is for each course to get you to B2 standard eventually. I’d say they’re not there yet but they’re on their way. The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re looking at this from an English perspective. The Duolingo English language test is widely accepted at universities as a demonstration of English proficiency so they must be doing something right in that regard.

> Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics.

What do you mean by “completed the French tree”. Do you mean you went through and unlocked every lesson once. Or did you gold every single lesson? There is a significant difference. You unlock extra vocabulary and the lessons became more focused on writing and listening comprehension when you complete the higher levels of each lesson. This is now baked into the new format as you go along.

> Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

I disagree with this. Hours of study is an important metric. You need proficiency on a standardised test along with hours studied for a true measure of method efficiency. And as you mentioned cost is also a massive factor. Most people cannot afford 65 hours of one to one tuition.

With Duolingo I can do half an hour in transit, but the remembrance is not great.

I do think there are more effective ways of learning a language. Probably the most effective and not so well known is Pimsleur.

Half an hour of Pimsleur asks so much focus of me, and im tired after, but I learn quickly.

It's an audio class that has a very smart way of repeating and reproducing conversations. The repetition is done in a way that it advances the conversation and slightly alters the repetition so it forces you to use your active focus & memory.

(no affiliation)

In your defence, the 480 hours is also only for group 1 languages. If you are learning a harder language it may take many more hours than this. Category 5 languages take 2200 hours. 15 minutes a day is totally reasonable for a category 1 language. For a category 5 language, not so much as it’s going to take you about 20 years. But I strongly suspect that the main problem is not the “15 minutes a day” but the fact that people are not expecting (or willing) to do it for years.

The “low effort” is made possible by Duolingo segmenting lessons into tiny chunks.

It doesn’t lower the total hours necessary because that would be witchcraft.

The takeaway is that Duolingo has definitely made learning the basics possible where every other popular alternative has failed for many people.

But I'm not disputing that Duolingo has uses and that its helped a lot of people.

What’s your purpose here?

It’s been communicated that Duolingo is the only thing that works for me and others, and you continue to make time to berate the tool. It comes across that you’re a language learning snob, a gatekeeper, or both.

Kindly let me enjoy myself in peace.

Duolingo is slower than other methods, and it only progresses through the basics of any language. It only covers the fundamentals of some languages. Fluency necessitates other mediums, and this is obvious to any user. Nobody thinks they’re fluent after Duolingo. Duolingo covers the hardest part, the beginning, of learning a language.

If at this point you say that you have met Duolingo-ers who claim fluency (but lack it) then we circle back around to the top-level comment. It’s your word against mine, and I say there’s no way you know many people who have spent the hundreds of hours required to learn a language. 10 years of daily lessons for an English speaker just to learn Spanish. (Spanish is the only Duolingo course that holds a candle for any level of fluency.)

The point is that nobody would adopt Duolingo when they needed to speak well quickly. Its target audience is people who casually want to learn a language and don’t have the motivation to use better tools. These people effectively have no other option, and shitting on the only thing that works for them makes you a gatekeeper and a snob.

I am telling you that I personally know many people (10+), who said "I saw that you can use this Duolingo app to become fluent in French/Spanish/Japanese, and all it takes is 15 minutes a day! That's perfect!" Because they saw it in the advertising. They did not look up how many years that would take, they did not grasp the fact that they are being gamified, they did not grasp the fact that they were learning in a slow and inefficient way, and they were 100% excited to learn a language quickly and painlessly entirely because of Duolingo's promises. And cost ("why would i pay hundreds of dollars for a course when Duolingo is free!").

So yeah, Duolingo's marketing definitely makes it seem like becoming fluent is "easy" if you use their app. And it isn't. That doesn't make it useless, that doesn't mean it's a waste of time if it helps you learn things about the language or move on to a different program.

I am not "shitting" on anyone, I'm pointing out a pretty obvious marketing angle by Duolingo that does dupe people, and I really don't see how that's gatekeeping.

You can’t seriously blame Duolingo for portraying itself positively in light of the difficulty of language learning. With 15 minutes a day, you can make progress. That’s not wrong. “Hey you lazy piece of shit who isn’t willing to buy a Spanish textbook, we have an app for you to learn to count to three in Spanish” wouldn’t do very well.

You use the word “dupe” as if the point of advertising isn’t to portray the most positive technically correct aspects of a product. People settle on Duolingo because becoming fluent is easy. It’s that simple. It’s the easiest path to fluency. Duolingo won’t get you all the way there (and it may even give you some bad habits), but it’s the lowest effort route through the hardest part. It’s a slow route, but it’s the only route if you’re too low-motivation to take a harder route.

You’ve clearly learned a language through better means, and you’re shitting on a tool that others use. Not only that, it’s the tool with the lowest barrier to entry. You’re the definition of a gatekeeper.

You're making a lot of assumptions about other people. Not everyone is as savvy as you. I know people who used Duolingo to learn French so they could move to Montreal. It didn't work. They can't have conversations and they can't remember vocabulary or syntax outside of specific cues. Is that "Duolingo's fault?" not entirely, but they definitely were under the impression that "15 minutes is all I need!"

Duolingo is great at getting you to use the app. That's fantastic. Use it if you find it helps. Just don't expect it to make you fluent by itself.

Terrible planning on the part of said Montreal people has nothing to do with Duolingo. I’m sorry that their plan didn’t work out. Ironically, their forced immersion has probably done wonders for their French.

Sorry you caught the brunt of my frustration. You seem reasonable. Duolingo’s great lol.

Well you're definitely passionate about Duolingo so you must be happy with the results!

I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun. It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve.

It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time.

At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old. When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me.

Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy.

For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.

It’s a pretty simple formula.

They work to understand something and then experience it repeatedly by reviewing it to move it long term memory.

Maybe this approach lays bare and trivializes some plain truths about learning which some academia would prefer to keep as a mystery of butts in seats for hours to measure competency.

Skills based and competency based learning is not always a strength of many of the naysayers I’m against Duolingo type tools (mobile learning apps).

The proof is in the pudding when it comes to usage. An app doesn’t have to be the best or most efficient or most effective. But if it meets the more in their hand than anything else, it can trend to a large advantage over time. Asking if people can pick something up, keep it up long enough on average to make it stick be a threat to the building of physical campuses.

Self-directed learning is also different to learning the theory of language learning vs the practical learning to swim by learning not to drown, then float, then move.

Coincidentally, this is also a major reason why Duolingo switched to “the path” (something else that gets flak on here). Spaced repetition is now built in by default. With the old layout a lot of users would complete a level and move on in an effort to complete the tree, rather than levelling up each level in a section before moving on.

Over the last couple of years, I've invested some serious time into learning Portuguese, first in Duolingo and then in an actual classroom. Duolingo was definitely helpful for reading proficiency, but did almost nothing for my conversation skills (let alone pronunciation). The real classes helped with the conversation skills, though I ended up supplementing them with a spaced repetition app for vocabulary drilling. Grammar is still lacking.

Another Duolingo language that I've spent quite a bit of time on is Yiddish, and I find that I can now read it quite well — but only in the exact font the app is using. I'm not entertaining much hope of ever being able to write or speak it.

Of the 8 or so apps I tried, Duolingo was by far the worst. It doesn't feel like it teaches me the language whatsoever, but is instead very good at teaching me the gamification.

The gamification is a perfect example of how Duolingo is optimized for people whose motivation is low. It’s specifically for people who just casually want to learn a new language. It’s successful not because it carries people to fluency but because it provides a fun way to learn the basics. Those basics are an unmanageable hurdle for people who don’t actually need to learn a language.

I almost got banned over a comment I made on another Duolingo post because I got so frustrated with the gatekeeping here. The attitude on HN is disgusting. It’s blatant gatekeeping. “Your way is wrong. If you can’t do it the right way you don’t deserve to learn a language.”

I regret commenting here. I’d delete my comment if I still could, but instead I’m stuck arguing with another language learning snob because I don’t have the self control not to.

But I can do it when I drop it on a daily basis to do the deed. Same with the other apps but they aren't as much fun, and that's what it's about while pooping.

DuoLingo while pooping is just one plank in my program, the others are Netflix and HBO in Spanish, as well as multiple travels per year to Spanish speaking countries.

I never said anything like that. I said that I found Duolingo worse than everything else I've tried. I'm glad Duolingo works well for you, but I posted my own personal review framed as my own experience.

A review that you disagree with isn't gatekeeping!

From my position, someone telling me that the only thing that I can even use is “the worst” feels like an attack with the purpose of gatekeeping.

My use case is expressly where Duolingo is nice. I simply don’t care enough to invest the effort that Babel or others require. Tutoring isn’t even in the cards considering the time and money.

From here, other folks in similar conversations have continued to say that I won’t learn anything with Duolingo. This is blatantly false; I’ve already learned to read a new alphabet, and I’m slowly learning vocabulary and basic grammar. I’m perfectly aware that Duolingo will never make me fluent, and even that I might have some bad habits when I transition to something else. The point is that it gets me to the point that I even can transition to something else. And research shows that the only bad habits that cause real problems in language learning are with pronunciation (something Duolingo is actually particularly good about).

Sorry you caught backlash from my frustration.

It's what you make of it. That said, I've clearly hit a wall of usefulness, and I'm looking elsewhere to continue learning. I'm going to be starting a French course next month - in person - because a huge aspect of what's missing is immersion, conversation, and thinking about the language in a way that's more than just repeating things.

I had 4 years of high school French many years ago and was a pretty good student overall.

But I never really used it much afterwards. I've forgotten a lot and was never really any good at understanding spoken French. Mostly I could get a sense for a French newspaper.

On the other hand, I travelled to Paris with a friend a few years backwho had zero exposure to French and the amount I know was actually at least somewhat helpful.

If I were looking to spend some extended time in France at some point, I'd look to do a refresher with some of the modern language study courses.

Also, I cannot speak the language at all. Or, barely at least. That is why I'm moving on from DL

(sorry, hard to write diacritics on this).

It's useful enough. I can read the signs to not get lost and navigate the supermarket, and it's a good base for if I ever wanted to properly learn the language with an actual course and immersion.

I do think that, for most people, a relatively low effort introduction to a language may be useful to set a minimal foundation. But you probably need serious immersion to get anything even close to fluent.

I try to do it on a self enforced “hard mode” where I close my eyes and listen before each exercise, and cover the answers. I also type all the exercises instead of the word bubbles which helps with learning the accent placement.

But it’s only a supplement to a more rigorous routine which includes a Pimsleur speaking/listening lesson, and two Anki (spaced repetition flashcards) decks, one for conjugation and one for vocabulary.

And then chatting with friends.

Finally, I listen to radio stations from Spanish speaking countries while working.

I suspect if I keep it up I’ll be pretty decent by the end of the year.

Their CEO has gone on Reddit a few times and came off extremely, probably insultingly poorly. I dropped the app like hot lead after they changed formatting late last year and his behaviour was the last nail in that coffin.

It's gotten progressively worse and more gamified which doesn't equate to learning.

There are some FOSS alternatives beginning to plant seeds. I cannot wait to see what they bring.

I couldn't understand why people thought LLMs would replace search entirely, since I search mostly to find content created by people. I want to read the article or watch the video, not just find some particular fact. But maybe I'm the unusual one in this case?

I've seen this in my own children. My daughter wants to use it occasionally, because it's like a video game. "Papa, look how long I've had the streak going!" but as that number of days climb into the high double digits, she knows less than what someone would know after their first week of a public school class. And I have no flattering opinions of public school, either.

It's Greek lessons are bizarre. I once saw a multiple choice quiz where it asked what the alpha character (the font made it obvious, just the single glyph) was... and the four possible answers were "alpha", "a", "Aay", and (phrase) "the ah sound in caught" (might be misremembering this, but definitely a phrase).

What sort of nonsense is that meant to be? How is that not more confusing?

What it never did was ever show or teach the Greek alphabet. You never learn the counting numbers. You never learn to conjugate verbs.

Other languages are no better, best I can see. If I had to guess, I would think the app is some sort of CIA-inspired conspiracy to prevent Americans from ever learning a language other than English. It pathologically horrible, impossible to describe without sounding melodramatic.

Good, motivated language learners will quickly discard it and proceed and progress with more effective methods. People who stick with duolingo will end up getting something like the old 'highschool French'. Some basic familiarity with the language but gained through an unsatisfactory, frustrating learning process that actually hinders them from getting to any degree of fluency.