The answer is not much. And I'm confused why this is the case.
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.
> Duolingo is great for practicing and keeping motivated. It has successfully gamifyed language learning, getting users to practice frequently.
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.
> 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 think the gamification was a bit part of why I stopped using it. It made it feel more like a chore than something I enjoyed doing.
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).
> came to the conclusion that the gamification was completely counter-productive.
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.
I think what you're missing here is that some people do not have the discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this.
So I think for them it's great, they do learn something instead of nothing at all.
> I think what you're missing here is that some people do not have the discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this.
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.
> Let me repeat: some people cannot learn faster than this,
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.
The issue here is that what you wrote is just not true. I did Ukrainian for a year. I started to be able to understand some of the content around a year in. I started to be able to parse Cyrillic.
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.
It works for some people, clearly, as stated by some on this very thread.
I hope you will not move from "Duolingo is useless for everyone on this earth" to "anyone saying Duolingo is useful for her/him is in denial"...
> discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this
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.
I agree it's not great. But assuming they are very bad at learning, then Duolingo make them learn something , kind of by accident. I cannot see this as a negative.
Obviously, for anyone who can learn faster, it's a lot of energy and time wasted, I agree.
> One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation"
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.
I think the issue is that your average Duolingo user doesn't have an intrinsic reason for learning a language -- anecdotally it seems many are just trying to fill their time in a way that's marginally more productive than playing a mobile game or scrolling social media.
No, Duolingo is not "marginally more productive" than playing mobile games. It's way better. You're learning something useful, albeit very sloely, instead of wasting your time.
I don’t know, it makes me get on everyday and do something - and they are pretty forgiving with the streak piece of the app. I’d rather learn a little everyday than look at one of the overly pedantic texts that the super geniuses of Hacker News will recommend that only work for them and that I’ll close and never look at after day 3.
The amount of people that find learning languages fun on itself is miniscule. Intrinsic motivation only gets so far ... and for most of us it means "no learning at all" or "two monts of learning and then giving up".
Duolingo is a low-density learning experience. Some of the drills are good, but there's a lot that are counter productive. The ones that ask you to translate a phrase back to your native language are the biggest time wasters.
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.
On the mobile apps at least (but I also believe they exist on the web app as well) there is a supplementary materials button on most lessons. They are also lessons for learning the individual characters of languages in non-latin alphabets. The comment is wrong about both of these things.
I just checked, I wouldn't equate the end of lesson material with what I'm asking for. I checked both Korean and Spanish. Spanish had more. Both had a few example sentences. Spanish has a few "tips" like "you also use esta when you're talking about something that's only temporarily true." This gets slightly better for Spanish as near the end it includes some conjugation (part of what I'm asking for) but Korean never has more than a few examples.
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.
I agree that the fact it only asks you to draw the character once isn’t great. At the same time, I do wonder how much drawing with your finger is going to translate into remembering how to do the same thing when you’re holding a pen (although I suppose you could do the same thing using a pen if you were on iPad or an Android device).
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.
> I do wonder how much drawing with your finger is going to translate into remembering how to do the same thing when you’re holding a pen
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.
> Honestly, the app does not seem significantly better than when I first used it in 2013/2014.
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.
I travel to Latin America as often as I can manage, so I have been studying Spanish. The approach learned from Duolingo does not train your ear to listen to spoken language well. If you want to actually speak a language with other language speakers, listening comprehension is crucial. I moved to using immersive language learning, listening to Spanish media (mostly on Youtube, but also listening to es localizations of movies/TV). The language basics Duolingo teaches are still useful, and I have a 1100+ day streak, but just doing Duolingo still left me flat-footed on the ground trying to use the language.
>also surprising to me is that there are things like Duolingo podcast, but that this is not accessible in-app
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.
> Spanish has a few "tips" like "you also use esta when you're talking about something that's only temporarily true." This gets slightly better for Spanish as near the end it includes some conjugation (part of what I'm asking for) but Korean never has more than a few examples.
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).
>> The problem is that humans aren't machine learning algorithms.
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.
Research says that grammar should come later. Grammar is easy to teach and grade though, while more effective learning methods don't show any results as fast, but in the long run do better.
Comprehensible input is key to learning a language. Grammar is helpful only after you are getting to where you could almost guess those rules.
I can see that being the case for learning how to speak a language, but I'd rather first learn how to read and write the language. And mapping the foreign language's rules of grammar to those of my native language feels like the best way to start that.
“Mapping grammar” is inapplicable in many language pairs. Especially English which is so simple.
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…
Noun signal, adverb, adverb, verb, verb, verb, plural noun, sentence end signal. Personal noun, verb contraction, verb, noun signal, noun, verb, personal noun, verb, compound noun, join signal, join signal, verb, personal noun, verb, verb, verb, noun, verb, noun.
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.
Yeah. If you want to learn a language with a different character set than the one you grew up with then you need to practice writing the characters. I studied Chinese for a year on Duolingo and now I can barely recognize a few characters. Without practice writing the characters by hand you’ll have a really hard time remembering them!
> I studied Chinese for a year on Duolingo and now I can barely recognize a few characters
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.
> Without practice writing the characters by hand you’ll have a really hard time remembering them!
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.
No. What the parent said. Learning how to write them puts knowledge of the glyphs' shapes in your body not just your memory. You will read them better too.
- 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.
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.