Re:Facebook Still Tracks People on Yelp, Duolingo, Indeed
by barry-cotter on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @12:04PM
(#19320519)
> That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer.
The design of the app isn’t an accident. They want you to start trying immediately. The testing effect works even for vocabulary. If you guess which of four words is the Spanish for milk you’re more likely to remember the answer than if you’re just told it. When you put effort into learning something you’re more likely to remember it, even when the effort is as trivial as a multiple choice test.
> The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc.
None of this is wrong to be honest. I wouldn’t use any Duolingo course that hadn’t been out of beta for more than a year because there are often plentiful mistakes.
> I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular.
It’s actually pretty good at getting you from nothing to novice for European languages as far as reading goes. And it’s free and gamified, which helps a lot with motivation. You might be mistaking the feeling of learning with actually learning too. Almost everyone does. That’s why most people do massed practice (cramming) instead of distributed (multiple reviews) and interleaved (practice different skills together, not one at a time, even though massed works worse. You feel like you’re learning more with massed.
The design of the app isn’t an accident. They want you to start trying immediately. The testing effect works even for vocabulary. If you guess which of four words is the Spanish for milk you’re more likely to remember the answer than if you’re just told it. When you put effort into learning something you’re more likely to remember it, even when the effort is as trivial as a multiple choice test.
> The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc.
None of this is wrong to be honest. I wouldn’t use any Duolingo course that hadn’t been out of beta for more than a year because there are often plentiful mistakes.
> I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular.
It’s actually pretty good at getting you from nothing to novice for European languages as far as reading goes. And it’s free and gamified, which helps a lot with motivation. You might be mistaking the feeling of learning with actually learning too. Almost everyone does. That’s why most people do massed practice (cramming) instead of distributed (multiple reviews) and interleaved (practice different skills together, not one at a time, even though massed works worse. You feel like you’re learning more with massed.