How exactly were you using it? It speaks to you, which is invaluable for developing an ear for the language. It forces you to translate both ways, which helps with reading and writing immensely. And optionally you can even speak answers in the foreign language to practice pronunciation (such that your phone can correctly transcribe what you're saying).
It's not exactly an immersive language course, but it is vastly more useful than flash cards.
I know a lot of people like to speed through the tree and only complete the first level, which I suppose is a more vocab-focused way of using the app. But if you go deeper on each level it forces you to grapple with grammar a lot more.
Probably a fair point - as mentioned I wasn't really using it to learn the language, rather to get a feel for "how useful would this have been when I was learning". So I admit I didn't dive into the later levels.
With that said, it was reasonably fun, and I did stick with it for a while due to the gamification, so maybe there's hope for the feature. Just getting people to study a foreign language regularly is probably a good step.
I also think that they have implemented some more advanced learning features with a few languages.
I've been learning French and have been using Duolingo for vocab, but then I listen to a French-teaching podcast as well as trying to work on reading/speaking it.
Regarding the differences between Canadian and France French, are there that many differences that it would make it difficult to understand someone from another region?
I have friends and former coworkers some from Quebec, some from New Brunswick all fluently bilingual. We've all worked with people from France on projects and my Acadian friends remarked they couldn't understand a word the people from France said.
Although the reverse of that a friend went to northern France on vacation. When he was there he said everyone asked him where he was from he told them New Brunswick Canada. From what I understand Acadian (French dialect of New Brunswick, Canada) is older and closer to northern France than the Quebec dialect. I'm not sure if my friend meant the regional dialect or standard Parisian French, I'm pretty sure he meant the former.
And this may be totally wrong but I believe the southern France dialect (Occitan) is quite different than the north. I've had to call Monaco (I know it's not France) and I was surprised at just the accent of the French person speaking English. I've been around French all my life but southern France to me sounds like stereotypical cartoon French like Pepe LePew.
The entire history of standard French for their language is quite interesting. It's not been accepted for as long as you may think and there are many dialects.
edit: I think Canadian French has a lot of slang not used in France which makes it hard to understand. Kind of like a Cockney from England coming to the US, sure you can understand his language but not the meaning the way he uses words.
2. italki for conversation with native speakers. You can find super cheap if you are just looking to talk.
3. hellotalk is free but takes more effort and mostly just spanish/english.
Swell idea though. Mobile support is a bit rough but not unusable.
Out of curiosity, what mobile issues are you encountering? This is actually a Flutter web app, which isn't officially production-ready yet, so I'm keen to provide feedback to the Flutter team if something's going wonky.
I'd love to try this but I don't have a Google account. Do you have any plans to add registration using an email address?
A couple of comments: for 水果, it only accepts shŭi gŭo, not shúi gŭo. I know that is technically correct, but the voice synthesis sounds it out with the sandhi. More a question of philosophy I guess, but thought it was worth mentioning.
Also, it might be nice to have an option that hides the characters, so you're forced to rely on hearing rather than just knowing that e.g. 多 is dūo.
Looking forward to seeing what else you do with it!
Asked me to sign in with Google. Couldn't click behind. Closed window.
Come on, don't make me sign in everywhere. This is just email harvesting. I get if you want to sell a service, but then I need to know what you are providing. If it is good I'll pay for it (as someone trying to learn Mandarin. There just aren't good tools out there). But please don't just blindly collect user data.
In the meantime, I've enabled e-mail registration without verification, so feel free to signup with a throwaway :)
Also, in counter part to Duolinguo, I suggest at checking out Hello Chinese, and using that as the metric to beat (it is popular among Mandarin learners).
You're right, there are a few artifacts in the audio. Most of these are due to generating speech at a slower cadence than "natural".
Native/enunciated recorded speech would probably be better for this specific purpose, but not necessarily practical for the larger app.
I've messed around with Duolingo a few times, just to get a feel for how useful it is. I came away feeling that it was about the same level as flashcard vocabulary learning - useful, but only a small part of the pie.
Vocabulary is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to carry on a conversation. Mandarin in particular is more difficult, since you need to grind through hours and hour writing/rote learning characters to improve your vocabulary.
The one thing that noticeably accelerated my proficiency was having an actual conversation with a native speaker (host family/tutor/etc). That's not something that Duolingo really replicates.
Self-plug - coincidentally, earlier today I just released a small tool for Mandarin learners to practise their tone recognition! I've been working on a larger app and this seemed like something that would have helped me when I first started out. App is currently live @ https://fluent.academy - I'll be introducing more functionality for Mandarin learners in the near future, so would really love to hear from students of any level.