>The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will.

I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language.

It is an amazingly powerful tool to bootstrap you from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talking about", though.

I cannot think of a single more effective method than Duolingo to get over this first hurdle.

> I don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language.

I'm active in various Facebook/Reddit groups dealing with language learning. The average user, who's never learned a language before, does think DL will make them fluent. And DL advertises themselves in this manner as well. It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I understand natives?"

> I cannot think of a single more effective method than Duolingo to get over this first hurdle.

I think an actual coursebook is more useful, but it also likely depends on person. DL doesn't really teach language skills for most the courses. It has you translate, you never practice reading for comprehension, listening for comprehension (or listening to natives at all, in the courses with TTS), or writing. And not to mention the default of 'click the words' in the mobile app doesn't force recall at all.

≥ you never practice reading for comprehension

This has existed for at least two years: https://www.duolingo.com/stories

Yes, it does not cover every language but the intent is to address that ( perceived ) complaint.

I disagree that an actual coursebook is more helpful.

I used Duo for 6 months prior to moving to a Germany. It gave me an incredible confidence boost to be able to at least understand what was going on around me.

After living in Berlin for 6 months I did a course and I was far ahead of others who had taken formal courses before.

It has been 2 years since I left Germany, I still do my Duo daily and have continued doing German courses.

It has helped maintain my minimal ability.

> it also likely depends on person

Indeed. My partner at the time did the same as me and Duo did not work for her at all.

> This has existed for at least two years: https://www.duolingo.com/stories

I'm aware of stories, but given that it's only available in a small minority of languages, I'd say it's fair to say DL doesn't offer it when the majority of their languages don't (and likely won't ever) have stories.

they used to have you read wiki articles like, 6 years ago? I feel that over the years, Duolingo started focusing way more on the game aspect than learning.

The spaced repetition is also mostly gone, only somewhat available on desktop.

This is not true, they've made changes recently to their premium features that forces you to do training (spaced tasks).

I see... It's kinda true still, as before we had that on the free plan.

> It's a common issue: "I've got my entire tree gold, why can't I understand natives?"

As an alternative anecdote, I've been using Duolingo for years and spend some time in the forums + different Spanish learning communities whose users frequently use Duolingo and I have never seen anyone ever ask this.

It's always struck me as obvious to everyone that you would need multiple resources to become fluent, but Duolingo is useful as a good quality free resource that can be done anywhere at any time.

I'm not saying you're wrong, as we probably come across different posts or groups, just an another experience to share.

Audio is the most important and hardest component of learning a language so apps have a huge advantage over textbooks any day. I really don't think recommending textbooks is at all relevant these days. Graded readers are better for simulating immersion. Apps are better for getting your feet wet. Textbooks can teach grammar but so can apps and really you have to be pretty far along for grammar to be the main stumbling block (over listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary).

I use newsinslowfrench.com for this very reason. They have a whole library of grammer lessons and language learning courses, but the main product really is that every week they produce 4 "news broadcasts" actually talking about news of the week by native speakers. In addition to the general listening reenforcement, each weeks script emphasizes a particular element of grammer and comes along with that topics lesson. They product both a speaking slow and speaking at a normal speed version so you can start with the slow one to get an understanding of what is happening, then listen to the actual speed lesson and have a chance. It's an awesome program, but it doesn't scale to other languages in the way that some general-purpsoe learn all the languages startup can.

> Audio is the most important and hardest component of learning a language so apps have a huge advantage over textbooks any day.

Assuming the apps actually use native speaker audio. Which Duolingo doesn't do.

> I really don't think recommending textbooks is at all relevant these days.

I disagree completely. Textbooks are still, in my opinion and experience, the most efficient way to start learning a language.

> really you have to be pretty far along for grammar to be the main stumbling block (over listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary).

I wouldn't agree you have to be "pretty far along". Grammar becomes a huge stumbling block as soon as you get outside the pleasantries section of learning. Once you start trying to talk about your day and what you'll do and did, then the grammar really starts to matter.

Why do you say Duolingo doesn’t use native speakers? Their Spanish speakers for example are either native or indistinguishable from native speakers.

Then that's an update. For the longest time it was simply TTS, with all the downsides that contains.

They've been working on improving their recordings for years. It's a lot better now.

The old FSI language courses are very effective. And free and in the public domain.

FSI combines hundreds of pages of print materials with hundreds of verbal audio drills. I used it to supplement a French course in college and my professor asked me how I advanced so quickly. The course materials were doing very little for the rest of the class because they didn't force natural language thinking. FSI grammar drills make you think on your feet in conversations with different roles and grammatical rules.

I had also tried Rosetta and Pimsleur at the time. Years later I tried Duolingo for another language. To me they all feel like fun toys, but only toys compared to FSI. If I wanted to learn another language, I'd check if it had an FSI course.

If you search, you’ll find plenty of people willing to sell you some “FSI” courses for hundreds of dollars. Is there an official source for FSI courses?

It looks like https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/ is what you want.

Surely there are updates to the FSI courses, right? Like what does our state department today use? Have they entirely farmed the job out to private institutions like Rosetta Stone and community colleges?

I've not heard of FSI before. Thanks for the recommend.

There are definitely more effective methods, just mostly not free and more time demanding.

I have a mission to get B1 French, tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year. You get into the bubble that you think you are progressing but reality is, its a very narrow and not-so-useful progress if whole language knowledge is your goal - mostly passive skills and certain type of language usage that goes along with the type of exercises in Duolingo.

If you want real language knowledge, as OP mentions speaking is the hardest part (active & rapid usage of all that you know), and Duolingo doesn't prepare you for this, at all. If your goal is purely passive reading newspapers/articles, then its helpful a bit, but I would still use at least 2-3 other methods if you are even a bit serious about it.

Try talking to people after using just Duolingo, heck try writing an official letter on whatever topic. You will not just struggle, you will fail if you don't use any external help.

I've made tremendous progress with zoom meetings with professional teacher over shorter period of time. But its because I made it a priority and dedicated my time to it. And it costs quite a bit (doesn't have to, but my case is quite specific).

>tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year

To be honest with you, I think you spent too much time on Duolingo. It's definitely not a suitable tool for learning new things after the first 8-12 weeks (assuming you put in around 30-60 minutes a day).

To be fair, though, in that short initial period you can pretty easily learn close to 1000 common words, as well as basic sentence structure in your target langauge.

This is immensely useful if you want to start communicating with others online or reading texts in your target language; you're looking up the few words you don't know rather than staring at a wall of gibberish.

I found watching French TV helped get the equivalent of language immersion.

One source that isn't region locked is TV5Monde [1], you can view programmes online if it isn't available as a broadcast channel where you are.

[1] http://www.tv5monde.com/

Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even if it were, it would take more than six months to get there.

A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months.

Duolingo could at best help you reach an A3, and even then you'd have to supplement it with reading and (ideally) conversation. Duolingo plus outside reading and listening could get you to a B1 level in a year if you really put your mind to it.

They even make a podcast available, to help the listening part. I happen to listen to the French one myself, and highly recommend it. The stories are interesting and well produced, and bring stories (and accents) from all around the Francophonie.

Doing it with a personal teacher will always be better than an app, but Duolingo gives a huge jump start on that. For free.

They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own.

https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/

I just completed all of that content up to French level 1. It's helpful in introducing a lot of important-but-uncommon verb cases (conditional, subjunctive), but at least at level 1 I still wouldn't really be able to follow them in context.

It sure as hell doesn't help that in French they all sound the same. They're clear enough in written form, but French in particular requires close attention to context. Even other Romance languages draw the same distinctions more clearly.

One of the problems with the Spanish course is that all the later content (past checkpoint 5 or so) just stops explaining things at all, so it's up to the user to figure out things like how the negative imperative uses the subjunctive case. It's okay if you've taken a more structured language course in the past but I can imagine people starting from scratch just getting completely lost at that point.

I agree. I feel like there's 3 phases to learning a new language.

Background: English first language, French second, and I've been trying to learn Japanese.

The three phases are:

1. Learning basic alphabet (if different from your own), basic grammar. Unlocks: being able to access more learning material and more rapid progress. Progress on these first building blocks is slow and can be discouraging.

2. Learning full grammar control. Even the most basic prose uses ~all of the tenses and conjugation rules. Unlocks: reading/watching non-educational native material.

3. Learning the culture and filling out vocab. Lots of languages are idiomatic, and understanding real-world usage can require just as much that you read Candide as that you memorize flashcards of more-obscure vocab (more-obscure meaning things like "chandelier". It's not an uncommon word, but a second-language learner probably won't run into it in wordbanks or anything.)

I think Duolingo is good for doing 1, and like, half of 2. I don't think it can get you to 3.

For 2, how often do you see Future Perfect Continuous or just Future Perfect anywhere outside of literary works?

I'd put grammar at much lower priority than vocabulary & common phrases, since knowing just a bunch of words (at least in most languages) can get you very far.

Duo is pretty good if your are a second language learner, with some courses/living experience under your belt and want to make sure you've covered all of the basic vocabulary. Like, maybe you never learned the word for "turkey" and it never came up.

DuoLingo is great as a first hurdle (better than e.g. Babbel, as it's friendly and eases you in gradually) - but there are diminishing returns. I found it useful to jump ship partway through the course and move to LingQ (which has a comparatively crude UX but exposes you to much more context.)

> from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talking about", though.

I think this too vastly oversells what Duolingo can do.

This. Duolingo is a great introduction to a language and can get you from not knowing a word to being able to understand something and maybe have basic tourist-level conversational skills.

Nothing gets you to fluency without actually just immersing yourself in a language for awhile.

I've learnt both English and German at school, for pretty much equal amounts of time - about 12 years each. And well, I can speak fluent English, but barely any German, despite usually having at least ~2 hours of lessons a week, plenty of homework, oral exercises.....

For me, it has everything to do with actually using the languge in practice. English was and is everywhere - it's much easier to practice when all your favourite movies, games and books are in English - but my real life experience with German was limited to those few times we went to Germany or Austria.;

I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much you "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can practice somewhere in the real world.

Immersion is absolutely essential to language learning and English has an abundant amount of resources, as you say.

I understand the difficulties you've had with getting immersed with German, given that my target language while in the military had very little content period, let alone things I was particularly interested in. It might be worthwhile to look for German translations of works you've read/watched in your native language or English, though, if you're still interested in learning it.

> I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much you "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can practice somewhere in the real world.

Yeah, there's too many methods you need to use to facilitate language learning and while Duolingo can potentially fill a lot of these holes, I don't think it can be your holistic one stop shop.

We're expanding LLN into this: https://www.languagereactor.com/ "Language Reactor ... helps you to discover, understand, and learn from native materials." It's still rough. TurtleTV is kind of useful already. (P.S. looking for a good mobile dev in Europe).

Learning Language with Netflix is a great resource and I'm really happy to see you're expanding! This looks awesome!

And yeah, anyone that's trying to learn a language should definitely try immersing with a tool like this. Connecting words with things on screen and hearing different people speak are really useful, and your retention of vocabulary is going to be better when you can see it in different contexts.

If you use Netflix and VPN into Germany or Austria to watch movies then many of them have closed captioning offered only in German.

Language learning is like Math, without consistent practice nobody is going to get anywhere. In some ways, languages are harder than Math - Math is logical, languages are often not (tons of arbitrary rules on spelling, grammar and especially pronunciation). More and more languages are going to die, despite best efforts from linguists to preserve them. English is going to be the dominant language for the foreseeable future, and we'll soon have apps (if we don't already have them) interpreting in real time. Given the long time commitment needed to even get to a basic fluency in a language, most people are going to give up quickly, except a tiny percentage of population that genuinely loves learning new languages.

If everyone learned at least one foreign language, the world would be a much better place.

It works if you're learning the language while you're in a place where it's spoken.

But then one got to wonder why not spend that time learning in the wild. People have forgotten how it works I suppose. It would take less energy.

There are a few options to learn a language. Some say immersion. What's most effective for the brain to capture and memories is _needs_.

We tend to learn languages out of a desire to add them to our skill belt. Or out of fun. And we are having a hell of a time this way. Duolingo innovates and will happily monetize their effort.

Learn a language? Move to the country where it's spoken. Get a job where interactions are a necessity, but where one would perform to some level without even the basics. Think kitchen porter in a buzzing restaurant. 6 months later you are fluent, and have actually learnt local expressions and the way people actually communicate. From there you can read books and ramp up your vocab to proper fluency.

I took English, by force, for 12y , 4h per week. I could still barely read, and in no way get a face to face conversation even started other than hello, what time is it.

Months in an environment where communication was a need, and suddenly I found myself nearly fluent. Never having to open a grammar manual or do extra effort for the sake of learning.

The teaching models are flawed. They are designed to extract a profit, at the detriment of the learners.

For the vast vast majority of people, if learning a language is "immersion or bust," their entirely rational response will be bust.

That said, relatively casual language learning isn't likely to yield a lot outside of essentially entertainment value. I had four years of high school French which likely tops the relatively casual bar. On the one hand, I classify my French as pretty terrible. On the other hand, I've traveled to Paris with a friend who doesn't know any French and it makes me realize I actually do have a bit of working knowledge especially when it comes to reading.

I've found that immersion alone doesn't work for me either. I've lived with roommates from China who spoke primarily Mandarin, and despite spending a lot of time with them, trying my best to learn, and them being very patient, I never got anywhere. I was also going to a university in Germany where students could enroll in German-language engineering programs with only limited proof of German proficiency. A lot of the less-experienced German speakers ended up just hitting their heads against the wall and not learning anything (about German or their field), even though they had significant pressure to pass their classes.

In my experience, most people need both some explanation of the fundamentals of grammar/pronunciation (formal education) combined with opportunities to use the language (immersion is perfect for this, but you can practice on your own as well). Figuring out what differences in Mandarin pronunciation are essential for meaning (tone) vs. which ones are meaningless, for example, is very difficult to do from immersion alone.

It's possible for the formal education to be in the target language, but if so it has to be very carefully designed. In my experience Duolingo does a somewhat decent job at the formal education part, but is more helpful if you had some formal education in a language, so you know what variations to look out for.

It sounds like you already had quite a lot of formal education before you had a chance to do immersion. Glad it worked for you!

Duolingo has been very effective for me, not because it's perfect, but because it's something I can actually do, while moving to a Spanish-speaking country or getting a job at a restaurant run by Spanish-speakers is not. Could I learn faster? In theory, but in practice it's the only strategy I've been able to stick with and I still am making progress. It's given me the foundation to practice using the language in other ways.

Language learning also requires you to actually be invested in the learning. I don't think any learning method works if you are totally passive. You have to be trying new things. You don't have to necessarily put yourself in a situation where you need to use the language. I've seen plenty of homesick people studying abroad who really need to learn the local language, but resent it, and end up sitting around learning nothing. But you do have to want to use the language. My German teacher was great at this. German had no practical applications where I studied, but we would play games, make jokes, and generally toy around with the language, which helped us push the boundaries of our language knowledge.

I find it fun to learn language on Duolingo as a kind of game. But unless I have a need to regularly use the learning, I know for sure it won't stick.

And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags.

> And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags

But those last .1 % are not very useful anyway if you're not living abroad. You want to be able to communicate fluently and not make noticeable mistakes, but it's not necessary to seem like a native speaker. Unless you want to become a spy maybe.

That's fine, because I only need 90%. I have no interest in passing for native, my intention is to communicate.

I think a lot of people miss this point.

Conversational literacy is a huge step on its own.

There are plenty of people effectively native in multiple languages. It’s not guaranteed (I have that missing part for one language despite having done all of High School and college in it), but i know people who speak perfectly in two languages (usually English+their parents native tongue)

I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well, so it’s easier to spot non-native speakers.

> I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well, so it’s easier to spot non-native speakers.

This applies to every language out there, English is certainly not an exception in this aspect.

> I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well

I'd think that English is not unique there.

To speak Chinese at the level of an educated native, I'd say you have learn not only the language, but also the country's history, and have some familiarity with canonical Chinese texts such as the "Four Books and Five Classics" (Confucius, Mencius, etc.), "The Dream of the Red Chamber", etc., to understand idioms such as "四面楚歌" (four sides of Chu song = facing insurmountable difficulty, defeat [1]).

As another example, Hong Kong has its own lingo (a variety of Cantonese) that evolves so rapidly that HK people that have been abroad a few years tell me that they note that the language has evolved and shifted when they come back.

I'm fairly certain that it is easy to spot non-native speakers in many languages, maybe even easier than in English.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/四面楚歌

I got huge value out of Duolingo as a first step. I live in a German speaking country where it’s entirely possible to speak no German. Duolingo and textbooks got me far enough to enroll in a B1 course and find some speaking partners. The alternative would probably have been paying for a year of A-Level courses, and to be honest I may not have found the time. For absolute beginners, Duolingo has a lot of value.

I'm glad that it worked out for you! I can't comment on the quality of every individual course, but if it propels you towards your language learning goals, then it's definitely doing its job.

I do think that for many languages there are more effective ways to learn in a given time period than Duolingo, but if Duolingo helps you stay motivated and keeps you practicing in a way that other methods couldn't, that in itself has a ton of value.

I have been learning languages on Duolingo and Babbel for years now. None of them I can speak well, but certainly well enough to have a good base of knowledge to start with. Duolingo has the advantage that you can do it whenever you want, while commuting, quickly a lesson before lunch, or on the loo. It just sums up if you consequently keep doing it.

I totally agree with your point, though, that some languages are better suited for Duolingo style of learning than others. For example with Russian it was quite difficult without any grammar basics explained so I needed to additionally read about it, while with Danish it was much easier to grasp the mechanics. Not quite so with the pronunciation...

The alternative could be a $40 textbook and an open source flashcard / srs program.

The problem with just textbooks is you don't get to hear or speak the language at all. There's also very little structure so you're expecting a novice to know how to effectively test themselves.

The beginner textbooks I've used have accompanying CDs, and also audio available on their websites. The best beginner listening practice is to focus on minimal pairs so that you can start to hear the difference between different sounds that originally sounded the same. Some textbooks include this (I remember having to combine initials and finals in Chinese with my teacher)

For speaking, Duolingo speech recognition isn't very good and is not going to provide specific feedback for improving your pronunciation. I'm not even a fan of practicing pronunciation virtually with a live tutor. I have found in person pronunciation practice to be very valuable compared to doing the same thing but online. A textbook doesn't solve this and neither does Duolingo.

They are also boring to the extreme and don't bite size it for you. They are also unpactical format- fiddling with cd requires you to be at home and have cd player available when you want to learn. So basically you have to be near laptop.

I don't know anyone who did stick with textbook approach long enough to learn something.

I also used those things! I used Anki and Quizlet (which isn't open source but you can import your own word lists so it doesn't feel too "sticky"). Duolingo was still key, though - it felt less like work, because it was nicely gamified. (I give all this praise with a twinge of dread now, because I'm sure that with the IPO, Duolingo will be twisted in the way that all publicly-traded companies are).

Ok, boomer.

I find it really useful for practice, but it's obviously not the best thing to be using solely if you think that's going to reach you to proficiency.

It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive. I've got books for learning Russian and German to go through along with using Duolingo as a pretty good option for practicing basically everything else. It's fun to compare how I got Spanish down via immersion without really practicing too hard on anything outside of rosetta stone (Didn't teach me a damn thing, was a very bad tool back in the day)... Just reading a book from the 1950s (Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish -- highly recommended) and sinking myself into that world for a while took so many years. I'm pretty sure I would have done better off with some better programs and proper study instead, but it definitely gave perspective to where tools like Duolingo have their place and where they're the most useful in pretty much giving you gameified drills and tests.

> It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive.

I've tried to use Duolingo to learn a new language. I found it very effective for a few weeks (of daily exercise).

I remember though, that at some point the questions were repeated frequently, went off the intended theme, and overall, they were not intended to make users think or remember.

Getting off track was something that irritated me the most, as I couldn't focus on a subject.

Essentially, after the initial phase, it's completely useless as a learning tool. It's a shame because it could be effective and fun at the same, but I have the suspicion that mid/long-term learning effectiveness is not their target.

Yeah, that's kind of the point where I reached with German on it and I think I'd have to agree with you. The only problem with German is that practicing in-person outside of that country and the conversation usually veers into English much too easily as their English is often quite good.

I'm surprised how much I get now between translating words I don't know on leo.org and just reading what I know already on news articles which is how I'm keeping up casually on that. The journalism in that country is top notch and it is probably worth learning the language for this alone.

I feel the same way about Duolingo. I used to be able to speak a moderate amount of German and let it lapse. I picked up Duolingo because it substituted for some other casual activity I might do on my phone (crossword, read hackernews, etc.) And learning some conversational German feels like a better use of time. However it is pretty basic. I know there are hundreds or thousands of units and spending 10 minutes a day probably won't get me very far. Still if I keep it up and take a trip to German I'll at least know some of the basics. I practice with my long-suffering family who has to listen to me say Mein sohn is sehr klug! and other stuff like that all the time.

Pick up a book or two to round out your formal understanding of grammar, and make some German friends, maybe even just online if that's easiest to help you with your pronunciation.

First if you enjoy learning new languages and you find it useful thats great! Not trying to put you down in any way. However, you say:

> it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive

This makes it sound like video games are useless and learning a new language is super useful. In your situation this could totally be true but for some people (like me!) learning a new language isn't super useful! If your a video game dev playing games would be 100x more productive than learning a new language and if you travel around the world then learning a language would be 100x better than a video game! I feel like its almost impossible to know whats more "productive" in general.

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages).

In my opinion it's the other way around.

Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach.

Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want.

Reading instruction is strongly amenable to automation. You can just sit and do exercises on an SRS until the cows come home and you will eventually learn to read. Not on duolingo through.

Speaking is the next easiest, you can't go at any speed but you can at least go slowly. Plus you only have to deal with one accent when speaking, your own.

Most languages have more consistent spelling than English, so if you know how to read an IPA phonology chart (and if you are embarking on the multi-year journey of learning a language then spending a time to learn IPA is a no-brainer) then you can probably figure out how to speak in a way that is understood.

Listening is the hardest because you don't control either the content, the pace, nor the accent. If someone is throwing words out like a gattling gun or in a non-standard dialect then tough luck. The learning curve for listening is a cliff in most circumstances.

Neither speaking nor listening are amenable to automation. TTS is no substitute for native speakers, and automatic speech recognition is a joke. So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.

I in fact did indicate that reading is the easiest in my post.

Speaking is harder than listening because it requires you to produce language and convey ideas from your own mind, with proficiency in pronouncing it in such a way that a native speaker might understand you. Things like idioms you may be able to infer meaning from interpretation when you are listening or reading but you will never use them in speaking unless you really truly know them. You’re correct that the variables of listening are out of your control (which is what makes it so difficult as compared to reading), but that does not make it harder than speaking.

In the military where the DLPT actually tests all three categories for proficiency, speaking is consistently and universally, regardless of target language, the one language learners are least proficient at.

According to the test specifications.

You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or using words you have no knowledge of.

Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages, and the same for my fiancée who is a native English speaker with one secondary language.

> According to the test specifications.

...Which define proficiency nearly identically between the different skill sets. Your relative proficiency for speaking is expected to be worse until you reach native proficiency, where you are still worse at speaking than reading or listening, but it doesn't very much matter in most situations.

> You will not speak what you don't know.

Yes, and what you don't know with speaking is invariably greater than what you don't know with listening and reading, hence why everyone scores lower in proficiency with speaking relative to their ability in listening or reading.

> Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages

If all my utterances in English were "I go school," "I eat pie," "I clean teeth," native speakers will easily understand what I'm saying. That doesn't mean I'm proficient or that it's easier to speak than it is to listen, just that I can create coherent and correctly understood sentences in English.

Re-read the thread.

Test results and fet experience are not connected.

Felt experience is not relevant. Your own evaluation of your speaking vs listening skills is incredibly irrelevant.

I'm surpised this is getting downvoted. The OPs assertion that listening is easier than speaking makes sense in the context he describes, a closed testing environment. In a more practical setting, as someone who is living in another country and learning the language, it is far easier for me to convey my meaning with limited vocabulary, than to listen and interpret another speaker, and especially a group conversation.

Certainly listening is easier than me speaking at the same proficiency as the other speaker, but in terms of what matters for using the language on a day to day basis, it is the other way around.

I'm a native Russian speaker but have forgotten most of it since I moved away from there. One thing that makes listening so much easier than speaking is that I can often infer context of a sentence based on just a few words, even if I don't know what the other 5 are. With speaking, I might know what I want to say but I get stuck on the one or two words that I just don't have in my vocabulary, and it crushes my ability to communicate(in Russian).

Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an anecdote :)

When we're speaking of proficiency and comparing them between reading, listening, and speaking, you look at them through a similar lens. How well can you understand or communicate ideas in the language? Can you convey complicated and nuanced thoughts in your target language? Can you understand those? How would your speaking ability compare to a well educated native speaker? How does it compare against a less educated native speaker?

You feel more fluent in speaking because you're only working within your own ability while listening you'll encounter things you don't understand or situations where it's difficult to understand things all the time. That doesn't mean you're more proficient at speaking and in most cases you aren't going to be nearly as proficient at speaking as you think.

Well apparently reading isn't so easy either since so many missed what the points being defended were.

The parent did claim that reading is easiest (you've even quoted that), so I don't think you're disagreeing there.

I do agree with the parent that listening is easier than speaking. When you're speaking, you have to know the right words, and know what order to put them in. Sure, there's some leeway: if you put words in the wrong order, or incorrectly conjugate a verb, or forget some types of words, your meaning will probably still go through. But if you forget other types of words, you just can't be understood. And sometimes conjugating a verb incorrectly does completely change the meaning of your sentence, which can confuse the listener.

I agree that the things you mention -- accents, pace, content -- are somewhat out of your control. But you can always ask the speaker to speak slower, and that will often lessen the impact of the accent on your ability to understand. The content problem is still there, just as it is with speaking, but I've found that I can usually understand more words than I can think of to speak on my own. And often you can get the meaning based on context even if you don't understand a word here or there.

I'm just a single data point, but... I took Spanish way back in primary school, for 5 years. I'm terrible at speaking it nowadays (over 20 years later). When I hear others speak Spanish, however, I can usually understand things that I'd never be able to speak on my own, even if I had all the time in the world to think about it.

Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have things repeated.

Speaking is hard, but those native in the language is more likely to understand slow and broken speech with a little effort than a learner is to understand fast and unclear speech that takes shortcuts.

This is my experience with learning Mandarin at least, both using classroom teaching and Duolingo.

> Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have things repeated.

This is definitely not the case. Yes, listening to difficult audio is really hard to interpret. Your proficiency in listening isn't defined simply by how well you can listen to people in a perfect scenario, but also your capacity to understand the language.

Reading is usually easier than listening because it provides a ton of context clues, a visual indication of what is being said (as in... writing), and essentially no time limit. If you can work out what is going on surrounding unfamiliar words, you can, at least sometimes, figure out through the context of the entire piece of writing what the meaning is. With listening, you are constrained because you are listening at the pace of the speaker, but there's still plenty of advantages that exists to help you interpret the meaning.

With speaking there's none of that. It's entirely dependent on your own mastery and because of this people will almost always speak at lower proficiency than they can read or write. It might not be apparent to you because you're the one doing the speaking, but I can almost guarantee you that your level of proficiency is greater in listening than it is speaking, because you can't convey the same level of complexity in your speech that you can understand from someone speaking it.

My ability to succeed in approximately deciphering an arbitrary sentence conveying meaning A is lower than my ability to communicate that approximate meaning myself. The odds are made much lower if communicating with a new person not already aware of my exact vocabulary.

Of course, I can decipher much fancier sentences than I can produce (especially in a controlled environment as I originally mentioned). My produced sentence will be much more awkward than the sentences I can decipher, but it will work.

From my perspective, this makes listening harder than speaking - I will not be fluent in a language until a decade of practical use, so the only metric that matters to me is whether something had practical application and acceptable understanding. In that sense, removing parts of a sentence you can't produce before you say it still passes as a success, but not understanding anything or most what a person is trying to say to you is not. Most people are not able to sufficiently simplify their speech as they do not know what or how you have been taught. If you are already able to have the meta-conversation needed to inquire about and discuss meanings of words and sentences comfortably, then you are already an advanced speaker.

Note that this is very subjective. I am expressing my current state of learning as it is, and claiming that this is wrong is silly. On the other hand claiming that you will experience the same would also be silly, but it's none tell less worth sharing experiences.

If there are multiple ways to say something, I only need to know one of them to speak clearly. For listening I need to be ready for anything.

As someone learning a second language through classes, immersion, and - when I remember - apps, I don't really agree.

Certainly early on speaking is easy because you have a handful of words and know how to put them together, and listening is very hard because you can barely make out the sounds.

However, in my experience and I've noticed this in others too, after a while you get better and better at listening and it quite handily overtakes your ability to speak as now you're wanting to construct sentences more complex than "a table for four please", but you can't necessarily pull out the words and put them in the order you need in any useful timeframe.

Yes, this right here! Not being able to reply to something you understand because you can't express yourself quite yet (but almost)...

In this case I agree with OP. Yeah, you have much more control in the output when you speak. However, most of the case, it'll take forever to brute force your brain to compose the right words/sentences and even found no result most of the times when you're not fluent. On the other hand, in listening, you've built the pattern recognition during your study and easier to spot the speech pattern.

In my country, lots of people are bilingual due to the nature of the ethnic composition. I know way more people whose much better at listening than speaking with the language that they're not fluent with.

>So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.

TV, movies, anime etc can fulfill the listening purpose. But you have to do it in copious amounts and turn off subtitles.

Or turn on subtitles in the language of the audio; it might let you discover the writing of new words you hear.

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

That's fair, though I think in the case of wanting to be able to be a tourist in a place with a foreign language, you'd be better suited using phrasebooks and a translation app. Duolingo isn't going to really prepare you to have those kinds of conversations and isn't really a reference book, so being able to look up the few phrases you need to get around isn't practical. It's designed to teach you the language in a structured way and while the ordering of it and most language courses does attempt to get people proficient at very basic touristy things, depending on what it is you're doing, you might not even get to the point where you can do that.

Reading a menu requires cultural context along with reading comprehension. Unless you're intimately familiar with the culture, being able to read it (as in sound it out by reading the characters) is pretty useless. نان (naan) is probably something you could understand because it's a loanword we use in English from Arabic but without cultural context could someone guess what قابلی پلاؤ (Kabuli Pilau) means? Probably not. If you're in Japan and China, learning to read a menu is in itself a huge barrier.

> قابلی پلاؤ

I’ve spent most of the last year struggling to learn the Arabic alphabet with Duolingo, yet FWIW my guess for what sort of dish Kabuli Pilau might be was fairly close.

I wonder if anyone outside the UK knows, or can guess, what sort of dish a “spotted dick” or a “toad in the hole” is?

I presumably made the same guess (spiced rice grains mixed with meat/veg), but British people have the cultural context to know what pilau means. They even a section in Tesco (not just a search, an actual section).

From Denmark, I can suggest brændende kærlighed (burning love, which for Danes is mashed potatoes and bacon), dyrlægens natmad (vet's night snack, rye bread with pâté, beef and meat jelly etc), æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple).

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/food-cupboard/dri...

> æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple)

That reminds me that the regional name for deep fried rectangular potato prisms in Berlin is “Pommes”, which is the French for apple, because everything else was dropped from the bowed French “pommes de terre friets”.

It’s a Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel situation ;)

American here:

1. I have had some incredible Kabuli pilau. I hope everyone gets the chance to have some. There are quite a few restaurants in the Bay Area that serve it, but homemade is best in my experience.

2. Spotted dick is a cake (steamed?) with currants… at least the stuff I had. Delicious.

3. No idea about toad in the hole. It better be good with that name.

For which the best tool is a phrasebook and learning enough pronunciation. Duolingo won't help with that.

More people learn languages to feel good and for bragging rights than for any actual use.

Bollocks. In Europe you learn languages to be able to go abroad and to at least try to meet strangers halfway. Knowing just your own tongue is rude.

In America, plenty learn for fun and status. You can travel thousands of miles in the US and still speak to someone in English making language learning extremely rare.

Except you won't be able to do that with Duolingo. I'll go as far as saying that Duolingo is (very) negative for learners: it sells them the idea they are learning a language and progressing when they are in fact not.

A good example of that is a comment I read here on HN from a user defending Duolingo since it allowed him to master hiragana (one script of Japanese) after two years and half. This is normally taking a week, for a slow learner, and the rest is practicing for fluency.

Source: myself; learned and learning multiple languages, at university and by myself. Working in edtech research.

Replying to deleted post:

First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. Then count 400-500 kanji per year if learning at university and being motivated (lot of people stops).

For conversation count two intensive years for the bare minimum, add one for more fluency. Actually all depends on how much effort you spend on it, I know a guy who was JLPT N2 or so after it's first university year (needless to say, he spent an aweful amount of time practicing, especially with natives). Then add at least one year in Japan to really get a good grasp (I went from N3 to N2 in a year while basically partying).

> First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough.

You’re still grossly over-representing what is needed to read Japanese.

1. 10k characters is utter nonsense. I assume that people conflate the 10k words needed for JLPT N1 with characters. They are totally different, since words are often combinations of characters.

2. Joyo kanji has 2,136 characters. All government documents and pretty much all mainstream media use only these characters plus some kanji specific to names. Any kanji outside of joyo (e.g., an unusual name or a stylistic word) typically have a phonetic reading (furigana) next to or over the character(s). Joyo is what is tested for the JLPT 1 (the top level).

3. Hundreds of joyo kanji are very context-specific — that is, they are relatively low utility.

4. There are a few additional kanji outside of joyo that are widely known. Educated folks also know more than joyo that are specialist terms or stylistic words. It would be like an English speaker knowing words like “deoxyribonucleic acid” (DNA) or “ceteris paribus”.

5. Lastly, for anyone reading Classical Japanese or historical documents… well, much of the above is not relevant due to changes in the language (mostly simplification over time). It depends on what is being studied or read.

6. 3000 kanji nets someone “highly educated native speaker” status — think teacher, doctor, lawyer. 5000 kanji gets you nerd status — think professor or logomaniac.

Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right. I chatted as soon as yesterday with someone studying Vietnamese dictionaries written in kanbun and nôm, so indeed that person need to know a lot of kanji. That's not representative of the whole society, but you can't rule out the existence of those people. It's also telling that the biggest dictionary of Chinese characters is the Daikanwa Jiten, compiled by a Japanese.

> Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right.

We might be talking past each other. I’m speaking specifically of non-native learners of Japanese.

I think you overrepresented for non-native learners of Japanese (who don’t get the benefit of 9 years of joyo kanji education), but you were closer to “right” than most.

Most learners of Japanese should focus on about 1000 kanji (roughly kyouiku kanji). This is easily learnable in a year for most people, and that amount will get them over 90% of text coverage that general learners will be reading.

Pretty much no learner should have an initial goal of learning 3000 kanji. Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction, especially if they plan on being a professional in Japan. Unless they find it to be a fun hobby, I would ask them why they are choosing to reach that level as a goal. The 2000th to 3000th most frequently used characters have very low utility, and this knowledge is far beyond “need this to survive/thrive” level. Some people who answer the “how many kanji” question in English-speaking forums (not you) seem to treat 3000 characters as almost semi-literate, and this couldn’t be further from the truth.

For a learner of Japanese, I would never recommend that anyone start with an initial goal of 5000 kanji. For anyone who ends up there, it would usually just come naturally over time to anyone being an academic (most likely in some sort of language or linguistics field)… and the masochists who try to take kanken 1.

Finally, to address your initial comment about 3000-5000 kanji being enough depending on what someone reads, I would put that number at more like 1200-1300 being enough with very mild use of a dictionary or lookup function on a computer/phone for learners. This will get folks though the vast majority of kanji in newspapers, magazines, and general audience books. At that point, just reading and looking stuff up will add to their kanji knowledge base organically.

> Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction

For the vast majority of people (including native speakers), knowing a few extra kanji outside of joyo brings very little benefit.

Most natives get by just fine by having a very rough understanding of even joyo [1], thanks to smartphones and computers.

Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change how you are perceived by natives [2], so it may be worth a try if your goal is to get closer to native speakers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHQcHSaj-c4

> Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change how you are perceived by natives

100% agree. Nailing accent helps smooth some wrinkles as a foreigner.

While it's been posted before, with just under 800 kanji you can have coverage of 90% of kanji in the wild. Of course, one still needs to learn all the clustered terms that these kanji can play together to create, but it reduces the barrier to native media substantially. [0]

[0] https://japanesecomplete.com/777

This is pretty valid, but sometimes people with limited knowledge will do something seemingly innocuous like ask where the 'toilet' is rather than the more polite reference and totally freak a complete stranger out. I think it's not a bad idea to do your best to try and learn at least a little bit beyond this before dropping into a foreign country, at the least because it makes the whole meeting new friends thing a lot easier.

Cultural context is difficult but it also can’t be learned unless you already have some language skills. It’s not helpful to expect 2nd language speakers never to make mistakes Like the foreign exchange student asking for a rubber instead of an eraser, those mistakes can be great learning points.

Yep. I studied French on the side while I was at uni. It was incredibly valuable as I learnt a lot about English and language in general, and a little French. I got to the stage I could actually read books in French, and write a little (I had a pen pal). But when I went to France, I could barely ask for a baguette in a shop and, once the reality set in, I prayed they didn't ask me any follow up questions because I just couldn't understand.

Duolingo was the new kid on the block at the time, but there were still some people recommending Rosetta Stone at the time. They used to say it was "used by the US military" or some rubbish. All of these language learning things are the same: they claim to be easy and painless. They tell you it will be like acquiring your first language as a child. Nobody seems to remember the years of babbling and years of schooling that were required to become fluent in their native language.

The good news is, learning a language as an adult is easier than learning your first language. The reason is simple: you already have language! You can learn about your second language using your first language. Immersion is still absolutely necessary, but learning grammar and vocabulary using your native language will greatly accelerate the whole process. But, bizarrely, Duolingo etc. actually refuse to use the most powerful tool you'll ever have. It's completely the opposite way you should be learning a language as an adult.

You're not going to become a triathlete thanks to training wheels either, but if you don't know how to ride a bike, the training wheels give you a good start. I've learned two languages using Duo Lingo as a supporting tool early in the process. I don't think I would have been able to have conversations so early without it. And for me, having conversations (even poorly) in my target language is the single most important factor for achieving fluency. Yeah, you're not going to become fluent from Duo Lingo alone, but early on in the process it's an essential tool.

but you see people still using Duolingo after 6 months or 1 year. If you saw someone still using training wheels after 1 year, you would tell them to stop because it's handicapping them. Duolingo is the same, it's a terrible investment of time after 1 month.

As someone who has used Duolingo and spaced repetition apps for ~10m/day for the last four or five years, is there something specific you recommend transitioning to?

I've started with some Netflix and podcasts, but they're a little more awkward in 10m chunks.

If I only had 10 minutes a day, I would go to an online newspaper and go to the advice column. There are people who write in for advice/discuss and people in the comments will reply. They're going to be using native expressions and idioms, making references to shared knowledge that everyone there knows. It's also going to be about a wide variety of problems (although a lot tend to be relationship based) which means you'll be able to naturally recall a large variety of words.

Try to read it. If you don't get some words or sentence, skip the sentence for now. Then once you're done with the first read lookup in a dictionary or glosbe and then finally text someone for an explanation to that phrase. (It can be hard to find those friends without visiting a country that speaks your TL and befriending people there).

And then feel free to enter that phrase in your SRS.

---

I went abroad for 6 months to study my TL (target language) at a foreign language school and would roam campus finding (local) people who don't look busy to help me accomplish this task in real time.

Thank you, I'll look for some newspaper columns.

I’ve been using a spaced repetition flashcard program called SuperMemo every day for more than 15 years. It has worked really well for long term retention on stuff I’ve made flashcards about, which includes languages and other stuff I find interesting.

Not the commenter you're responding to but I recommend switching to your own custom set of cards using Anki after you've done the basics of Duo Lingo. I use Anki Droid almost every day, and there's also an iOS, desktop and web version that all sync.

When learning a new language, one uses a lot of tools.

Duolingo is just another tool at your disposal.

Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language.

If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement / scamming.

> Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language.

Lots seem to have that belief, though. As I said in another comment, it's something you can see quite often in various language learning forums in Reddit (/r/duolingo) and Facebook, as well as on the DL forums themselves.

> If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement / scamming.

They might not explicitly claim it, but they certainly imply it in my opinion.

> I suppose in the end Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually learning a language, though.

> Language learning is hard and a multifaceted thing that no single application is going to adequately prepare you for.

Why do you sound disillusioned with Duolingo? It's just an app. I think the hacker news community undervalues it for no reason

>>"Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually learning a language"

Duolingo is a game 1st and then a learning app. It's very engaging at first but it failed for me since I started to play it without learning much even though I was advancing (which I equated as learning, wrong..). I think it's certainly better than nothing but ultimately it's just a game.

I think it could be a great part of a structured language program. I hope that they use some of the IPO money to create such a program where you need to learn the language to advance in it.

I believe that games can be used to learn. In nature, playing is a way to learn so we should be able to use games for learning.

I never played it, but a friend used to play EverQuest and he told me how he had friends that had become Leather Craftsmen as a result of playing it. I wonder if Duolingo could be that inspiring to language learners in the future?

Totally echo all of this. I'm one of the owners at the Orange County Lingual Institute (oclanguages.com) and we see Duolingo as the gateway for people to tap into their language learning interest but then get serious with in-person or online language learning classes. We have seen firsthand hundreds of students unsuccessful with apps since they are not practicing live conversations and not understanding grammar. With 80+% retention of our 2 month/once a week classes, adult professionals get through a college textbook in a year and can become fluent enough to travel to those countries, speak with relatives, and read novels & newspapers with high levels of profiency. Language learning is hard work with no shortcuts but can still be accessible without apps that overpromise and underdeliver. Ping me privately or check out our site for more info.

> The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will.

It still improves you way more then anything else you can do alone with low effort.

Being fluent is absurdly high goal. At first, remembering basic structure of sentence and vocabulary is already achievement.

I think Duolingo's valuation says more about the current stock market than it does about Duolingo.

The immersion is definitely the most valuable. Very few language apps can help you learn idioms or slang, even if they are in common usage.

Even if you were learning English, you are more likely to learn "that is very good" rather than "that is amazing" or "sweet!".

I think we also underestimate how much immersion forces us into thinking in the other language when we are surrounded by it, even passively. If you use English all the time and learn German for 2 hours per day, it's not even close to what it would be like living in Germany, even if you were speaking English there.

In theory their valuation is based on expected future returns. There are a lot of apps that have no or limited benefits that still drive traffic and revenue (all the brain training apps come to mind).

Yes, I agree. I think that there's a lot of value to be extracted from people's desire to learn a language, whether or not the product is actually effective at creating that environment to do so. That's kind of what I meant in my original comment.

Duolingo is great for producing a cursory introduction to a language. But yes, there is no substitute for immersion. For example I spent some time in Spain after learning the language basically on Duolingo. I’m sure I spoke like a 2 year old, but at least I wasn’t totally helpless (I was even able to give someone directions to the airport!). Contrast that with my experience in France where I barely knew anything, and felt totally out of place and awkward.

I imagine it’s helpful for their valuation as well that there’s no accountability on Duolingo’s part whether anybody actually learns or not, which makes think you’re spot on. They don’t have graduation rates like a school would, or job placement rates or any meaningful metric. There’s no measure of success they can track apart from how many people finish the “course” which means nothing with regard to whether they actually learned anything or not.

the problem isn't that it's hard to do. the problem is that their business model relies on their app not achieving it's portrayed purpose - learning. success means losing your customers. that's why I don't use it anymore and I'm baffled by how good they are at being bad. or rather - staying on the exact thin border between "not good enough" and "not bad enough".

This just isn't true. Duolingo's mission is 'to make education free, fun, and accessible to all'. And for the most part they have succeeded at(or are striving towards) doing those things and have left the learning part to you. Maybe it is not working out for you, and that is likely the case for many people, but to say that their model is to create an unsuccessful learning environment sounds a little bitter.

Such a silly way to think about it. You could frame every service as having this conflict. Does Google want to obfuscate results so I'll spend longer looking for results?

Duolingo is extremely popular because people get use out of it and like it. You've taken a tiny perverse incentive and jumped to the conclusion that it trumps all the other more important incentives.

Every foreign language that I've learned (4 in total) I felt it's necessary to get basic vocabulary and grammar and then just try communicating it in. Obviously living with people surrounded by the language helps, I don't even know if 'remote' is possible. For that purpose duolingo is pretty good.

This was the only way I could do it as well, formal courses didn't really help me after the basics. It's the same way I learned to program and I think some people are just wired that way.

It's not perfect but I found that it was the easiest way to just get started. Japanese is intimidating but Duolingo got me started. Immersion and other material such as detailed books on the subject are still absolutely necessary but without Duolingo I'd still be planning to learn japanese instead of doing it.

> They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement with humor and gamification.

That's the part I hated the most and the main reason I stopped using it. I wasted more time in front of "achievement" animations and shiny rewards than on actually learning the language

Exactly. I learned russian to B2 level without any paid material. I used Google translate to learn about 50 words per day. I went for couple of months to the country. Took me about 10 months to get to B2. Advancing further now is harder. Guidance needed from a professional.

A 16 month course of 6 to 7 hours per day with a lot of exercise and you didn't learn the language at all?

I don't think Duolingo is a good solution but in your case you had all the opportunity to become fully fluent with that kind of regime, it starts to be your fault.

Obviously I knew my language well enough to perform a job which required some amount of proficiency in it. I'd imagine that some people might describe my level of proficiency as fluent. If you were to compare it against university, it'd be around the level of a four year degree, but undoubtedly worse than someone with a master's degree in the language.

I think this is more a case of your definition of being "fully fluent" is vastly different from mine.

At this point, we are talking about a really high education of a certain language on a thread about a tool to help people going from zero to say basic sentences on another language.

They are two different things. I mean, I am sure that there are academics with superior knowledge than me on my own native language.

I think this is more of a Dunning-Kruger situation. The more you know a language, the more nuance you recognize and the more you see there is to learn. I only speak English, and I still feel my command of the language could grow.

Can you talk about the resources you used to learn in the classroom? I learned German using the Foreign Service Institute handbook and I thought it was great introduction to the language. I'd love to know what's in use nowadays.

The language resources were largely designed in house as the other comment mentions, so unfortunately unless you attend DLI, you probably won't get to see them. I don't think there's much in terms of content that you can't find in civilian courses, just that it's designed specifically around being in class for 6-7 hours a day rather than the 3 hours per week you'd be attending at University.

There were audio recordings made specifically for the course and there is some deal with Transparent language to provide language software to the military like Rapid Rote, though Anki is just as capable as Rapid Rote is.

Big things are access to native speakers (most of the instructors) and non-native "military language instructors" who can help navigate difficult to understand concepts for non-natives. Also the whole spending every day doing it over and over again part.

Sorry if this isn't as helpful as you were hoping.

I’m pretty sure this person was learning Pashto or Dari.

The materials were mostly (all?) developed in-house.

If they were learning Dari, they would have been better off just using externally-produced Farsi textbooks since they have a more robust history of development.

The specific recommended materials for an introduction to a language depend on what your goals are for learning the language.

Yeah, the Dari course was notoriously bad quality and rife with controversy with some of the highest failure rates in the entire Presidio at the time. Not sure if anything's changed at this point?

Things improved slightly, then the program got reduced and then cut due to less demand.

Somewhere in there, they got creative and had folks who passed Farsi take a 3-month Dari course to bridge the gap between Farsi and Dari, and those folks had a lot of success.

> won't achieve any sort of fluency in your target language from taking a course in it

For a randomly picked person, yes, but it doesn't matter to apps that specifically cater to motivated language learners. It's like saying "new training shoes will not make a random person run better or become healthier".

Obviously talent and motivation are mandatory.

However, any stock-market valuation right now is divorced from the success potential of the business. That's a separate issue.

> * Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages).*

I’ve always found speaking and reading to be far easier than listening—especially keeping up with native speakers of a foreign language.

Duolingo is a great example of gamification done well, I'd argue that's the whole selling point of it!

I'll also say it was useful for me to learn basic German for a trip to Germany, 6 months of Duolingo + a few extra (beginner) books do wonders

Can I just say that 'cryptologic linguist for the army' sounds like an incredibly far out occupation, and also that 16 months of 7 hours a day of linguistics training sounds like a very daunting undertaking. Kudos to you!

But Duolingo makes people happy because you can sit on your ass, or in bed, not really try and feel like you're putting in the hard yards.

Kind of like watching sport instead of playing / training.

10/10 satisfaction score.

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening

Listening is much harder for me. I find it easy to mimic/parrot sounds, but not distinguish them when listening.

Speaking in this case isn't simply speaking words out loud intelligibly, but the entire process of thinking and communicating ideas in a foreign language. There is almost always a gap in your knowledge with regards to what you can understand being said and what you can actually say which is why I say it is harder, even if you can say everything that you can say fluently.

This doesn't ring true to me. I can memorise a phrase, mimic it, and associate the whole phrase with a meaning. But that comes before I even know what each individual word means.

Duolingo is such a joke. They don't have even a single textbooks worth of content for the languages that I've tried.

It's free and it certainly isn't worse for you than watching tv.

If you're watching TV in your target language it can actually be very productive for your language learning and definitely better than Duolingo. Granted, you have to get to a point in your language learning for that to be the case. Perhaps Duolingo can get you over that first hurdle, though there are probably better resources for that.

As a general rule, modern-day capitalism produces products based on whether you can market it to somebody with money, not on actual results. For a lot of markets, the revenue is nearly as good and it's much cheaper to make something that doesn't work well, or doesn't work at all.

The most obvious example here is make-money-fast schemes. Those things never work; if they did, they wouldn't be offered for sale to randos. But there are a ton of others.

duolingo is A2 which is very good to continue own to B2

Everything you say is true, which is why when I talk about language learning, I discourage people from setting fluency as their goal. Just knowledge of another language is good for the brain, and the fact that you can't become a native speaker should not deter anyone from trying it for fun.