For people who have a specific need to learn a language this is of course true. Or even for people who have an amount of time and effort they are willing to dedicate to that end.
The thing is, though - I’m very unlikely to invest in private tutoring in order to learn a language speculatively. The time and financial requirements are too high a barrier.
But Duolingo is an investment of maybe 10 minutes a day at some moment of downtime. I’d estimate that I’ve spent maybe 200 hours over three years with it, which has taken me from not knowing a language to being conversationally fluent in that language - something I would otherwise just never have done.
Duolingo (or other similar systems) are very obviously not the optimum way to learn a language to fluency. And it’s especially obvious that they wont replace a tutoring service for government and military clients. But a lot of the criticism of them completely ignores the fact that they fill an entirely separate niche which is totally valid.
This really jumped out at me. 200 hours to get to conversationally fluent is very, very fast: in the CEFR framework, with proper tuition, this generally gets one to about A2 ("elementary").
How closely related is the language you're studying to the language(s) you already know? Do you supplement Duolingo with other resources? And, last but not least, what's your definition of "conversationally fluent"?
But you can't have a private tutored lesson while in a queue at the supermarket. Or on a train. Or while you wait for the water to boil.
Of course the government pay for your services. They need people to be trained to be good at languages. Most of the people who use these apps are doing it as a hobby.
Eh, the implication in my post is that Duolingo is minimal effort and the streak doesn't really mean anything other than you may have maintained that minimal effort for a long time.
Besides, very few people are mastering a single language let alone many. I'm a native English speaker and sometimes I feel I haven't mastered that language.
And yes - private lessons are going to offer the most value if you can't live in the country. Even then it's only in this particular part of this country where I would hear something like "On prend le traclet pour acheter du Papet."
It's not nearly enough on it's own to learn a language though, it's very very good as a supplement though, ime
Based on my experience of language learning, I agree with you.
> The OP take about having used Duolingo for almost 10 years. That seems absurd to me. I would hope they have mastered at least half a dozen languages with that kind of effort.
This completely glosses over the costs involved.
Has anyone had success with finding tutors on platforms like italki.com? I tried for a bit but probably didn't spend enough time to find the right tutor.
italki - yes, absolutely, but taking your time to do the research definitely pays off.
My method was to shortlist teachers who:
(1) fit my linguistic needs (country/dialect, native speaker status etc); and
(2) satisfied certain availability criteria (timezone, teaching days/hours etc); and
(3) had a high enough number of students and -- critically -- a high enough total_lessons/total_student metric (I forget the cutoffs I used).
I then looked through their profiles (there were by this point only tens of teachers left on my list for German), arranged trial lessons with a handful, and picked the one.
Been with that teacher for a few months. Couldn't be happier with the experience and with my progress.
There is a lot of diversity in instructor-led training. None of our classes are anything like what you would have experienced in highschool or college. Our largest classes have 4 students in them, and that's strictly a cost-cutting scheme that Gov has insisted on for maintenance training. You'll be one-on-one with your instructor. They'll be a native speaker with often decades of experience teaching language. They'll be tayloring a lot of supplemental material specific to you. We even have some of our own apps that we've developed (that's my job), nothing like Duolingo (though nothing you can just use without our curriculum or instructors).
A lot of people say "the best way to learn a language is to live in a country where it is spoken". Clearly, that is unrealistic for the vast majority of people. I would also say it presumes you are a specific kind of extremely extroverted, fearless person. Most people find themselves becoming quite introverted in situations where they can't communicate easily.
For these reasons, I think the most realistic answer for the best way to learn language is private tutoring. The OP take about having used Duolingo for almost 10 years. That seems absurd to me. I would hope they have mastered at least half a dozen languages with that kind of effort. Language training shouldn't take that long.