How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?

Re:How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us? by z_open on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @10:38AM (#35614586)

There's a dozen resources you can use to learn the language and Duolingo is possibly the worst. Learning a language takes a lot of effort, especially if you're not in a country where it's spoken. Being efficient and persistent is the only way to get anywhere. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting all that time. I have to imagine the portion of people who have spend 1000+ hours learning to end up without the ability to communicate is pretty high.

I don't mean to be so dismissive but even as a supplemental resource, it's just at the bottom of the barrel.

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Re:How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us? by hombre_fatal on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @04:02PM (#35619240)

The best tool is the one you actually use, not the ones you would like to use but never use. Duolingo fits this daily use slot in a way most apps don’t.

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Re:How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us? by dzikimarian on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @06:03PM (#35620990)

Duolingo has lessons that take 1-5 minutes. It's so small amount of time, that I feel, I literally cannot excuse not doing it every day. This is unachievable if I had to deal with less packed way of learning.

I took a few weeks long initial course to get a grasp of grammar for my third language and since then I'm using Duolingo daily, for a few hundred days now (so it costed me well under 100 hours in total).

I'm far from fluent, but able to communicate verbally, work with text and I don't forget what I learned.

If that's the bottom of the barrel, I wonder what was my public school program I had in the past (yet another language), that included many semesters of learning and left me with handful phrases.

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