Duolingo is not useless.

It works well to learn the basics, which means a few thousand words and the core grammar. Like ANY tool in language learning, it's not a complete solution.

The ONLY way to speak a language is to...gasp...practise speaking and use other resources! Ahhh, the horror!

Your father isn't trying. He's just using Duolingo as a game.

> It works well to learn the basics, which means a few thousand words and the core grammar.

This is not entirely accurate. The better courses on Duolingo teach an excess of 7000 words (8000 for french) as can be seen on DuolingoData[1] and clicking on the W column to sort the courses by words taught.

Clozemaster is a good resource for vocabulary building if you want to supplement Duolingo.[2]

[1] https://duolingodata.com/

[2] https://www.clozemaster.com/

A lot of those word counters count the same words but in different conjugation.

Run, running, ran,... Gosto, gosta, gostamos, gostou, gostei ....

Which I do not. Though your count might be more accurate.

"Your father isn't trying"

fucking lol, the audacity

I meant not trying to learn a language. Plenty of people use Duolingo as a game or puzzle to pass the time without ever going beyond it. I don't see what's wrong with calling a spade a spade.

You are probably right to be honest. I think Duolingo is hyperhyped because of the main market it operates, americans tring to learn a second language, which has a very low bar.

I speak already most of the main languages Duolingo teaches and the other courses are pretty weak

It is not entirely useless, but it is an extremely inefficient way to learn.

It has its uses, I find it pretty good for learning vocabulary. It's basically glorified flashcards.

but worse!

Worse for learning, better for maintaining motivation by gamification. It's a personal preference but that trade-off is worth it for many people

If you need games to motivate yourself, something is off. Don't take this the wrong way, but that is not a very sustainable way to keep going forward. You'll get tired of games way way earlier than learning a language

It's not useless at all but the quality of the courses varies. I've been doing the English to Spanish course (the most developed course on there), I'm on Section 6 (Upper B1) and I can now read the majority of Spanish subtitles in real time. Duolingo has been my main resource for learning by far, the only other thing I've done is watch some Spanish shows on Netflix and Youtube using LanguageReactor as well as subscribing to some Spanish subreddits and using DeepL for translation of words/sentences on there that I haven't encountered. Once I have completed Section 8 (Upper B2) I plan to do the iTalki language test[1] to find out what I need to work on and will be preparing to take one of the official DELE/SIELE/CELU qualifications at B2 level with a view to moving to Spain for study/work.

To get the most out of it, I would recommend reading the built in grammar sections multiple times as well as subscribing to language learning subreddits and googling things you don't understand. I suspect this will become less of an issue as they roll out their AI offering which bakes this into the app (e.g you can specifically talk to the AI and delve into the subtleties of the grammar).

I don't know but I suspect they are focussing on perfecting the most popular courses and getting them compliant with the official educational framework levels and then using those as templates to flesh out the other courses. They've also explicitly stated they're looking into AI to auto generate content as at the minute every lesson is handmade and approved by humans. I suspect once they've got this down, they'll then expand the Duolingo Language Test to more languages other than English.

[1]https://www.italki.com/languageassessment/ila

How tf do you use LanguageReactor? That app is garbage, my lord.

The mobile version? What's the biggest complaint? :)

It's buggy but a page refresh or settings tweak normally does the job of getting the dual subtitles working which is the main thing I use it for and there's nothing better out there as far as I'm aware. Tbh I find it odd that big streamers like Netflix and Youtube haven't built this in as a feature already. Feels like it would be pretty trivial to implement and would be of great value for a lot of people.

I'm using Duolingo to learn my third language: japanese. Still a beginner but I'm already able to piece out meaning in a surprising amount of dialogue. I'm actually impressed with my own progress, never thought I'd make it this far.

Want to try my iOS/Mac app for learning Japanese through reading?

https://reader.manabi.io

this is badass

thank you. please lmk if you have any feedback, or any leads on getting the word out on this.

Looks amazing. I want to try it but I use Android and Linux. There's no version for me.

I'm working on bringing it to more platforms via SwiftWASM but it'll probably be another year or two, sorry.

Good point hidden in badly formulated comment. After two years of making good progress with Dutch, I can't understand anything in a movie. If I can read it, I can get much of it.

Since my goal was to be able to have a conversation with someone in Dutch, I eventually stopped using Duolingo. Part of the "gamification" makes it fun but also misdirects a user from the audio part of learning a language. When I started learning Czech I paid much less attention to the visual and more to the audio. I did better, but that was despite how Duolingo is presented, not because of it.

Duolingo is certainly not useless, but my experience echoes that of the poster, so certainly it has significant - and for me crucial - limitations.

> my goal was to be able to have a conversation with someone in Dutch

Hi I'm Dutch. If you want to practice with English or German as languages in which I can explain things, email me via https://lucb1e.com/email-address and we can chat on Signal or Telegram or whatever :)