One thing that I deem a falacy though, is comparing it with e.g. an expensive paid for classroom or personal lessons. It may well fail in such direct comparison, and no surprise!
People then use that comparison to claim "it's worthless", and I disagree with that.
If the claim is "30min of structured learning with duolingo will get you no closer to learning a language than 30 min of mindlessly scrolling facebook cat videos", I don't believe that's true. And THAT is the correct comparison :)
One thing to note though, is how you use it - note I used the term "structured learning" in previous sentence, not "doing match madness for points" :)
Personally, I spent first few months learning on duolingo, and it was wonderful; had some small chats with people who speak that language at work, occasionally wrote a sentence or two in that language in emails, etc. Then I spent next few months preserving the streak. I did the challenges and matches and got thousands of points and first places... but learned nothing. In fact, my knowledge deteriorated.
Then after 200 days, I lost my streak and... breathed a sigh of relief. I am now making sure I do the lessons and practice and learn, and purposely avoid the competition part of it or activities which give many repetitive points but don't increase my knowledge. My familiarity with language is increasing again and I can make more and more sentences on my own.
The correct comparison would include the effect size on language learning of using Duolingo instead of scrolling through cat videos. The effect size appears to be close to zero. And without considering in the analysis the long-term negative effects on the self-perceived ability to learn a language after spending hundreds of hours using Duolingo and being able to simply say "Hola" in Spanish, which may make the use of Duolingo a net negative on lifetime language learning.
But, yes, I used a hyperbole, it is a classic tool of rhetoric. I could have said that they just learn how to ask for a coffee, or the directions for the Eiffel Tower. The meaning is the same.
Can a person find a way to waste hundred hours on Duolingo? Sure. I got perilously close :). But after a tenth of that I could generate sentences for friendly emails and at beginning meetings etc when I actually tried to learn.
Has the "100 hrs and not gotten beyond hola" been your personal experience or somebody you know? Trying to understand if I'm arguing with a strawman / straw scenario, or actual occurrence. If latter I'd be genuinely extremely curious to hear a lot more! What were the 100hrs spent on?
But among the people (about 20) who have told me they have used Duolingo to (try to) learn my native language, I have yet to find one who can say more than a few disconnected words. And among the people I have seen who are fluent in my native language or the other languages I speak, I have yet to find anyone who said they used Duolingo to learn that language. Am I extrapolating too much? I think the sample size was pretty good.
Based on this statement it seems like you've never used Duolingo.
I have a 297 day streak right now and I just feel like slave to the owl. I’m going to get to 365 and then purposely break the streak to free myself.
Why do you even care? It's an artificial count by a for-profit company with an Owl logo that doesn't even know you exist outside of a few database rows.
You've just self-described it as slavery, why would you keep doing this to yourself?
It's kind of like telling a smoker to just quit because it's the smoking company who benefits. Yeah, sure, but the addiction is internal. They're not just selflessly smoking to help Philip Morris.
#downvoteInApproach :)
Nobody has yet shown me a flawless proof that they themselves exist, or anything else, and yet somehow, I manage to get through my days just fine based on the versions of things in my mind that correspond to the empirical phenomena that I experience. And occasionally those mental constructs change with new empirical data even.
The GP's comment was that they were effectively 'slave' to a skinner box, and even recognized it. And yet, refusal to do anything about it.
I see it again and again. The answers are there, and a bit harder, but yeah.
I mean, I literally said in the same post what I was going to do about it. I'm ending it on my own terms when I'm satisfied with my own progress.
After a year the milestones become less meaningful (400 days? 500? 700? meh) yet harder and harder to break the longer you go. A friend recently hit 1000 days in Duolingo--really hard to give up once you've gone that far.
Lots of people harness this for their own good with streaks for things that are really actually valuable for them.
I don't like being nitpicky, but if we're going to argue about the "correct usage" and not accept colloquial usage has perverted the term, I may as well set the record straight:
>a person who is forced to work for and obey another and is considered to be their property; an enslaved person.
No, it is actually completely correct. But for the sake of playing this fun game of being "Technically right" here's also a dictionary definition:
Slave noun:
"a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person:"
She was a slave to her own ambition.
>>and not accept colloquial usage has perverted the term
No such thing has happened, words can have both literal and figurative meaning.
fair enough, I thought that definition was unofficial or marked as slang.
>No such thing has happened, words can have both literal and figurative meaning.
yes, like "literally" having the definition of "figuratively". I would indeed call that a perversion:
>to divert to a wrong end or purpose
most of the time that is at best marked as slang (such as use of a double negative to mean a negative, and not a soft positive), but I guess that's not my call to make.
Thankfully I got out of it and am much more consciously breaking streaks.
The downside is that I've clearly been exercising a lot less since I stopped focusing on the streak, so it works in some ways…
We should have a way to adjust what we consider a streak: maybe a daily streak is important to you, but maybe 3 times a week is what matters to you. Having the option for each app would be great.
I know people who have done Duo Lingo for years. I was shocked when I saw how bad their language skills were.
It's best treated as reading some motivational quote in the morning. Gets you out of bed and into the mood but it won't carry you through life alone. Is that worth $10/month? Depends on the person, but it would be for me if I was being serious.
Anyhow, when it tells me it’s sad, or it misses me, it makes me actually avoid the app. It’s so stupid and annoying as all hell.
I just hope I'm not learning wrong things from the new AI-powered checker. It's bad enough that I can't always find an explanation why I got something wrong. (I've actually used ChatGPT 3.0 to explain some of my mistakes, and then was able to verify its explanation because of the keywords it used, and then googling those.)
Not sure about the AI checker yet; we'll see! I've used ChatGPT myself though as a wonderful language tutor to complement Duolingo, so I'm trying to not be completely skeptical / cynical :-)
https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/ulj7pa/psa_you_ca...
Last year, I decided I'd start working on Japanese, so I did the same thing I did before: hit Duolingo hard, listen to audiobooks to build up my phoneme recognition, etc. I was shocked at how slow progress was - not because I wasn't putting in the effort but because it had me redoing over and over and over again the same damn words and phrases. Gohan, mizu, sushi, gohan, gohan, mizu, gohan, sushi.
I was a proponent of the site/app for quite a while - even after I outgrew it - because I legitimately believed it helped me. Now that I've seen what it's become, I can't recommend it to anyone unless you strictly do it for entertainment value with no expectation of useful education.
And it feels like that was the nexus point between it feeling like progress, and feeling like learning by rote. Even after getting past where i was pre-reset, it still was slow, rote memorization.
I got to 150 days, and the news about layoffs and AI was enough to have me reevaluate it and realise it has just become a pattern matching dopamine box.
I've tried classroom instruction, and teacher-driven courses, multiple times in my life. They never really stuck for me.
Duolingo has worked for me where other techniques haven't. I'm now at a stage where I can read a newspaper article in Spanish and understand ~90% of the content.
(5 year streak, but that's 5 years of 5-15 minutes a day which turns out to be exactly the commitment that works for me.)
A lot of Duolingo's questions ask a user to pick and choose words to complete a sentence. That gives a false sense of achievement when in reality it simply does not challenge one's mind enough to learn a language effectively. Besides, a simple sentence does not give me enough context to build my intuition. I personally find the idea of Comprehensible Input works much better: reading extensively, watching videos extensively, using a language increasingly frequently, and etc.
I wonder how well you would have done if it hadn't been for that 18 months. Because 'three weeks in a classroom' sounds suspiciously to how I learned Polish: I seemed to be making zero progress for years and then in a very short amount of time (a couple of weeks at most) it suddenly 'clicked' and I started to make sense of what I heard. I probably was learning at some level that wasn't accessible all the while thinking I wasn't making any progress at all.
Duolingo is 'infotainment', it gets you from zero to a little bit above zero and it may give you some useful number of words to recognize and maybe even to use actively. But it won't help you to speak a language, for that you need to progress beyond it. This is pretty much the same story with every other language, nobody learns to speak and use a language actively by reading the dictionary. But it certainly doesn't hurt to have a basic 200 or 300 word vocabulary on which to build.
Personally I use Anki for such learning rather than commercial services, it allows for far more customization and you won't be sucked into silly gamification for the sake of extending your subscription because there is none.
I gave up Duolingo around 18 months before starting the course, which is for complete beginners with zero knowledge.
Did they really? Did they all ace the tests and do all the assigned homework? I find that even harder to believe than Duolingo being the primary resource to teach you a language.
It's not like it's impossible, depending on the age of the class, money spent, if the school had a selection process, etc. But most adult classes aren't really that selective.
Most people try to use logic and comparisons to their native language, but this is imho not a good way. Kids don't learn like that. It's argued that grownups lose this ability, but personally I sometimes say thing where I have no idea why I said that and if it's really correct. But then it turns out it is. It's somewhere in my head and it got there by listening to other people speak or reading. I know a lot of people that got nowhere by going to class because they had their group of friends from e.g. Spain, China or Korea around them. I met a person from the US who was disappointed with the little progress they made and said "I don't understand that and why it's like that". My only answer was really "because it just is". So I think Duolingo has a place, as a sort of a virtual native speaker you can interact with.
Maybe that’s why I went with Duolingo initially. I’m not finding the language learning particularly hard even though I have twenty years on you, but I also have the benefit of having to be in a classroom four hours a day, five days a week. That is making the difference, apart from a very good teacher.
I know that in theory languages get tougher as you get older, but the teaching of languages has come leaps and bounds since I did French and Spanish at school, and my motivation has shifted too, so I’m finding things easier now than ever before.
Your experience may not be typical as bilingual people are known to pick up additional languages more easily than monolinguals [1].
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bilingualism-languag...
In reality, there is no shortcut to learning something. It's just about having the curiosity, motivation and discipline to do so. And many people may think they have that or are enticed by the idea of learning a new language but their life doesn't depend on it enough to have the aforementioned qualities to do it.
I don't use Duolingo to learn a language as effectively as possible. I use it because it's a super easy and an entertaining way to stay motivated while I learn a language. I would never go out of my way to take a class or watch videos to learn the language.
I don't think people are "falling for it". It does exactly what they want it to do for them.
I've also used Jumpspeak, which is an AI conversation partner. It works ok, but the speech recognition is... not great. But you can have a conversation and practice listening and responding. I was able to treat the AI as an uber driver and ask about places to go in Peru, and how to get there, and why they were nice.
The language I was learning had no tuition available for adults in my country and I practiced with native speakers when I could find them and consumed media from the community of the target language.
All while on public transport, when I would otherwise be on my phone. All for the price of nothing (though their model has grow much more user hostile).
This is not to advocate for Duolingo as a company or even the app as a method but I found it effective and useful as a tool.
Duolingo isn’t going to learn a language for you. You have to internalise the grammar and vocabulary.
Could I have done the same with a book? No. I could have done something different. Could I have done the same with a class? No, no classes existed for me.
If you intend to move, then whether you practice Chinese for 4 years in a classroom vs. with Duolingo, any differences are going to melt away very quickly and what will emerge as the forefront factor of success will be one's innate ability to push yourself in a foreign environment; i.e., don't be safe and only interact with people who speak your native language.
I learned French and Spanish natively because of my family, but I speak other languages like German or Mandarin, although I only know the most common Chinese symbols I can understand people talking and communicate myself effectively.
The most important thing is not forgetting what you learn, specially when the neural connections are weak. For this I used Anki and my own tools.
You do not need to push yourself so much. In fact I do not recommend pushing yourself into a foreign environment without basic understanding, specially If you are an adult and need to function in that enviroment.
I traveled to Germany only after studying it for years 30 min a day. It was much better experience than in China in witch it was similar to your "pushing yourself" method where very few people speak English.
In China the rate at which I could learn was not better than if I had started learning that in Europe. It overwhelmed my capabilities.
Also, China is a different culture, and you have to learn it the hard way with painful misunderstandings.
I will say that I believe that it's not harder because of any innate fact but because people give up and go back to native.
My speech pathologist/therapist friends hate me.
We quickly learn how vulnerable we are without a local language or Lingua Franca.
In my experience working class immigrants who have immigrated to places that have no large established language community in their new home are the best demonstration of this. They often start with nothing but end up with great skills whereas others will just stay and interact with their native language community and be barely conversational in the majority language.
This might be a cynical take, but I think that for most users of Duolingo, it functions more as a game than as a tool which produces substantial gains in language knowledge. I'm a computational linguist, and whenever on hearing this people ask me what I think about Duolingo, I like to say it's language-flavored entertainment.
I myself have used Duolingo to learn some rudimentary basics of a foreign language and I haven't forgotten those.
I doubt Duolingo is the most efficient, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
You can't do it with just Duolingo. But I truly believe that there is no method except for full immersion which can make you learn a language alone. It's always: in person classes, reading, watching medias, changing your phone's language, going out to restaurants, language learning apps, making new friends.
Duolingo is effective, just not alone.
I will pause my lesson and jump over to Google or ChatGPT, and usually end a session with a pen and paper writing out any phrases I was less familiar with. You also need to make sure you’re being challenged, with some languages I get into a phase where it is really easy for a long time, when that happens, you need to skip ahead because just scoring points is meaningless. I still think the gamification is useful and unique and can help keep your overall learning efforts progressing. Also I always supplement with Pimsleur, an audio-only program that is great for listening while you’re at the gym or biking or otherwise unable to read or interact with a screen.
Focusing on streak, leagues, and XP/points was detrimental. I'd do the repetitive high-points exercises instead of lessons and feel "I've accomplished my goal" (of having a high score).
Once focusing on my goal of "I want to learn a language" rather than points, it was WAY better. I also create my own cheat-sheets for conjugation / adjectives / etc, and find ChatGPT a phenomenally patient tutor for my incessant "WHY, French? WHY is it thus?!?!?" questions :->
A bit like you plan a holiday, read the guidebook, then you go to the destination. Your knowledge of the place was thrashed vs. reading the guide book. But the guidebook helped with some foundational knowledge and was still useful.
Clozemaster is a bit like Anki with prepackaged sentences.
What I think OP meant to say:
All pupils found success. My success could be explained by being primed for success with 18 months of duolingo, but all pupils had similar success.
As written, it reads like "all pupils [...] primed for success by duolingo" which is perhaps why you tried to look for irony to match it with their conclusion.
Judging by the tone, I'm assuming that didn't actually occur.
Using AIs conversational skills seems like the best way to employ AI in language learning.
This is assuming that there is a "most efficient path to learning a new language" that applies to everyone.
One resource that seems to be universally loved over there is Assimil [2]. I've been working through one of their courses and it's been great. I augment it with youtubers that make comprehensible input videos at my ability level, as well as with iTalki lessons.
I tried Duolingo once many years ago, but there's no way that memorizing words is going to get you all the way there. You need reading, writing, listening, and speaking practice in real world situations.
[1] https://forum.language-learners.org/ [2] https://www.assimil.com
I’m not disagreeing that multiple sources is necessary, but describing Duolingo as just a “memorising words” app is wrong.
It has reading, writing, listening, speaking, and conversation exercises.
If people find it a useful tool and it has helped them gain fluency though that’s great!
My personal favorite ressource is Lingolia [1]
But unfortunately, I mostly want to focus on reading in a foreign language and that's just a huge slog as of now.
How intense was your classroom learning and how much time per week?
I took years of French in school and would like to learn Spanish.
I did five years of French at school and three years of Spanish and definitely enjoyed the Spanish more.
Personally, I'm happy with it. I took years of Spanish and started with Duolingo in French with zero prior French, and I can now recognize phrases and hold some basic conversation; for 5 minutes a day with no significant continuous time commitment that's not bad!
Anecdotally, this has not been the case for me.
Similar to the parent, I have accelerated my learning tenfold by ditching D**** in favor of reading, watching, and listening to content in my target language as well as speaking to a tutor I found online.
I've wasted a tremendous amount of time going through and ultimately completing a tree only to find myself crossing the finish line not being comfortable saying anything in that language. Is that a criticism of me? Perhaps. But, the big D once fooled me into thinking the answer to that question was that it is. Which is to say, I don't believe it's a criticism of me.
In the beginning I thought it was excellent and that’s why I kept coming back.
I tried it again the last 12 months and the app wasted so much of my time making me skip through promotions and do-nothing animations. Opening chests, collecting gems, all the gamified stuff.
I didn’t need it. I was already self motivated to learn without a bunch of time sinking doodads that you have to click through.
I guess duolingo is good if you are struggling with motivation.
Recently I used a paid app called Pimsleur that I liked. There’s also a lot of good free resources on YT
It would be awful if I was forced to wait for the animation to complete, which fortunately, they do not. The same applies to basically all the animations except for the opening screen.
I also suggest using something like News In Slow German to understand actual content generated (and read) by real people.
The matching is ridiculous. It doesn’t really challenge you with conjugate variations.
Example, your answer choices are: estas, estamos, or somos.
Hmm which one is not like the other?
I felt like I was pattern matching my way into Dora leveled “can you find the airport?”
It’s important to not throw the digital learning baby out with the bath water.
No single EdTech is that effective or ubiquitous, even though the possibility of new solutions anchored in the future starting to form is increasing.
Yeah, but if you have time for 3 weeks in class, why do Duolingo in the first place? Those serve different markets. Duolingo is for low effort, low commitment, but interested enough to do it a bit in their spare time kind of people.
Around the beginning of 2023 they did a couple of things that ruined it a bit for me. They completely changed the track system so now you have to follow one set path, and they got rid of the classes feature which was awesome because for around $5 I could have a zoom lesson with a native teacher and other people learning the language.
Also the sentences it teaches you are a bit less silly now and that was a cool gimmick.
I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo.
Unless anyone has had a different experience, Duolingo is an exercise in self-deception. No doubt there will be people in difficult situations that have managed just fine with Duolingo, or in spite of it, but it doesn’t feel like a growing market.