An opinionated critique of Duolingo
isomorphism.xyz241 points by agnishom 2 days ago
241 points by agnishom 2 days ago
I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language. It's not that it's a bad app, it's just that that's not going to happen. There's no one resource that will get you to even an intermediate level in a language. And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].
For me to put a foundation for French down it was: Assimil for about 6 months (30 min/day), 30 minutes of daily comprehensible input, and Anki & Clozemaster for vocabulary (~15-20 min/day). Mixed in there was a couple months on Yabla doing listening comprehension, some grammar study from Bescherelle books, and some tutoring on iTalki. After about maybe 9-12 months I could listen to RFI's broadcast targeted to learners [2], but even then I still needed to go to the transcription a lot at the beginning.
To mislead people into thinking that doing some vocab study for 30 min a day in Duolingo is going to get them anything beyond the most basic grasp of a language is kinda not cool.
[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
> And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].
It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.
Also the FSI estimates are for what it takes to get people who've tested into a FSI language program to that level. Individual differences are known to be a huge factor in language education, and FSI has the luxury of only needing to worry about teaching people who they know are well-suited to learning using their methods.
I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.
Yeah, for sure, thanks for pointing that out. For them it seems like fluency is defined as the ability to work comfortably in a professional setting in that target language. I self studied some of their French courses and found them helpful. I've never taken a course of theirs before, but a family member did do a year immersion in Arabic as part of their training for the foreign service, and of course it was a lot more intense than self-study.
There's also various levels of "fluency" - and what you're trying to achieve will inform how you're going to go about it.
There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."
For me, the best way to learn a foreign language was (besides also studying the grammar separately) to read some books in whose content I was interested and to watch carefully some untranslated movies spoken in that language, until I became able to understand perfectly the books and the movies.
Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier.
So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested.
Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.
So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one?
Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?
I'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturally push you to the limits of your abilities when you talk to them.
There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work.
Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.
> Focus on producing speech over everything else
That’s a great way to gimp your language learning curve.
Receptive skills develop before productive skills. This is just a truism about language.
I could buy into dedicating time to speaking, as many folks don’t put enough time into that skill, but I’m not sure I would ever recommend prioritizing it over receptive skills.
> it's the hardest part 90% of the time.
While this is true, it doesn’t mean that production should be one’s “primary focus”.
> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input,"
I assume you are basing this on second hand information, or “really strong evidence” is doing a lot of work here, but volumes have been written about the efficacy of comprehensible input in foreign language learning.
To be charitable, I think many people do “comprehensible input” incorrectly (content too difficult, overly scaffolded with translations/subtitles, etc.), but the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary) almost always have had massive amounts of (comprehensible) input at some point in their language learning journey.
There are some new AI apps out there that I would put in the “hack” category for being a lot more effective than all the stuff I used in the past (which also included Duolingo, Anki, etc). The one I used the most over three months to refresh my Spanish is Langua (bad name with too much competition, but I put the link below).
This app, and I’m sure others, is a polished “overlay” of sorts on top of one LLM or another, but it’s very well done. By far the best way of learning a language is conversation with a native speaker. This puts 90% of that in your pocket on demand. You can chat (out loud) on various topics, or any topic, and this is augmented with various tools, way to save words to a vocabulary list with a flash card UI, etc. After each conversation you get an evaluation. I found it a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, than anything else I’ve tried.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id...
> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people.
Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).
Comprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1).
I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English.
Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.
Sitcoms are a tried and true language promotion tactic. I remember when I was young there was a French teenage-sitcom, "Helene", which my mother would watch because her students watched it religiously (she was a language teacher). It was outrageously soapy, but even I noticed the relatively accessible language. My mother told me the show was a subsidized export of France's language evangelization program. Apparently teaching French was a lot easier when that show was popular.
Friends wasn't that, but close enough. I think I recall Simone Giertz saying that she learned English from it, and I can't be the only one who has noticed that there's something uncannily Lisa Kudrow-like about her stage persona.
You can find a lot (all?) of the Hélène et les Garçons episodes on YouTube, too.
Another good "sitcom-like" that you can find on YouTube is extr@. It's cheesy, but it's entertaining enough for what it is, and they have it for French, German, and Spanish (and English). Interestingly, it's the same main actor for French, German, and Spanish, a Dutch actor playing an American, while the rest of the cast changes around him.
There's something charming about old language learning shows, both overt and "covert" ones like Hélène et les Garçons. I remember Muzzy in Gondoland, BBC's English language teaching cartoon from the 80s.
I wonder why language learning apps aren't more into making entertainment in the language they're proselytizing these days.
Videos are expensive to make and expensive to host. Hard for an app to make money off them.
That makes sense. These old shows probably got government funding for their language promotion mission.
Why are you learning Ukranian?
I became interested in the language after a brief relationship with a Ukrainian.
For me it was because I dabbled in Russian before, but recent events have led me to avoid anything that could be seen as supporting Russia in any way, including culturally.
I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.
That's just sad to hear for me as a Russian. Russia and the Russian culture are a lot older than the current war and will still be around long after the war, but a lot of people just cannot draw a line between the two.
This is how it goes after any major war of aggression. Happened to Germany, Japan and USSR after the WW2. Germany and Japan are both generally seen in a favourable light now.
It seems that the reputation takes about two generations to recover once the hostilities are over and the country has started to reform. Russia never really attempted a real reform in the first place, so for it the outcome was different. Russia (and yes, the image of Russian culture) will obviously not come back from this disaster during our lifetimes.
You could argue that Russia successfully managed to sidestep reputational damage despite neo-imperialism/warmongering in the past, specifically with the Chechen wars.
I personally think this only worked out because it was easier to sell this as a civi-war-like internal conflict (and the situation was less obvious to other western nations than now). On the other hand, had the Ukraine invasion gone according to plan, I'm pretty confident that Russia could have managed at least a puppet government and lots of regional control at a manageable cost (in international reputation).
But it was very interesting to see how quickly the Ukraine war turned Russias image (at least in Europe) from "slightly crazy, badass" into overt contempt.
Totally agree. Even the 2014 invasion of Crimea didn't cause widespread anger in Europe towards Russia. And the Chechen wars were definitely seen as an internal event.
This war is different. My generation and the one growing up now will hostile to Russia for our lifetimes. No Russian culture will be willingly ingested, no Russian products will be willingly purchased. I do hope that Ukraine manages to take that cultural spot though, including but not limited to changing all existing multilingual signs from Russian to Ukrainian.
> I personally think this only worked out because it was easier to sell this as a civi-war-like internal conflict (and the situation was less obvious to other western nations than now).
I mean... it was?
It absolutely wasn't.
Chechnya had a very popular president and was a stable country.
> But it was very interesting to see how quickly the Ukraine war turned Russias image (at least in Europe) from "slightly crazy, badass" into overt contempt.
I think this is because while much of the Europe was willing to 'turn the page' from 90s onwards, that changed during the 2008 war in Georgia. Since then there was enough attention in the media to the 'frozen conflicts' (Abkhazia, Transdnistria), then since 2014 we have the situation in Ukraine including MH17. Also how Russia dealt with its own political opposition. So in 2022 while the war itself was surprising, it did not require a total change of worldview to change the image of Russia.
This is a good point.
It seems to me that Russia could've easily kept pretending to be a slightly flawed democracy, and it would've been super effective in hoodwinking "the west", but they "blew it" with obvious assassinations even before the Ukraine war.
This raises the question: Why would you ever admit to be totalitarian or a dictator if you have to deal (economically/diplomatically) with softhearted democracies which really hate that?
I think the answer is that just lying about this (to improve your reputation abroad) by itself hurts your local power base. Every signal in that direction undermines that image of strength that dictators rely on to keep in control, and no dictator can stay in power "against" the population because all the instruments to exert that power (prison/murder/army) rely themselves on (parts) of that population.
Then again Israel is annexing land and actively committing genocide and voicing any anger is seen a deeply antisemitic and completely taboo. You will see a reflexive assurance that you can not equate the people with the government and so on.
My point is not Whataboutism. I don't want to relativate any war crimes done by anyone. I don't criticize people that lost relatives in Ukraine for using dehumanizing language like calling Russian soldiers orks. For the growing racist rhetoric that says the Russian culture were inherently imperialistic.
You might reflexively try to figure out whose narrative I am trying to push. What is my angle? I am not sure if this works or is even possible but maybe try to reflect on why you do this. Isn't it because it clashes with your own narrative? Which is not something you are allowed to notice because the West has no narrative, you are the one who is objectively right, only other people have a narrative.
So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently? Because there is Western geopolitical interest that people do so.
> So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently?
Israel had more accumulated goodwill left to burn though. Russia was on thin ice after Abkhazia, Crimea, etc. Israel was basically seen positively beforehand.
It's not infinite. A year ago it was basically only Muslim countries, some UN observers and the odd outlier like Ireland or Spain that were criticising Israel. But we've had in recent times the leaders of the UK and Germany criticising Israeli actions, and a decent number of mainstream US politicians even too. Israel is at serious risk of burning through as much goodwill in 2023-2026 as Russia did in 2008-2022.
The goodwill was because it was and is an geo-strategic partner of the West.
Israel has never garnered any goodwill from a humanitarian perspective. Gaza has long before been described as an open air prison. Israel itself as an apartheid nation. It has illegally annexed Syrian territory. Israel was never a beacon of humanity.
Israel is facing a ton of backlash for the latest conflict too (even from countries like Germany!).
But I would argue that in the Ukraine war it is much more obvious who "good guy/bad guy" is, because you have a totalitarian aggressor on one side and a somewhat democratic defender on the other.
In Israel, you have a democratically controlled army vs a terrorists group (Hamas), and it is much less clear where the justifiable limit for collateral damage is or whom to blame primarily for the current level of escalation.
> But I would argue that in the Ukraine war it is much more obvious who "good guy/bad guy"
I'd say they both suck. Have you seen how Ukraine abducts random people from the street and sends them to war?
I don't think mandatory conscription/press-gangs are anywhere close to murder/rape of civilians (which there are well-documented cases on the Palestinian and Russian side).
Pressing young men into military service is not even on the same scale by comparison.
And its not just the rape/murder/looting thats the problem- its about how the perpetrators deal with it.
The harsh reality of war is that tragedies like that are hard to completely prevent even for a disciplined force, but if you can not even be arsed to prosecute escalations like that (and respond with obvious lies, denial and finger-pointing instead), you lose any moral high-ground.
> So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently?
When did Ukrainians terror bomb Russia for decades on end?
When did Ukrainian authorities pay people to kill Russian civilians?
When did Ukrainians cross the border to massacre Russians, rape and take hundreds of hostages and take bragging videos of it to share on WhatsApp and Telegram?
Gazans have done all this and those who do it have - until recently - been universally seen as heroes in Gaza although that is finally changing. Gazas official position is still that October 7th was a fantastic day but simultaneously just a small taste of what is to come.
Even those that acknowledge that 07th of October was a mistake seems to be more concerned about what it means for them than the fact that they killed over thousand innocent civilians, documented their own extreme sexual violence and bragged openly about it and took hundreds of hostages.
Ukrainians did terrorize the Donbass for years. They bombed the cities, tried to ban the Russian language, committed a horrible massacre on Odessa where they murdered many trade unionists and so on.
Ukrainian use cluster ammunition that has been internationally banned because it leads to extreme civilian causalities. They have formations of "idiologically-motivated" soldiers that are literally neo-nazis.
I am repeating the Russian narrative here? Yeah, this is how you framed the Palestinian struggle.
The genocide that Israel is committing did not start as a reaction to the terror. The terror was a reaction to the goal of Israel to eradicate the Palestinian people. Gaza has been an open air prison for decades.
And no I am not defending any war crimes from anyone. But it matters who the victim and and who the aggressor is. The aggressor is Israel. Palestinians have a right to exist.
Stop spreading Russian lies.
Donbas looked nicer after years of alleged Ukrainian bombing than any Ukrainian town looked after a week of Russian "liberation".
My wife is Russian and we have close Ukrainian friends and Ukrainian neighbors. We often shop at a Ukrainian grocery store. Her dentist is Ukrainian. It’s never been an issue. She spent many vacations as a child in Ukraine and obviously doesn’t support the war. She still loves her country. We watch Russian classics and I learned how to cook Russian dishes for her. It’s wild to me that people who are neither Ukrainian nor Russian take such extreme positions of canceling an entire nation when not even Ukrainians themselves do.
It is what it is.
I used to really want to learn Russian language. I thought of it as an investment in my career as I expected to work a lot more with Russians and Russian companies because I assumed Russia like the Baltics and Poland would become part of Europe.
I have also had some really nice and smart colleagues from Russia over the years.
Then came 2014 and 2022 and now sadly I think Russians will go through what Germans experienced from 1946 and the next few decades.
Hopefully you'll not go through what Germans suffered in 1945.
If you are working against the regime we are still friends.
And I look forward to visit Russia again in a decade or two.
But remember (and everyone should remember this): a people is responsible for the government they choose. Those who cheer when their militaries are successfully attacking peaceful neighbors and taking civilians including kids as hostages and talk about erasing their neighbors can't expect much sympathy when the war returns home.
Some also don't really want to draw a line, because the current war is not an exception, it's fully in character with the past 200 or so years of Russian behavior. In the 90s and later some thought it's going to be better, but I think most people can see now nothing has changed for the better and Russian culture does not reflect any sort of guilt and shame like the Germans did.
That's a narrative. Over my life, I've seen 4 regimes and heard about a dozen historical narratives about the particular place I was born in, each radically different from the others and exaggerated to ridiculous proportions. Enough to understand that they're all mostly nonsense. One massive red flag is dealing in absolutes, another is "it's always been like that".
Sure, it's easy to dismiss anything as 'narrative, therefore nonsense'. I will give you another narrative to dismiss: oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high. Russia is an oil-rich country. And there are several other reasons why things are the way they are.
> oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high
I'd really like to see some statistics backing that up
this seems like a good starting point: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/petro-aggression-when-oil...
And yet we're both discussing it on an American site in English, so you clearly have no problem with either imperialism or wars ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ah yes the old 'and you are lynching negroes' defence deployed again because you can't face your failures. My country was occupied by the Soviet Army, many people killed and whole society destroyed, and all of that for nothing. Did we hear an apology, admission of guilt, anything, not only from the Russian heads of state but from artists etc? Of course not.
And let me expand on the 'and all of that for nothing'. The Americans brought us prosperity. To some other countries, they brought misery. I'm not a fan of that. But at least it's very clear they are doing it for the money, that when someone is exploited, someone else is going to be rich. Eventually the exploited people or even whole countries can get rich too if they are smart, like South Korea.
Now contrast that with the Russian imperialism. Not only are they not bringing prosperity anywhere, they also can't manage to create prosperity back home. They plundered Eastern Europe for decades, they have vast natural resources, whole country could live very comfortable life. Instead there is a very small group of people living luxurious life until the next upheaval when they are going to flee into exile or be killed, and a bigger group of people living a mostly comfortable life mostly in big cities. The rest are essentially serfs that are also sent to the war to be killed. Maybe this war will end soon and another will start in a few years. Maybe the oil price will go down and there will be no money for a new war, which means there will be even less monery for the serfs. And all of this for nothing, it does not advance the society, it doesn't do anything good, it's just evil people playing their games. That's why what we really want is to be as far away from Russia as possible.
I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. You don't have any problems with imperialism or wars, when you're not targeted by them personally or even can get some benefit out of them, which is normal human behavior. This is why I don't see why the war in Ukraine is any different. If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture, then why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture? And I'm sad if it does.
> You don't have any problems with imperialism or wars, when you're not targeted by them personally
I do. And I don't agree it's normal human behavior - normal human behavior is also to feel some empathy for people you have never met. Or even for animals.
> If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture
It did. Can't speak for South America (who probably have a more balanced view already) but it definitely changed the perception of American culture in Europe.
> why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture?
Every day the news are full of Russian indiscriminately killing Ukrainian civilians, children in their sleep, the Russian society is quiet about that or even cheering, and you are asking why that should have any impact on our attitude towards the Russian culture?
Well German and Germany took a significant hit after WW2, you will face the same disgust for a generation or two depending on you future behavior.
Immersion and transferring patterns you already know from other languages.
Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org
Language Transfer is great. On the topic of immersion, I made https://nuenki.app in my gap year. It estimates the difficulty of sentences in webpages and translates the ones at your knowledge level into the language you're learning.
The danger here is that you're not learning German - you're learning machine German. Even if the app makers have structured the machine translation so that it's smart about taking context into account, it will be at best subtly different from actual German, and at worst you'll pick up nonsense and think it's good German.
The safe way to use this would be in reverse. You shouldn't be browsing English pages and get 1 in 10 translated into German. You should be browsing German pages and get 9/10 translated into English. You'll still get machine translation artifacts, but they're much less likely to interfere with your learning, and you'll be much better equipped to spot them.
Transferring patterns only really works when the language you’re learning is similar to ones you already know. I’m learning Chinese, and to my Western mind it feels like an alien language.
For sure, some common ground is needed. Madrigal's is a famous example of LT that almost exclusively focuses on transfer itself, because English and Spanish are reasonably similar.
LT's method goes a bit further though, hence why there are courses on Arabic, Swahili and (upcoming) Japanese. Chinese might be even further removed, but the LT courses are about learning to _think_ about how the language works, and the format of the course (teacher + median student + you) goes a long way to encourage this. Beyond Madrigal's "look how similar these words are".
This looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.
Its in the article itself.... Nothing wrong with coming straight for the comments but this is what the author recommends as an alternative lol
As others have said, immersion is the only way that you have control of.
If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
I keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning?
For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
My strong suspicion is that children just have no responsibilities and are socially allowed to not be able to talk while everyone will speak at their level with a great deal of patience.
speaking to a child at their level is the best way to keep them from speaking well. I never did it with my son and it didn't hold him back one bit. Everyone remarks his incredible vocabulary and language skills for his age. IMHO holding back with kids is an anti-pattern.
My aunt used baby talk with my cousin so much she accidentally invented a new language with him, and he ended up needing a bit of speech therapy to get back to a "standard" level of English for his age.
Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.
I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.
The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.
> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.
It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.
But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.
The idea that child brains are better at learning languages is a myth. Adults struggle with languages because traditional language education is not fit for purpose. If you took a child and isolated them in such a way that they never got comprehensible input, and instead only gave them traditional language lessons (think textbooks, grammar drills) - they too would struggle. The good news is that if you take an adult and give them comprehensible input like you would a child, they will learn at least as effectively as a child.
What about pronunciation? Many of the assertions I've heard about adults in a foreign language is about our ability to recognize, differentiate, and reproduce the different phonemes, many which do not exist in our language.
These phonemes are even more difficult to recognize when we're not conversing face-to-face and in-person! So if you're listening to "comprehensible input" if it's on audio, or video voice-over, it is much inferior to seeing/feeling/hearing a native speaker make sound-shapes with their mouth!
I made many efforts to imitate my Spanish teachers in my youth, in terms of pronounciation, mouth shapes, accent and emphasis, etc. I credit the in-person instruction with achieving a nearly fluent comprehension and ability to make myself understood.
So the argument goes: if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?
> if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?
The answer is sort of "yes". If an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, they will have a more difficult time with the phonemes of a new language than an infant would.
However, "learning new sounds" is not a correct way to think about it. You're born knowing all the sounds. You unlearn the differences between certain ones. If you, as an adult, have unlearned a difference that matters in your target language (because it didn't matter in your native language), you will have trouble with that difference. An infant can't have this problem.
Note that the cutoff point where an immersed child will fail to learn the pronunciation of a new language "automatically" is somewhere in the late teens, though.
I hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actually true?
It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.
Children spend pretty much every waking hour - every day - learning language. If you were to put in that amount of constant effort, you might also learn language just as effectively as a child. Okay, probably not just as effectively, but I think people underestimate the amount of effort children put into learning language. That's practically their job for the first 5+ years of life.
The main reason why people fail to learn languages is that they do not put in enough time. There is no magic shortcut, despite countless language-learning programs claiming they have one. You have to spend a significant amount of time every day working at it.
Having good resources (e.g., access to native speakers, competent instruction, a flashcard app like Anki) is important, but again, people fail mostly because they don't dedicate enough time towards the language.
The hack is there isn't really one thing, it's using multiple tools like I mentioned in my original comment.
If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.
I have Dutch friends who swear they learned all their English simply by watching Friends on BBC in the Netherlands.
Then they're lying...
(Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)
You don't need to watch BBC for that. Not a lot of tv shows, even child programs are dubbed on Dutch tv. So you get accustomed to it early on. Combined with the fact the languages are closely related means the Dutch usually have a reasonable grasp of English before it's being taught in school.
I learned english at school in France, and we're notoriously bad at teaching foreign languages. The approach is way to academic and mainly based on reading. That's why our accents are often atrocious. I was good at written tests, but what allowed me to actually get fluent (as in being able to think in english and convert my thoughts to speech in real time) was watching tv series in english with subtitles in english (no translation involved.)
Those two languages are very close, if he had to learn Japanese or Arabic he won't be able to do it.
The hack is immersion. Move to a country where the language is spoken, and have a girlfriend/boyfriend native in the language whom you move in with.
That's it.
It is so often dismissed how important the second part is. Many think that just moving to a country is enough, and you will pick up the language. Maybe the basics, but not if you don't speak and think it 24/7, however uncomfortable that is at the start.
You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast.
Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer.
This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.
A native-language workplace helps too, but that's step 2. Step 1 is getting to a level that allows you to switch from english to local language at the workplace.
In an immersion context I can get to conversational fluency in about 3 months and to complete mastery in a year. I've done it twice, once for Spanish and once for English. A few things in my approach helped me move quite a lot faster than my peers:
1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY.
2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot.
3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months.
3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way.
Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.
That's part of immersion or comprehensible input, yeah.
Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good
but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much
This is how I learned English myself. Good enough to pass a phone interview with the mumbling Dutch softie, and then it was easier.
(motivation, I guess, plays a role too)
Had a friend in college learn Ukrainian by switching his phone language settings and watching only Ukrainian reality tv… and then he also spent a summer in Ukraine
Immersion as others have said.
But you can speed up the process by simply getting better at memorizing words to give you a much wider vocabulary.
There are various hacks to memorize things such as decks of cards or long sequences of numbers and similar techniques can aid you here too.
Probably traveling to the local and living there.. ie full immersion. If I were to wager and riff off ya ;)
You would still need to study or this would be super slow. When I went to China even after I did DuoLingo for two years I understood only super basic sentences and sometimes I even missed those because of accents. I couldn't learn "new" words or concepts or grammar through immersion, it only gave me the question to ask my wife so I could learn it through study.
I'm not sure how you can be so confident about that. A year of Duolingo got me far enough along to comfortably follow "NOS Journaal in Makkelijke Taal", seemingly the Dutch equivalent of the RFI broadcast you linked. No transcript needed, though I do pause on occasion to look up an unfamiliar word.
Maybe you call that "the most basic grasp of a language", but it doesn't seem to have been less effective than the approach you took with French.
That's great! Maybe Duolingo has changed things up since the last time I tried them years ago. Being able to listen to even simplified native content and understand it would of course be beyond a basic grasp of the language. What were your study habits with it?
My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.
I started out doing 5-10 minutes a day, building up to 30 as motivation grew. I'm still at it, 633 days later, though I'm no longer pushing Dutch quite as hard now that I'm also learning Spanish. (I figure that exposure to Dutch through youtube, reddit, etc helps me continue to learn now, anyway.)
My goals are: maintain the daily streak; stay in the diamond league; do all the "legendary" bonus levels; get all three daily quest points. That's enough work that I'm usually pushing myself a bit, but not to the point of tedium.
I'm sure that if I actually needed to learn a language, for some practical reason, Duolingo would not be the quickest or most thorough way to do it. As something I'm doing for fun, though, using downtime I'd otherwise waste on puzzle games or pointless web scrolling, it feels like a pretty good deal.
Feeling the world of Dutch-language media starting to open up was kind of magical. I'm not there yet with Spanish, but I look forward to it. How much bigger can my world get, I wonder?
I accept that some people are doubtless much more talented in acquiring languages than I am. But I did take 4 years of high school French and was considered "good." And, traveling with a friend in Paris, I clearly knew a lot more of the language than they did. But I'm a very very far way from being fluent.
Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or maybe they're BSing.
A few weeks is definitely BS, but I took 3 years of German in high school and after roughly 3 months of 30min-1hr daily Duolingo I was already past the high school material.
I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.
> I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language
But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1.
The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.
By learn another language I mean getting to C1 or equivalent. Being able to comfortably spend time in a country that speaks your target language. Having regular, improvised conversations of various depths. Reading literature in that language. Things like that. I really don't think Duolingo can get you there on it's own, but hey, I'm open to being wrong.
I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.
https://www.languagereactor.com is something similar to Yabla I think... But you can use it indefinitely and subscribe if you need the premium features.
I tried it for a few months, but never was really able to get it to work for me, although I did find the dictionary hover overlay in YouTube videos to be helpful at the beginning. Yabla is different in that they will break up a video into pieces, have you listen to it without subtitles, and then ask you to type out what you heard. This was really helpful, particularly on the advanced levels, as picking up various accents can be difficult until your ears adjust.
Lord have mercy. All the languages I'm learning are:
> Category IV Languages – “Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
Given that four of the five are Asian languages, there's a lot of transferability. Not a crazy amount but enough to give you a boost. Knowing Chinese made learning Japanese feel a notch easier, and learning Korean afterwards felt yet another step easier.
The 2200 hours represents learning from scratch.
I hate this take. Duolingo users understand fully, once they clear their language's Section 3 or higher, that they have a long road ahead.
The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language.
Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duolingo? Posts like yours are doomer cringe.
This is an app that constantly nags you to use it, to the point that its mascot is so widely known as annoying that they play it for laughs in their ads.
All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads.
And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t take initiative and build a better habit-based approach that incorporates Duolingo, but that’s not what the app is pushing you to do.
Most apps are nagware, that is not a Duolingo issue.
The ads are for converting users to paid subscribers, not just "ads."
I don't see your point at all.
I'll vouch for the nagware. When I was studying with duolingo, it was the nag features that got me to practice every day.
A lot of apps are nagware, but I’ve never seen any as blatant and forceful as Duolingo.
They diligently A/B test their notifications, constantly looking for the variations that’ll show a higher click rate. They’ll hit you with “[Your friend’s name] will hate you forever if you don’t do Duolingo right now!” if you start slipping.
I’ve dropped it after a year or so when I realized that I wasn’t really learning any Turkish, but I was caught in some sort of corporate-designed psychological trap.
I agree with you, it could have a place in a toolkit of things to acquire a language with. But I don't think that's what they're marketing themselves as. Their tag line is "The world's best way to learn a language", which, personally, I wouldn't blame a person for reading and thinking "cool, I guess I'll just do this and finally learn a second language!". They didn't say "build your foundation in a foreign language" or "first steps in your language learning journey". They said "best way to learn a language", which, I'd say, is false and misleading.
I've never used TikTok, but I actually wonder if this hypothetical teenager would learn more following a ton of users in their target language or playing games on Duolingo. I'd be interested in that study.
When I see my friend getting their smartphones out at 23:58 to complete a lesson and not lose their streak because they paid for the app I can confidently say that the point of duolingo is to make money by appealing to your monkey brain through gamification
You're instinctively ranking TikTok as worse, but I think that parent is trying to say that Duolingo is effectively a waste of time. If you have two ways to waste your time on a phone, what makes one of them worse?
If the difference is that TikTok is a thing that "the youth" does and that we don't understand, then I guess some introspection is warranted on your closing ad hominem...
Both of my parents are teachers of a European language. They both have phd's in linguistics, and rate very highly with students (who basically adore them).
All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.
I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.
But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.
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Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning as an adult is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself motivated. People who watch native media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.
The biggest problem with Duo are the extremely limited exercises and educational materials. Gamification is great.
But you're not going to learn declension and cases from repeating the same few stilted examples that don't even exhibit enough variety to pick up the underlying rules, especially as an adult.
Duolingo is trying to do implicit language learning but the language input is far too narrow.
I used Duolingo to start learning a language with a different alphabet, and it taught me the alphabet, the sounds, and some basic vocabulary. But it couldn't teach me verb conjugation, noun declension, plurals, ownership, etc. etc. etc. That I needed a teacher for.
With the teacher, I then used Anki cards to help with remembering more vocab and with keeping things fresh everyday in between lessons. Duolingo could be that, if they had enough examples, perhaps. I would prefer Duolingo type exercises over my Anki cards, as well as the streak and friendship network effects, but there's simply not enough content.
> Gamification is great.
Is it?
I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.
At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.
What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.
Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.
We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.
> spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc.
In the end this is the only one that matters.
You can do things before going to that country that will help. But you'll never be close to fluent without taking that final step.
For real. My French always skyrockets every time I take any vacation to France, even for a week. After just one day I'm back to being able to understand a lot of what people are saying and respond pretty comfortably. It's also surprising how quickly the words come back to me after having been away for a year or whatever, with minimal practice between.
Same. I need to practice more when I'm outside the country. I remember last time I'd just arrived in Brussels and got a snack at a cafe and had to check on my phone how to ask for the bill. I feel like a dummy for the first day or so until everything unlocks.
My high school French teacher said if we really wanted to learn a language, go live there for a couple months.
Of course, that's easier said than done (and paid for). But if you can afford the money and time away from home, it's probably the way to go.
I've never been to an English-speaking country and yet I'm pretty close to fluent. How come?
English is relatively easy and the default "culture" (games, music, movies, shows, internet, &c.) language for like half of the planet, plus it's mandatory in schools in most of the west.
I’d broadly agree with this critique but I’ve had some success with Duolingo. About 10 years ago, I used it with the aim of learning enough Spanish to get by for a two-week holiday.
While learning useful language constructs (gender of nouns and pronouns, how to conjugate common verbs), I also had to learn some useless – to me – vocabulary, e.g., names of animals at the zoo. Anyhow, after a 2-3 months of using Duolingo, I had learned enough to be able to communicate with bus-drivers and shop staff. My conclusion was that Duolingo would be a useful tool to complement more structured learning.
I’m currently learning guitar and I feel the same way about Rocksmith: it’s a lot of fun and a great tool to incentivise me to pick up the guitar but it doesn’t substitute a more structured learning course and it completely neglects the theory of music.
> keep yourself motivated
As an entertainment device, Duolingo is fine. I used it to start my French journey, not truly appreciating the INCREDIBLE difficulty and quantity of effort required. Fortunately for me, I was and still am super curious about languages, and I really want to learn.
I speak French now at roughly a B2 level. When I travel to la Francophonie, I get by, and people are usually reasonably impressed by my level (or at least are humoring me, which is fine). But my friends and family who have seen me hold conversations in French, as impressed as they may be, would never put in the amount of effort that I have.
Personally I like Babbel. It looks a bit dated (or did the last time I used it), but its content is really good and it helped me bootstrap 3 out of the 5 languages I speak fluently.
There's no gamification like in Duolingo, you have to bring your own motivation and endure the UI, but it really does get you to the level where you can continue on your own.
This. Same experience. It's worth noting that Babbel is designed with much input from actual language teachers, not just statisticians and coders. It also received funding from the EU, which makes a subscription a particularly good deal.
It's funny that Issen doesn't have HN on its "how did you hear about us" list.
> gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country,
I think it's not unreasonable to point out that, at least for Americans (I'm guessing the largest user base of Duolingo), of the three options you listed, one costs tens of thousands of dollars for us (academic instruction), and the other is virtually impossible to do because we aren't part of a bloc of nations with border freedom (immersion).
There are a number of institutes/colleges dedicated to language learning in the US: Alliance Française [0], Goethe institute [1] with multiple satellite offices around the country, all offering language classes for a few hundred dollars.
There are a multitude, nay - infinite! number of online classes with teachers who will use "traditional", textbook-based approaches. [2]
Young Americans regularly go for 1-2-3 month trips to Italy, France, Germany, etc. American passports give folks a ton of latitude. You can stay in a hostel and eat cheaply - many thousands of people have done it.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I will definitely push back on the idea that it's impossible.
(and will also absolutely agree that the convenience of an app will be 10,000,000x more tempting to use than doing any of the above)
I have a teen who's been using DuoLingo for French for a while but hit a ceiling with spoken language. I suggested to him to look around for voice chats with French speakers like maybe on Discord but it's a desert out there. Wonder if you have some experience with using these paid options to recommend. Would be neat if there could be something without a rigid course-like structure he could join occasionally for low-key conversation practice.
Some Alliance Française outposts offer online classes, and italki has a number of great tutors. It always depends on the teacher you work with ofc, but I know someone who had great experience with both.
There are also a number of social media influencers (who probably were language tutors in a past life) that run online paid communities aka you pay to be part of their language community, and then have access to classes, zoom calls, etc.
They're harder to find / it's more difficult to immediately parse which ones will be good. But you can get a preview of "how they are" by consuming what they publish. For instance, for Canadian (Quebec) French, these are great:
https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench
https://www.youtube.com/@maprofdefrancais
https://www.frenchwithfrederic.com/
I'm sure there are equivalents for French from France, and other languages. Searching "Learn {language name}" on YouTube/Instagram would be a good start.
> Young Americans regularly go for 1-2-3 month trips to Italy, France, Germany, etc
Its really not that common outside of really wealthy people. Only 50% or so Americans under 30 years old even have a passport, much less spend months overseas. And that's a percentage that has gone way up over the years. In fact, its probably more common to find people that have barely even left the same state than have traveled in Europe, especially so for spending any appreciable amount of time in any particular part of Europe.
https://today.yougov.com/travel/articles/46028-adults-under-...
Your parents have any impression of students that used Pimsleur?
I don't remember what's their impression of it, sorry. But I definitely know someone who loved and used Pimsleur in her journey to learn French (in addition to the other tools I already mentioned)
I want to learn German (as an adult). What should I do then?
Already mentioned elsewhere, but take a look at https://www.goethe.de/en/spr/kur.html , search for "Goethe Institut" on Google Maps, consider working with someone from https://www.italki.com/en/teachers/german , search for "learn german" on YouTube, etc.
Babbel was mentioned a few times, Pimsleur as well (they're different companies/methods), https://www.languagetransfer.org/ ...
Mix and match to find what works for you - what seems fun and motivating.
Oh, and consider informal irl meetings as well - https://www.meetup.com/topics/german/ (depending where you live ofc)
I'm currently holding a 1100 days of streak of Italian in Duolingo, so I think I am entitled to drop in my 2 cents ;)
To some extent I agree with the critique. Would I be able to write an assay like the op in Italian? surely not. Is their marketing annoying? yes, very much. Is the platform perfect? far from this. However - after 3 years with Duo I am capable of having causal, simple conversations, I can navigate most of the websites in Italian, I understand most of the marketing emails, I can write simple emails myself. I trust this is mostly due to DuoLingo - building the vocabulary and quickly recognizing the patterns (and It was not super simple, my native language is Polish, and I was learning Italian via English interface - there was no Polish-Italian course back then, now there is one but it's just very low quality).
Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns. During the 3 years I've spent with the platform I made trips to Italy, I tried talking to people, tried to read texts and and explored some grammar myself. About a month I go feeling I've outgrown the platform I started doing 50min conversations on Preply platform and I am now confidently moving into stage where I can build longer sentences, use past and future tenses and irregular verbs.
In my discussions with friends I emphasize that IMHO Duolingo alone is not going to teach you (complete) language. If you have a goal to learn a language (in general, not on Duolingo) and you use it as one of the tools - it could be really helpful.
I agree with your last point. I get the criticism of Duolingo and it is fair, but I can't agree that it is completely useless. I learned/am learning French. I can get by with non-English speakers and people won't immediately switch to English when they hear me.
It took about 5 years of on and off practice. Not sure how much actual time I put in. Duolingo was one aspect, where honestly I probably learned like 75% of my vocabulary. I also have a French wife and friends, took classes, hired teachers, watched movies, read news, etc, etc, etc. I probably could have got to where I am without Duolingo but I'll never know. Learning a language is a pain in the ass and I don't think any one thing is really going to do it. Duolingo is free and can be one aspect out of many that will help get you there.
I think what you say about having 'outgrown' the platform is basically hitting the nail on the head here. Duolingo knows their audience is people just looking to start learning a language. That's the top of the funnel and therefore the place where they can capture the most users, which for them makes sense because the majority of users are monetized through ads.
There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.
So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.
Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.
I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...
I do feel like many of the Duo critiques are strawmen. Of course no single method will lead to new language fluency. Even full immersion requires practice and often classes.
I use Duo, Pimsluer, live in Italy, and will start classes in a month or so. Duo is a fun game that also helps with my language journey.
Duolingo was helpful for me to expand my Spanish vocabulary, but it definitely did not teach me the language itself. Some of the most critical linguistic concepts are buried at the top of stages and not brought up in the gamified lessons themselves. I'm in a privileged position since my wife is a native Spanish speaker, so I quickly began to grasp how much Duolingo wasn't teaching me and how much speaking Spanish with my wife (and watching Spanish-language shows without subtitles) _was_ teaching me.
IIRC the CEO(?) of Duolingo was asked what he would choose if he had to choose between a more effective language course and more gamification. His answer was gamification, because the best course doesn't help anyone if noone shows up. So at least they know that it's not the best way of learning a language.
I used Duolingo a fair bit in 2015–2017 to improve my Swedish, and generally enjoyed myself. Having not touched it for most of a decade, I downloaded it earlier this year to try my hand at basic Greek and wow but it’s gone downhill. Everything is massively over the top, all subtlety has left the system, and when I stopped after a couple of days because I couldn’t deal with the intensity they sent me nagging messages for over two weeks in more and more pleading tones trying to get me to come back. I’d never use them again at this point.
Edit: just went to delete my account and they’ve got a tearful owl above the “Erase personal data” button to try to guilt-trip me into staying. https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg
I had a similar experience, I was a heavy Duolingo user between 2014 and 2016 (I used it for Spanish) and I still believe that back then it was actually a pretty good way to learn the basics and I had learnt enough to be able to get by in Spain, have casual conversations with people, even hang out with a group of natives (but I also was a member of a few WhatsApp groups with Spanish people so I had a bit more practice).
Then they dumbed down the phone app and soon enough they did a similar thing with the website. Tips & Notes section was gone (or they kept it but removed a lot of information? can't remember), the tree-style courses were gone and replaced with some kind of a Path, the exercises became too easy and they'd make you translate from Spanish to English most of the time, which is much easier than the other way around. Then they removed the ability to type with your keyboard, added the "match the word pairs" exercise (which sucks if you use a keyboard and yes, I know you can try to use the numbers on your keyboard), all of which made the whole experience even worse and less effective.
I lost my streak somewhere in the middle of this enshittification process and I've never really gotten back to using the site, other than maybe checking once a year whether it's still shitty (and it always is).
In my opinion, back in 2014 Doulingo used to be a learning website with some gamification aspect that made the learning process a bit easier and more entertaining. Now it's just a gaming app which tries to give you a false sense of learning a language but in reality you aren't learning anything. Just a waste of time.
I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.
> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?
Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".
Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.
Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.
Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
> For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
This has been exactly my experience with it. I would probably progress faster if I had others to speak with, but for just doing the lessons offered, I'm pretty happy with my results.
By contrast, when I was studying Spanish using something more similar to the Assimil method, I was reading full length novels and watching Yo Soy Betty, La Fea within about six months.
It's not just me. There's been some research on this sort of thing, and it tends to find that just about the only thing that's slower than Duolingo is traditional classroom language education.
Admittedly I was doing more than 10 minutes a day. But that's because I was legitimately having heaps of fun. I wanted to spend a bunch of time with Spanish, and I didn't need any weird gamification tricks to help me sustain that level of motivation.
Yeah, same for me using Assimil for French (along with a few other tools). Six months in I could read L'Étranger in French.
My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.
For me I mostly use Duolingo as a mechanism to encourage myself to spend time learning each day. I find that it's helpful for reviewing a lot of basic vocabulary, but I typically supplement it with other stuff (listening to music, watching shows, youtube language channels, AI conversations, etc). I find I make the most progress when I choose to do things that are challenging which Duolingo really is not.
Duolingo is surely flawed, but realistically I don't see any other way how I could have progressed in French by spending exactly 3 minutes per day with near-zero mental effort. I do it on auto pilot before going to bed, usually being dead tired after work. After 1000 days (so like 50 hours) I can have simple conversations, I can read and I have a rather big vocabulary.
Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life.
I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into.
* Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests.
* Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit.
* Ignore music, math and other courses
* Stick to 1 language, at most 2.
Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.
It took you 3 years to be A1 level. Duolingo is not a language class, it's more like traditional brute force ML.
It's A2, and yes I think it's a very good return on the time and effort I invested: around 50 hours, no homework, no memorization of words or grammar rules.
Realistically in my situation it's either this or nothing. I work 55 hours a week, the rest goes into my family and running, I hardly can do anything else.
Duolingo's marketing of "learn a language in 5 minutes a day" or whatever their similar slogan is, is bad. Duolingo won't teach you hardly anything at all in only 5 minutes a day, and even with considerably more time (30 minutes to an hour a day), on it's own it is unlikely to teach you a language. However, in combination with other learning tools like classes, immersions, comprehensible input, etc. It is a very valuable tool. I finished the German class in about 2 years, and I found it helpful, and wished that the Duoloingo German class continued further than it did.
Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.
> But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, [...] it's really helpful.
Yes, but once you get the hang of how to learn well from each exercise, it's interesting how the app will seem purpose-built to... slow you down.
You know that exercise where you arrange words into a sentence? I learned a lot better once I stopped looking at those words for cues, and just formed a sentence in my mind and then looked.
At that point, it's a pure waste of time to assemble the sentence and tap through all the UI transitions, I'd rather see the next exercise right away!
But the app doesn't allow me to! I have to pass the minigame first! At the end, it seems 80% of my effort was spent practicing "how to visually hunt for words in a word-cloud".
Theres a persistent myth that you can just "absorb" a language; you can't, you have to understand it either intuitively or unconsciously through experience. Duolingo took so much money from people by pushing this idea.
Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?
People just need to properly set expectations. I've been using Duolingo for about 15 mins per day on average for a few years now. What I've found is that my reading skills are actually pretty good (roughly A2/B1 level), for instance I can open up a Spanish language subreddit and mostly make out what's going on. My listening is rudimentary at best, I can generally have a vague idea of what people are talking about if I listen to a Spanish conversation. My speaking is almost nonexistent.
But you know what? That makes sense. I'm mostly just reading text and clicking words to fill in the blanks. And the listening component is so unrealistic that it barely builds anything up. And I don't do speaking at all.
As you say, it beats doomscrolling. For a free service I'm not expecting that I can parachute into a Spanish speaking country and be fluent. At the same time, I'm a lot better in terms of my skill level than I would have been otherwise.
TBH native Spanish speakers talk FAST. Like fast-fast.
Exactly, that's a big part of my issue. I'll catch some words & phrases so can sometimes catch a big picture view of what they're saying, but that's it. If I watch a video intended to be educational & at a slower speed, then I'm much better off.
And that's not a surprise to me. 95+% of my listening experience is listening to Duolingo's unnaturally slow, computer generated voices and that's a poor substitute. But hey, I can also do it quickly while drinking my morning coffee instead of putting a lot of effort into it, so it is what it is.
That's a very, very low bar though.
It’s a bar that every Duolingo user is hopping over while a bunch of procrastinators are making excuses about why they haven’t started yet.
Duolingo is not a complete solution and I don’t think they or anyone else claims that it is. What it solves fantastically well is the zero-to-habit transition.
I have friends and family who earnestly desire to learn a language, and ask me what to use. They often end up choosing Duolingo and make no progress toward fluency in the subsequent years. The criticism is that it subverts their goal, preventing their success by replacing learning with addictive behaviors that don't educate (like someone wanting to enter a new field and getting hooked on "educational" YouTube Shorts podcast clips). It also spoils their ability to focus on alternative learning methods as none deliver as much of an immediate dopamine rush as Duolingo. These alternatives could do better at that, sure, but it doesn't change that Duolingo fries their brains preventing them from adopting productive methods without therapeutic interventions.
That's why people advocate against it and advocate for alternatives.
Their goal wasn't to defeat doomscrolling, it was to learn a language!
I've been doing "Dreaming Spanish", which is a comprehensible input service, and using Duolingo as a self-test of sorts. Watching a lot of curated spanish-language content is very engaging, and I believe this method will work (for some definition of work), but it is nice to have duolingo as a fancy flash card system. I think duolingo by itself probably isn't very effective, but it serves as a motivator and i think it's useful as part of a more complete language learning strategy.
Yes and mine say things like "why pay 500 for a language course when I can do this?" Of course they ignore me when I say language meetups are free, because "im not at that level yet." It's usually anxiety.
Finally a good critique of Duolingo, couldn't have written it better myself. A fresh take separate from the cliche everywhere on the internet that you can't learn an entire language on Duolingo itself which I've heard a thousand times at this point. (Currently "learning" French on it, but going to quit cause have been guilty of cheat-streaking myself).
Yes, the social aspect is trash. The "path" is trash. The leagues/incentives don't make sense. It's just a bad app. This blog made me realize that it could possibly be better in concrete terms. And without even going against their bottom-line. Like, it could still be gamified and what-not, but BETTER. But it isn't. It is just a poor design. YES, language-learning takes effort and many different sources, and YES Duolingo-like apps can only hope to be like a SNACK, but they could still be much better, ugh.
Yes, indeed most of the top level comments on this post seem to be repeating this cliche. They are not wrong, but this doesn't mean there aren't interesting (even if negative) things to say about Duolingo.
It feels like this: Suppose I write a detailed critique of phone cameras, and everyone says "Well, professional photographers would be using a DSLR anyway"
Duolingo is useful, but not efficient. When people say I want to learn a language, they often mean I want to learn this language efficiently, e.g. to be able to write an essay like the post says after a realistic period of time.
I personally don't believe its pedagogical deficiency is mere incompetence. The whole business model is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, so why would they make you learn faster rather than just enough to keep you there?
As a long time user before, I have observed a lot of mechanism changes that bear out this observation.
From a 2019 Forbes article [0]
> Duolingo has gotten bad press from writers who try the app and don’t learn much. But Von Ahn promises only to get users to a level between advanced beginner and early intermediate. “A significant portion of our users use it because it’s fun and it’s not a complete waste of time,” he says.
> He’s been logging 15 to 20 minutes of French every day since November, and when asked to describe what he did the previous weekend he says, “Je fais du sport. Je suis mange avec mes amis. Je suis boire du biere en un bar,” mangling his tenses. (Rough translation: I play sports, I am eat with my friends. I am drink beer in a bar.)
> Bob Meese, Duolingo’s 42-year-old chief revenue officer, has been studying Duolingo Spanish for more than six months. In response to the question, “¿Hablas español?” he freezes, then says, “Could you repeat that?”
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/07/16/game-of-t...
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Also, having worked in the language learning industry myself, readers may be curious to learn that Duolingo is seen as a pariah that no one takes seriously as a learning tool. And I'm not one to use the term "scam" lightly, but if that word is to mean anything, then it definitely applies to Duolingo!
Duolingo is gamification gone wrong, with most of the development effort spent on childish animations! I've been trying to learn Greek for four years using it daily, and most of the time, I'm just trying not to drop out of leagues or ruin my streak, and not so much trying to learn as the gamification incentive is to waste time, not to learn and increase my chance of dropping. What a joke! If I put all this effort into real language learning, I would have been a fluent speaker already. And I'm literally nowhere!
Viewed another way, the gamification is a sign that they don't trust the actual content to be good enough that the user would want to return to it
They only care about engagement, as you need to keep paying for the premium service; otherwise, you will waste most of your time with the app watching ridiculous and annoying ads. I suppose they are concerned that if you don't use the app daily, you will not renew, and the premium service won't be worth it otherwise. But then you will have no streak, and will be in the first league, and friends won't like your stupid activities!
Ehh... language learning drop off rates for all methods is really high. It's a subject that people view as attractive, but it's really hard.
I really miss the tree format in Duolingo. I enjoyed being able to choose my own activities and jump around, the variety was fun and engaging. When they got rid of the tree and forced us all to use the boring straight 1-track path I got bored and couldn't sustain my daily practice.
> I'm just trying not to drop out of leagues or ruin my streak
You could try not getting suckered in by the gamification. I've been using Duo for years. I have no idea how I'd even find out what a league is, much less if I've dropped out of one.
I do try to use it every day, so my streak is high, but if I don't use it I don't use it.
And no, I don't think my ~15 mins a day over the same amount of time would have made me notably more fluent. I might be *differently* fluent, however as Duo heavily skews towards reading comprehension.
The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language. But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.
It's worse than anki because there is no SSR built in ( at least when i was doing it ).
>But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.
Just memorizing 400 vocabs alone is actually pretty good early on because then you aren't tied to practicing grammar with childish content like " I went to school by bus yesterday" because of limited vocabulary.
I spent the first year alone learning about 2000 vocab without any grammar. And when I go on and do grammar I can actually practice with interesting content that related to my daily life. I now recommend new learner to learn their vocab by N + 1 level relative to their grammar.
I have a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, mostly learning Russian. The app has got progressively worse since I started, for a while just giving me the same lesson every single day. I of course finished the course years ago, but I keep up with my one lesson a day to keep the bird happy. I find the UI incredibly annoying, I've disabled all the sounds and animations that I can. You might ask why don't I stop? Well I want to keep up my Russian, and the one lesson a day keeps my brain ticking over.
Last year they replaced all the recordings of native speakers with ML-generated recordings, in both Russian and Ukrainian (probably other languages too but those are the two I have). The ML-generated recordings are terrible, for example they can't deal with the ambiguity betweeen vse and vsyo (written identically in Russian) so they always say vsyo. They'll sometimes randomly say the names of individual letters instead of reading the word, particularly the hard and soft signs. One recording is for a sentence with the word "tochka" (period, as at the end of the sentence) and instead of reading "tochka" the recording just has a silence there.
I've reported these issues hundreds of times since they added the ML recordings and none of them have been fixed.
But like you I keep using it just to get that little daily exposure to the language. I suspect it's useless for actually learning a new language, but it's maybe just barely good enough to keep up a language you already know.
The ambiguity goes away if you write them as "все" and "всё". Diacritics, accents, umlauts and cedillas are useful; if you omit them you do a disservice to the reader.
Maybe so, but omitting them on ё is standard practice in Russian. A language learner who doesn't learn to deal with the ambiguity of the omitted diacritics will struggle to read real-world texts.
I've also got a 2000+ day streak (Spanish) and keep it going for similar reasons. I can't stand the goofy animations they keep adding to Duolingo. I'm about to dump my streak and move to something that doesn't make me feel like the developer thinks I'm a child clapping at the cartoons on the screen.
I stopped playing after reaching a bit more than 2000 day streak. Towards the end I was just going through a lesson as fast a possible before going to sleep. That was no fun and I got nothing out of it.
That's exactly what I'm doing these days, sadly: just quickly sprinting through a quick lesson or two before going to sleep so I can maintain that streak. I've learned a lot from Duolingo, but none of that learning is recent.
I was happy to read some comments here reinforcing the experience I had - that immersion is absolutely necessary. For the sake of anyone who might ever be interested, and because today marks literally one year since I began doggedly learning Danish, here is how I get immersion while being thousands of kilometers away from a community of speakers (currently live in Brazil, before that Switzerland).
- The system language in my cell phone is Danish
- I started with Duolingo every day, but then after some 3 months or so it wasn't so fun/effective anymore.
- I read Danish news every day. Most often just the first two paragraphs is enough, but I make a point of understanding everything. Whatever is first on the webpage and is non-trivial. I know more about Danish handball than I ever thought I would.
- I found some Danish bands that I really like and I listen to them very frequently. For now I don't actively try and translate all the lyrics, since this is my "relax in Danish time", but I have noticed that I can pick up more and more - only then, I go and confirm to see if this is true or to learn what it actually is
- I read reddit posts in Danish (including on jokes) and I often try to write some responses myself. I am still ramping this last part up, but my procedure is: I first write in whatever flows: true Danish, broken Danish, a mix of Danish and German. Then before posting I ask ChatGPT to correct to C2 Danish and explain every little correction. I usually learn a lot doing this.
- I read LinkedIn posts in Danish, wikipedia in Danish when I'm searching for a new topic, and asking ChatGPT for responses in Danish when I have the time to read it through.
- I am also now increasingly exploring using Danish dictation on my computer, but this is still very much work in progress.
- Plenty of podcasts as time allows (I don't drive to work)
- Movies, first with subtitles in English and then in Danish
At this point, I feel that I can:
- understand a good enough portion of what is said in movies and songs to make me proud and motivated, although Danish pronunciation is notoriously difficult for the non-initiated and of course I am still a beginner
- understand written texts where the main difficulty is finding vocabulary rather than picking up the grammar
- I can actually understand some written Norwegian and Swedish, which is a pretty cool plus!
This is really helpful. Every comment is about immersion, I get it people, but how do you achieve that in the real world. Most of those comments seem to ignore that fact that many people can't move to another country for a couple years and leaving their significant other to get a new one that natively speaks the desired language isn't a great suggestion. I understand those are the best ways to learn, but let me run that by my wife and kids and we'll see how that goes.
A lot of Duolingo criticisms to me read like someone saying "I was walking on a home treadmill for 30 minutes every day but I didn't really get in shape until I started spending 5 hours each week in the gym with a professional trainer."
Yes, obviously an actual class with a qualified teacher is going to teach you a language faster than Duolingo. Obviously you will learn faster if you move to a foreign country or if you have people around you to regularly speak your target language. Obviously you can cheat at Duolingo and not learn anything, just like you could turn the speed way down on your home treadmill and not really get any exercise.
But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa, and a ten minute language lesson will still teach you more than no language lesson at all.
Now you are making me feel bad about walking on the treadmill for 30 minutes.
Jk, I agree with you but that doesn't mean there are no meaningful criticisms of the treadmill
Agreed; I think there are plenty of valid criticisms of Duolingo but that hey are more productive if we start with an honest appraisal of which things are realistic alternatives. (And good work on the treadmill, keep it up!)
>But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa,
That's right. Most of the criticism directed at Duolingo seems to be about unrealistic expectations of engaging with an app for 10 minutes a day. That is not going to get you to fluency, but it does beat doom scrolling on your phone.
Before I committed to study Japanese seriously I did about a year of Duolingo. I learned about a thousand words, maybe 100 kanji, I could follow parts of conversations and read easy sentences, and that is exactly what I expected from the effort I put in. In fact I was happy with what I got out of it. What it excels at isn't teaching you a language fast, it's that it keeps you going and has course material laid out for you.
Do you have any suggestions for supplements to the Japanese course on Duolingo? I feel like I'm almost ready to make the leap after having built up a good streak and slowly realizing that some of the Duolingo sentences apparently sound unnatural. For example, on review lessons, Duolingo quizzes the sentence "My name is" by using "iimasu"[0]. This older video[1] that is part of a playlist that tracks the Duolingo course claims that it incorrectly teaches you. It's not really explained why it's wrong though.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A8%80%E3%81%86 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FNrpMQZzJ0&t=457s
>Do you have any suggestions for supplements to the Japanese course on Duolingo?
One source that I (and quite a lot of people on the internet) find fantastic is Cure Dolly's series which is more grammar oriented and you can consume either in the form of Youtube videos on the channel of the same name or in written form here: https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/
those helped me a great deal in addition to consuming media, duolingo etc.
Each time I read this kind of feedback, I wonder if there should be a free, community driven, alternative to Duolingo.
- Content may be provided by contributors (like Duolingo did for many years)
- It could be supported by donations (I believe the costs can be kept low)
My feeling is that lots of problems with Duolingo are caused by monetization (and many things were better in Duolingo a few years ago).
I'm still not sure of how it should be designed and what we need exactly. One of the problems is also to get enough contributors. I'd be interested in hearing more thoughts on this.
As a hobby, I started building an alternative to the Duolingo Stories feature (https://lingostories.org), but it's still fairly limited.
Could LibreLingo be a useful step in this direction?
Previously discussed in April (363 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035
And in 2022 (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142852
I'm making a free/unmonetized language learning app as my side project. (I made it out of anger at duolingo, lol.) You can check it out at https://yap.town . It's sophisticated in some ways but simplistic in others, for example there are not yet any stories. If you want to collaborate, hit me up, my email is in my bio. I think the world needs an actually-good language learning app
It would be lovely if such a project pans out.
However, I would say that for very popular languages (Japanese, in my case), there are probably good (but paid) niche apps/resources. If your target language is Finnish, there are fewer options, like another commenter points out on the parent thread.
Anecdata: my daughter, when a rising high school sophomore in 2023, used DL to skip a full year^1 and join upperclassmen in Spanish 3. She went on to take AP Spanish, earn college credit w/ her AP test score, and join the Spanish National Honors Society. She credits DL w/ giving her the confidence -- and vocabulary -- to make the leap when she did. Of course that doesn't mean critiques aren't valid, and YMMV, but it does help show that DL isn't necessarily useless, either.
1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.
Duolingo was exceptionally useful to get me started on my language learning journey (Spanish, a bit of Japanese) while knowing basically nothing. It tapered off pretty fast, is very slow to introduce new vocabulary, and the core lesson structure doesn't explain much unless you dig into the submenus with intent.
As a basic starter tool, it's cute and briefly enjoyable, and that's enough. But you'll need to supplement it with something else almost right away, and your daughter's structured classes and reading material were almost certainly that something else. I think Duolingo's *streak* is the only key feature worth imitating in any form, as it gamifies habit development, which is difficult for many people. If only the lesson content could keep up with that one good idea.
DL was a core part of my German studies before my first kid was born so I could start speaking my family's heritage language with her. I spent about six months working through the entire tree (this was a small-ish tree, back in 2016), supplementing with Wiktionary + Hammer's German Grammar and by the time she was born, I was contacting tutors to work with them and saying "I'm guessing I'm around low-B1" only to have them evaluate me as probably B2 for spoken language.
The caveat here was that I was intensely motivated, my native language (English) is related to German, and I already had learned two other languages, so I had internalized a good process to learn a language (plus an interest in linguistics meant I could read "here's how the subjunctive is constructed in German" and not have to read fifty pages of explanation about what the subjunctive even is.
It CANNOT be overstated how useful it is to understand grammatical concepts at an academic level when you're learning a new language. There's so much that can be conveyed with one term instead of twenty examples you have to read over and over to grok what this construction is for. Pay attention in seventh grade English when you're being taught what passive voice is, pay attention when you're learning about mood. When you hear past and past perfect, remember it! It will make things SO much easier when you decide to acquire another language.
(Edit) Even very different languages like Japanese still have a lot of the same concepts. The most complicated verb ending IMO is the "causative-passive," and many of my classmates struggled to learn it. IMO it's probably because of the "passive" part. But passive voice exists in English, and if you can recognize it, the construction in Japanese is really easy. "To be allowed to XYZ" or "To be forced to XYZ" if you translate in your head (like most learners do at first). You speedrun the whole concept but for actually learning the mechanics of constructing it: for one category of verbs, drop -ru and add -saserareru. For the other, drop the -u and replace with -an and then -serareru.
Bam, if you already know what passive means, you're done. You've literally just learned the entirety of it, a thing I watched take a full week in my university class.
Having no prior exposure to any European languages, I tried using it for learning a bit of German, just to be able to sing along with some songs while also understanding what the words mean. I learned about 1500 words, but about a year later I watched a language training video and it became obvious to me that I have been pronouncing S, Z, and ß all wrong this whole time and made the wrong pronunciation a habit that I'm having difficult breaking. It taught me nothing about the alphabets and how the combination of certain letters or their position in a word can change the sound. Clicking through the words and advancing to the next level probably made me go too fast without giving me enough time to really absorb it. If I repeat a test, it's the same questions being repeated so it kind of feels like rote-learning than actually giving me an opportunity to reflect on the mistakes.
It also allows you to skip through the audio and speech tests, so these shortcuts make you chase XPs rather than actually learn the language you originally set out to learn. My biggest pet peeve about this app is that I have absolutely no idea if I'm pronouncing words correctly. Even if I intentionally pronounce a word wrong, it'll tell me it's correct.
I wouldn't say I learned nothing from it. After all, there is nobody I can speak with, so Duolingo made something impossible, possible for me, but it hasn't made me conversational at all. If I watch a German movie or a TV show, I can understand a little bit by looking at the subtitles, but the audio seems to go way too fast for me that I pick up just 1 or 2 words from a sentence. I'd imagine if someone asks me a basic question really slowly, I might be able to answer it, but if I'm in a group or something, words will just fly by too quickly for me to be able to comprehend anything.
One thing it did is make me motivated. After learning so many words, it made me pursue training courses by professional language teachers, and eventually I will join an actual classroom. I don't think I'd have gone all the way if I hadn't got my first start with this app. After all, my original motivation to learn was just cultural / music, and not because I want to move there or that it'll help professionally, but after having coming this far, it made me think I should pursue learning more seriously and become fluent.
> Having no prior exposure to any European languages
I'd classify English as a European language. It is even classified as a Germanic language.
Duolingo and many other apps avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.
It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.
You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:
The language is difficult -> La lengua es difícil.
I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.
I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."
[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to
[1]: https://mangolanguages.com (not sure why no one knows about this)
[2]: https://busuu.com (probably the best for grammar)
[3]: https://memrise.com (very, very good AI text convos with corrections provided and mixed language support)
> avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.
The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :)
(or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)
> Games worth their salt are not created by bolting together a collection of numerical statistics. That is how you get cookie clicker.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the article, but cookie clicker IS a game worth its salt. Input mechanic difficulty is not the sole factor to consider when determining the quality of a game loop.
I first used Duolingo back in 2018. That was how I started learning French. I majored in Classics in college and had taken Spanish all eight years of middle school and high school, so my vocab progress was very fast. Within that year, I felt like Duolingo had become too slow, and decided to switch my learning over to reading books and watching movies in French.
Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.
Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).
I think this criticism can applied to most SV products/companies. What they care about is:
- Being seen as a new and hip way to do a thing
- Making sure their approach scales to lots of users
- Making the first user experience and onboarding seamless
What they are willing to give up:
- Long positive term user outcomes
- Sustainability and supporting complex user needs
It seems their goal is to extract value from the users by promising them a better/easier to use/cheaper product then hooking them and stringing them along until the users grow frustrated enough. I'd list some examples of this exact business model, but there's too many to count, and I'm sure most people here won't have any trouble coming up with some of their own.
Look, Duolingo is obviously not the only thing you use to become proficient in another language. It's not perfect, it's gamified, it's over simplified - it's a tool in the toolbox.
That being said, it's helped me immensely with both polishing my Dutch (I passed my state exams a while back but there are still so many words I don't know), and I'm now learning Japanese.
Yes, Duolingo does not teach you directly all the intricacies of Japanese grammar. That's because it's a dumbed down, spaced repetition app. If you're actually serious about learning a language you'll see that pretty much from the start and like, buy some Japanese textbooks or something to supplement what you learn from the owl app.
I'm currently using Satori Reader and have bought a manga to practice my Japanese reading. My grammar is still woeful, so I'll need some other material to work on that and get a real understanding.
Anyway, I don't really disagree with the author on their criticism per se. But I think the criticism applies to a bunch of language learning methods...
My only criticism of Duolingo is the monetization. The ads on the free version are unbearable and makes me want to never use the app again. Also as soon as you stop using the app, they spam your inbox with emails every 2 days such as "Duo misses you so much! <sad emoji> Are you giving up on learning?? <crying emoji>". This made me uninstall the app.
Otherwise I don't share the criticisms in this comment section. It's a fun educational game to learn a few words in other languages. I don't think it's misleading anyone into thinking they will become polyglot by using Duolingo. I wanted to learn a few words of Japanese while waiting for a flight to Tokyo and it did the job.
It's a shame their original business model didn't work out. If I remember right as you learnt the language you could translate real web pages, and companies would pay Duolingo for the crowdsourced translation work. Win win really for the users. I think the guy that came up with captcha started it (similar idea).
I can relate to this post - great thoughts!
I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.
It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.
I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.
I finally abandoned the app this spring.
I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.
> I grew to hate the gamification
I don't understand people who say this. I completely ignore the gamification. If I don't feel like doing it one day, I don't do it. I don't even know what the leagues are, despite seeing people talk about them. I never look at any score or badge that they provide.
Why do people care about this?
You have to click through a lot of it. If I open it and do a lesson, it will demand I commit to a streak (if I haven't done it in a while), show me the new 1-day streak, show me about streak freezes, see how much XP I got, see what quests I made progress on, see that I did not get promoted in the leagues, see my new league placement, and probably a dozen other things that aren't language learning. I don't care about this stuff, but I'm forced to interact with it to use their app.
Duolingo makes it hard to ignore - the whole app is gamified. It's like ignoring water while swimming in the ocean. Yes, you can turn off notifications, but sometimes they were helpful.
I think gamification triggers some innate feature of our brain, just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games, etc. It is designed to be hard to ignore.
This may be part of it. I refuse to use the app. I use the website only.
It sends me daily reminder emails, which I use as a reminder to do it if I have a chance, otherwise I ignore them. It flashes up a bunch of crap after I complete a lesson that I just mindlessly click through. Which could be the league stuff you mention but I ignore it.
> just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games
Fair, I have the same question about those. It boggles my mind that people fall for the gamification of those too. Or even back in the day stuff like badges in StackOverflow. If one doesn't care, one doesn't care.
Curious if you have ever heard of/tried https://www.spanishdict.com/learn?
I think it's important for those responding about their Duolingo experience to include the tier that they are using. Specifically, I wonder if the conversations with AI, and the "explain this" feature in Duolingo Max change outcomes? I'm new to Duolingo, chose the max tier, and feel that I'm learning quite a bit specifically because I am having simple conversations in French daily (albeit with an AI that seems to me to have questionable hearing at times). I haven't used it long enough to provide insight or even judge the platform, but for those using the more expensive tier(s) I wonder your thoughts...
I totally believe that (some) people are achieving great results at the free tier.
I am definitely not saying that Duolingo is useless or a bad (i.e, net negative) use of someone's time. But even good things are not immune to criticism
> I totally believe that (some) people are achieving great results at the free tier. I am definitely not saying that Duolingo is useless or a bad (i.e, net negative) use of someone's time.
I definitely didn't mean to imply otherwise
> But even good things are not immune to criticism
100%
2800 day streak here, primarily in Finnish. I haven't been a fan of the app for a long time, but the problem I've always had switching is the question: What else? There might be a thousand different Spanish courses, but for less popular languages there just aren't many choices, the fact that they still host one is great. Yes I haven't really learnt much, it's more maintaining what I do know, but I'd've lost it without.
Incidentally I do think Finnish is one of the cases where it could work well. The way I see it the difficulty in learning Finnish is primarily learning an entirely new vocabulary, the grammar and sentence structure isn't that hard, and Duolingo could work well to teach you thousands of new words. The problem is they have a very limited amount of exercises, to the point my phone's auto complete can solve half of them.
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Please don't just link me stuff you've found on Google, I've tried them all. My favourite was Yle Kielikoulu, but that's been shut down.
> 2800 day streak here, primarily in Finnish. I haven't been a fan of the app for a long time, but the problem I've always had switching is the question: What else?
Something from this list https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Finnish or reading with lute if everything there is too advanced.
Any chance there are textbooks for Finnish as a second language that you could find?
How about taking lessons with some Finnish tutors on services like iTalki?
I like the realistic idea of Duolingo. I know I'm not going to get fluent with it and I'm not trying to, but I do want a good app to expand vocabulary and basic structures that I can do in 30 minutes a day. And I'm a sucker for streaks, but not all the other gamification. I don't need gems or XP or potions, just a streak to form habits, which I am bad at and need that positive affirmation.
Does anyone know any alternative apps that achieve the same goals with less of the fluff?
I think Duo could be a good way to get started on language learning, but it is not effective on its own. What it lacks is an obvious way to graduate from its call and response mechanic to synthesis, as in creating your own sentences and participating in conversation.
Tandem was a good way for me to improve my Spanish to the point that I felt comfortable traveling. I dropped Duolingo pretty soon after starting on Tandem. Language learning is much more than memorizing words. Unfortunately, Tandem is also basically a dating site for many people, and scammers are using it as well, and this makes it hard to use consistently for language learning.
Once you get the minimal confidence that you think you could find your way back to the airport or bus station in another country, you really should just go visit. Couchsurfing really helped me meet people in many cities. I don't know if the community is still as strong, but it used to have regular meetups of people within a city who are interested in talking with foreigners. You don't need to stay on people's couches if you don't want to.
A lot of people seem to be learning English through multiplayer online gaming. I do not know if this approach works for learning other languages, as I am not inclined to participate.
I can't stress it enough, though. Any language learning approach that isn't writing or conversation is going to max out at a very low level.
I think duolingo is taking some steps. Not sure how effective they will be.
they have added some "write your own sentence" exercises in recent months. generally a story you listen to and then you write a summary or answer a question about why or how something happened in your own words. your sentence is then graded/corrected by AI. these are still rare but they do make me think more than the typical forms.
there is also some new more expensive level called Max that claims to have audio conversations with you using AI. I haven't tried that one.
See, that's my issue. If Duo is only a good way to "get started," then it isn't a good way to LEARN a language, as in learn how to actually use it to a level approaching fluency. The whole thing is false advertising, not because of the specifics, but because of the advertising which makes people think (and yes, millions believe(d) it) that you can become fluent by using Duolingo.
It's all false advertising. Rosetta Stone was the pinnacle of false language program advertising, but the rest just take their cue from that.
A part of what I was saying, which didn't come across, is that I think Duo lacks a way to get people to move on. Being "free", there is less incentive to give it up when it stops having a benefit. Eventually it becomes a daily accomplishment, like doing the Wordle, that doesn't really improve anyone. That doesn't make it bad, but it hinders progress at learning a language.
It sucks balls. I learned more in one month of studying from a textbook and attending conversation classes than I did in two years using Duolingo. And its so much worse now than its ever been!
Anki is Free and Open Source Software and it's way more effective. Why waste any time on Duolingo when you could be using Anki instead?
The actual reason is that the vast majority of Duolingo users are only using the app because they like to play Duolingo. I don't say this to insult Duolingo users, but they're not actually serious language learners. They just really like playing Duolingo and if Duolingo stopped existing, they would simply stop "learning" languages all together.
because setting up and using anki is a pain? using and configuring anki is not intuitive. if you're just starting, you'll probably need to find a good premade vocab deck. once that's done, you'll need to make cards. making cards manually is a pita, i would probably not make any if i didn't have a good mining setup (yomitan/ttsu reader/asbplayer). i've spent countless hours getting my mining setup just right (setting up anki and yomitan, tweaking card fields/templates). yomitan probably works well because japanese conjugation is so regular. i imagine for languages with less regular conjugation, it wouldn't be so nice.
Sorry, maybe I'm not using it right in learning a language, but isn't Anki just flashcards?
It's flashcards++: They can have audio attached, for example, and multiple "sides" to the flashcard, but the most ++ part of it is the integrated spaced repetition algorithm(s) that automagically adapt the next time a card is shown based upon its difficulty to improve long-term recall without having to look at all of the cards super often. This is termed spaced repetition.
It's really good. It's still flash cards and best for things where you just have to memorize something (I use it for mandarin characters, for example, for which it's really excellent). But it's great at what it does.
Duolingo was amazing for learning the Russian alphabet, something I struggled with from YouTube videos, etc. I can confidently read Russian nowadays (although I may not understand everything). I did get quite far in the lessons as well, but I don't have a high opinion of them. There were things I've learned from Duolingo that I said to native Russian speakers who were like... "we don't say that".
Note: The alphabet lessons are separate from the main content.
My Spanish is infinitely better than it would have been if Duolingo didn't exist, because I don't really have a burning desire to learn Spanish, but I do like playing games on my phone and watching numbers go up.
Depends what you compare it with.
Having a Spanish-speaking language buddy or actually living in Spain or Mexico is much better than Duolingo for learning Spanish. (xx)
Watching hours of brainrot youtube doomscroll is much worse than something like Duolingo.
The niche for Duolingo is the latter. Obviously it can't compete with the former. You don't need an opinionated blog post to realize that.
(xx) unless perhaps it's spanish youtube.
I went down this road with their Japanese.. in summary, their focussing on "words" vs "phrasing/talking" from day one like Pimsleur was, wat killed it for me.
On that note Pimsleur was/is EXCELLENT for me: 1. Focusing on phrases vs words 2. Talking from Day 1 3. Lesson oriented.
Pimsleur is the best thing I've found for my first ~30 hours of learning a language (Courses 1 and 2, basically). It gets to the (IMO) most important words/phrases/interactions first, and the spaced repetition works well for me. It almost feels like magic is happening in my brain. In find going past 1 and 2 is still worth my time, but I usually start to sense diminishing returns, and at that point I start to look around for other options to supplement it.
Pimsleur's implicit way of teaching grammar works well for me for the most basic stuff, but as it gets into more nuanced grammar, it gets a bit less helpful for me. It also feels less magical to me once it gets past the first couple hundred words.
The removal of the forums that the author mentions was what finally ended my 1000ish day streak. It was the most important part of the app for me, the way each question would link to a forum topic and users would discuss the various subtleties.
My assumption, despite plausible claims of moderation issues, is that they removed it so that their expensive AI addon provided more value. But it was the last straw for me.
Duolingo is a good example of terminal enshittification.
"[I]f it’s our content, as in, like, our learning content, there’s so much of that - thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs. That is mostly done by computers, and we probably spot-check it. But if it’s things like the user interface of Duolingo, where we say - like, you know, the button says quit, and we have to translate, that is all done with humans. And we spend a lot of effort on that, but that’s because each one of those is highly valuable.
Yes, the button that says ‘quit’ is more valuable than the learning material, which is only ‘probably’ spot-checked."
Thanks. I am surprised more people on this thread aren't commenting on this.
This quote is bonkers. How the CEO can say such a thing without any shame is beyond me
What you all (most likely technical people) need is someone who teaches HOW a language works.
Please check out Michel Thomas.[1]
You will be speaking sentences and understanding how words connect together in the first 20 minutes.
He is the only reason I speak any Spanish at all, and it’s a borderline miracle I can now speak fluently despite being the absolute worst language learner as a kid.
The BBC made a documentary about him (teaching French) where he goes into a UK school, says “Give me your worst pupils” and then teaches them most of the years long curriculum in a couple of weeks.[2]
He was also in the French resistance a Nazi interrogator in the 2nd world war. [3]
An absolute dude. Would be my #1 historical dinner party guest!
1. https://www.youtube.com/live/XeQODLgjQu8?si=gIcXoh7XwsGIaXhD
I did Language Transfer for Modern Greek and found it excellent. The host and creator is a native Greek speaker. I cannot recommend it enough!
Gamification isn't about turning work into games, its about turning work into gambling.
One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.
Duolingo is a mobile game with a language learning gimmick, not a serious learning tool.
There's a lot of hate for Duolingo.
My brother talked with his cab driver on Spanish. And is able to understand Spanish at a much better level. All from only using Duolingo for a year. So it seems like, it does work. At least with anecdata
Duolingo has been around for so long that I feel like there should be a wealth of case studies showing how folks have used it to actually learn new languages. I've yet to see one, personally. (But perhaps I'm not looking hard enough!)
"Big tech embraces blitz-scaling: the primary goal is neither financial sustainability nor the quality of materials but making the number of users grow."
In most cases, there are no materials. It's intangibles only. Duolingo, for example
There are exceptions. High quality materials are a goal for Apple
I really enjoyed your opinionated article. You put the finger on the weak spot of Duolingo: It's an ineffective way of learning a language. With the advent of AI they, we see a lot of different approaches pop up that might actually be more enjoyable and which might put Duolingo in jeopardy.
However, you also touch upon an other interesting point, namely that learning a language involves many skills, that even differ from language to language. One app pretending to learn it all probably won't work.
I have been making my own language learning app (lingo llama, check out the site :)), and learned the hard way that actually learning a language is not straightforward, and very different for every user. For example, if you want to learn Spanish, and already know Portuguese, you want a different approach then if you come from Japanese. Maybe using tools to learn parts of the language is the way to go.
Anyway, I liked your read, thanks!
Duolingo is great at gamification and terrible for actually teaching you the language. You memorize a ton of random words without really learning how to put everything together.
I found Babbel to feel much more like an app designed by language instructors.
I repeat: Duolingo is not a language app. It’s a gaming app. Don’t use gaming apps to learn languages.
Duolingo did a great job of encouraging me to find a real human to learn from.
Seconding the recommendation of Language Transfer. It helped me learn Spanish grammar remarkably quickly and easily.
The way to learn a language is to immerse yourself at location.
I bought Rosetta Stone for a similar purpose.
They cannot give you a chart or synopsis to save their lives. They are quite weak on tenses for this reason.
I feel like people overestimate Duolingo, and end up disappointed.
I am convinced that doing some Duolingo while in the bus is a lot better than swiping stupid videos on TikTok.
Will it effortlessly teach you a language? No. There is no such thing, and Duolingo does not pretend there is. But it will regularly expose you to sentences in the language you are trying to learn, which is most definitely better than nothing.
Now if you are motivated enough to spend 1h per day learning, of course there are better ways. But I thought it was obvious that the "I want to sit back and enjoy" attitude won't teach you a language.
What is a non-opinionated critique?
I used DuoLingo two or three years ago to try to learn Spanish. I knew a little of the basic grammar from high school and some words. By the time I got to lesson 20, I was completely loss. I also got sick of the gamification and just the grind of it. I just stopped.
That and I realized the continuous click buttons got tiresome.
Then, earlier this year my wife and I decided that we wanted to start spending at least a couple of months every year in Costa Rica starting next year and maybe alternate between there and other Spanish speaking countries in us time zones.
This time, I had ChatGPT and a Trello board I put together of concepts and categories of words I wanted to learn based on the CEFR level A1 list. I would create various drills, ask ChatGPT to explain concepts, etc. I became more focused on production - mostly writing. ChatGPT is a good teacher to get through the list of topics of my known gaps.
I even asked it to summarize the most important current event at an A1 level and ask me questions.
As far as speaking, I used Apple’s voice to text and not the better one built into ChatGPT. It’s pretty good with my English native southern twang so I figured any mistranscription in Spanish was caused by my bad pronunciation. The one built into ChatGPT is better. But that’s actually a bad thing when trying to pronuncie words correctly.
After a few months of ChatGPT, I did recently go vac to DuoLingo. I do the first exercise in a unit, then see if I can skip the rest (which it does let you do). If I don’t know vocabulary or a concept, I go back to ChatGPT for drills.
Being able to listen in Spanish in real time at an A1 level is the next step. I can use ChatGPT for that first and then watching kids tv shows in Spanish
I want to learn German. What should I use? I planned on starting with Duolingo, but I'm not sure anymore.
You can still start with Duolingo. Just know that if you are serious about your language learning, there may be better things in terms of learning per unit time or learning per unit cognitive effort.
I couldn't stand Duolingo because of the gamification. I'd complete a section and then there would be four screens telling me I earned points, then another screen saying I earned a different type of points, then a screen asking to share my results, etc... Each lesson was only a couple minutes so this ends up taking a non-trivial amount of time. Also, the sentences were often times nonsensical and nothing you would use in a real conversation. However, I would sign up tomorrow if I could get rid of all the gamification nonsense. There simply aren't that many half-way decent Hindi options out there. Pimsler is by far the best, but it only has two levels and you can only do it so many times.
Personally, I found I cannot learn languages through apps like Duolingo, nor through regular education.
What works for me:
- associate words with their meaning. This means not trying to translate words into their counterpart in a different language. So no flash cards with words on both sides, but with pictures.
- listen to music. This helps me develop a feeling for the language, where I understand the beginning and end of words, and intonations.
- watch simple shows in the foreign language. Kids shows, cooking shows. Stuff where the context is obvious, so once again I am not secretly “translating”.
- going on holidays or booking a conversation with a language coach. Because understanding and production are two different brain areas (wernicke vs broca), so there are languages which I can understand, but not speak.
If it's 2025 and you people still use Duolingo, then probably they just like to use Duolingo. It's like people who grind grammar books – both ways to learn language are dead ends, but make people feel better because "look I have 1000 days streak in Spanish" ("I can write conjugations for 100 verbs").
If DL taught me something, it's that it's better to completely ignore any gamifications, streaks, "hours of input", levels and other metrics that language learning services give you. It's easy to get into trap of using them as KPI of your learning process, and not your ability to speak to other people.
What do you guys think about DuoBook.co?
Duolingo app doesn't even work at all anymore; it is non-functional. The sad thing is that it used to work in the past.
Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)
†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
There's a newer app I use called Natulang, developed by a Ukranian software dev to solve this problem for themself, which is entirely speaking focused w/ AI support and aims to get a person to a B2 level over 360 lessons w/ about 15 minutes each. I'd round up to 30 minutes each for actual time commitment due to the extra SRS sessions tacked on.
I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recently was on a date w/ someone who knew about as much English as I know Spanish and only grabbed Google translate about a half dozen times.
It doesn't have much in the way of gamification... to me the fact that it seems very evidently effective is enough motivation to do a daily lesson.
Actual LLM powered free-form conversationalist assistants are better once someone has a solid base understanding, probably at least a 2000 word vocab. What you'd really want is a LLM powered instructor that develops and adjusts a lesson plan based on progress.
Playing briefly, looks pretty good! -- though I wonder if there's a way to move away from using a source language (or maybe it does this in later lessons?). You really want to try to get your head 100% inside the target language as quickly as possible, and not be translating back and forth.
You can do this with the "free dialog" option from the beginning. The only issue with this is you do have to reference the actual lesson material to that point, so it's more of a review piece.
That said, my impression is getting to functional in a language quickly requires referencing a source language that is fully understandable by the user to build vocab and comprehension - ie. explaining a new concept in the target language using the target language for a B1 student is going to be inefficient and not expressive enough. Otherwise you're fortifying what you already know vs. actually building more knowledge. Things like comprehensible input are great but seemingly more indirect and less efficient.
If you have an option to get from zero to B2 fairly quickly, you are functional enough in the target language to use a myriad of options to fluency, including doing nothing other than conversing with others.
You can get quite far with consistent long term approach with stuff like Duolingo. The problem is, its just one or very few... vectors or dimensions in which you progress, specifically aligned with how the material is done. I have a friend, he is doing DL for French for maybe 2 years, every day. He can talk some stuff pretty well, freezes on some other situations. Passive understanding works quite well for him too.
Real use of language has many dimensions, changing also ie the ways you think in that language for example.
Nothing beats real use where you have to express yourself and not skip to other languages as a shortcut, no way around this.
I've tried learning apps with LLMs and part of the issue is that you can't have much of a conversation early on. A conversation of "how many cats do you have?" "I have two cats" "what color are your cats", etc., isn't much different than the non-AI lessons. At the point where it would be really useful, the other options you mentioned are much better choices.
I think having a world (3d maybe, or maybe just 2d) you could talk about in a really simple way might be useful here. Imagine something like "el gato quiere la pelota roja" and you have to carry the red ball to the cat to pass to the next lesson, and there's a cat, and a dog, and capibara and various shapes; something like that...
There's probably the opportunity to have simple stories and personalities come into play too, early on, to add interest. Think about e.g. the Frog and Toad books for children learning to read.
There's two games I know of similar to that concept (I think Noun Town is more similar): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2313720/Noun_Town_Languag... https://store.steampowered.com/app/274980/Influent_Language_... I think it's interesting, but falls into the same issue Duolingo does, vocabulary is necessary but not sufficient for language learning.
I teach languages and teaching people how to functionally craft things with a language works much better in the medium to long term. By the time you get some basics down, you can actually have a conversation beyond "comment ca va, comment t'appelle tu?" because you know how to use the language, not just parrot phrases.
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