There have been previous threads on trying Duolingo. I played around with it briefly. But it doesn’t match my learning style and while painless I can’t see learning a language that way. Maybe a quick review or supplement to other things.
But maybe I’m wrong. Did you learn a significant amount of practical skills from Duolingo? Enough to hold a conversation or express any common thought?
I tried it for Russian and Greek. IMO you get what you pay for. As an example I kept failing at Russian verb conjugation. I found a chart online and said to myself, “But conjugations are so easy.” I think their theory is see enough examples and you will learn language like babies do, except andragogy doesn’t work like pedagogy. Two very different styles.
I’ve been on Duolingo for a number of years now.
My take: You can’t learn a language using ONLY Duolingo, but Duolingo can help you learn a language.
Honestly, there’s no one thing that can ever teach you a language, it’s always something multi-dimensional. Full immersion is supposed to be the best, but full immersion means being surrounded by it all day every day and using it, particularly with other people.
Here’s a professional linguist talking about to “make Duolingo work” (15 minute video): Link to video
My first impression of it was that it really only worked in conjuntion with actual classes. They throw vocabulary at you and unless you write every word down as a dictionary as another exercise, I don’t know how you absorb it. I completed the Welsh course in pandemic lockdown, but I’d studied the language IRL for a long time and used it to keep things fresh. I’ll admit that there was some stuff I actually grasped a bit better online than in person.
Then I switched to German and what I’m finding is that I’m at the point where I can read a sentence in German (I should say I’m only 25 or so chapters in and haven’t even gotten to a second verb tense yet) but to formulate one is a slow, clunky process. What it’s helping most with is understanding structure, word/clause order, and the Dative and Accusative cases are becoming slightly (but not entirely) more automatic. I doubt I’l be able to hold a conversation when I go to Hamburg in the fall, but I appreciate what it’s gotten me so far.
The nerdish part of me really wishes I could try High Valyrian but, like with other little-spoken languages, with no one to practice with and extremely limited amount of text available to read, it seems a fool’s errand.
Yes. pretty much this. It’s just one tool to use. I use it in conjunction with another free program (Transparent Languages), workbooks, listening to TV and radio shows in my target language and live lessons with a teacher through iTalki. The online programs can’t train you to hold a conversation with a real live person and they’re not great for teaching listening skills either - you have to do that through talking to other people in that language.
I think a lot of it has to do with whether or not you’ve learned a foreign language before, and how related the new language is to something you’ve learned before.
Here’s my experience:
I’m currently on a 153 day streak learning French. I took a year of French in high school that didn’t stick and was worthless.
Separately, I did pick up fluent Mexican Spanish, though, due to years of marriage to a Mexican national and years of living in various parts of Mexico. Both being Romance languages, there are a lot of similarities, and written French was about 40% intelligible to me based on Spanish. For example, when I was living in China and wanted to fix my Belgian-made water heater, I was able to find and understand the French language version of the owners manual, and fix my problem without waiting two weeks for service.
About 154 days ago I was motivated to solidify my French because I was going to visit Quebec, but not just Montreal and Quebec City where English is plentiful, but rural Quebec, where I was led to understand that English wouldn’t be welcome.
Duolingo is not the normal way I like to learn languages. I like rules and explanations, and Duolingo doesn’t do that. It uses repetition, but it’s been pretty effective. My ability to read and comprehend written French is such that I’m able to subscribe to some Quebec-related subs on Reddit, and keep my head above water.
Reading isn’t the same as speaking, though, and reading isn’t the same as listening, either, which is where I think that Duolingo falls short.
Because I don’t have someone outside of Duolingo to converse with, I’m still at the “translate what I want to say” phase, rather than “rolling off the tongue” phase in French, other than for certain, canned expressions. “Je voudrais manger avec toi ce soir” is easy enough, but I really have to think about more complex things before I can say them. And, of course, my pronunciation sucks.
Basically, I need someone to talk to to take full advantage of what I’ve learned, which, judging by my ability to read, really is considerable.
And, no, although the French isn’t Quebec French, it’s not been an issue. Outside of Duolingo, I’ve learned some of the Quebec-specific details of the language. Obviously I would prefer Duolingo to have Canadian French, but honestly, it’s not that much of a struggle. If you speak Mexican Spanish, getting used to Madrid Spanish is amusing but not a burden.
So, how did I do in Quebec? As expected, in Quebec City and Montreal, everyone answered me in English. In smaller towns, people tolerated my French, and were nice when I desoled myself and had to revert to English. My studying was not a waste, and made the experience richer. I’m continuing the course, because I want to get better.
I also play around Duolingo with Spanish. Some of the higher levels are really challenging for me. Maybe I’ll study them in the future, just to be better. I can kind of speak German once I’ve practiced a bit, so early levels have been a good refresher. And because I have a friend from Brazil, I’ve tried a few levels of Brazilian, just to I can say things like I want an apple.
Some of you may know that my wife is Chinese. This is where Duolingo sucks. I’m not at all interested in learning Hangzi. Maybe in the future, but not now. I just want to speak and hear. Written Chinese is an entirely different language that doesn’t currently interest me, but I’m not given the option to study Chinese using the Romanized alphabet (“Pinyin”). My brain is hard-wired to Roman and Greek/Cyrillic letters, and I need an actual alphabet to learn. Duolingo is useless to me in this respect.
Sorry for the wall of text!
No, it’s interesting.
Quebec spoken French can be quite different from other countries, but to see this you might have to do something like see a comedy show, not just watch the news. Visiting the countryside might expose you but it also depends on who you are talking to. If interested in improving French you might consider watching or listening to French CBC, Radio-Canada, even if it means watching programming for younger viewers. They have a free app, CBC Gem. Glad you enjoyed the trip.
Written Chinese languages are so difficult I don’t know why they always include it. Much better to get the spoken stuff down, which is hard enough. Chinese languages tend to be very logical, at least, with little chaff, easy tended and few plurals.
My limited experiences suggest Duolingo is good for reviewing nouns. Not so good for tenses or commonly used slang. It is pretty painless. But you don’t speak a language, really, unless you can have a moderate length conversation.
Apparently iTalki is supposed to be helpful for that, but on the other hand it’s not free. Here’s their website. I offer this information with the caveat that I have not personally tried this site. You get 1 on 1 tutoring and speaking with an actual human being.
Been playing around with German, Spanish and French.
See, I spent at least a month every summer from age 6 [well, pre6, until the june of my 5th year we were in Germany and moved back to the US in time for me to hit kindergarten] at my grandparents second summer home [first one was in western NY] and if one is in Canada, one has to learn the local patois if one needs to play with someone other than one’s brother [shudder] So I grew up with a reasonable command of French [Canadian dialect] Ended up in a private school that had a requirement for fluency in French, and I sort of slid past snoozing in the back corner of class until they noticed and decided they could manage someone who spoke Spanish, books and an office so I did 3 years of Spanish in a year and they gave up and let me snooze in the library for the class period.] Then as Mom started out life Amish, I also still had German running around in the backgroud.
So I mess with Duolingo in French to refresh, German to refresh and Spanish because we are moving to Nevada and it is the secondary language locally. I try to do 1 Spanish to each German and French, and then 1 Spanish because I want to really refresh it solidly.
I use iTalki. You can choose to sign up for formal lessons with certified teachers, or you can choose a ‘community tutor,’ which are typically people who don’t have professional qualifications but with whom you can have a conversation, and they can correct your grammar/pronunciation, etc. Formal lessons cost a bit more, but are pretty reasonable considering you are getting a private lesson - you can choose between 45 minute sessions or 1 hour sessions.
They’ve also recently started offering group lessons, but only in English, Spanish and Japanese.
If you want something free, try checking Meetup to see if there’s any groups that get together to speak your target language. Many of them meet via Zoom or similar, so you don’t have to even search for a group in your area.
And you can, of course, Google for groups in your area that meet in person.
As I remember my high school foreign language courses, a part of those was rote memorization of “idiom”. That part can replaced by Duolingo.
The rest, not so much.
Duolingo is a form of practicing the target language and when you’re learning a new language any use of it will likely be of some benefit. Like I said, it can be helpful. It has the advantage of being bite-sized chunks and highly portable, easily accessed when you have a few spare moments.
In conjunction with other language study it’s useful. By itself, no, it will not teach you another language.
Didn’t work for me. I did most of the tree in Duolingo Spanish and got to where I could somewhat read it. But my understanding of speech was far worse, and speaking basically nonexistent. Almost certainly you need to practice with real people to get anywhere, but - at least when I did it - it wasn’t even rehearsing the right things. It had you hear a phrase and then translate it to English, but I think what you actually need is to practice hearing a phrase and then replying with something sensible, and that was not included.
I’m using Duolingo and it seems to be working - but I’m using it for a language that I studied on high school that I have mostly forgotten. I actually am more fluent this go round -in high school I had to translate sentences in my head word by word in order to understand but now I understand some without translating that way.
Duolingo has changed over time, especially for major languages like French and Spanish (and presumably English). Supposedly it’s going to try to incorporate some AI to enable some of the features you mention it lacks, but that’s very much experimental at this point. I’m not convinced it will work.
The two languages I study most in Duolingo are French and Spanish.
For French I have the advantage of having studied it for a very long time and had the opportunity to actually speak to other humans in that language. I retained my ability to read French, but my spoken and listening skills deteriorated from lack of use. Duolingo helped me refresh those and I’m now listening to some news every day in French, although, alas, my opportunity to speak it is still largely non-existent at this point.
Spanish I hear out in the community. I am now picking up some words and phrases when I hear it, and occasionally it’s come in handy when a *abuela * with poor to non-existent English skills comes through my checkout line. But then, I’m hearing real people having real conversations, not a computer or phrase book regurgitating sentences.
Since my spouse passed away I’ve been hanging out with my local Jews and have been hearing Hebrew in bits and pieces. I’ve been dabbling with that as well, and hearing it spoken, again, has helped although learning a new “alphabet” (technically, it’s an abjad) is daunting, as is reading right-to-left. Pretty sure Duolingo will not make me fluent in Hebrew, or even functional.
I think Duolingo works best to either refresh language you learned in the past or in conjunction with more/expanded learning.
I implied it above, but people that don’t actually speak or have learned another language, you probably didn’t infer my meaning.
If you’ve already learned another language, you probably actually know English better than you did before studying. You know grammatical gender exists, you know about case, number, verb conjugation, etc. You understand that things aren’t literal translations most of the time.
Basically, if you already know another language, Duolingo works aside from the needed conversational opportunities I mentioned upthread.
Because Duolingo doesn’t actually explain anything, I think I’d be completely baffled (given my preferred learning style is “rules”) by its approach if I didn’t know other languages already.
Yes, this is another flaw. It doesn’t explain verb conjugation, sentence structure or anything else like that.
I learned to good deal of French in two weeks before a trip. It was fun, too.
Luckily, I’d taken French classes in elementary and middle school, and still knew a lot of the grammar (in fact that’s where I’d learned my English grammar; we didn’t get Imperative Tense in our native tongue…).
So I knew more French grammar than the program did… :~)
For instance, I was looking forward to reviewing the future tense. Some verbs take unexpected turns.
Mais non, M’sieur! The sections on future tense just used present tense verbs with “tomorrow” or “next week” tacked on the end.
(So if it were an English lesson, “I’ll go to the store” would become “I go to the store … later.”)
Now, that would work to make yourself understood in a monolingual country.
So the Duolingo lessons were more than adequate for traveling, but I’d rate the grammar “good enough”.
I don’t think that’s a flaw - it may not match your learning style, but it seems to match mine. After all, none of us learned to speak our first language by having conjugation and sentence structure explained to us (and plenty of people don’t learn their second that way either) , so that can’t be the only way to learn a language.
Providing those things as an optional study for those who want it would be a good thing, though, and Duolingo doesn’t.