Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete, discipuli!" to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"

The fact that all these years later I still remember some things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.

In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other languages), which is a similar "get actual language input rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method, and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!

It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.

[0] https://nuenki.app

some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages

[0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/

edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive joke) if you are using something like uBlock!

Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".

buenos dias does mean good morning. it literally means good day and can be used as such but most often used as "good morning"

I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads. It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic Chinese is better learned elsewhere.

However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.

Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.

The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.

Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.

The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.

If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.

People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.

The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.

And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.

And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...

Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.

On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.

Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.

(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)

I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.

The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.

If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.

To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.

It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.

I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.

For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.

I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.

What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.

No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.

While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:

- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials

- at what point you should move on from Duolingo

TFA might work for my use case.

Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.

The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).

So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.

Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.

It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space

The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".

In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).

Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.

For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.

That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.

I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30 minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often able to skip two or three units in a row.

Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an easy, gamified supplement to serious study.

I was under the same impression, but later the problem disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of sentences that you should already understand.

Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.

Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.

Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.

The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.

I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.

For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.

Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store

It was really nice to discuss the sentences with other learners and the creator of the course.

And it was always fun to open the thread for the sentence "I love you" in the language that you were learning.

The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better. Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually less janky overall than Win11.

Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are another good example of my point, the former being largely superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity, and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly less of a risk with FOSS.

Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie, not to mention tiling window managers.

I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front page.

What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent dictionary app

Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.

You don't know about LibreOffice, really? Your post is so ridiculously ironic I'm having trouble determining if it's satire.