The Spanish course is one of the best courses on Duolingo.
I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc.
It was a little rough going at times but basically it brings you to the basic conversation level. That's all you can really expect from it because it's rather short (took me about 6 months to complete). Of course, I practised regularly outside of Duolingo especially with writing and looking stuff up on Wiktionary.
No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. But Duolingo will give you the starting point so that you'll know where to go next if you really complete all the lessons. After finishing Duolingo, if you spend another year studying, practising, and consuming material in that language, you should be able to get to a reasonable working level in it.
With the length of the Spanish course, I am guessing you can progress even further.
I had a similar experience, although it's going back a few years now. I'd always wanted to learn Spanish and one year my wife and I were going to Spain in the fall, and then three or four months later we were going to a country in Latin America, and I decided that was the year I'd do it. I started with Duolingo and did it for three or four months before my trip to Spain, and after successfully managing a few basic interactions in Spanish and also being able to easily read signage and simple phrases, I was hooked.
When we got back I continued with Duolingo but also got an online teacher and did a pile of other stuff and by the time we went south I was somewhat conversational. You can't truly learn a language with Duolingo (you especially need practice speaking with someone) but it gave me a great start.
I've had a similar experience with Spanish. But I learned another language, Mandarin, in a more formal way, so I alread had experience throwing myself out there and immersing without fear for years. That experience made it much easier to try speaking broken Spanish without hesitation when I finally had the opportunity. In other words, if you already know how to learn languages, Duolingo is a great way to build grammar, vocab, and pronunciation for when you do get a chance to practice, but may not be great for first timers.
If I was younger and without a family I'd still consider in-person courses full time instead though.
I don’t think so. Some people can pick up languages relatively easily, and some people can’t. I don’t really know how AI could solve this, unless you mean that the AI can ferret out your gaps and tune the program to your learning needs. Isn’t this what Duolingo tries to do? Genuinely asking. I pay for the “super” Duolingo for no ads and unlimited learning because I’m kind of addicted to it, but I plan trips to Germany every year because you really do need immersion to get to even basic fluency.
I don’t think that will ever be a replacement for living somewhere the language is spoken. I believe true fluency requires that (unless you’re some kind of savant) and I don’t think AI can replace the experience of walking into a shop, reading all the signs and labels in the language, making small talk with others in there, talking to the cashier. It’s that kind of immersion in a language that combines not only practice reading, writing, and speaking the language, but also all the other sensory experiences that reinforce what you’ve learned and forms associations that deepens your understanding.
Riffing on nearby comments: (2022+n): I don't think living somewhere a language was spoken could ever have been a replacement for living _in_ the language. Contrast the oh so limited and scattered signage of legacy RL, versus the ubiquitous object tagging, with text and audio and interactives, of Apple's newest glasses. The moment-by-moment narrated-life apps. The chatbot making up funny stories and cartoons about things you see, and bantering variations with you. Teaming, both meetups and improv - versus what, constantly starting new conversations with people walking near you?? And I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me, learning pronunciation without echo would be like, like learning dance steps without overlays, with just a metal mirror or someone's kibitzing. Living learning versus a legacy call-and-response classroom or paper book - yuck. There's a reason kids historically took so many years to learn language, and so poorly, even with adult focus and peer support. Immersion is just really really essential for learning well. And unaugmented RL doesn't support it.
1. Ask GPT for a list of 20 A1-level sentences in English.
2. Save them.
3. Try to translate them to Spanish.
4. If you can't use a translation service.
5. Try again the next day.
The only problem is making sure that the AI generates sentences that use the vocab that you don't know, so that you keep expanding it. Not sure how to solve that.
For pronunciation, record yourself repeating after a natie speaker recording, play back and analyze. Make use of phonetic transcription in dictionaries.
Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough. What I mean is - when you were first learning your native language, you probably mispronounced lots of things and didn't understand the grammar. But you kept going, learning as you went. Duolingo et al. want you to get the pronunciation of things correct before they will let you go on to the next step or lesson. They want you to absolutely get it right or else you find yourself in a cycle of trying again, to the point of frustration.
My German was probably pretty bad for a long time. It took a decade+ to get any kind of accent and comfort with the language (especially since I wasn't living there for most of that time). But I was up and running with the language, having conversations, reading the news, listening to podcasts, etc even if I wasn't "perfect." That, to my thinking, is at the core of what I need a language learning app to do - get me to the point where I'm making progress with it and forming my own thoughts and statements, don't hold me back because I mispronounced an accent or missed the gender on a word, etc.
My own experience with Duolingo is that it is ok as a way to memorize some grammar, but the lack of context is a problem. Random sentences just designed to mix in vocabulary don't seem to be as useful as contextualized learning, IE: at the train station, at the bank, etc.
I've had the best success with Pimsleur, which is almost completely audio-based, and just rotates through vocabulary and situations at increasingly lengthy intervals. Somehow the constant back and forth talking to the tape just works better for me than looking at something in writing. As a result, I can't write anything in French and have no clue how most things are spelled, but I've been told my pronunciation is pretty good, and definitely not American-sounding. To me, being able to get by speaking while traveling is my main purpose in learning a language so I'm not taking it as seriously or studying as long as someone who wants full fluency. But for a really rapid 2- or 3-week launch point into a language you don't speak at all, Pimsleur is really impressive.
I can second the recommendation for Pimsleur. I managed to take seven 30 minute lessons before a trip to a conference in Israel, and got people starting to talk to me in Hebrew based on the few sentences I knew, apparently due to a pretty good pronunciation.
The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.
Yep. I’ve been learning Spanish off-and-on since high school. The biggest step I took toward some amount of mastery and ability to speak rudimentary Spanish in conversation was with doing Pimsluer tapes. Repeating “un vaso de leche. Un gran vaso” and things like that over and over again just made it sink in.
I’m doing Duolingo Spanish now, every day for over a year and a half. It’s a reasonably entertaining way to practice and pick up vocab, but I don’t know how much proficiency I’m achieving.
Pimsleur has been my goto for over 20 years now also. It's good enough to spur my memory on stuff I know, and get me base functional in something new if I'm travelling. I had a real cool moment when due to Pimsleur I picked up on Egyptian Arabic being spoken in a place that was mostly Levantine. Next on my todo is Hindi. (I also tend to do sticker books all over common items as an assist)
Oh man good luck learning to write french! I had lots of success with pimsleur for Spanish (but I'm already a basic competency french speaker so most of the concepts and grammar are familiar to me). Duolingo did not really do it for me. Luckily, Spanish orthography is pretty regular as long as you stay within the same regional pronunciation group.
Agree, in that when I needed to learn some Egyptian Arabic in a hurry, Pimsleur worked very well for me. In languages where I do have the alphabet/writing down, other methods are very useful & complementary, but when I just need to be able to hold a conversation/catch a trolley, Pimsleur really comes through!
I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly, right down to the accents and stresses we placed in our sentences. It was super helpful for having conversations later on. YMMV, I really liked it. I remember a couple cases where our teacher interrupted the lesson and kept calling on students to repeat the same phrase until we all (or mostly) got it right.
This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time.
This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.
I once had a short conversation with a hotel receptionist and she said my Spanish was kind of basic but OK, yet my pronunciation was perfect. I do remember feeling a lot more confident after this.
I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
>I took a foreign language class in college where our pronunciation was corrected ruthlessly
Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.
In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.
Around five years ago, I had to learn a new language because I moved country. I've learned several languages before and so I got good at it quite quickly, and I think my pronunciation in general is quite decent, but you can notice the words I learned very early, because I have a habit of pronouncing them with the wrong stress or vowel quality. It's hard to break those habits once you've formed them.
I skip all of the pronunciation parts. Hell, I sometimes do call center implementations that do speech to text (Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex) and it doesn’t understand my native English southern accent. What chance does DuoLingo have?
But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.
Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.
> Something that bothers me both about Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and similar apps...) is that they don't let you fail enough.
I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).
Technically what you want is a bouteille d'eau. If you're asking for l'eau, you're asking for all of the water, not some of it. Depending on how accommodating the French speaker is, you may just get stonewalled for butchering the language.
Lest anybody accuse me of trafficking in stereotypes about the French, this is a real example from my life.
Maybe the future is AI. If ChatGPT is conversational in several languages it could work as the teacher and it can also look past these mispronunciations and misspellings.
I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity, I thought.. you could feed in the transcript of a short youtube video as a conversation starting point.. or some kind of game..
I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good:
What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake."
What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016."
This also works:
Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.
Why would you need to learn a separate language with ChatGPT capabilities in the world? Learn one language well and let the computers translate between that one and the others.
I agree. I’m trying to learn German now and I keep failing lessons because I screw up gender and conjugation stuff.
I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
I think it depends on one's goals in learning the language. If the goals are modest (e.g. say a few simple things in standard situations), then knowing a bit of vocab and couple of verb forms is probably all that's needed.
Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:
1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].
2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.
3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.
Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.
Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.
(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
A lot of the language learning methods out there really are built to be graded/measured. Books, courses, duolingo, anki - they all kind of seek to answer this question ‘how can we measure your language and make sure you’re progressing through it’.
There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products.
I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.
If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)
To be honest, if you don't get the agreement right I simply won't bother listening to you, unless in a good mood.
This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and phonemes which are unknown to the recipient.
Getting gender right is something any competent in person course will force you from the start. Having American accent is something to be expected and fine. Using wrong gender causes pain in listener. It really pops up great time.
Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
Indeed, years ago now, I tried to brush up on my French which I had learned in school. Duolingo did not like my pronunciation (probably fair), and kept me stuck on very basic French that I knew well rather than actually getting to the point where it was challenging me and helping me improve. There may also have been an element of Canadian pronunciation versus France pronunciation. Anyway, it was annoying, and I quickly gave up. Also, there was at least one time where it would not accept my correct answer and insisted on a (IMHO) worse answer.
Not only do your answer's need to be perfect in order to progress but you can also answer correctly without knowing why you are correct.
Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly.
Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.
It does not seem to me that it demands correct pronunciation. The pronunciation check is super loose, you get away with practically anything. And you can skip it.
I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.
I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going.
While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scores. While reading a very short story in Spanish, I had the experience of the first time, a second language making me laugh because what I was reading, was funny. Nothing during my five years of 8th-12th grade did that. Just sharing, it's not meant to mean anything.
> I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.
Can confirm. My wife and I both took 4+ years of spanish in high school and college, over 15 years ago. We can almost get by on just that knowledge alone in spanish speaking countries, but it is difficult and we always have a translator around.
That said, we took a vacation last summer to a spanish speaking country and spent the 2 months leading up to it using Duolingo. We both had streaks for that entire time. Personally, the refresher course of Duolingo made conversing with people in their native language of Spanish MUCH easier compared to other attempts in the past. We didn't need to use our phones to lookup phrases or even ask locals to speak English. I even learned a few new words and phrases.
That isn't to say that Duolingo is the best or only option, just an anecdote about our experience.
Interestingly, I had a very similar situation recently, but had the opposite experience. Took 4+ years of Spanish in high school and undergrad, ~20 years ago. Had a trip to Costa Rica and I spent about 2 to 3 months using Duolingo, and I felt it didn't help much at all, other than as a refresher for very basic vocabulary.
I ended using Google translate towards the end of the trip, which was disappointing for me.
The first time you finally get to fire off your first short, stupid joke in a new language that actually makes native speakers laugh is one of the greatest feelings ever.
That first laugh at a real joke in a foreign language is precious. I remember reading a collection of short stories for vocabulary, and there was one about a fishing trip going badly anx hilariously wrong. Priceless moment for me and my confidence.
I have a roughly 600 day streak in Spanish, having started with no background, and I am quite pleased with the progress given how little time I dedicate to it each day.
My only issue with Duolingo is that I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules. Their inclusion currently is really poorly executed, haphazardly located in certain lessons as if random. I’d love if I could get specific lessons on demand for anything I am struggling with.
Also, it is really annoying how sometimes it gives you the translation after you are done and other times it just says “Great!” Or something similar, so if you are slightly unsure of something you don’t always get the actual translation to help clarify.
From my experience, yes. I did about an hour a day total - 20 minutes on waking, 20 minutes at lunch, and 20 minutes before I go to sleep. 3 years ago, I didn't know a lick of Spanish. Now when I go, I can be a translator for my friends. It's not great, and I trip over my pronunciation a lot, but it's functional.
As to the context of article, I'm also in the group that thinks the latest Duolingo updates are the worst to come to the platform since it's inception. It's beyond awful and I honestly despise it. I frequently went back to areas I felt myself getting rusty at, and practiced those. The new "pathway" has broke that method completely. It's impossible to see previous course content clearly, essentially forcing you through poor UX design to take the next step on the pathway instead, like you're playing Candy Crush. The update spurned me to give up on my 500+ day streak and cancel my subscription over the Summer. I haven't used the app in the last 5 months.
I'm lucky enough to live in Oxford, which is renowned so having some great evening language classes. I've signed up to my first semester starting in January which I'm very much looking forward to. If it wasn't for Duolingo, any interest in furthering my language skills would not exist. I guess it's a silver lining that an awful update to my favorite app by incompetent product management and executive decisions forced me to finally peruse a formal education in Spanish. I just wish it was a amenable break-up.
my 9 years old son was really enjoying the app that I bought one year subscription. after the update he stopped and when I asked why it was clear he hated the new update and doesn't like to touch the app.
I was always crap a languages. Top class for everything. Rock bottom for German. Tried lots of language learning things to learn Spanish, including Duolingo - but they just teach you vocabulary - and mostly weird stuff you don’t need initially.
Then I stumbled upon Michel Thomas. I listened to the basic course and 2 weeks later I was in Spain speaking to people - even managed to talk my way onto a bus when I got lost and had no ticket. It’s a completely different way of learning. Speaking sentences from the first 5 minutes. You’re learning grammar from the beginning and how to actually express yourself. It’s more like a conversion course from English to Spanish (but also there’s Portuguese, French, German, some others)
He’s such an interesting guy - emigrated to the USA after the war and set up his school. Invented a whole new way of teaching languages but wouldn’t let anyone know about it because he was so mistrusting (he was a nazi hunter in the war). Only when he was 70 something did someone convince him to record the language method. The tapes when you listen have a perfect learning curve - there’s always 2 students, one is good the other not so good so you feel better than them. I assumed he must have recorded many versions and then extensively edited - NOPE - they’re all recorded in a one time session. He was just that good.
BBC has made a documentary about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 6 worst pupils French in like 2 weeks.
He’s a genuine legend and the only reason I speak Spanish.
If you want to learn a language please try this out. It is just on a different level to anything else, especially the BS repetition of duolingo type sites - although they are useful later when you want to just learn vocabulary.
Anyway, as you may be able to tell, I am always very excited to pass on Michel Thomas. What a dude. RIP.
Has anyone tried "Language Transfer" to learn a foreign language? I've done a few of the lessons and it's so incredibly intuitive. They use concepts and patterns in the listener's native language to learn concepts in the target language. Surprisingly, It's completely free (please donate if you can)
I have, and it’s fantastic to learn. I think there’s a focus on ambiguity that is incredibly important for language learners (combine some gestures with your hands and ‘it’ ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘there’ ‘he’ ‘she’ can get you really far).
However, it’s really not great for review. I’ve tried to go back even after a couple years and listen to the Italian course again, but couldn’t do it.
So it’s a great (amazing (fantastic)) ‘boost’ but I wouldn’t rely on it entirely
I have learned, over the course of five decades, French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, with at least some immersion for all of them.
Outside of being immersed in the language, Language Transfer (which I'm currently using to learn Spanish) is easily the best method I have ever used. It relies mainly on recognizing patterns, rather than memorization, which is right up my alley. Maybe others do better with memorization?
It's also free, and very convenient (lessons are on YouTube, SoundCloud, downloaded MP3 files, or Android/iOS app). I'm a Patreon supporter, because I believe in it.
I did some Language Transfer briefly, but only after I had already learned a significant amount of French with other tools. Then I did it again for a bit when my son wanted me to learn German with him.
While I can't really speak to its efficacy, I really liked it, thus would probably stick with it, thereby making it effective.
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I took a slightly less-developed course -- the Portuguese course and completed it. At the end of the course, I was able to have basic conversations in Portuguese. I had one half hour conversation where I talked only in Portuguese to an Uber driver and we talked about what he was doing, what he did in his spare time, etc.
It was a little rough going at times but basically it brings you to the basic conversation level. That's all you can really expect from it because it's rather short (took me about 6 months to complete). Of course, I practised regularly outside of Duolingo especially with writing and looking stuff up on Wiktionary.
No online course can ever teach you to become fluent. But Duolingo will give you the starting point so that you'll know where to go next if you really complete all the lessons. After finishing Duolingo, if you spend another year studying, practising, and consuming material in that language, you should be able to get to a reasonable working level in it.
With the length of the Spanish course, I am guessing you can progress even further.
When we got back I continued with Duolingo but also got an online teacher and did a pile of other stuff and by the time we went south I was somewhat conversational. You can't truly learn a language with Duolingo (you especially need practice speaking with someone) but it gave me a great start.
If I was younger and without a family I'd still consider in-person courses full time instead though.
I get your point, but with the pace of AI, there's a good chance this statement is not true in 5 years!
For pronunciation, record yourself repeating after a natie speaker recording, play back and analyze. Make use of phonetic transcription in dictionaries.
My German was probably pretty bad for a long time. It took a decade+ to get any kind of accent and comfort with the language (especially since I wasn't living there for most of that time). But I was up and running with the language, having conversations, reading the news, listening to podcasts, etc even if I wasn't "perfect." That, to my thinking, is at the core of what I need a language learning app to do - get me to the point where I'm making progress with it and forming my own thoughts and statements, don't hold me back because I mispronounced an accent or missed the gender on a word, etc.
My own experience with Duolingo is that it is ok as a way to memorize some grammar, but the lack of context is a problem. Random sentences just designed to mix in vocabulary don't seem to be as useful as contextualized learning, IE: at the train station, at the bank, etc.
The importance of getting to sound right from the start is something that is stressed a lot in the Pimsleur description, and I think it makes sense. Having a good pronunciation will give you so much better confidence, and chances to actually interact with native speakers, while they also claim it is much harder for the brain to relearn something that got wrongly learned, than learning it correctly from the start.
I’m doing Duolingo Spanish now, every day for over a year and a half. It’s a reasonably entertaining way to practice and pick up vocab, but I don’t know how much proficiency I’m achieving.
This extended to vocabulary. If I forgot a piece of vocabulary, the teacher would call on me again later in the same class to either make the same mistake or remember it this time.
This was one of the best classes I ever took in college, in any subject.
I'm not sure it should be instilled as ruthlessly as you suggest but it does reinforce the fact that there are some things you just can't learn from an app alone.
Herr Doktor Liermann absolutely grilled me day after day. Twenty-five years later, my classmates still recall vividly the "fünf" incident. So I get what you are saying, yet there's something about the way these apps are blocking that I find irritating more than helpful.
But occasionally I do use iOS’s built in Translate app and test my pronunciation by speaking Spanish and seeing if it can translate it to English.
Going the other way is about 95% effective for me.
That's pretty clever.
Thank you so much for this tip, it is honestly astounding how well this works and I can instantly see how useful it's going to be!
I mean, if you get the pronunciation wrong, you're going to have a terrible time and I speak from experience trying to get a bottle of water in France and not having realized that I had the pronunciation so badly wrong they thought I was a Brit trying to find the bathroom (l'eau [~low] vs. loo).
Lest anybody accuse me of trafficking in stereotypes about the French, this is a real example from my life.
She took it upon herself to walk through the hotel bar & restaurant searching out a group of mature, well-spoken women.
I just tried this on ChatGPT, looks pretty good:
What is the grammatical error in this sentence: "The dog eat the cake."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the verb "eat" should be in the third person singular form "eats" to agree with the subject "dog." The correct sentence would be: "The dog eats the cake."
What is the grammatical error in this sentance: "I have been living here since three years."
>> The grammatical error in this sentence is that the preposition "since" should be followed by a specific point in time, such as a date or year. The correct sentence would be: "I have been living here for three years." Alternatively, you could say: "I have been living here since 2016."
This also works: Please correct this sentence: "I have been living here since three years." Do not type any additional text.
I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:
1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].
2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.
3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.
Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.
Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.
(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products.
I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.
If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)
This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and phonemes which are unknown to the recipient.
Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
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Most people manage to speak their native language just fine but very few speak it anywhere near perfectly.
Obviously, you need to learn the basics of grammar in order to construct a sentence that sounds more or less right but I'm not sure Duolingo can even do this with any degree of success.
Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos
I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going.
While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scores. While reading a very short story in Spanish, I had the experience of the first time, a second language making me laugh because what I was reading, was funny. Nothing during my five years of 8th-12th grade did that. Just sharing, it's not meant to mean anything.
Can confirm. My wife and I both took 4+ years of spanish in high school and college, over 15 years ago. We can almost get by on just that knowledge alone in spanish speaking countries, but it is difficult and we always have a translator around.
That said, we took a vacation last summer to a spanish speaking country and spent the 2 months leading up to it using Duolingo. We both had streaks for that entire time. Personally, the refresher course of Duolingo made conversing with people in their native language of Spanish MUCH easier compared to other attempts in the past. We didn't need to use our phones to lookup phrases or even ask locals to speak English. I even learned a few new words and phrases.
That isn't to say that Duolingo is the best or only option, just an anecdote about our experience.
I ended using Google translate towards the end of the trip, which was disappointing for me.
My only issue with Duolingo is that I wish there was somewhere to get much more formal information on the grammatical rules. Their inclusion currently is really poorly executed, haphazardly located in certain lessons as if random. I’d love if I could get specific lessons on demand for anything I am struggling with.
Also, it is really annoying how sometimes it gives you the translation after you are done and other times it just says “Great!” Or something similar, so if you are slightly unsure of something you don’t always get the actual translation to help clarify.
I have had this same wish. I often find myself wondering why something is a certain way and I'm not even sure how to go look it up.
You can find the excellent tips that cover grammar that used to be on the DuoLingo website at https://duome.eu/tips
As to the context of article, I'm also in the group that thinks the latest Duolingo updates are the worst to come to the platform since it's inception. It's beyond awful and I honestly despise it. I frequently went back to areas I felt myself getting rusty at, and practiced those. The new "pathway" has broke that method completely. It's impossible to see previous course content clearly, essentially forcing you through poor UX design to take the next step on the pathway instead, like you're playing Candy Crush. The update spurned me to give up on my 500+ day streak and cancel my subscription over the Summer. I haven't used the app in the last 5 months.
I'm lucky enough to live in Oxford, which is renowned so having some great evening language classes. I've signed up to my first semester starting in January which I'm very much looking forward to. If it wasn't for Duolingo, any interest in furthering my language skills would not exist. I guess it's a silver lining that an awful update to my favorite app by incompetent product management and executive decisions forced me to finally peruse a formal education in Spanish. I just wish it was a amenable break-up.
Then I stumbled upon Michel Thomas. I listened to the basic course and 2 weeks later I was in Spain speaking to people - even managed to talk my way onto a bus when I got lost and had no ticket. It’s a completely different way of learning. Speaking sentences from the first 5 minutes. You’re learning grammar from the beginning and how to actually express yourself. It’s more like a conversion course from English to Spanish (but also there’s Portuguese, French, German, some others)
He’s such an interesting guy - emigrated to the USA after the war and set up his school. Invented a whole new way of teaching languages but wouldn’t let anyone know about it because he was so mistrusting (he was a nazi hunter in the war). Only when he was 70 something did someone convince him to record the language method. The tapes when you listen have a perfect learning curve - there’s always 2 students, one is good the other not so good so you feel better than them. I assumed he must have recorded many versions and then extensively edited - NOPE - they’re all recorded in a one time session. He was just that good.
BBC has made a documentary about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 6 worst pupils French in like 2 weeks.
He’s a genuine legend and the only reason I speak Spanish.
If you want to learn a language please try this out. It is just on a different level to anything else, especially the BS repetition of duolingo type sites - although they are useful later when you want to just learn vocabulary.
Anyway, as you may be able to tell, I am always very excited to pass on Michel Thomas. What a dude. RIP.
It's very effective for learning conversation essentials.
https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish
However, it’s really not great for review. I’ve tried to go back even after a couple years and listen to the Italian course again, but couldn’t do it.
So it’s a great (amazing (fantastic)) ‘boost’ but I wouldn’t rely on it entirely
Outside of being immersed in the language, Language Transfer (which I'm currently using to learn Spanish) is easily the best method I have ever used. It relies mainly on recognizing patterns, rather than memorization, which is right up my alley. Maybe others do better with memorization?
It's also free, and very convenient (lessons are on YouTube, SoundCloud, downloaded MP3 files, or Android/iOS app). I'm a Patreon supporter, because I believe in it.
While I can't really speak to its efficacy, I really liked it, thus would probably stick with it, thereby making it effective.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33933602