by hyperific on 4/29/25, 5:45 AM with 363 comments
by sieve on 4/29/25, 4:11 PM
The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.
After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like
sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti
sarvē janāḥ gacchanti
sarvē janāḥ namanti
and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.
To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.
[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)
by pergadad on 4/29/25, 1:31 PM
That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?
Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.
by salimmadjd on 4/29/25, 3:27 PM
Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).
If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.
by daniel_iversen on 4/29/25, 6:16 AM
by _fat_santa on 4/29/25, 2:38 PM
First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.
With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
by anothereng on 4/29/25, 1:41 PM
by Tor3 on 4/29/25, 6:35 AM
by joaohaas on 4/29/25, 2:43 PM
by est on 4/29/25, 6:57 AM
So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?
by ReflectedImage on 4/29/25, 1:30 PM
by hyperific on 4/29/25, 4:22 PM
https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...
by simonbarker87 on 4/29/25, 6:56 AM
by mentalgear on 4/29/25, 10:36 AM
I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.
But overall, great work !
by zelphirkalt on 4/29/25, 4:57 PM
I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.
One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".
by jmyeet on 4/29/25, 2:40 PM
Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:
- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")
- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);
- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;
- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.
- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;
- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.
- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.
My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.
Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).
I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
by GardenLetter27 on 4/29/25, 10:22 AM
It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.
Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.
Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
by pessimizer on 4/29/25, 4:13 PM
The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.
Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.
I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.
Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.
by sschueller on 4/29/25, 6:35 AM
by neofight78 on 4/29/25, 7:24 AM
by monkeyelite on 4/29/25, 7:47 AM
by mattkevan on 4/29/25, 1:55 PM
But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.
Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]
---
[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.
[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.
Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?
by shemtay on 4/29/25, 3:40 PM
Nevertheless, Duolingo is an amazing and convenient starting point for unlocking the learning of new languages.
Make your way through the entire course as fast as you can, while also listening to music, talking to people, talking to chatGPT, reading books, etc in the target language as soon as you can manage.
Protip: learn your 3rd language using your second as the language of instruction.
by brewdad on 4/29/25, 7:46 PM
Being a far less popular language than the standard "big boys" that most apps, web sites, books etc tend to offer, it's been a lot of false starts for me or simply feeling a bit lost when a resource throws me directly into a scene to learn dialog without having any of the foundational knowledge first.
I plan to spend a year or two (at least) in the Philippines in the not too distant future. While most Filipinos understand English, I feel like learning at least some Tagalog would go a long way in fitting in and feeling less like an outsider.
by insane_dreamer on 4/29/25, 7:24 PM
However, I think apps that focus on one particular language and how to learn that language are better than a one-size-fits-all approach like Duolingo. The structure and grammar of languages like Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and French (I've learned all 4) are all significantly different from each other. Or at least different approaches for language groups (French and Spanish, which I also speak, are similar enough to warrant the same approach).
by alkonaut on 4/29/25, 3:16 PM
I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience not to be very janky in the end.
by jiffygist on 4/29/25, 2:24 PM
by pkdpic on 4/29/25, 3:11 PM
Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out there... Im getting closer...
I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!
Please Duo hear my prayers...
by psychoslave on 4/29/25, 2:42 PM
I’m mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two have voice recognition it seems.
by kamatour on 4/29/25, 3:04 PM
by i_am_a_squirrel on 4/29/25, 7:07 AM
by gitroom on 4/30/25, 6:38 AM
by martinrue on 4/30/25, 10:32 AM
by dang on 4/29/25, 7:59 PM
Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 - April 2025 (43 comments)
by throwaway743 on 4/29/25, 2:11 PM
by thenoblesunfish on 4/29/25, 3:03 PM
by Pavilion2095 on 4/29/25, 2:25 PM
by charcircuit on 4/29/25, 9:00 AM
by sh3rl0ck on 4/29/25, 5:00 PM
by damjon on 4/29/25, 4:01 PM
by alganet on 4/29/25, 10:07 PM
by gnarlouse on 4/30/25, 3:56 AM
coded applications with injected content are ~GASP~ not the way humans learn language.
I know that this LibreLingo project is probably somebody's baby, and if it works for them great. Heck, if it works for you, great! But for anybody who really wants to (durably) learn a new language, aren't the results already in? Immerse yourself in the language, be around people. At the very least, listen to native speakers on YouTube or something. Read articles/books. Struggle at it, like a baby! That's not pejorative either; babies are the world's premier language learners.
by unbleaveable on 4/29/25, 11:36 AM
Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?
Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add the word libre?