I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate.
When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I find out I need to learn how to recognize Haber, Poder, Ir, and Tener in preterite and future tenses at conversational speed. Otherwise I can't hold the context for whatever is going on (we tend to talk about what I did the last week, which I love. Throughout the week I lookup words and build a vocabulary in anticipation for our conversations)
I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons, and answering questions about stories. I pay way more attention for those questions and really feel like I am getting better at hearing the language. However, I spend more time, and I do better at those questions. I fly through the other questions and tend to make typos which are bad enough where I get the question wrong. I don't know if this trains the AI to keep giving me easier things that I don't pay much attention to.
Thanks! I had 4 years in High School (well, 3 years took me 4 years :)). That was 2 decades ago. Some of it, apparently, stayed in my head.
I have learned WAY more with Duolingo in 6 months (10 to 15 mins a day, but I started slower) than I learned in 4 years through High School (US). Just one data point, but I've heard similar from friends. TBH I am more motivated today than I was in school, so I'm sure that plays a part.
I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 3 months. Prior to this I only had a half year in middle school in the 80s. I'm not quite 20% of the way through their material. I just got back from a trip in a Spanish speaking country and to be honest was pleasantly surprised at the level of ability I had. Mind you that level was nowhere near good, I'm sure I'd still classify as an A1 level. But I had figured everything would still sound like gibberish to me and that was far from the case.
If you pay for the subscription version, there are dedicated listening and speaking lessons on the practice page that tend to be more challenging than the ones you get in the lessons. It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well. I’m planning on creating a multilingual blog to practice my writing though. They do a duolingo Spanish podcast as well that you might be interested in.
> It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well.
Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections. Nice to get some feedback, but I don’t have any real way to know how correct or comprehensive it is.
Yeah but you basically get two stories every unit so it’s not a lot of practice. It’s weird that they have dedicated speaking and listening lessons but no dedicated writing lessons (you could count stories or general practice as reading). It’s definitely another improvement I’d like to see at some point.
> I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons
I feel the same (approx 205 days of French). While the multi-modal aspect(text&audio) was helpful especially at the beginning of the course, I feel like text now is a crutch at times. I wish some of the tasks were audio only and required either answering from among text responses, or single word speech responses.
Because of this crutch, I feel well equipped to approach written French in my day-to-day life, but freeze up at even simple questions like "Parles-tu français ?" I feel like I would freeze less if I could practice these types of exchanges in app, but part of me also knows that the best solution to this problem is simply getting over it with a language partner or teacher.
I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.)
I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.
For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.
I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.
But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.
What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.
I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.
Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)
Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)
Duolingo was my gateway drug to Anki. I just can't imagine going back to Duolingo with the speed of going through say a 100 cards in Anki. There is just so much animation/sounds/nonsense in the way with Duolingo. It would take at least 10X longer.
There is absolutely something special about building decks too. I also get pretty much the same motivation from the timeline statistics in Anki as the streaks in Duolingo.
This is a really interesting article that not only gives insight into how Duolingo works technically but also maybe how Duolingo works as an organization culturally.
The most recent changes to UI reduced user choice on what to learn and practice significantly. Some of it is being repaired, but if you are continuing to use Duolingo you are deferring to its algorithm significantly on how you should learn.
This is probably a good thing in some ways as they are potentially better at identifying weaknesses I'm not aware of. However, I know for a fact that I'm weak on some things and I want to practice those things with their exercises. It'd be really helpful if it gave me the freedom to make my own decisions more easily. For instance, scrolling back in lesson history was lousy previously but at least possible. With the path UI it's much worse - still technically possible but so much scrolling.
Solving for this would be pretty easy. "Jump scrolling" as I call it, not sure if that's the correct term, where the scrolling shows indexes based on letter or number that you can scroll through more quickly would let me go back to lessons I want to revisit more easily. I'm also sure that people who work on algorithms like this are capable of coming up with other ways to take into account how I might know or understand my own weaknesses that their observations can't just detect. I see no curiosity about that in this article though.
It's pretty clear that Duolingo is more invested in improving their algorithms and all of what is discussed is entirely based on observing the learner rather asking the directly or providing them easy ability to make their own learning path when you feel Duo isn't getting it right.
I still use Duolingo and think it's been a great way for me to learn a language that I probably wouldn't learn otherwise. However I'll always be slightly disappointed in how restricted it feels. It's a tough balance for sure and I can probably solve my concerns with outside solutions like supplemental reading and flash card apps. But I would love to have Duolingo adapt to my preferences in some ways and take into account how I know my own deficiencies in learning. I just don't think they're culturally or financially motivated to make those changes, and I live with that comfortably for the most part. At least until I read articles like this that informs me that I'm paying for some amazing learning technology that has no interest in directly listening to me.
I hope they consider changing, I won't be surprised or upset if they don't.
The CEO of Duolingo has gone on their subreddit and been super insistent about how the redesign is amazing because they have AB test results to prove it.
Complaining directly is useless in the face of a rigid data driven approach (assuming the correct data is even being gathered), so I've decided to vote with my feet and hit em in the OKRs by switching to another app. I've been using Lingodeer
Man, the new redesign is terrible. I usually don't do reviews on the Playstore, but this made me give a 1-star with what I thought of as reasonable and constructive.
Sounds like it's not going to be changed back. It's a shame, really.
It's just so stupid. Every time I give it a chance I end up this way: it repeatedly asks me stupid questions, I get bored, I start clicking-through it faster and faster without thinking, I make stupid mistakes while knowing right answers - for purely mechanical reasons and lack of attention, it asks me more stupid questions because of this.
I think there should be a "never show/ask me this again" button on every slide/question in every learning app. This alone can make their "AI"s a lot smarter.
This is precisely my fear using an AI model. I don't want to end up in some local minima where I endlessly misspell Snow, and get forced into aggressive weather training.
Through italki (spanish) I make tu/usted (informal/formal) mistakes, I make plural mistakes, and I make gender mistakes. My italki instructor still understands me and we can focus on other things.
I have a related but different experience: it's constantly asking me about "library" or "spring" and it's been a long long time since I've made a mistake. Why is it not trying to review other words where I do make mistakes, or even words where I need to click on the translation / listen to the audio multiple times? It always makes me a little doubtful of their claims.
> It’s a nudge from Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, whose algorithms know you’re most likely to do your 5 minutes of Spanish practice at this time of day. The app chooses its notification words based on what has worked for you in the past and the specifics of your recent achievements, adding a dash of attention-catching novelty.
Ugh. I want so badly to believe that this kind of technology of manipulation would be used for nothing but good.
Unfortunately I know better. Duolingo, and education in general, is a great use-case for many of these technologies. The reality of how they'll be employed has been, and will continue to be, less rosy.
Duolingo quality varies a lot based on which specific language you're doing. Some features (e.g. stories) aren't available in all languages.
It's possible this is just the language I'm learning, but the "duolingo learning what you need to learn" seems iffy in my experience. It frequently prioritizes three words for me: "spring", "autumn" and "bag". It's unclear why, but every time I do an "review of old material" practice there are those three lessons.
There's a lot of material which I make actual mistakes on that it could prioritize, but it never does. It used to be you could get a the whole list of words (and duo's rating of your progress) but they killed the endpoint with the redesign. (Probably reasonable, the main use case for it was to dump the course into something like Anki... certainly that's what I was going to do with it).
I definitely made a fair amount of progress using Duo, but never got beyond the "struggle to communicate in any meaningful way" stage. Fluent Forever (a competing app) got me a lot farther (but is expensive and requires a fair amount of invested effort), and some basic flashcards got me much closer to reading comprehension than grinding Duo lessons.
All in all I can't tell if this is a marketing speak that is only loosely connected to reality or if duolingo just has inconsistently rolled out features.
> I definitely made a fair amount of progress using Duo, but never got beyond the “struggle to communicate in any meaningful way” stage.
How far did you go in Duolingo? I have been working away at it for 10-30 min/day for around 18 months and am around halfway through Intermediate 2. I find I can read and write quite well but my speaking has a lot of room for improvement. I feel like if I fully immersed myself in the language, the base I’ve built would allow me to get to oral fluency quite quickly.
The article reads like ad copy. Not surprising given the author. My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally. It attempts to make you feel like you're adept at the language to keep you motivated. This is accomplished by teaching you a restricted subset of the language that you can become skilled at, but isn't necessarily sufficient in real world usage. It also contains a number of guardrails meant to prevent you from making any mistakes except by choice. This leads you to learn the language to an extremely shallow depth. Importantly, you forget how much you are relying on these guardrails, and hence think you have a deeper understanding than you really do. Hopefully duo's expansion into teaching other subjects doesn't maintain these flaws.
> but isn't necessarily sufficient in real world usage
IIRC Duolingo only claims to get to even B1 level for a couple of their most robust language courses. Not sure what you view as sufficient for real world but B1 is about where I'd personally draw the line.
Duolingo can get you surprisingly far for vocabulary and alphabet memorization, but it will not bring you to functional fluency since it simply doesn't have any practice for that in it. They have tried to correct this for some languages, adding in 'stories'.
All that said, it was actually a really great introductory program that made language learning more approchable. As an early intro and vocabulary supplement it is great. After that you will want to seek greater depths of learning and get immersed in content of the target language.
Defined as verbal communication only? It has got me far enough so far that I can read certain newspapers with good comprehension. (I am at Intermediate 2 on Duo, so I suspect this will improve further)
Basic fluency is usually considered to be at the B2 level. Duolingo is generally viewed as topping people out around the A2/B1 range, depending on the language. I've seen them claim that their more thorough classes can get you to B2 but that would definitely not be the case halfway through their course material.
> My working assumption is that duolingo's goal is to keep you using the app, and only ever teaches you a language coincidentally.
For what purpose? You either subscribe or you don’t, and once you subscribe you’d think they would want to show you real results so you continue to subscribe. If it was just shallow learning then they would lose subscribers over time once people wised up to this, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. It seems incentives are aligned to actually learn! How do you monetize what you are saying?
Total anecdata but with a combination of Duolingo and a French wife I've learned conversational French much faster (3.5 years) than I learned conversational Dutch with Dutch friends and books (5+ years).
So I guess I agree that while Duolingo alone isn't enough to get good at a language I have been frequently amazed by how it "gets" where I'm at on my learning journey.
Especially recently I've started taking the occasional tests it provides and that seems to change my learning journey in a convincing way.
New with Duolingo, agreed that it tends to keep you at a high level of success.
I disagree that this is (only) about keeping you using the app. When I studied piano, it was critical to work through pieces slowly and in small snippets that you could play. If that meant a quarter the speed marked, so be it (if slower than that, you'd bitten off more than you could chew). Otherwise, you weren't practicing the music, you were practicing your own mistakes. So a 95+ success is really about practicing reading and producing the language correctly as it is about playing games (the games may help ease the conscious boredom of the same thing over and over while the reflexes build).
Also, something like 'the owl' and 'the mouse' may seem trivial and logo-ed, but the language angle is 'le hibou' vs 'la souris' (masculine vs feminine gender) and these don't follow across different languages ('die Eule, die Maus' - both feminine) so repeating this along with exercises that flesh this out has value. I do think that the exercises don't often enough provide the opportunity to get it wrong, but that may be the 95% thing.
Students waste a tremendous amount of time learning these things which could be better spent elsewhere.
What if what humanity needs to realize is that language learning is a waste of time, unless you are studying the history of language. There's no reason we shouldn't have only one planetary language, besides the whims of governments and nationalists.
I dream of a advanced designed language that incorporates the best features of existing written and verbal systems. Now that's a goal worth spending time on.
That discards a _lot_ of culture along with it, no?
Learning languages is fun, and the people you can meet (which you wouldn't otherwise) and things you learn about your own native languages is worth it to me.
The most learned language on Duolingo is English, which is as close to a universal language as we have.
I think anything that allows other people to get outside their box and learn more about (and from!) people who don't share the same cultural background is a positive for the world.
I just disagree entirely with this. Isn't Esperanto that planetary language? Or possibly even English? Apparently it doesn't scale a 8 billion people, and I'll say that is A Good Thing.
What if what humanity needs is to realize that you don't have to scale to the limits of the planet for something to be worth while.
Maybe the "time better spent elsewhere" should be spent learning that we are all humans with amazing cultural backgrounds, and what could be a better way to engage with others than through language?
I've just been reading way to much history of South America recently to accept this idea, but let's be honest, the entire world is based on this concept. Every time somebody tries to setup a "Planetary Language/Religion/Culture" it comes at the expense of "the others". Fuck this idea.
I tried Duolingo Spanish pretty much every day for 1-2 years at the highest rate (5 lessons/day IIRC) and honestly... I don't remember any of it.
The vocab is extremely selective (and limited). It's too easy to guess answers without knowing them. Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last. It seems like your recorded "fluency" just faded at a simplistic rate rather than there being any true attempt at spaced repetition.
And then there was the gamification. The main goal of this was, of course, to get you to pay. At some point (years ago now) they added this hearts system where guessing wrong would hurt you. This is completely counterproductive (IMHO). The streaks, the badges, etc. It just seemed like it was shallow engagement bait.
But an AI that learns what you need to learn? No way. Not even close.
> Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last
This might be a newer feature and perhaps only on the browser version, as I don't use the app. But you can configure Duolingo to make you type in all the words freeform instead of suggesting words for you. This helps get rid of the little cheat you mention above.
It's interesting as I fired up the web app for the first time in a week (was on vacation to a country speaking the language I'm taking) and it won't let me select the keyboard option. I wonder if they're in the process of getting rid of it.
I gave up on DuoLingo after 150 days trying to learn Spanish. It was pretty good at first. But the gamification, constant alerts, repetitiveness and everything being multiple choice got to be a bit much.
I switched to Babbel last week. It seems to do a better job at teaching you the basics.
The pedagogy around learning a language has changed since I tried and utterly and completely failed to learn a language as a student.
Learning languages is awesome, and I fucking hated it and was awful at it. So I’m curious if new approaches will be more successful overall, but after some initial head scratching I’m curious to learn more about language pedagogy and hope my kids do better than I did!
i wish there was a language app designed around tim feriss' paretto principle with languages where you can focus on the top 500 most used words which are like 60% of a language so you can be proficient at a travel level or survival level in just a few months. Or even a day get the top 50 or so and be ready to order some food where you're going.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 74.1 ms ] threadWhen I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I find out I need to learn how to recognize Haber, Poder, Ir, and Tener in preterite and future tenses at conversational speed. Otherwise I can't hold the context for whatever is going on (we tend to talk about what I did the last week, which I love. Throughout the week I lookup words and build a vocabulary in anticipation for our conversations)
I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons, and answering questions about stories. I pay way more attention for those questions and really feel like I am getting better at hearing the language. However, I spend more time, and I do better at those questions. I fly through the other questions and tend to make typos which are bad enough where I get the question wrong. I don't know if this trains the AI to keep giving me easier things that I don't pay much attention to.
I have learned WAY more with Duolingo in 6 months (10 to 15 mins a day, but I started slower) than I learned in 4 years through High School (US). Just one data point, but I've heard similar from friends. TBH I am more motivated today than I was in school, so I'm sure that plays a part.
Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections. Nice to get some feedback, but I don’t have any real way to know how correct or comprehensive it is.
I feel the same (approx 205 days of French). While the multi-modal aspect(text&audio) was helpful especially at the beginning of the course, I feel like text now is a crutch at times. I wish some of the tasks were audio only and required either answering from among text responses, or single word speech responses.
Because of this crutch, I feel well equipped to approach written French in my day-to-day life, but freeze up at even simple questions like "Parles-tu français ?" I feel like I would freeze less if I could practice these types of exchanges in app, but part of me also knows that the best solution to this problem is simply getting over it with a language partner or teacher.
I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.
For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.
I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.
But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.
What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.
I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.
Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)
Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)
There is absolutely something special about building decks too. I also get pretty much the same motivation from the timeline statistics in Anki as the streaks in Duolingo.
The most recent changes to UI reduced user choice on what to learn and practice significantly. Some of it is being repaired, but if you are continuing to use Duolingo you are deferring to its algorithm significantly on how you should learn.
This is probably a good thing in some ways as they are potentially better at identifying weaknesses I'm not aware of. However, I know for a fact that I'm weak on some things and I want to practice those things with their exercises. It'd be really helpful if it gave me the freedom to make my own decisions more easily. For instance, scrolling back in lesson history was lousy previously but at least possible. With the path UI it's much worse - still technically possible but so much scrolling.
Solving for this would be pretty easy. "Jump scrolling" as I call it, not sure if that's the correct term, where the scrolling shows indexes based on letter or number that you can scroll through more quickly would let me go back to lessons I want to revisit more easily. I'm also sure that people who work on algorithms like this are capable of coming up with other ways to take into account how I might know or understand my own weaknesses that their observations can't just detect. I see no curiosity about that in this article though.
It's pretty clear that Duolingo is more invested in improving their algorithms and all of what is discussed is entirely based on observing the learner rather asking the directly or providing them easy ability to make their own learning path when you feel Duo isn't getting it right.
I still use Duolingo and think it's been a great way for me to learn a language that I probably wouldn't learn otherwise. However I'll always be slightly disappointed in how restricted it feels. It's a tough balance for sure and I can probably solve my concerns with outside solutions like supplemental reading and flash card apps. But I would love to have Duolingo adapt to my preferences in some ways and take into account how I know my own deficiencies in learning. I just don't think they're culturally or financially motivated to make those changes, and I live with that comfortably for the most part. At least until I read articles like this that informs me that I'm paying for some amazing learning technology that has no interest in directly listening to me.
I hope they consider changing, I won't be surprised or upset if they don't.
Thanks for posting this article!
Complaining directly is useless in the face of a rigid data driven approach (assuming the correct data is even being gathered), so I've decided to vote with my feet and hit em in the OKRs by switching to another app. I've been using Lingodeer
Sounds like it's not going to be changed back. It's a shame, really.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I think there should be a "never show/ask me this again" button on every slide/question in every learning app. This alone can make their "AI"s a lot smarter.
Through italki (spanish) I make tu/usted (informal/formal) mistakes, I make plural mistakes, and I make gender mistakes. My italki instructor still understands me and we can focus on other things.
Ugh. I want so badly to believe that this kind of technology of manipulation would be used for nothing but good.
Unfortunately I know better. Duolingo, and education in general, is a great use-case for many of these technologies. The reality of how they'll be employed has been, and will continue to be, less rosy.
It's possible this is just the language I'm learning, but the "duolingo learning what you need to learn" seems iffy in my experience. It frequently prioritizes three words for me: "spring", "autumn" and "bag". It's unclear why, but every time I do an "review of old material" practice there are those three lessons.
There's a lot of material which I make actual mistakes on that it could prioritize, but it never does. It used to be you could get a the whole list of words (and duo's rating of your progress) but they killed the endpoint with the redesign. (Probably reasonable, the main use case for it was to dump the course into something like Anki... certainly that's what I was going to do with it).
I definitely made a fair amount of progress using Duo, but never got beyond the "struggle to communicate in any meaningful way" stage. Fluent Forever (a competing app) got me a lot farther (but is expensive and requires a fair amount of invested effort), and some basic flashcards got me much closer to reading comprehension than grinding Duo lessons.
All in all I can't tell if this is a marketing speak that is only loosely connected to reality or if duolingo just has inconsistently rolled out features.
How far did you go in Duolingo? I have been working away at it for 10-30 min/day for around 18 months and am around halfway through Intermediate 2. I find I can read and write quite well but my speaking has a lot of room for improvement. I feel like if I fully immersed myself in the language, the base I’ve built would allow me to get to oral fluency quite quickly.
IIRC Duolingo only claims to get to even B1 level for a couple of their most robust language courses. Not sure what you view as sufficient for real world but B1 is about where I'd personally draw the line.
All that said, it was actually a really great introductory program that made language learning more approchable. As an early intro and vocabulary supplement it is great. After that you will want to seek greater depths of learning and get immersed in content of the target language.
Defined as verbal communication only? It has got me far enough so far that I can read certain newspapers with good comprehension. (I am at Intermediate 2 on Duo, so I suspect this will improve further)
For what purpose? You either subscribe or you don’t, and once you subscribe you’d think they would want to show you real results so you continue to subscribe. If it was just shallow learning then they would lose subscribers over time once people wised up to this, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. It seems incentives are aligned to actually learn! How do you monetize what you are saying?
So I guess I agree that while Duolingo alone isn't enough to get good at a language I have been frequently amazed by how it "gets" where I'm at on my learning journey.
Especially recently I've started taking the occasional tests it provides and that seems to change my learning journey in a convincing way.
I disagree that this is (only) about keeping you using the app. When I studied piano, it was critical to work through pieces slowly and in small snippets that you could play. If that meant a quarter the speed marked, so be it (if slower than that, you'd bitten off more than you could chew). Otherwise, you weren't practicing the music, you were practicing your own mistakes. So a 95+ success is really about practicing reading and producing the language correctly as it is about playing games (the games may help ease the conscious boredom of the same thing over and over while the reflexes build).
Also, something like 'the owl' and 'the mouse' may seem trivial and logo-ed, but the language angle is 'le hibou' vs 'la souris' (masculine vs feminine gender) and these don't follow across different languages ('die Eule, die Maus' - both feminine) so repeating this along with exercises that flesh this out has value. I do think that the exercises don't often enough provide the opportunity to get it wrong, but that may be the 95% thing.
What if what humanity needs to realize is that language learning is a waste of time, unless you are studying the history of language. There's no reason we shouldn't have only one planetary language, besides the whims of governments and nationalists.
I dream of a advanced designed language that incorporates the best features of existing written and verbal systems. Now that's a goal worth spending time on.
Learning languages is fun, and the people you can meet (which you wouldn't otherwise) and things you learn about your own native languages is worth it to me.
I think anything that allows other people to get outside their box and learn more about (and from!) people who don't share the same cultural background is a positive for the world.
What if what humanity needs is to realize that you don't have to scale to the limits of the planet for something to be worth while.
Maybe the "time better spent elsewhere" should be spent learning that we are all humans with amazing cultural backgrounds, and what could be a better way to engage with others than through language?
I've just been reading way to much history of South America recently to accept this idea, but let's be honest, the entire world is based on this concept. Every time somebody tries to setup a "Planetary Language/Religion/Culture" it comes at the expense of "the others". Fuck this idea.
All this is lost if we all switched to Esperanto tomorrow.
I tried Duolingo Spanish pretty much every day for 1-2 years at the highest rate (5 lessons/day IIRC) and honestly... I don't remember any of it.
The vocab is extremely selective (and limited). It's too easy to guess answers without knowing them. Simple things like capitalization giving away the first word of the answer and trailing puncutation giving away the last. It seems like your recorded "fluency" just faded at a simplistic rate rather than there being any true attempt at spaced repetition.
And then there was the gamification. The main goal of this was, of course, to get you to pay. At some point (years ago now) they added this hearts system where guessing wrong would hurt you. This is completely counterproductive (IMHO). The streaks, the badges, etc. It just seemed like it was shallow engagement bait.
But an AI that learns what you need to learn? No way. Not even close.
This might be a newer feature and perhaps only on the browser version, as I don't use the app. But you can configure Duolingo to make you type in all the words freeform instead of suggesting words for you. This helps get rid of the little cheat you mention above.
Also the cheat mentioned above only sort of works because the app does remove them when it wants to make a question more difficult I've found.
I switched to Babbel last week. It seems to do a better job at teaching you the basics.
Learning languages is awesome, and I fucking hated it and was awful at it. So I’m curious if new approaches will be more successful overall, but after some initial head scratching I’m curious to learn more about language pedagogy and hope my kids do better than I did!