Can a chatbot teach you a foreign language? Duolingo thinks so | Hacker News Reader

Can a chatbot teach you a foreign language? Duolingo thinks so

theguardian.com

24 pointsm0nty10 comments

This sounds incredible. Can't believe I haven't heard of it. My kids are trying to learn French and I'm going to have the whole family try to use it. This is one of those things where I say "Why didn't I think of that?" The chatbot lives and has utility, who knew?

Have you used the current Duolingo app? It really is good. I'm also using it for French, I've been stuck on "basic French" for too long now so I'm making a concerted effort to raise my game.

They also just release spaced repetition software called Tinycards, although Anki might be better at the moment, according to the reviews. Either way, I wish I'd had this stuff at school.

Still patiently waiting for duolingo to have Korean for English Speakers as an option. :/ it's been years

I believe recently they moved some stage ahead with English for Korean speakers, but it seems to be taking forever :(

Just wanted to say Duolingo is fantastic software. I've been using it to learn spanish and I'm blown away at the level of quality.

Hm, the frequency of odd phrases such as "I need a horse", "she is a double agent" and "you only need two witnesses" put me off. I found the sentences distracting and too simplistic.

On topics such as the future perfect, it constructs weird sentences such as 'Nosotros habremos llamado a la policía' (we will have called the police (strange in the first person plural)) and 'la pareja habrá muerto' (the couple will have died). I suspect little human effort goes in to the examples.

There are tumblr blogs dedicated to Duolingos funny sentences!

I really wish I could use Duolingo on the subway...

You can... When it asks you to speak, you can hit "Not now" and it disables the microphone for an hour. It's not great about caching lessons offline, but it definitely prefetches a handful.

Everytime I've tried that I can usually finish the section I'm on, but can't move onto the next one. I've read they used to have an implicit caching behavior, but that hasn't been my experience.

You can set it to never speak/listen and only do text. That's how I use it. Obviously I'm missing out on the hearing/speaking portion of learning the language, but it's still been pretty useful

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