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Comment by bayesian_horse | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend the Duolingo German from English course instead. It has an app, so you can practice wherever you are, it has grammar, audio, speech recognition, spaced repitition (how ever much you want of that) and gameification. Duolingo courses and exercises are also improved through data-based methods.

I have completed Spanish, Mandarin and Norwegian. The Spanish and Norwegian ones are very comprehensive, the Mandarin tops off at around 1000 words. German also seems to be one of their most polished languages, contrasted with courses in Hawaiian and Navajo.

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Duolingo is really really bad at teaching you anything remotely useful. It tried it for both languages I know (Japanese, French) and another I don't know (Czech) and in both case the experience was terrible. It's basically just quizzes with no lesson on grammar whatsoever. Sentences are taken from corpora so they sometimes are really unnatural. Speech is TTS. It's a beautifully designed glorified vocabulary app that has low educational value.

The mobile apps don't have grammar, but the web site does, for most skills in most languages. Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.

The sentences are not taken from corpora, but edited by Humans, mostly volunteers. The courses are improved using user data. Some of the courses are indeed not the best quality.

If TTS is used (many courses use natural speakers), it was OK for me, so far.

Duolingo isn't perfect but I think it's the most efficient way to learn a new language from nothing up to a certain level (A2, maybe B1). If used correctly. You need to decide yourself how much time you spend on repetition vs progress. And yes, you probably need something else for full grammar explanation or Chinese/Japanese Characters. Though they are reportedly working on better Character exercises.

> The mobile apps don't have grammar, but the web site does, for most skills in most languages.

Ok, I’ve never been far enough on their website to see it (I mostly test the mobile app). I’ll check it soon.

> Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.

Which defeat using Duolingo in the first place. And no, some language have quite complicated grammar (Czech, Turkish, Finnish for instance) and somewhat lacking in ressources if your native language isn’t English.

You won't be learning a language from a single source ever. Duolingo is the most efficient for what it does, including teaching grammar, actually.

Yes, it might help to have a more organized grammar reference, but Duolingo does make you practice grammar quite efficiently in my experience.

For those complaining about Duolingo: Are there better routes? The convenience of the app, integrating audio, grammar and vocabulary are really hard to beat in terms of learning efficiency, even if you might have an in-person course.

My personal recommendation would be Memrise's third party 5000 word deck for vocabulary, and something like this course or a tutor for grammar.

I used Duolingo for a month when starting out and consider it a mistake. It doesn't teach grammar, vocabulary goes faster when you space repitition individual words, and even after the full tree is unlocked there isn't really that much depth.

I like Duolingo because it is so accessible, however I found that it doesn't bring you up to the level where you are able to speak a language in practice.

For instance, I completed the entire French course but I still can't have even a basic conversation when I'm in France.

Did you keep the skills at level 1?

What do you think is holding you back? Is it that you don't know how to form a sentence, are you unsure to come up with the right words, do you think the course didn't contain the words you need?

In my opinion the Duolingo course does contain the necessary words, phrases and grammar for holding a conversation. But it may not be enough to understand native speakers at native speeds. And maybe you need to be more confident!

I would recommend listening to French podcasts or videos even if you don't understand them. With subtitles if available.

>> Did you keep the skills at level 1?

I went through all the levels.

>> What do you think is holding you back?

What was holding me back was: 1. Spoken French goes much faster than the French spoken in the course so I wasn't able to understand most of it.

2. To form a sentence to express yourself in real life is much more difficult than to translate a given English sentence like in DuoLingo.

I agree that to be able to use a language you need to do more than just follow a course like DuoLingo; you have to read books, watch television and most important practice it in real life.

Listening comprehension is the toughest part for virtually everyone.

Forming sentences gets easier once you make the switch from translating sentences into composing them without the intermediate step. That's also possible when translating in Duolingo, you just have to concentrate on formulating the idea in the foreign language.

I made that switch in English first, and I seem to do it by default in any other language. It's much easier that way.

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