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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Just one more anecdote, but this is what turned me off from duolingo completely. You can't just learn words or sentences alone, you have to have at least some grammar in there. You need lists of prepositions and pronouns, and you need a little bit of at least simple rules for verbs and nouns. Yes, it's boring but otherwise you'll really struggle.

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Many (but not all) Duolingo languages, eg Chinese, actually have basic grammar covered in the Tips section boxes before each lesson:

https://www.duolingo.com/skill/zs/Existence/tips

However, this feature is not really discoverable and often the main content that follows is only loosely if at all related.

Even worse, it is (or at least was) not available in all methods used to access the content. I think it is available on the web, where I started using Duolingo during a downtime at work, and when I later wanted to continue, I just did not find the button for it on the iOS app (or the other way around). That is pretty terrible for such a basic part of the learning experience.

It took me a while to find the "tips" lessons on duolingo but now I always review them before the translation drills and usually find them to be relevant.

I don't find Duo helpful in isolation for this (and many other) reasons.

But I've found ~15 minutes per day to be fairly helpful in conjunction with other activities.

Not that I disagree necessarily, but to play devil's advocate: kids don't learn any formal grammar rules before they speak their first language fluently.

Well kind of depends what you mean. Kids do years of formal grammar in school here in Germany, the language is hard. Kids take a long time to pick up a language via immersion and they typically don’t need to express any complicated constructs. They also have all their needs met by a caregiver, I know what you’re getting at but it’s impractical for most adults to learn this way.

To be fair, people were speaking German for hundreds of years without any formal education in grammar.

But the key point is that, while it is POSSIBLE to learn a language this way, it is definitely more efficient with some formal training as well, until you can develop the "ear" for it.

> But the key point is that, while it is POSSIBLE to learn a language this way, it is definitely more efficient with some formal training as well, until you can develop the "ear" for it.

Agreed. This is the main point I was getting at.

Sure, but there are two caveats:

1. Kids take about 7-10 years of constant immersion to become fluent in a language

2. Child brains are different from adult brains, and it is likely that the ability to pick up a language in this way degrades significantly after a certain age

I'm not saying it is impossible to pick up a language without being told the grammar rules, just that it's much faster if you do learn them.

> 2. Child brains are different from adult brains, and it is likely that the ability to pick up a language in this way degrades significantly after a certain age.

There is plenty of evidence which counters the latter part of this claim (see Stephen Krashen and the input hypothesis).

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