Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

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I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-featured app.

Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are no vignettes like in Spanish and French where you watch a conversation and then summarize what was said. They just throw in new concepts with no instruction whatsoever. So you see a word that you know is a verb, but the ending is one you've never seen before. There's no chart or examples, or even explanation that "now we're going to teach you past tense," or whatever. Just suddenly there's a bunch of new stuff you don't understand and you have to go to the Internet to look up what the hell is happening. God forbid you ask a question on the forum. The Greek mods are stereotypically rude and controlling. Nothing is ever the fault of the app, it's always the user's fault, even when native English speakers are telling them, "The English translation of this sentence doesn't make sense and is not valid English."

So yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay for an AI that is likely giving wrong advice anyway.

Not relevant to the discussion but possibly for you: I discovered this 100% free no-signup audio-only course for Greek through a previous HN post. Amazing approach (like Michel Thomas but more charming and modern and free!):

https://www.languagetransfer.org/about

Of all the language apps I used Duolingo has by far been the least useful. I've spent hundreds of hours but took barely anything away (for FR, ES) If you must pay go to a proper app with structured learning, like babble or something language specific.

Hey, thanks for this recommendation!

I’m Greek and I’ve never heard of LanguageTransfer before (it’s even created by another Greek, Michalis). I used for a few months the free tier of Duolingo in the past, but it wasn’t to my liking and although it helped a bit, I can’t say it taught me Spanish (perhaps the paid version is better).

For sure I’m going to try the free Spanish course from LanguageTransfer ;-)

Languagetransfer taught me Spanish about 10 years ago, really excellent approach.

Thanks! I read about it previously on HN, but haven’t had a chance to check it out. I’m going to do that now. For what it’s worth, I have learned stuff with Duolingo, but it could be so much more (for me) if they’d get feature parity with some of the other languages. I get that Greek probably doesn’t have a lot of people trying to learn it, but it’s sad.

+1 for language transfer, great execution of a great method.

Follow up recommendation: for Spanish, “Madrigals Key” is language transfer in book form. It can in fact be used as a workbook for this course.

Oh, I see the Greek course has gotten worse.

Before the UX update at the end of last year, I was trying Arabic (something like 2 years of daily lessons and I still couldn't manage the alphabet), Greek (felt worse than before the preceding UX change but I couldn't say why exactly), Esperanto (the audio sounded like it was done by a volunteer at their own home?), Dutch, German, and Spanish.

I'm still doing German, because I live here now, but I gave up on all the rest the day that update happened.

Oh my goodness the voices and animations are annoying. Whenever the young boy appears I have to mute my speakers.

I'm sure they're hyper-focused on "engagement metrics" to the detriment of all else, just like how old-school OK Cupid turned into just another Tinder clone.

This is funny because in Spanish, the young boy (Junior) and his father (Eddy) are both absolutely fucking hilarious. But I 100% get what you're saying because I did some of the French lessons, almost identical content and Junior came across as snooty. It really does go to show that choosing the right voice actor makes a world of difference. The Spanish casting is absolutely phenomenal but the other languages don't seem to quite nail it. Part of me wonders however if this is actually a cultural difference. Perhaps I personally find the Spanish ones phenomenal because I am personally more aligned with Spanish speaking values, culture, humour and communication methods than other more reserved cultures such as those of German and French.

Well, if they are so focused on engagement metrics then surely they would notice an active user drop since the big UI update? Both my partner and I were using the app daily and completely dropped it since then. Going from the reviews we are not the only ones. It is just such a clusterfuck and I'm still feeling bitter about it.

Personally I find the German voice actors super annoying. The Indonesian ones seem fine. Funny how this is experienced differently for different people :)

> Well, if they are so focused on engagement metrics then surely they would notice an active user drop since the big UI update?

My guess is the "school homework assistant" market is very different from the "self-directed adult learning" market, and growth in the former outweighs loss from the latter.

Whatever the reason (I can invent many hypotheses, but they're just stories I can't test), Duo has gone from the app I enjoy making time for to the app I only bother with to keep my language lessons a little more diverse.

Oh, good point. You may be on to sonething there. I missed that we may not be the target demographic anymore.

I think OKC was just a catch-and-kill by Match. When they bought them, little of substance changed afterwards, and it's just slowly decaying. Shame.

I occasionally do Duolingo for a little Japanese practice but I don't think it does a good job there either. The Japanese learning experience seemed far worse than the Spanish experience. Maybe it's because I knew more Japanese and passed in to the higher levels, or because I'm more aware of the errors, but I think it's more due to the fact that Japanese is further from English and Duolingo wasn't designed around it. It is missing tools around Kanji and regularly "speaks" using the wrong reading (since characters can be pronounced differently in different contexts). There are no tools around learning characters or grammar, no short stories or other supplemental exercises, etc. The language pack feels like a bit of an afterthought rather than a core offering.

The translations already aren't great, and I can't imagine polluting it with some unvetted AI translations would help at all.

You shoud google for duolingo grammar notes. You'll find some for every course I imagine. The same people who originally created those courses made unofficial wikia or other pages and populate unofficial discords.

You just have to know to look for them...

That's ridiculous. DL makes some really bafflingly stupid choices that make its product near-useless for serious study.

I'm using it for serious study in multiple languages. It's still plenty useful.

They are just not hosting the community interactions anymore. Probably because it was too difficult to keep it clean from abuse and they decided to be about educational technology rather than about hosting and curating social content.

How do you identify a declension? The gender and case are never provided, forcing reliance on comment replies. Now those are locked.

I don’t understand. Why aren’t the notes in the app? I can already search for language information on the web. But I’d prefer it was just in the language learning app I’m using already.

Duolingo is driven by analytics. My guess is that they saw that almost nobody is using the notes compared to the app and it's too much work to maintain them. Also they have to keep them working for three platforms, which isn't all that trivial.

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