How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us? | Hacker News Reader

How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?

newyorker.com

13 pointsmalshe14 comments

Interesting point:

"Like all the teachers I spoke to, Zimotti sees Duolingo as supplemental to the kind of deep immersion that language learning requires. But, in his opinion, the time most people spend on Duolingo is time they would otherwise spend on TikTok or watching television, not learning a second language in some more optimal way."

It has got me to the point of being able to look at https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/ and get someplace. I've had two other efforts at language that never got that far. (Granted that was mostly pre-internet so finding that sort of resource wasn't a fraction as easy.)

Totally agree in using it as a supplemental. It's basically the TikTok of language learning with its dopamine-based point scoring and streak building system, but I've known people who never missed a day for 3 years and still sound like a 3rd grader when they speak that language they were learning.

If there were doing one lesson a day at 2 minutes per lesson, that would be about 36 hours of study total. Sounding like a third-grader seems pretty good for that amount of study.

Most estimates I've seen are more like 100+ hours to gain basic conversational proficiency.

Yeah I could have phrased it better, but my point is that they were doing more than just a 2 minute lesson a day for years and couldn't really communicate that well beyond very basic stuff, including not knowing proper conjugation structure.. which is fine I suppose - people can still understand you for basic communication.

But then what's the ultimate goal? To post "streak" badges on Instagram? I know I'm sounding cynical, and I'm sure people DO actually learn a lot using the software, but I also wonder if it was used as a supplement to another way of learning that they'd be able to communicate better.

I agree. I'm thinking that online exercises won't get proficiency. If that's all one does, it's just a game.

What I'm seeing for me (and it's incomplete, it might be a fiasco in a year) is that it keeps me doing at least some daily roadwork. Once you get to reading news/magazines/whatever (that's how my father expanded his ESL vocabulary) or childrens books, you can start to work beyond. The real hazard is that once you break the chain, the incentive to do something (even when you are tired) is gone, then you probably drop it altogether. So I see the gamification of 'keep the streak' as helpful.

Besides, you’d have to evaluate them on the skills they were practicing which is mostly reading on Duolingo.

You can easily end up dismissing someone’s language skills who can read the news and even books in a language yet can’t speak the language.

Agreed on this. One of the courses that I took (that didn't achieve the goal) was 'Reading Knowledge of $language'. The textbook said at the outset words to the effect of "To be fluent in $language and operate in that society takes years of study and immersion. This (book/course) is for those with less ambitious objectives, and less time to achieve them".

I'd say that simply being able to read the Francophone news (this is Canada) would give a very different interpretation of how things are seen politically. Total mastery (able to pass for a native speaker) isn't the only valid outcome.

A general point: not all foreign language users need to pass for locals --- or, not all foreign language use-cases require that. An extreme example (not one that Duolingo caters for) is opera singers (and singing in general): they need flawless diction, and thorough understanding of the text, syllables, and how they map to the meanings that they are singing. But they don't need to speak, read, write, or understand the language for day-to-day communication --- and there are anecdotes about being cornered in (eg) Russian, and having to 'fess up that they don't actually know how to chat in the language.

I mean, it does take 3rd graders about 8 years of immersion to sound like 3rd graders…

The thing for 'sounding like (whatever)' is, a chance to practise. The thing that Duolingo does not provide is the live with real people forum. (Well it does, sort of, but it would feel like sending FB 'friend requests' to strangers.) So I'm not surprised that DL learners sound like three-year-olds, I'm actually impressed that there's the courage to speak at all. Give them a couple of beers, that might help.

There's a dozen resources you can use to learn the language and Duolingo is possibly the worst. Learning a language takes a lot of effort, especially if you're not in a country where it's spoken. Being efficient and persistent is the only way to get anywhere. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting all that time. I have to imagine the portion of people who have spend 1000+ hours learning to end up without the ability to communicate is pretty high.

I don't mean to be so dismissive but even as a supplemental resource, it's just at the bottom of the barrel.

Duolingo has lessons that take 1-5 minutes. It's so small amount of time, that I feel, I literally cannot excuse not doing it every day. This is unachievable if I had to deal with less packed way of learning.

I took a few weeks long initial course to get a grasp of grammar for my third language and since then I'm using Duolingo daily, for a few hundred days now (so it costed me well under 100 hours in total).

I'm far from fluent, but able to communicate verbally, work with text and I don't forget what I learned.

If that's the bottom of the barrel, I wonder what was my public school program I had in the past (yet another language), that included many semesters of learning and left me with handful phrases.

The best tool is the one you actually use, not the ones you would like to use but never use. Duolingo fits this daily use slot in a way most apps don’t.

This was a nice article! I used Duolingo a lot until the latest redesign which I totally despise. It's nice to see a face behind it all (even if it's not enough to bring me back to the current version of the app).

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