Hacker News Reader

Comment by rozenmd | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo is useless for learning to speak to people, for one

You won't be able to hold a fluent conversation based only on Duolingo, but it's not _useless_.

True. I learnt Swedish on it. Pretty high score and everything. Landed in Sweden. Couldn't understand a thing.

Do you have any recommendations for folks learning Swedish outside of Sweden? So far I’ve been bouncing between Duolingo and 8sidor for reading comprehension.

No lol. It was such an embarrassing situation. I was dunking on my wife before landing in Sweden - "hey do you see how good my Swedish is? guess i'll have to do all the talking". And once we reached there, to have to speak English at every situation made me turn red and she looked on with a smirk.

Duolingo is a bit like Notion. It makes you think you are achieving things but the direction is completely incorrect.

So what might a useful environment look like for you?

What do you mean? To learn a language?

That's the subject at head.

By "environment" I mean of course apps + devices (combined with real-world sources, perhaps).

I wouldn't say it's useless. Won't make you fluent, but I've found the short phrases I can use (just a little over a year of Duolingo, plus HS Spanish classes in the late 90s) useful in a few situations. (I'm in the Houston area, so it's pretty common to encounter Hispanics who do not speak English well)

Of course, we live in a world where the translations apps on ours phones are approaching a "universal translator" level.

True but it's not totally useless. My comprehension is probably north of 80% but I can't speak as fast as I'd like, which is frustrating.

My wife has like a 230 day streak in Duolingo and every time I speak any Spanish to her (I'm like early intermediate level maybe) she doesn't understand. She's just hooked on making number go up.

230 days is not very far in if you're doing the minimum each day, but something simple? ¿Donde esta el gato?

I have a 1400+ day streak in Russian. I can only understand the odd word or two when I listen to a native speaker.

Good news: you only need to know 5 words to get around in Russia.

The most important being of course сука and блять. What are the other 3?

just step on someone's foot, you will learn all 5 and their variations in no time.

Duolingo is kind of garbage. As a native french, for fun, I tried to quickly finish the whole french course. I quit well before halfway. Duolingo would refuse perfectly fine sentences. The accepted answers aren't flexible enough.

I didn't try english though.

Esperanto is super easy if you speak both french and english. But man there is less content on the internet than klingon...

Does she supplement her Spanish learning with anything else? Books? TV? Music or podcasts? Or does she ask you to help her?

My experience: Essentially all consumer language learning apps are only useful for learning up to maybe CEFR A2 or B1. That makes sense, because that's all the typical consumer has patience for. Going beyond this basically requires hiring a tutor, because so few people ever progress to that point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com