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Comment by tremarley | Hacker News Reader

I had an 1000 day streak with Duolingo. The streak is great for being consistent, but I spent almost half of the time on Duolingo at the aim of keeping my streak rather than truly learning the language.

When I stopped using the app, I could read the language I learnt ok, but I wasn’t conversational, and couldn’t understand people speaking at their normal pace. Still a beginner.

Someone suggested the free language learning website called ‘Language Transfer’ here on Hacker News last year.

Within the first day listening to Language Transfer I was fairly conversational. By day 21 I could understand some Spanish shows without sub-titles.

Clozemaster is another excellent tool if you want to become proficient in a language.

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Literacy and conversation are two very different skills with Duolingo being better at the former. There is little doubt that all that Duolingo repetition over three years aided your ability to jump start your conversational ability. Very few folks can start from scratch and watch shows in a new language without subtitles in just a few weeks.

Then there's the issue of accents. There isn't a single Spanish language despite what the Spanish Academy would like. Castilian Spanish (lispy) is a very different animal from Mexican (beat poet who's constantly out of breath), Venezuelan (all the sighs), Cuban (if Sean Connery spoke Spanish), Nicaraguan (I dunno. I still really struggle with this one.), Equatorial Guinean (like from Spain only clearly not), Chilean (Spanish is only a rough guideline, ¿Cachay?), Dominican (one word, and it's all the words), or Argentinian (spoken with an Italian accent).

If you're from the US and only learn from Duolingo, you might be able to get by a bit easier with folks from Colombia than with other accents (as long as you steer clear of Medellín).

These descriptions of the different accents is accurate and hilarious

I wish I could take credit. https://youtu.be/VlK-neOypDM?si=ZE3BJ0_E1pPEvDkp

I generally find my educated mostly urban Southern colleagues to have a pleasant slight drawl. But go into the deep rural South and urban Southerners struggle as I also will in places like northern England where my speech processing centers are forced into overdrive.

You mean nobody can start duolingo and watch shows in a new language without subtitles shortly after

I mean nobody can start to learn any foreign language in any modality (even immersion) and watch shows in that new language without subtitles a few weeks after with the possible exception of shows like Plaza Sésamo, but even that would be a hard sprint.

The Defense Language Institute has Spanish at 36 weeks, Russian at 48 weeks, and Mandarin at 64 weeks. And those courses are NOT for the faint of heart. They are for folks who can get down and grind on language learning.

Only prodigies could learn in substantially shorter time, like this guy. https://youtu.be/_GXjPEkDfek

You and I are not that guy.

I'm 250 days into the Duolingo French programme and feeling similar things— I traveled to Quebec City recently and was only very barely functional at the simplest tasks. Duolingo goes to great lengths to make you feel productive, but I think it's prioritizing the wrong things— particularly if you mostly care about spoken communication, there's just a ton of stuff around verb conjugation and gender that really doesn't matter at all; getting it wrong makes you sound like a noob, but it doesn't actually impede understanding the way barely being able to piece together a sentence does. And some of it is just plain invisible in speech, like an English speaker not being able to tell the difference between its and it's; they're the same until you need to write one down.

Anyway, yeah. Putting so much emphasis on streak-maintenance and leaderboard position has me following silly patterns like doing enough of a lesson to net a 2x exp bonus and then cranking on the "match madness" mini game, which is all vocabulary I already know and isn't teaching me anything new.

Just break it. I don't understand how people allow apps to trap them like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Yeah, I probably will. I originally bought a year of Super to do it with my daughter (yay "friend quests", more stickiness!), but I think she's also been on and off the bandwagon recently, so that's less of a factor as well.

You can still use it and learn with your daughter. Just purposefully miss a day so you know you are using it out of joy instead of out of obligation.

If one accepts that the points are meaningless, they lose their value as a motivational tool, which could compromise a person's goals.

There's also the guilt factor, where the meter says "you must be THIS active to be serious about your goals", so disappointing the meter means (supposedly) you've fallen short on something that matters to you. Framing it as "back to square one" doesn't help.

Making the gap to conversational is probably always going to require more than just an app. You've got to hear real people speak the language and interact with them, maybe it could be done with a lot of very expensive work with LLMs and advanced text to speech generation but there's a big gap between the basic grammar and vocab that language apps teach to really understanding a native speaker. French in particular is rough for this though because of the... loose... association between the spelled word and the ways it's spoken.

I also had this issue. I had to ignore all their social features but overall I think the core app is fine. It won't make you fluent but it does teach a lot, and at least for me, I remember a lot of it. I can't say I learned french from the app, I married someone french so I had a lot of extra help, but I learned a lot of vocabulary that probably would have taken much longer to learn from regular conversation with the same few people in the U.S..

People expecting to learn a language from it probably will be disappointed but as an addition to other things I was doing I think it helped a lot although I have no real way to quantify this.

You are comparing doing something with doing nothing, so it is quite likely that doing something gives better results than doing nothing. For a more fair and balanced comparison, you should compare the use of Duolingo with some other "methods" of language learning. For example, for learning new words, spaced repetition would give way faster results than using Duolingo

I did years of French immersion in Canada, only to go to France a few years after i had finished and realized I didn't know French as well as I thought I did (I felt like I was nearly bilingual). A few years after that, with zero practice, I went to Montreal and could understand everything perfectly, and had zero problem communicating. That's when I realized that I had learned Quebecois and not French.

I'm curious where you did French immersion?

As far as I can tell what my friends' tell me (their kids are in French immersion in Ontario), French immersion teaches standard French, not the Quebecois patois (which we call le joual).

Canadian French differs from European French in few areas like pronunciation and vocabulary, but it is very much still the same language and mutually intelligible.

In Alberta, one of the original French Canadian communities with a number of families that have lived there for generations. Accent differs considerably, and use of slang in France seemed significantly greater. We definitely learned things like "les bas" as socks, and not "chaussette".

I’m curious about how Duolingo fits betwern Quebec, and Metropolitan French etc; I gather it can be like a Glaswegian talking to a New Yorker - one can find the other much harder to follow than vice versa. (My wife for instance speaks metro French fluently, but finds Quebecois really hard to follow )

I tell people that you should never get more than 100 day streak. If you have not reached the end of duolingo in 100 days, then you should give up as you are not putting enough time into study to ever learn the language, while if you finish the tree in 100 days you are ready to move on.

Obvious 100 days is somewhat arbitrary, but it is a good round number to work with. If you reach 100 days you should at least stop to evaluate your real progress: If you are not at least mostly done with the tree you should be honest with yourself that you are not motivated enough to learn the language. If you are mostly done, then 100 days is a good time to start looking for other ways to engage with the language.

I'm experiencing the same thing. I've got almost 1800 days on my Spanish streak in Duolingo right now, and I speak it decently well [1], but that's only because I knew some Spanish growing up with a multilingual best friend.

Duolingo was pretty good, say, 1500 days ago; I felt like it was really helping me brush up on those forgotten Spanish skills and even helping me learn new things that I didn't know. But it's gone through so much gamification since then that I haven't felt like I've been learning anything in a long, long time. Their primary focus now is to get me to download their AI app and pay a subscription for that, instead of actually teaching me the language I'm learning. And before the AI app, the focus was getting me to purchase DuoBucks (or whatever they are) so I could have more time to race the clock on those impossible timed countdown lessons.

Now I only log in to keep that streak going each day – streaks are one of my primary motivators in other parts of my life so it's hard for me to let this one drop, even though it's not doing much for me.

[1] If I were a young, Spanish-speaking kid.

I did about 100 days on Duolingo and from knowing no Spanish at all was able to converse in very broken Spanish to people at bars in Spain. I mean long 2 hour conversations where I could for the most part understand what they were saying and get my point across. Obviously they had to modify their Spanish like they were talking to a five year old.

I just checked out Language Transfer and learned it was originally created to teach Greek and Turkish to residents of Cyprus, with the aim of bridging the divide between those two distinct populations. Greek happens to be the language I want to work on, and the free resources for that language are incredible! Thank you for the link.

Welcome

Yes +100 for language transfer, it’s super helpful. Same experience as yours, I fell duolingo overemphasis gamification to the detriment of actual learning.

Ai is going to be a game changer there I imagine because the biggest impediment to learning a new language is being able to practice and getting corrected without social embarrassment.

Language Transfer hasn’t got a huge range of language options unfortunately.

I wonder if it would be easily possible, if AI could understand the Language Transfer style and make really good alternative courses?

That’s an interesting idea, the conversational style and the way the teacher was breaking down the language rules in the Spanish language transfer was really useful.

I tried Language Transfer for German an found it very underwhelming. I heard a few bits of the last lesson, and it sounded like A2.1 stuff to me.

Same. Feels like B1 top for Spanish and French.

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