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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.

First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.

With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.

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It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started German with it before doing more traditional classes and live speaking with a partner Annoyances (in particular, ads disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth paying for as a quick daily refresher.

From my experience, Duolingo teaches you the vocabulary and the set sentences very well. But this is by far not enough. I use regular textbooks that describe the structure of the language, the grammar, the syntax, etc, so as to gain some analytical understanding of it. On top of that, Duolingo helps to get used to recognize these structures and flesh them out with various words. Also, unlike a book, it forces you to listen, and, crucially, to speak. It's a very important step from being able to read written language only to being able to actually talk.

Words without structure are generally comprehensible, especially if you are in an interactive situation where you can generally catch cases where there is a coherent but wrong meaning. (No, you do not want the microwave, you want what's in the microwave!)

I think Duolingo does an okay job of teaching structure, but it probably comes around the 2nd year or so (I've been using it about 3 years, but I did have a few years in high school of Spanish a long time ago)

Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5 years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site works.

I never thought to check Udemy to learn my target language

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