Oh I didn’t know that. I use an iPad Pro, I’ve never Duolingo’d on a phone. Without a keyboard I don’t see how one could really benefit from Duolingo’s strongest feature. Oh yeah, when I use the web it’s gold, just remembered.
On the iPad I see the Tips that you can see on a computer as well. And I have Schools set up so I can see all the vocab used per skill as well as have access to THOSE tips which are different from the iOS tips on my iPad.
Edit:
I really love Duolingo, I learned so much and I took it seriously. But I was gutted to realize that the voices were machine, and pitches were incorrect. It makes me want to use the app with the sound off. And just stick to LingoDeer for listening - You can change the voice speed, and choose male/female. So many options in LingoDeer, but the typing feature is trash man!!
I wanna thank you, you put an idea in my mind that I just tried out with my Bunpro reviews haha.
Basically, with each grammar point I answered the question (filled in the blank) and then, on notepad, composed my own sentence using that grammar point. I’ll try to factor that in to my daily routine, that may help solidify the points too (not that I have a lot of trouble, as of now).
I think Duolingo is alright but you need to take it seriously. Otherwise, you will be like the majority of Duolingo users that thought they are learning the langauge. But actually they just have an illusion of learning something from a trial&error process.
Many people said Duolingo is bad or even horrible because they wasted a lot of their time on Duolingo by answer quizzes semi-randomly (I’m not sure if this is an actual word) and progress to deeper levels without really understand the grammar behind each answers. I think a lot of them not even realize Duolingo offers you grammar points explanation on their course lol.
That’s probably true! The Tips are the first place people should go, though they don’t prompt you to read them first (which they should). Also true is that they don’t actually explain all the grammar points, or explain them well. Take for instance these two example sentences:
Something like this isn’t explained in the course as far as I know. People ask all the time why it’s を for one and は for the other, and then participants on the forum have to walk through what は even really does and why people sometimes use the second construction. Duo could at least throw in a couple lines about this in their Tips…
Not as painful as what I feel when I have to repeat the same thing over and over while trying to work out whether I’ll learn anything new. Literally the only thing that keeps me going through the additional levels is the fear of missing out.
Thanks for the answer, by the way. I checked, and yeah, so, I’m still on the old tree. The new notes do look much better, or at least much more intuitive to understand.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Well, at least that confirms the fact that the content the levels are based on is essentially the same… I’ll consider your advice, but for now, I might just jump through everything at level 1 for any language I start and only come back to old lessons much later. I got so annoyed pushing my first unit up to level 5 after starting Korean 1-2 days ago because everything was exactly the same (just presented using different exercises), to the point that I started spending my lingots (I think they’re converted into ‘crystals’ on the iPad) in order to test out of each level because it was taking too long. I tend to try to learn everything at once, so by the time the programme is expecting me to do assisted production, once I’ve found the pattern, I’ll already be doing recall on my own and writing words using my finger or typing them. If the computerised voice isn’t precise or clear enough, I’ll also be replacing the listening with the Wikipedia phonology page for the language so I know what’s supposed to be said using IPA. For example, Wiki and Duo informed me that the distinctions between several vowel sounds in Korean are increasingly fading, so they basically sound the same, but that made any sort of listening practice impossible, so I learnt the conservative pronunciations myself and read the symbols out loud each and every time, because I know how to make the sounds represented by the IPA symbols. (They all exist in French and English, both of which I speak.) Duolingo is certainly good practice, but not knowing if I would learn something new at the higher levels when I was essentially already done with absorbing the content was slowing me down because my ignorance created a fear of missing out. I’ve been trying to use it for reviewing German lately, but all I ended up doing was paying with lingots (thankfully I have quite a few, so I don’t need to spend any money) to test out of things because the lessons were taking too long. Your explanations cleared up a lot for me, so I appreciate it.
When I was active in the Duo forums, I remember seeing an explanation to recent FAQs that explained it. When they did A/B testing, apparently user retention was higher for those listening to robot voices. So not explicitly saying they trust it more, but showing through actions. Personally I feel it’s an insult to the idea of free learning that Duo is based on, but if they’d rather stop pretending that they’re trying to be nonprofit rather than a business, so be it.
Yes it does. They no longer offer lifetime purchases.
Personally I found it was good for me to practice what I had already learned and pick up new vocab, but at some point, I had to keep repeating certain exercises because the English was blatantly wrong and the French mods explicitly refused to fix it or didn’t add alternative answers. The latter seems to be a site wide issue of not optimizing things for mods and also using volunteers for course content rather than hiring people.
Seconding this again. Duolingo is decent for Romance language practice and vocab but not for learning.
Oh, good to know they lied about that holiday sale then. They said it would be the last time they offered a lifetime plan. Interestingly too, they said it was a sale, but it’s the same price as on this link.
Yep and then they’re inconsistent about usage in the lessons and practice, so you get angry people in the forums.
I’m not saying that I think that the robot voices are better, I absolutely don’t, but it’s not hard to understand Duolingo’s point here. If someone drops the course entirely they aren’t exactly learning anything. That said, I do think that their focus on retention has often come at the cost of features that benefit more advanced or more dedicated learners.
The robot voices are so frequently straight up wrong though. Duolingo would prefer to bad, unobjectively incorrect content over correct content.
Personally I find it sickening that they make choices like this while insisting on the slogan “The world’s best way to learn a language”
Plenty of people quit due to the lack of useful explanations and the developers’ focus is on bonus features like animations and stories (stories would be great, don’t get me wrong, but having base course with the kinks worked out should come before bonus content). I see this as a prioritization of profit over learning. I think it’s garbage of them to pretend like it’s not their focus instead of actually teaching a language now.
You know what, I’ve actually restarted Duolingo and got everything correct when they gave the small test upon creating my account to gauge my level, and I instantaneously unlocked every level up to the halfway point. But even at the halfway mark, I feel that the sentence construction etc is far too simple. A lot of the vocabulary used in Duolingo can also be found in WaniKani though, so I feel that it is a nice tool to further reinforce the words you learnt in WK.
But from the standpoint of using it as the main language learning tool, does it still suck though? Yes, I think so.
Yes! I clicked on discuss to find this out.
The discussions are fantastic, my favourite discussion by far has to be for:
すみません、私はりんごです。and the follow up of calling it Duoringo
“Excuse me. I am an apple.” is one of the banes of my existence lol. I sometimes try to explain that the Japanese won’t always mean that (given more context), but “Excuse me. As for me, (something) is/are/am apple(s).” just isn’t as a-peeling!
It can just be hard to show people that 私は isn’t always “I”, nor is it always the grammatical subject that です is linking to another noun/adjective. Examples like that one just tend to ingrain misconceptions about how the Japanese is actually working (and Duo isn’t exactly explaining the nuance).
It constantly marks things wrong that are grammatically correct, and the placement test was so frustrating because of this that I decided not to use it as a study resource. I majored in Japanese in college, yet they placed me as upper beginner (basically level 1 on the whole first skill tree, with the 2nd and 3rd trees totally locked) because I made “mistakes” that weren’t mistakes at all.
For example, they wanted me to say, “I drink tea, and I also drink coffee.”
So I typed, “私はお茶も、コーヒも飲みます.” But they marked it wrong and said I should have typed “私はお茶を飲んで、コーヒものみます.”
Of course, both ways are correct, but it would only accept one. I was just trying to use more advanced grammar than what they wanted, since they didn’t tell me what format they wanted the sentence in/what grammar structure I should use.
They marked others wrong because I left off the ”私" because in normal Japanese, speakers rarely use a subject. It’s implied.
The whole thing is a waste of time for anyone beyond beginner level, IMO.
I think the reason for them only accepting such a narrow field of answers is that the contributors literally have to type in every answer they want to accept. It’s not a very advanced system; it’s very dependent on those people who create the exercises to begin with. They’re the ones who then have to add any “My answer should’ve been accepted.” entries.
But you’re right, this happens a lot. Also they won’t accept kanji sometimes when they haven’t introduced them in the course yet, even if you already know them!
Yeah, I understand why it’s the way it is, but I still think it’s a poor system and could be done way better. The Japanese course has been public for several years now, so by now you would think they would have gone through and added some more acceptable phrases/alternatives. I know they had Japanese in beta for ages, so I feel that it should have way fewer issues than it does.
I tried Spanish just to see if that was any better, but being an absolute beginner, I quickly got frustrated by the lack of grammar explanations. I think that, as others have said, it’s probably only good for a few romance languages, and even then only for building vocabulary as an addition to another primary method of learning. In other words, it’s just not for me.
I’ve tried Duolingo for Spanish, and it was awesome, and then I tried it for Mandarin, and it spent like an entire day just learning to say “Nihao ma?” I’ve never checked out the Japanese because as a rusty former N2, I figure there isn’t anything there for me. But I get the impression both from here, and from other people’s experiences with other languages, that Duolingo has a really good experience for a few core languages, and then just phoned it in on the rest to try to get to 100% language coverage.
It’s not just that the approach is flawed for certain languages – I ended up using an app called Hello Chinese, which is a shameless clone of Duolingo, except made by actual Mandarin teachers with experience in teaching Mandarin to native English speakers. The curriculum was 100% copied from Duolingo’s Spanish curriculum, but for some reason their app worked, and Duolingo didn’t teach me a thing.
There are definitely limits to how far you can get with nothing but flash cards, but that’s not what’s holding Duolingo back. They’re just not trying hard enough.
Problem with the list like this one is you might as well list a private tutor.
Duolingo is free. LD, WK. Bunpro are not. (I haven’t tried Bunpo and Kitsun so don’t know how “P2W” are they).
I started Japanese with Duolingo (probably the first few levels) then dropped it when I started taking Japanese classes in college. Then, after two years of that, I tried to pick it back up as a sort of review/language maintenance tool. I was immediately stymied by the fact that it was so limiting in sticking to the です・ます forms of everything, there was only ever one correct way to order parts in sentences, and kanji instruction was basically nonexistent. Dropped it after I realized that it was doing nothing for my Japanese ability and was only frustrating me. (I decided to go the textbook self-study route and found WK soon after that.)
I’ve used it for Spanish in the past (alongside an in-person class) and it was fine but my attempts to learn Korean through it have been just as frustrating, so I think maybe any language that isn’t very close to English isn’t optimal to use Duolingo for. It’s a cool idea, but in practice it falls short.
This is true, but all of these are significantly cheaper than a tutor in the long run, especially if you get lifetime plans, and for me, they are more engaging, because the exercises/practices are interactive and unlike every tutor I’ve ever had in any language, they don’t rely on textbooks. If I have to use a textbook, I mostly prefer using it on my own. I think tutors are best used maybe once a week to answer questions and help clarify nuance, not for actual lessons. Kind of like how weekly seminars work in college.
As for DL being free, this is not surprising. I’d be astonished if they had the gall to charge people for it. You do get what you pay for, after all.
Also, we are a community of people who have largely shown a willingness to pay for quality products, so I think suggesting alternatives, even if they are paid, is not a problem on here.
I do agree with this. I will say this though, the combination of shortcomings that you listed does seem like a deal breaker if you put the Stories aside.
Not sure if you’re actually looking for an alternative, but renshuu.org is free and pretty much BunPro without the links but also with more stuff like kanji, vocab, counter practice, etc.
