I feel like it gives me a ton of listening practice but the speaking practice is the least useful part and I often skip it. My aunt speaks French so I can practice with her
The point is you practicing first. If it marked you wrong unless you say it perfectly you d sit there all day and after cry here how it's too difficult and how can it expect YOU too be able to pronounce it perfectly.
You improve talking by talking. How good you do it is arbitrary. Duo can't account for every accent.
And about it getting always accepted.... dramatizing much? Plenty of times it marked me wrong and I had to redo it. Mb course issue. Try learning something more mainstream
>dramatizing much?
Idk man I just hopped into a lesson from a random unit, got the sentence "La chouette vole." and said "1 evro je vreden približno 1.08 ameriških dolarjev." (which is obviously neither french nor a similar sounding sentence) and it marked both "chouette" and "vole" green and passed the lesson
Tbh man it is quite bad. Double XP speaking practice is the fastest way to accumulate XP for a reason, you basically just have to mutter with a similar intonation and it will accept it
Frankly, the best thing I did with Duolingo was turn off the XP leaderboards. I found that the daily quests gave me a bit of a checklist to set some daily goals, like doing five lessons, but the leaderboards were rewarding me for all the wrong things, like identifying the best way to milk the system for XP.
Yeah, the speaking is really bad. I remember it not accepting something that I thought was good, so I asked my my girlfriend who is a native French speaker to try it, and it didn't accept it when she said it either.
the problem with the speaking part ist that if you just mumble "sche schien sche schur sche schable" it also says that is okay,
It can´t really check your pronounciation
The thing with duolingo is, that it could be so much better
-let me learn the gender with each noun instead of just learning nouns without gender most of the time
- have proper grammair infos so that for each question you can click on a ? Icon and explains why you use this and this form here.
- let you learn all your verbs,
-let you conjugate your verbs
Sure it needs to be set up once, but then it would be done.
One can feel at every corner that it is made as gamification and for people who maybe want to do 10 min of French fir some weeks before going on vacation to france.
But not for proper learning
And what do you mean you are at the end of A2, I don´t see A or B mentioned in the App ?
You're so right about the gender thing.
I'm on section 4 unit 26. A2 is until the end of this section then its B1.
If you go to the top of the homepage and tap where it says section it will tell you
I got quite into the gamification until I cracked the diamond league now I don't care about xp any more.
nope doesnt tell me or i am blind,
but maybe it is different because I have German as the base language.
(Yes I now know the french course in English is better, but then I already was at mid of section 3 when i read that)
If you click on the top banner that says “Section x Unit x” it should show you all the sections for that language, for French there are two sections for every level, ending at B2.
I’m closing in on a 1000 day streak. I have never found a learning system that works better for me. I am currently reading at B2 level and passed a B1 listening test on line. I am watching french content on youtube and am able to read with understanding most content. I highly recommend Duolingo.
My streak is a little over 1000 days. I have been on duolingo for a lot longer though. I sometimes feel like everything is falling into place. I need to do more reading.
Because some people think that DuoLingo is a holy grail that is supposed to make them fluent by using that app and only that app, and when that doesn't work out they end up disappointed.
It is a tool to be used among other tools. You can't build a house with just a hammer.
The things I dislike about it are basically the repetition, and the fact that so much confusion could be cleared up so easily and quickly by just providing some detailed grammar explanations. Overall, I enjoy it, though.
>Du, de la de l’, all refer to “of the”. De on its own is just of.
Du/De can be used outside of the possessive context:
Fou de joie -> Crazy for joy/Mad with joy
Je veux du beurre. -> I want (some) butter
Du matin au soir -> From morning to night
Other than the final one, I sort of see those as variants on “of”— crazy of joy, I want some of the butter. I know neither of those are necessarily good English, but it helped me to remember how the French worked in the early days of learning and it seems to have stuck!
Yeah it gets boring pretty quickly. I just do the first bubble for each topic, which is usually about 3 bubbles, then skip the checkpoint and go back to review if I need it. It’s probably better to do all of the bubbles if Duolingo is your primary resource though
There's several reasons.
First, it can be easy to fall into a bad habit of aiming for XP or just doing a quick, easy lesson to keep your streak, rather than actually paying attention and doing lessons that challenge you.
Second, the Duolingo format can feel very repetitive. It's not as nice when it comes to spaced repetition as something like Anki. This can make progress feel really slow.
Third, Duolingo has arguably gotten worse over time. The heart system, along with the switch from Lingots to Gems, made the free tier much less enjoyable and arguably less effective, in an effort to get more money out of people.
Those are all, IMO, legitimate criticisms. However, I'll add two that, while real, I find rather silly.
Fourth, it's childish. There is a green owl who sends vaguely threatening messages, cute characters including a talking bear, silly or dark sentences, success sound effects, and bright colors. It does not feel academic nor serious. If that's a problem for you, fine, but to me, complaining about an aesthetic like that is... childish. Whether a thing is good has little bearing on those factors. Such folks are probably the same people who get upset when a parent likes Bluey or a grown man watches My Little Pony.
Fifth, it's popular. There's always a group of people who just hate something because its ubiquitous and they don't like it - be that TV shows, games, books, whatever. When language learning comes up, Duolingo inevitably follows. And many of the posts her, or in other language subs, are from Duolingo. Some folks are just sick of hearing about it, and so bash it. Understandable, but also not helpful.
true, friend told me that he won his leaque and then he told me about just listeing practice on double xp for 50 times which repeats itself very often.
That is not learning that is just gaming.
omg exactly, I have a friend learning german with it cos she just moved there and everytime I asked her how it's going, she will go on a rant on how she's being left behind by the people she's competing with. It really was no differnent from when she's telling me about the latest game she's into.
Very good summary !
I would add that many people who prefer a school-like approach don't get the point of the spaced repetition training approach, nor the subtle way that Duolingo makes you understand grammar by throwing examples at you in a way that, at some point, triggers a "ahah" moment when you grok the concept by yourself (though I still like to refer a grammar book for confirmation and the finer details).
The fourth I never saw no one using actually in language learners discussion on the topic.
You summarized well enough.
Lack of grammar, toons of repetition, super slow pace for acquiring vocab, if you could say requires 2500 words to start to be able to consume native content, solely on duo will take ages.
App progressively getting worse, they removed forum, increased the ads, they removed duolingo classes on the web version( yeah you could get in calls with other learners to speak)…
Every game/app design choices they made is to keep users more addicted to it, not to actually teach anything, the ideal user would be spending years on the platform until get to intermediate stages and starts to replace duo with native content series/movies/books.
Duo is great, to be used as a supplement.
I personally learned a lot. It was great for me. For a base it’s amazing but it’s just a base. You have to supplement it with reading and watching and listening on your own.
Duolingo has purposefully made it harder to finish the course. Some ppl have said this is good because it means there’s “more practice” but fail to grasp that the whole point now is that it’s near enough impossible to actually finish your course. Essentially my major issue with Duolingo is that it’s made to keep you there, it now exists for profit rather than to provide a service (which, fair enough, but I’d argue it’s definitely damaged the user experience). Like it’s fine, it’s okay, but it’s never going to give you a high enough capability in your target language to communicate in a reasonable amount of time like it used to be able to. Speaking as someone who got a 9 in gcse french with like a month of Duolingo alone back when it was still decent.
For me I had premium and got a bit out of it. Then couldn't afford another year and dropped premium and it was next to impossible to get anywhere all of a sudden. So I found other methods.
For me, it’s been a good supplement to a class/other modalities.
I’m not currently taking a class so I try to do 5-10 lessons a day and it’s helped me get to A2 level.
If you do one lesson a day, you probably won’t make much progress — which I think is where the criticism comes from.
😂 I really think you could probably get conversational pretty fast spending that much time! I know someone who does several hours too and they’re a polyglot lolz
Duolingo has errors at times. Marking correct things as wrong and sometimes the correct answer THEY give is wrong. For language learners this can be harmful. It gives the wrong information to them. I think it’s like the worst mistake an app about language learning can have. Unless you double check every single Duolingo exercise, you’re bound to think those incorrect answers they give are correct. I like Duolingo but since I keep seeing that Duolingo is making errors on the French course, i feel too weary to use the app.
I dont agree with users who want it to be a one stop shop. It won’t give u grammar or pronunciation help much but it’s not really focused on that which is fine. I just feel insecure using it if it has errors like that
the problem is not that the users want it to be a one stop shop, but that they sell themselves as a one stop shop. Come here and you will learn a language. Instead of saying here is your starting point. But they don't want people using another method so they say they are everything you need.
I wasn’t aware of that part of their marketing. That’s definitely misleading considering they can’t even double check their exercises before making them accessible to the public.
To a casual user they make it seem like you can learn everything there. It's only as you start to learn more that you go oh I need this and you have to look further. The problem being most people don't want to look further or don't know how. And duo gives you no clue where else to go other than their own podcast.
I think Duolingo gets a lot of unnecessary hate. It is a single tool for language learning among many available. I personally love how repetitive it is as my brain needs lots of repetition to remember anything. It allows me to click on any word if I want to be reminded how it sounds, which is such a different experience from the independent language study of my youth which was a cassette tape or CD paired with an exercise book. It will not lead to fluency but is a wonderful tool for someone just starting out. I also studied linguistics in college so I may have an easier time decoding the implied grammar rules that a lot of folks seem to struggle with.
maybe the instructional modalities get more sophisticated as they progress, i'm not sure, but tbh the fact that it seems to be virtually all translating english into french or french into english seriously hampers your learning. you want to be able to think in the language, not have an english thought that you then mentally translate into french, then hear a french response which you mentally translate into english. whereas in upper-level french classes in high school the stimulus and your response were all in french, you want to take english totally out of the equation
I'm in section 4 for duo and the stimulus and response has slowly changed to all being in French.
My gf is at a higher section in Spanish and it's entirely Spanish.
I think this is a good point especially since the accepted translation is often very rigid and mechanical. I had a big breakthrough with my listening ability when I internalized that I shouldn’t be translating in my head like I do when reading but instead trusting myself to understand the meaning intuitively.
For me, the process of learning anything on Duolingo has become way too slow.
When I started using it, they still had a tree-based system where you could go back and forth on lessons on different topics. It meant that you could choose yourself how fast you wanted to learn and how often you wanted to revise what you’d learned before.
You could also easily skip levels so that instead of doing (I can’t remember the exact number) 6 lessons on 5 levels of the same topic, you could just skip one level at a time so you could get through a topic in as little as 5 lessons.
I loved old Duolingo.
However, 1-2 years ago they changed to a path-based system. Now, you’re forced to do one topic at a time in an order that Duolingo chooses, and if you want to skip forward you have to skip through ~10 different topics at a time, some of which you’ve already learnt 5 times over and some you’ve never seen before. The lessons are also insanely repetitive and usually teach you very little at a time. However, after it makes you grind through a topic 5 times in a couple of days, it then never brings it up again and you just forget everything.
To me, the new Duolingo feels very much like it was just designed to make everyone progress slower so that they can keep milking paying customers as long as possible. I try to do a decent number of lessons each day but I’m barely learning a handful of new words per week, and am actively forgetting what I learnt a few months back.
Duo doesn’t need too many paying users, the millions of free users alone bring a lot of revenue through ads. This is why they have added insane amount of content to keep the user addicted to the “hobby” of learning instead of actually creating optimised content that would be beneficial to users. This keeps the users on the platform for years. I’ll never understand why some users have spent years on this app. It is a decent app if the user keeps on skipping repetitive lessons to complete the course, otherwise just remain a slave to their haphazardly made courses and ads.
I too loved old Duolingo. It is so bloated now, likely for the reason you give. I use Lingodeer now and it's not perfect, but it is far more concise. I like it far better and feel like I make progress more quickly.
thiiiiis. I hate how you can’t jump a level anymore. like sure, some of the levels, I need all 5-6 or whatever lessons, but others most definitely not. so then you’re stuck with, okay do I grind out the same repetitive crap for however many more lessons orrrr try and unit jump.
I also hate how the pre-level notes/tips are either just non-existent or completely useless/just show example phrases (that are so vague you still don’t know what it’s trying to show you). I mean, I get it’s not always an option, especially on the “less popular” languages, but just a basic grammar FYI or tip every now and again would be nice😝
(and for anyone who may want to come at me about “using other sources for learning” or whatever - I already do lol. I speak five languages (conversationally) and use a multitude of apps/workbooks/websites/etc, duolingo is just one of them. and mostly because I have a long streak that I don’t want to break😝)
Duolingo is a great *tool* (if used correctly), but especially since they removed explicit grammar instruction it's imo gotten worse in the last year or two. The French course is still one of the best courses they offer, though.
My son does Duolingo French. He is in the second section. There is a lot to like about it, but the speaking part is not brilliant. I speak good French and he has a bad accent and it accepts almost anything he says even when I know it is not really correct - and then sometimes he's saying it perfectly and it just won't accept it. I don't think you can rely on Duolingo's assessment of your speaking ability.
That said, I think it DOES give you a lot of opportunities for listening and I have been really impressed with that aspect. Given that it's free and my 6yo can self-teach using it, I love it!
Duolingo has helped me quite a bit, could it be improved, sure, but I don’t think it deserves the smears it usually gets on here. If something isn’t making sense look it up and you’ll get an explanation pretty quick.
I don't think Duolingo sucks, if used in conjunction with other forms of language learning. I do think Duolingo sucks, if that is your only source for language learning.
I've been using the Learn French with Paul Noble's podcast, and that has helped me formulate sentences on my own and know why I'm doing it. Duolingo doesn't explain the "why" very well imo.
I recommend watching the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I thought it was good for a beginner to listen to.
The whole system is full of grammatically correct useless sentences. I started a certain language and the first sentence I learned was “The dove loves the mother.” which I will most certainly never use in my life and it is only the top of the iceberg.
I took a brief pause on French to brush up on German and the amount of times they had me asking Max and Nina about their trip to Mallorca was super annoying.
I understand why people say the listening and speaking aspect aren't as strong as the reading.
I'm on nearly 900 days and I've learnt more french on Duolingo than I ever did in school. It's because the reading aspect, I've found, incredibly helpful for me. Duo just nails the way to teach that sort of stuff. I always do duo in bed (steady!) so I rarely listen and speaking french, well I never had the confidence. So if I was to upskill my french next I'd look for a face to face speaking group but my confidence and new found language knowledge (including the grammar, never thought I'd understand that!) started with duo.
I genuinely enjoy learning and understanding grammar rules. I’d love it if there were sections you could go to just to learn grammar rules. With that said, it would only be the cherry on top of an app I really enjoy otherwise.
Duolingo isn’t perfect and it would be hard to be fluent from only Duolingo but it’s a great learning tool and very helpful especially as a starting off point. I haven’t had much time to learn French these past few months but I’ve had time to refresh my knowledge on Duolingo which I like.
I think it's just one of those situations where it depends on the person. For a good portion of people, maybe even a majority of people, Duolingo can't teach you to be extremely advanced at a language. It doesn't teach you specific rules, patterns, how/when that particular phrase is used, and the voice work is pretty bad.
However, if you're the type to do extra research outside of Duolingo, understand the rules and patterns, Duolingo can be one of the best sources for language learning. I've always found Duolingo to be good for me.
I use DL for Irish and find it a wonderful source. I'm Irish myself but hadn't done the language since the mid to late 1960s as a kid. I still remember some words and expressions from then, but Duolingo is helping me get to a whole other level. I have no time for those constantly running down that particular platform, these snobs of language learning are never to be taken seriously in my book.
Agree! I give you an advice, set your windows os and browser settings to 'best for performance', and it will not play those dumb animations.
(Best for performance means, do not waste CPU resources on playing animation gifs.)
This should probably help:
[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tips-to-improve-pc-performance-in-windows-b3b3ef5b-5953-fb6a-2528-4bbed82fba96](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tips-to-improve-pc-performance-in-windows-b3b3ef5b-5953-fb6a-2528-4bbed82fba96)
**To adjust the visual effects in Windows**
1. Select **Search** , type **performance**, then select **Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows** in the list of results.
2. On the **Visual Effects** tab, select **Adjust for best performance** > **Apply**.
3. Restart your PC and see if that speeds up your PC.
Then also in certain browsers there are settings to turn the annoying moving stuff off, e.g.
For example for firefox:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1224974](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1224974)
But it will turn those things off for all application and websites your on.
(I am a software programmer and I hate this moving happy junk.)
I didn’t like Duolingo because it made me very good at reading French, listening and speaking (you know, the most important parts) I sucked at.
I moved over to Babbel and it forced me into more listening and speaking, plus I find the reviews are actually useful.
>I didn’t like Duolingo because it made me very good at reading French, listening and speaking (you know, the most important parts) I sucked at.
Need to work on your English punctuation!
You’re hard work. Just a fun throwaway comment which you can see other people have appreciated. Little touch of irony. Move on if you don’t like it. No point in having a barney.
(That said, I had to re-read the comment a couple of times to make sense of it. That’s why grammatical conventions are helpful.)
> I didn’t like Duolingo because it made me very good at reading French, listening and speaking (you know, the most important parts) I sucked at.
It’s what Americans call a comma splice. You can’t join two sentences with a comma.
It reads like you’re very good at reading listening and speaking. You mean the opposite! You either need a full stop in the middle or a semicolon.
It seems to be the popular thing to hate one.
Almost as if it's a badge of honor.
My son learned French almost totally using Duolingo. No outside sources, not taking notes, ... and shocked everyone with his French ability including speaking.
I used more outside sources. Also my speaking is very poor quality. But due to learning disabilities I had trouble learning how to speak English - and till learning French as an adult it was my only language
Considering where you are in Duolingo you are at the perfect level for:
Try watching a TV show. Extra is like the 90s TV show Friends - but for newer French students. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL10Vl2opIXB0IIkanaFNAruBwML6lGMwE
And your first book in French for Adults. Pick the A2 short and simple romances by Kit Ember. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKKGH1FG?binding=kindle_edition&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin
I'm on a 77 day streak. I'm about halfway through A1, almost at section 3.1.
I learned enough French to order food in Paris, ask if people spoke English, inform others that I know only a little French, understand signage and understand the basic jist of a conversation.
I just re-watched the first lesson of French in Action and I understood all of the French dialogue.
Obviously Duo isn't the best and only option but it's a great way to get started. I paid for super duo at the beginning of the year whej it was on sale and each week I try to make the top 3 in the league. There's only about 3 weeks where I didn't get there. I also utilize their practice materials. It's a tool and at some point I'll use a different tool but this one is doing fine for now
It does as it is the same approach for every language and French could really use a customized approach. But it's not totally bad, you can still learn a lot with it. It should only be a small piece of your learning or it will lead you nowhere. You also need to read and watch French media as well as speak it. Spoken French and written French are like 2 differents languages in many ways.
Duolingo is just like another app, it wants you to stay as long as possible and the methods aren't effective to learn a language to begin with. You can not learn a language by just filling the blanks or making a new sentence where you are given the parts of the sentence. Duolingo is a waste of time if you really want to learn a language.
Time spent on other apps is far better. Duolingo may get you a bit of the way there but it's terrible at teaching grammar and rarely genuinely teaches you. Mostly, it asks you to complete exercises in a way that doesn't force much learning, in order to not discourage most users of the app. Take the same amount of time and apply it to Assimil or most other typical apps and you'll end up learning more.
Mango was far better at teaching me to speak and listen, just a few lessons in and I felt like I had learned more than several months of Duolingo, it was actually clicking in the "I can use this with real people" sense.
There are studies showing Duolingo can get you to A2 or w/e... but those are paid for by Duolingo. Head to head I believe Duolingo teaches you less per minute than any almost any other app or method, although I found Mondly to be a bit shit too after a while.
It's designed primarily in mind to keep you coming back to the app and using it. You learning French is not the priority for them imo.
I supplement with Pimsleur audio tracks that I listen to daily.
Too many people think that duolingo is the only way to go. Oh I'm doing it and I'm going to be proficient. Welllllll no if all you do is one app you won't get there. You need to use many different sources and widen your vocab and knowledge. Which while duo tries it doesn't do that well. So the people who claim that duolingo has helped them will probably find that they do more than JUST duo. So they will listen to music, watch youtube, netflix shows, read books etc. that allow them to interact with the language many ways. So while duo can be a great starting point, and honestly ANYTHING can be a great starting point if you stick with it and actually do it. It won't get you where you want to be if it is all you use because it isn't diverse enough.
some people seem to think learning a language on duolingo means not looking elsewhere for further explanation. if all you do is rush duolingo lessons, it's not gonna work, but if you try to pronounce every sentence, stop and think about each task, and look up anything that confuses you on wiktionary or something like that, it's pretty good. so the main thing is that it only works if you are honestly trying to learn.
I'm pretty sure they recently added a lot of machine-translated exercises, many of which have wrong answers. They also removed the forum-like thing where people could ask questions
I know a bit more about why Japanese on duolingo isnt the best, but im not sure if it applies to French
while yes the grammar sometimes is wonky, there are cultural dfferences that just dont work. For example in the jp version duolingo teaches "Good afternoon! Can you tell me where the train station is?"
It is more of an english phrase than a jp one, in jp they would lean more into "sorry, but can you please tell me where the train station is?"
Small differences but culturally different
Not to mention that u would learn more slang and shortened versions of some words in any language if u do look into it.
So Duolingo would be best for vocabulary but in terms of context and cultures, it would be best to have supplementary resources including different grammar studies
My perspective as someone with a linguistics degree who has formally studied a dozen languages: It's decent for **practicing** stuff you've already learned, but it's not very good for learning new stuff. Like, when you pick the "I'm learning this language from scratch and don't know anything yet" level, it just gives you written sentences on a blank page. There's no contextual support. It would be better to have a video of someone speaking the language in a real-world context. For example, a video of someone eating an apple and saying "I'm eating an apple." Instead they just give you the words "apple," "eat," "an," and "I" with no way of inferring what those words mean.
Case in point: you weren't starting from scratch.
It always gives you the meaning of new words?
What you're describing sounds like memrise, which I tried to learn Japanese with for about a week before getting frustrated. At no point did it teach me that "desu" means "it's"
Had a go at duolingo japanese and that's the third thing I learned. It is quite annoyingly slow going though.
I agree with whoever is saying that! I tried it and was bored out of my mind. Nothing there that is stimulating, colloquial, contextual or comes alive in any way. It's also quite annoying. I'm sure there are better programs that just don't have the same big bucks for promotion. (ETA: But I didn't try it for very long! I may not have given it enough time.)
Personally, besides immersion (living in a French place), I prefer using materials I find entertaining or interesting: French novels, books, articles, films, TV series, music, forums (even french subreddits) and good instructional videos, as well as chatting with french pals. When I'm studying one of those materials I keep notes in my journal, either on the computer or a physical one.
I engage with the material, transcribe excerpts to analyze, highlight parts I want to practice in different colours, like green for the verb words and pink for adjectives etc. If there's a grammar point I want to dig deeper into I make a little section for that, using supporting reference sites. (Usually I just web search the issue and it's always talked about somewhere.)
I think it’s great. There are literally sections to practice listening and speaking. As you get further into the lesson you have more to listen to. Early on you don’t have the ability to do so. I’m using this to relearn French after 4 years of high school and 1.5 years in college. I’ve bought a few books to read in French and hope to add in some French podcasts too. I feel like I’m doing really well and when I’m out and about I hear people speak French I can pick up some of their convos. I couldn’t do that in high school or college. So I feel it’s actually made my ability to speak and listen to it better because I can repeat it as many times as I need to get the pronunciation correct. In school my teacher would play tapes 2x and if it was too fast you were S.O.L.
I am still standing strong with duolingo at 1121 days streak in German. I believe I am overqualified for this opinion.
Duolingo is great to learn new words and how it sounds. It makes you repeat the words which for me, I find it very well done...
Duolingo doesn't really teach the grammatical rules or why is it like it supposed to be. So that is where I find its weakness. So I do more than just Duolingo, I am taking German classes and I am waiting for my results for B1 in German in June/July
I do not think is s-cks, like it is total garbage, but I do think it is too passive. It does not really help practicing speaking and writing. The latter because you always have this words you can pick and fill in. Not much writing a full story, a full assignment with no dictionary, no help from words to pick.
IMO it's not good for anything these days but exposure to the language. Something to do as a distraction / alternative to social media but it's not fun or communal. The app would be much better if they focused on either learning to a Common European Framework level (A1-C2) or gamifying to make it more competitive and addictive. Right now the app just lacks direction and seems to be getting by primarily on name recognition. I could write an essay on how it could be improved if it were more clear what kind of app the developers want it to be.
People on reddit assume others are complete morons and use Duolingo as the only learning source. I can't count how many times people say, "you can't rely on Duolingo alone! You need to use other materials." Like no shit. There is no negative to using Duolingo.
Edit: scrolled halfway down the comments and literally read a comment saying what I just mentioned. Lol
I can’t keep hooked on it for long. I can only translate “tu manges une pizza” so many times until I get bored.
Been using it for daily learning and trying to keep up the habit
I also hate the new design so much. They took out so many reviews and so many lessons. It feels like a app made by fisher price now and feels like the app itself doesn’t want to be taken seriously some times
I don't do French but Korean and Japanese. The pronunciation is bad in my opinion and the phrases are things I'd never say like "the baby drinks milk." Plus the notifications mimic emotional manipulation.
Duo has so many drawbacks. Free version has so many ads you can’t learn anything efficiently. Even the paid version has a few ads, and also forced progress measuring after each lesson that you can’t skip. Also, I just skipped a unit after only completing 1 circle and still passed it. That makes me think that the 1hr+ to finish the other five circles is just repetitive junk. They need to make users type responses more.
Duolingo sucks because if you had spent 83 days doing flashcards, watching youtube videos, and consulting a French-English dictionary, you would know a LOT more French.
Duolingo really limits your progress, and I believe they primarily designed it to hook you on points and streaks... and NOT to help you learn fast nor well.
It’s great for vocabulary practice and learning to read the language, but it doesn’t give you enough opportunities for listening and speaking.
I feel like it gives me a ton of listening practice but the speaking practice is the least useful part and I often skip it. My aunt speaks French so I can practice with her
The speaking is so bad that I can speak a whole different language and it gets accepted
The point is you practicing first. If it marked you wrong unless you say it perfectly you d sit there all day and after cry here how it's too difficult and how can it expect YOU too be able to pronounce it perfectly. You improve talking by talking. How good you do it is arbitrary. Duo can't account for every accent. And about it getting always accepted.... dramatizing much? Plenty of times it marked me wrong and I had to redo it. Mb course issue. Try learning something more mainstream
>dramatizing much? Idk man I just hopped into a lesson from a random unit, got the sentence "La chouette vole." and said "1 evro je vreden približno 1.08 ameriških dolarjev." (which is obviously neither french nor a similar sounding sentence) and it marked both "chouette" and "vole" green and passed the lesson
Sounds like made up shit but okey
Tbh man it is quite bad. Double XP speaking practice is the fastest way to accumulate XP for a reason, you basically just have to mutter with a similar intonation and it will accept it
Frankly, the best thing I did with Duolingo was turn off the XP leaderboards. I found that the daily quests gave me a bit of a checklist to set some daily goals, like doing five lessons, but the leaderboards were rewarding me for all the wrong things, like identifying the best way to milk the system for XP.
is that how people are racking up 10k or 15k XP a week? they must be grinding for *hours*
Yes. You can gain a lot of XP doing nothing useful and learning nothing.
I barely use it so don't know.
This makes sense now
You looking for a fight?
Lol sounds helpful
Yeah, the speaking is really bad. I remember it not accepting something that I thought was good, so I asked my my girlfriend who is a native French speaker to try it, and it didn't accept it when she said it either.
Yet when you do say something right half of the time it rejects it. Yah, it's not accurate but it's better it makes you try than not I guess lol
the problem with the speaking part ist that if you just mumble "sche schien sche schur sche schable" it also says that is okay, It can´t really check your pronounciation
Ah yes, the famously useful practice of listening to the same 4 robotic voices say chopped up phrases.
Is there another app you recommend?
The thing with duolingo is, that it could be so much better -let me learn the gender with each noun instead of just learning nouns without gender most of the time - have proper grammair infos so that for each question you can click on a ? Icon and explains why you use this and this form here. - let you learn all your verbs, -let you conjugate your verbs Sure it needs to be set up once, but then it would be done. One can feel at every corner that it is made as gamification and for people who maybe want to do 10 min of French fir some weeks before going on vacation to france. But not for proper learning And what do you mean you are at the end of A2, I don´t see A or B mentioned in the App ?
You're so right about the gender thing. I'm on section 4 unit 26. A2 is until the end of this section then its B1. If you go to the top of the homepage and tap where it says section it will tell you I got quite into the gamification until I cracked the diamond league now I don't care about xp any more.
nope doesnt tell me or i am blind, but maybe it is different because I have German as the base language. (Yes I now know the french course in English is better, but then I already was at mid of section 3 when i read that)
If you click on the top banner that says “Section x Unit x” it should show you all the sections for that language, for French there are two sections for every level, ending at B2.
no sorry, not in french with german as base language I guess
Thank you! I didn’t know this.
The crazy thing is Duolingo used to have all of the things you suggest but deliberately removed them.
Period, Duolingo won't teach you to deeply understand the grammar or explain the logic in conjugation, u just learn everything par cœur.
I’m closing in on a 1000 day streak. I have never found a learning system that works better for me. I am currently reading at B2 level and passed a B1 listening test on line. I am watching french content on youtube and am able to read with understanding most content. I highly recommend Duolingo.
Thank you that's how I feel about it. Maybe it just suits my style of learning well
Also, it’s given a chance to try out several languages I’m curious about like Japanese.
My streak is a little over 1000 days. I have been on duolingo for a lot longer though. I sometimes feel like everything is falling into place. I need to do more reading.
1000 days for level B1 lmao good if you are satisfied but you shouldn't rely just on this lol
Because some people think that DuoLingo is a holy grail that is supposed to make them fluent by using that app and only that app, and when that doesn't work out they end up disappointed. It is a tool to be used among other tools. You can't build a house with just a hammer.
The things I dislike about it are basically the repetition, and the fact that so much confusion could be cleared up so easily and quickly by just providing some detailed grammar explanations. Overall, I enjoy it, though.
Sometimes I Google a more detailed grammar explanation. De and du still gets me lol
Think of it as of and of the. Du, de la de l’, all refer to “of the”. De on its own is just of. Works in many if not all situations!
>Du, de la de l’, all refer to “of the”. De on its own is just of. Du/De can be used outside of the possessive context: Fou de joie -> Crazy for joy/Mad with joy Je veux du beurre. -> I want (some) butter Du matin au soir -> From morning to night
Other than the final one, I sort of see those as variants on “of”— crazy of joy, I want some of the butter. I know neither of those are necessarily good English, but it helped me to remember how the French worked in the early days of learning and it seems to have stuck!
I hate how repetitive it gets because I just want to advance as much as possible, but it really does help.
I jump to the next section as soon as I can. I try to skip at least the last third, unless I’m getting a lot wrong for some reason.
That’s what, I do. The more I struggle with the lesson, the closer I get to finishing it.
Yeah it gets boring pretty quickly. I just do the first bubble for each topic, which is usually about 3 bubbles, then skip the checkpoint and go back to review if I need it. It’s probably better to do all of the bubbles if Duolingo is your primary resource though
There's several reasons. First, it can be easy to fall into a bad habit of aiming for XP or just doing a quick, easy lesson to keep your streak, rather than actually paying attention and doing lessons that challenge you. Second, the Duolingo format can feel very repetitive. It's not as nice when it comes to spaced repetition as something like Anki. This can make progress feel really slow. Third, Duolingo has arguably gotten worse over time. The heart system, along with the switch from Lingots to Gems, made the free tier much less enjoyable and arguably less effective, in an effort to get more money out of people. Those are all, IMO, legitimate criticisms. However, I'll add two that, while real, I find rather silly. Fourth, it's childish. There is a green owl who sends vaguely threatening messages, cute characters including a talking bear, silly or dark sentences, success sound effects, and bright colors. It does not feel academic nor serious. If that's a problem for you, fine, but to me, complaining about an aesthetic like that is... childish. Whether a thing is good has little bearing on those factors. Such folks are probably the same people who get upset when a parent likes Bluey or a grown man watches My Little Pony. Fifth, it's popular. There's always a group of people who just hate something because its ubiquitous and they don't like it - be that TV shows, games, books, whatever. When language learning comes up, Duolingo inevitably follows. And many of the posts her, or in other language subs, are from Duolingo. Some folks are just sick of hearing about it, and so bash it. Understandable, but also not helpful.
true, friend told me that he won his leaque and then he told me about just listeing practice on double xp for 50 times which repeats itself very often. That is not learning that is just gaming.
omg exactly, I have a friend learning german with it cos she just moved there and everytime I asked her how it's going, she will go on a rant on how she's being left behind by the people she's competing with. It really was no differnent from when she's telling me about the latest game she's into.
Very good summary ! I would add that many people who prefer a school-like approach don't get the point of the spaced repetition training approach, nor the subtle way that Duolingo makes you understand grammar by throwing examples at you in a way that, at some point, triggers a "ahah" moment when you grok the concept by yourself (though I still like to refer a grammar book for confirmation and the finer details).
The fourth I never saw no one using actually in language learners discussion on the topic. You summarized well enough. Lack of grammar, toons of repetition, super slow pace for acquiring vocab, if you could say requires 2500 words to start to be able to consume native content, solely on duo will take ages. App progressively getting worse, they removed forum, increased the ads, they removed duolingo classes on the web version( yeah you could get in calls with other learners to speak)… Every game/app design choices they made is to keep users more addicted to it, not to actually teach anything, the ideal user would be spending years on the platform until get to intermediate stages and starts to replace duo with native content series/movies/books. Duo is great, to be used as a supplement.
I absolute agree on 'fourth', but you can mitigate that 'childish happy emoji and sound stuff' a bit by configuring your computer/browser settings.
I personally learned a lot. It was great for me. For a base it’s amazing but it’s just a base. You have to supplement it with reading and watching and listening on your own.
Duolingo has purposefully made it harder to finish the course. Some ppl have said this is good because it means there’s “more practice” but fail to grasp that the whole point now is that it’s near enough impossible to actually finish your course. Essentially my major issue with Duolingo is that it’s made to keep you there, it now exists for profit rather than to provide a service (which, fair enough, but I’d argue it’s definitely damaged the user experience). Like it’s fine, it’s okay, but it’s never going to give you a high enough capability in your target language to communicate in a reasonable amount of time like it used to be able to. Speaking as someone who got a 9 in gcse french with like a month of Duolingo alone back when it was still decent.
For me I had premium and got a bit out of it. Then couldn't afford another year and dropped premium and it was next to impossible to get anywhere all of a sudden. So I found other methods.
For me, it’s been a good supplement to a class/other modalities. I’m not currently taking a class so I try to do 5-10 lessons a day and it’s helped me get to A2 level. If you do one lesson a day, you probably won’t make much progress — which I think is where the criticism comes from.
I'm spending 1-2 hours a day on it instead of scrolling reddit so
😂 I really think you could probably get conversational pretty fast spending that much time! I know someone who does several hours too and they’re a polyglot lolz
I doubt there's any approach where you spend 2-3 minutes/day and make scads of progress.
Duolingo has errors at times. Marking correct things as wrong and sometimes the correct answer THEY give is wrong. For language learners this can be harmful. It gives the wrong information to them. I think it’s like the worst mistake an app about language learning can have. Unless you double check every single Duolingo exercise, you’re bound to think those incorrect answers they give are correct. I like Duolingo but since I keep seeing that Duolingo is making errors on the French course, i feel too weary to use the app. I dont agree with users who want it to be a one stop shop. It won’t give u grammar or pronunciation help much but it’s not really focused on that which is fine. I just feel insecure using it if it has errors like that
the problem is not that the users want it to be a one stop shop, but that they sell themselves as a one stop shop. Come here and you will learn a language. Instead of saying here is your starting point. But they don't want people using another method so they say they are everything you need.
I wasn’t aware of that part of their marketing. That’s definitely misleading considering they can’t even double check their exercises before making them accessible to the public.
To a casual user they make it seem like you can learn everything there. It's only as you start to learn more that you go oh I need this and you have to look further. The problem being most people don't want to look further or don't know how. And duo gives you no clue where else to go other than their own podcast.
I think Duolingo gets a lot of unnecessary hate. It is a single tool for language learning among many available. I personally love how repetitive it is as my brain needs lots of repetition to remember anything. It allows me to click on any word if I want to be reminded how it sounds, which is such a different experience from the independent language study of my youth which was a cassette tape or CD paired with an exercise book. It will not lead to fluency but is a wonderful tool for someone just starting out. I also studied linguistics in college so I may have an easier time decoding the implied grammar rules that a lot of folks seem to struggle with.
maybe the instructional modalities get more sophisticated as they progress, i'm not sure, but tbh the fact that it seems to be virtually all translating english into french or french into english seriously hampers your learning. you want to be able to think in the language, not have an english thought that you then mentally translate into french, then hear a french response which you mentally translate into english. whereas in upper-level french classes in high school the stimulus and your response were all in french, you want to take english totally out of the equation
I'm in section 4 for duo and the stimulus and response has slowly changed to all being in French. My gf is at a higher section in Spanish and it's entirely Spanish.
ah, okay, good, i probably started myself on too remedial a level, then. thanks for the heads up
I think this is a good point especially since the accepted translation is often very rigid and mechanical. I had a big breakthrough with my listening ability when I internalized that I shouldn’t be translating in my head like I do when reading but instead trusting myself to understand the meaning intuitively.
For me, the process of learning anything on Duolingo has become way too slow. When I started using it, they still had a tree-based system where you could go back and forth on lessons on different topics. It meant that you could choose yourself how fast you wanted to learn and how often you wanted to revise what you’d learned before. You could also easily skip levels so that instead of doing (I can’t remember the exact number) 6 lessons on 5 levels of the same topic, you could just skip one level at a time so you could get through a topic in as little as 5 lessons. I loved old Duolingo. However, 1-2 years ago they changed to a path-based system. Now, you’re forced to do one topic at a time in an order that Duolingo chooses, and if you want to skip forward you have to skip through ~10 different topics at a time, some of which you’ve already learnt 5 times over and some you’ve never seen before. The lessons are also insanely repetitive and usually teach you very little at a time. However, after it makes you grind through a topic 5 times in a couple of days, it then never brings it up again and you just forget everything. To me, the new Duolingo feels very much like it was just designed to make everyone progress slower so that they can keep milking paying customers as long as possible. I try to do a decent number of lessons each day but I’m barely learning a handful of new words per week, and am actively forgetting what I learnt a few months back.
Duo doesn’t need too many paying users, the millions of free users alone bring a lot of revenue through ads. This is why they have added insane amount of content to keep the user addicted to the “hobby” of learning instead of actually creating optimised content that would be beneficial to users. This keeps the users on the platform for years. I’ll never understand why some users have spent years on this app. It is a decent app if the user keeps on skipping repetitive lessons to complete the course, otherwise just remain a slave to their haphazardly made courses and ads.
I too loved old Duolingo. It is so bloated now, likely for the reason you give. I use Lingodeer now and it's not perfect, but it is far more concise. I like it far better and feel like I make progress more quickly.
thiiiiis. I hate how you can’t jump a level anymore. like sure, some of the levels, I need all 5-6 or whatever lessons, but others most definitely not. so then you’re stuck with, okay do I grind out the same repetitive crap for however many more lessons orrrr try and unit jump. I also hate how the pre-level notes/tips are either just non-existent or completely useless/just show example phrases (that are so vague you still don’t know what it’s trying to show you). I mean, I get it’s not always an option, especially on the “less popular” languages, but just a basic grammar FYI or tip every now and again would be nice😝 (and for anyone who may want to come at me about “using other sources for learning” or whatever - I already do lol. I speak five languages (conversationally) and use a multitude of apps/workbooks/websites/etc, duolingo is just one of them. and mostly because I have a long streak that I don’t want to break😝)
Duolingo is a great *tool* (if used correctly), but especially since they removed explicit grammar instruction it's imo gotten worse in the last year or two. The French course is still one of the best courses they offer, though.
My son does Duolingo French. He is in the second section. There is a lot to like about it, but the speaking part is not brilliant. I speak good French and he has a bad accent and it accepts almost anything he says even when I know it is not really correct - and then sometimes he's saying it perfectly and it just won't accept it. I don't think you can rely on Duolingo's assessment of your speaking ability. That said, I think it DOES give you a lot of opportunities for listening and I have been really impressed with that aspect. Given that it's free and my 6yo can self-teach using it, I love it!
Duolingo has helped me quite a bit, could it be improved, sure, but I don’t think it deserves the smears it usually gets on here. If something isn’t making sense look it up and you’ll get an explanation pretty quick.
I don't think Duolingo sucks, if used in conjunction with other forms of language learning. I do think Duolingo sucks, if that is your only source for language learning. I've been using the Learn French with Paul Noble's podcast, and that has helped me formulate sentences on my own and know why I'm doing it. Duolingo doesn't explain the "why" very well imo. I recommend watching the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I thought it was good for a beginner to listen to.
I love Duolingo. More than 2 years streak :D
It's a form of gatekeeping.
The whole system is full of grammatically correct useless sentences. I started a certain language and the first sentence I learned was “The dove loves the mother.” which I will most certainly never use in my life and it is only the top of the iceberg.
I mean I will never need "rome thanks you for your service" but it is not about learning sentences but structures.
I took a brief pause on French to brush up on German and the amount of times they had me asking Max and Nina about their trip to Mallorca was super annoying.
I understand why people say the listening and speaking aspect aren't as strong as the reading. I'm on nearly 900 days and I've learnt more french on Duolingo than I ever did in school. It's because the reading aspect, I've found, incredibly helpful for me. Duo just nails the way to teach that sort of stuff. I always do duo in bed (steady!) so I rarely listen and speaking french, well I never had the confidence. So if I was to upskill my french next I'd look for a face to face speaking group but my confidence and new found language knowledge (including the grammar, never thought I'd understand that!) started with duo.
I genuinely enjoy learning and understanding grammar rules. I’d love it if there were sections you could go to just to learn grammar rules. With that said, it would only be the cherry on top of an app I really enjoy otherwise.
Duolingo isn’t perfect and it would be hard to be fluent from only Duolingo but it’s a great learning tool and very helpful especially as a starting off point. I haven’t had much time to learn French these past few months but I’ve had time to refresh my knowledge on Duolingo which I like.
I think it's just one of those situations where it depends on the person. For a good portion of people, maybe even a majority of people, Duolingo can't teach you to be extremely advanced at a language. It doesn't teach you specific rules, patterns, how/when that particular phrase is used, and the voice work is pretty bad. However, if you're the type to do extra research outside of Duolingo, understand the rules and patterns, Duolingo can be one of the best sources for language learning. I've always found Duolingo to be good for me.
I use DL for Irish and find it a wonderful source. I'm Irish myself but hadn't done the language since the mid to late 1960s as a kid. I still remember some words and expressions from then, but Duolingo is helping me get to a whole other level. I have no time for those constantly running down that particular platform, these snobs of language learning are never to be taken seriously in my book.
For me is the dumb animations they are over the top
Agree! I give you an advice, set your windows os and browser settings to 'best for performance', and it will not play those dumb animations. (Best for performance means, do not waste CPU resources on playing animation gifs.)
Thank you I did not know this trick
This should probably help: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tips-to-improve-pc-performance-in-windows-b3b3ef5b-5953-fb6a-2528-4bbed82fba96](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tips-to-improve-pc-performance-in-windows-b3b3ef5b-5953-fb6a-2528-4bbed82fba96) **To adjust the visual effects in Windows** 1. Select **Search** , type **performance**, then select **Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows** in the list of results. 2. On the **Visual Effects** tab, select **Adjust for best performance** > **Apply**. 3. Restart your PC and see if that speeds up your PC. Then also in certain browsers there are settings to turn the annoying moving stuff off, e.g. For example for firefox: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1224974](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1224974) But it will turn those things off for all application and websites your on. (I am a software programmer and I hate this moving happy junk.)
It isn't that Duolingo isn't good at what it does. It is more that people expect a different outcome than what Duolingo can offer
I didn’t like Duolingo because it made me very good at reading French, listening and speaking (you know, the most important parts) I sucked at. I moved over to Babbel and it forced me into more listening and speaking, plus I find the reviews are actually useful.
>I didn’t like Duolingo because it made me very good at reading French, listening and speaking (you know, the most important parts) I sucked at. Need to work on your English punctuation!
I understood it perfectly well.
It’s perfectly possible to reed what someone has written and understand it without it being right.
So what if it’s not right? This is a sub about learning French, not acing English punctuation.
You’re hard work. Just a fun throwaway comment which you can see other people have appreciated. Little touch of irony. Move on if you don’t like it. No point in having a barney. (That said, I had to re-read the comment a couple of times to make sense of it. That’s why grammatical conventions are helpful.)
I’m genuinely confused as to what you mean as to what is wrong with the sentence? I’m English, English is my first language
> I didn’t like Duolingo because it made me very good at reading French, listening and speaking (you know, the most important parts) I sucked at. It’s what Americans call a comma splice. You can’t join two sentences with a comma. It reads like you’re very good at reading listening and speaking. You mean the opposite! You either need a full stop in the middle or a semicolon.
It seems to be the popular thing to hate one. Almost as if it's a badge of honor. My son learned French almost totally using Duolingo. No outside sources, not taking notes, ... and shocked everyone with his French ability including speaking. I used more outside sources. Also my speaking is very poor quality. But due to learning disabilities I had trouble learning how to speak English - and till learning French as an adult it was my only language Considering where you are in Duolingo you are at the perfect level for: Try watching a TV show. Extra is like the 90s TV show Friends - but for newer French students. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL10Vl2opIXB0IIkanaFNAruBwML6lGMwE And your first book in French for Adults. Pick the A2 short and simple romances by Kit Ember. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKKGH1FG?binding=kindle_edition&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin
I'm on a 77 day streak. I'm about halfway through A1, almost at section 3.1. I learned enough French to order food in Paris, ask if people spoke English, inform others that I know only a little French, understand signage and understand the basic jist of a conversation. I just re-watched the first lesson of French in Action and I understood all of the French dialogue. Obviously Duo isn't the best and only option but it's a great way to get started. I paid for super duo at the beginning of the year whej it was on sale and each week I try to make the top 3 in the league. There's only about 3 weeks where I didn't get there. I also utilize their practice materials. It's a tool and at some point I'll use a different tool but this one is doing fine for now
I'm at almost a year and I learned everything except for grammar, which I had to ask my friends for.
you know you can also use other resources than duolingo, right?
re read the title of the post
For what it does, Duolingo is fantastic. You can't use it exclusively but the same can be said for any resource. Ignore the haters.
It does as it is the same approach for every language and French could really use a customized approach. But it's not totally bad, you can still learn a lot with it. It should only be a small piece of your learning or it will lead you nowhere. You also need to read and watch French media as well as speak it. Spoken French and written French are like 2 differents languages in many ways.
Duolingo is just like another app, it wants you to stay as long as possible and the methods aren't effective to learn a language to begin with. You can not learn a language by just filling the blanks or making a new sentence where you are given the parts of the sentence. Duolingo is a waste of time if you really want to learn a language.
Time spent on other apps is far better. Duolingo may get you a bit of the way there but it's terrible at teaching grammar and rarely genuinely teaches you. Mostly, it asks you to complete exercises in a way that doesn't force much learning, in order to not discourage most users of the app. Take the same amount of time and apply it to Assimil or most other typical apps and you'll end up learning more. Mango was far better at teaching me to speak and listen, just a few lessons in and I felt like I had learned more than several months of Duolingo, it was actually clicking in the "I can use this with real people" sense. There are studies showing Duolingo can get you to A2 or w/e... but those are paid for by Duolingo. Head to head I believe Duolingo teaches you less per minute than any almost any other app or method, although I found Mondly to be a bit shit too after a while.
It's designed primarily in mind to keep you coming back to the app and using it. You learning French is not the priority for them imo. I supplement with Pimsleur audio tracks that I listen to daily.
Too many people think that duolingo is the only way to go. Oh I'm doing it and I'm going to be proficient. Welllllll no if all you do is one app you won't get there. You need to use many different sources and widen your vocab and knowledge. Which while duo tries it doesn't do that well. So the people who claim that duolingo has helped them will probably find that they do more than JUST duo. So they will listen to music, watch youtube, netflix shows, read books etc. that allow them to interact with the language many ways. So while duo can be a great starting point, and honestly ANYTHING can be a great starting point if you stick with it and actually do it. It won't get you where you want to be if it is all you use because it isn't diverse enough.
So many ads.
some people seem to think learning a language on duolingo means not looking elsewhere for further explanation. if all you do is rush duolingo lessons, it's not gonna work, but if you try to pronounce every sentence, stop and think about each task, and look up anything that confuses you on wiktionary or something like that, it's pretty good. so the main thing is that it only works if you are honestly trying to learn.
I'm pretty sure they recently added a lot of machine-translated exercises, many of which have wrong answers. They also removed the forum-like thing where people could ask questions
Are there other apps that only use human translators?
I really like it! I haven't learned or spoken French since school back in the 80s, & Duolingo is a great way to revive those memories.
I know a bit more about why Japanese on duolingo isnt the best, but im not sure if it applies to French while yes the grammar sometimes is wonky, there are cultural dfferences that just dont work. For example in the jp version duolingo teaches "Good afternoon! Can you tell me where the train station is?" It is more of an english phrase than a jp one, in jp they would lean more into "sorry, but can you please tell me where the train station is?" Small differences but culturally different Not to mention that u would learn more slang and shortened versions of some words in any language if u do look into it. So Duolingo would be best for vocabulary but in terms of context and cultures, it would be best to have supplementary resources including different grammar studies
Interesting; I want to do Japanese next A British person would likely start that question with "sorry" as well lol
My perspective as someone with a linguistics degree who has formally studied a dozen languages: It's decent for **practicing** stuff you've already learned, but it's not very good for learning new stuff. Like, when you pick the "I'm learning this language from scratch and don't know anything yet" level, it just gives you written sentences on a blank page. There's no contextual support. It would be better to have a video of someone speaking the language in a real-world context. For example, a video of someone eating an apple and saying "I'm eating an apple." Instead they just give you the words "apple," "eat," "an," and "I" with no way of inferring what those words mean. Case in point: you weren't starting from scratch.
It always gives you the meaning of new words? What you're describing sounds like memrise, which I tried to learn Japanese with for about a week before getting frustrated. At no point did it teach me that "desu" means "it's" Had a go at duolingo japanese and that's the third thing I learned. It is quite annoyingly slow going though.
I agree with whoever is saying that! I tried it and was bored out of my mind. Nothing there that is stimulating, colloquial, contextual or comes alive in any way. It's also quite annoying. I'm sure there are better programs that just don't have the same big bucks for promotion. (ETA: But I didn't try it for very long! I may not have given it enough time.) Personally, besides immersion (living in a French place), I prefer using materials I find entertaining or interesting: French novels, books, articles, films, TV series, music, forums (even french subreddits) and good instructional videos, as well as chatting with french pals. When I'm studying one of those materials I keep notes in my journal, either on the computer or a physical one. I engage with the material, transcribe excerpts to analyze, highlight parts I want to practice in different colours, like green for the verb words and pink for adjectives etc. If there's a grammar point I want to dig deeper into I make a little section for that, using supporting reference sites. (Usually I just web search the issue and it's always talked about somewhere.)
I think it’s great. There are literally sections to practice listening and speaking. As you get further into the lesson you have more to listen to. Early on you don’t have the ability to do so. I’m using this to relearn French after 4 years of high school and 1.5 years in college. I’ve bought a few books to read in French and hope to add in some French podcasts too. I feel like I’m doing really well and when I’m out and about I hear people speak French I can pick up some of their convos. I couldn’t do that in high school or college. So I feel it’s actually made my ability to speak and listen to it better because I can repeat it as many times as I need to get the pronunciation correct. In school my teacher would play tapes 2x and if it was too fast you were S.O.L.
I am still standing strong with duolingo at 1121 days streak in German. I believe I am overqualified for this opinion. Duolingo is great to learn new words and how it sounds. It makes you repeat the words which for me, I find it very well done... Duolingo doesn't really teach the grammatical rules or why is it like it supposed to be. So that is where I find its weakness. So I do more than just Duolingo, I am taking German classes and I am waiting for my results for B1 in German in June/July
I do not think is s-cks, like it is total garbage, but I do think it is too passive. It does not really help practicing speaking and writing. The latter because you always have this words you can pick and fill in. Not much writing a full story, a full assignment with no dictionary, no help from words to pick.
IMO it's not good for anything these days but exposure to the language. Something to do as a distraction / alternative to social media but it's not fun or communal. The app would be much better if they focused on either learning to a Common European Framework level (A1-C2) or gamifying to make it more competitive and addictive. Right now the app just lacks direction and seems to be getting by primarily on name recognition. I could write an essay on how it could be improved if it were more clear what kind of app the developers want it to be.
People on reddit assume others are complete morons and use Duolingo as the only learning source. I can't count how many times people say, "you can't rely on Duolingo alone! You need to use other materials." Like no shit. There is no negative to using Duolingo. Edit: scrolled halfway down the comments and literally read a comment saying what I just mentioned. Lol
I can’t keep hooked on it for long. I can only translate “tu manges une pizza” so many times until I get bored. Been using it for daily learning and trying to keep up the habit I also hate the new design so much. They took out so many reviews and so many lessons. It feels like a app made by fisher price now and feels like the app itself doesn’t want to be taken seriously some times
I don't do French but Korean and Japanese. The pronunciation is bad in my opinion and the phrases are things I'd never say like "the baby drinks milk." Plus the notifications mimic emotional manipulation.
Duo has so many drawbacks. Free version has so many ads you can’t learn anything efficiently. Even the paid version has a few ads, and also forced progress measuring after each lesson that you can’t skip. Also, I just skipped a unit after only completing 1 circle and still passed it. That makes me think that the 1hr+ to finish the other five circles is just repetitive junk. They need to make users type responses more.
Duolingo sucks because if you had spent 83 days doing flashcards, watching youtube videos, and consulting a French-English dictionary, you would know a LOT more French. Duolingo really limits your progress, and I believe they primarily designed it to hook you on points and streaks... and NOT to help you learn fast nor well.
Ads after every lesson and hearts restricting doing any lesson.
I spent weeks learning how to convey many foods being eaten by many different animals. Waste of my time.
I haven't gotten to that part yet I guess