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As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult.

The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.

After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like

sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti

sarvē janāḥ gacchanti

sarvē janāḥ namanti

and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.

To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.

[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)

I built a tool[0] that gives you constant input at your level as you browse the web, so you don't need to take time out of your day. You can just learn a little as you browse, and let it compound over time.

It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.

[0] https://nuenki.app

Cool idea, unfortunately the example on the front page has errors in both Danish and French.

In Danish the third line is translated as "Du kan vende tilbage til oversættelser ved at holde musen over dem." which means "You can return to translations by hovering over them." i.e. the opposite of what happens. As a native Danish speaker I'd write "Du kan vende tilbage til originalerne ved at holde musen over dem.". I've had a hard time finding a translation that more accurately matches the wording of the original. The best I could come up with is "Du kan reversere oversættelserne ved at holde musen over dem.", but that just sounds like you're speaking English with Danish words to me, so I don't know if it's useful.

In French the second line is translated as "Plus la difficulté augmente, plus la traduction est importante" which means "As the difficulty increases, translation becomes more important.". Kagi Translate proposes "Plus la difficulté augmente, le volume de traduction augmente" and a few other things that don't look quite right to me.

I don't know how much this matters, since you'd probably end up exposed to a lot of different translations of many different sentences with this tool. Statistically, most of those will be correct and so you'll end up good enough understanding of the other language anyway.

In any case, you'd probably want to make extra sure that the examples on the front page are absolutely correct, so I hope you find my two corrections useful.

Oh! One more thing... when you select Japanese it says "Supports Furigana", but there's no furigana shown in the example. It would've been cool to see that on the example page as well.

Thanks for letting me know. The front page items are translated with DeepL, which is used for text that's currently visible. My benchmark claims that it's actually pretty good at French (I haven't got data for Danish) - one of the reasons I'm currently remaking it!

I hadn't heard of Kagi Translate; I'll add it to the benchmarking I do. And I'll see about adding Furigana there.

What's your benchmark? How many paid subscribers do you have that actually use it while browsing?

And why do you think did duolingos competitor "toucan" not take off? How does nuenki do the job better?

Seriously interested and happy to read more insights.

Disclaimer: i did create an MVP of this exactly. But it was just to try and generate some cash quickly to finance my main project (dumb idea, of course). I did get some signups but never even launched the app (and not planning to). Just curious what your experience is.

this tool is really nice...

Suggestions: Can I get some transliteration when I hover over it, rather than translation? Maybe a Alt+ ?

You can get definitions when you hover, but it depends on the language - it uses Wiktionary.

For some languages it's available but disabled by default. You can change it in the extension popup under "Hover Behaviour".

This looks really useful! Wish I'd had something like this when I was learning Mandarin.

I'm curious what determines whether or not you add a given language to the list. DeepL and Claude, at least, have usable translation ability in more languages than the app currently supports. Is there a lot of manual effort required for each language, or do you want to keep the list limited just to avoid overwhelming users?

Thanks! I'm glad people like it; I'm hopeless at marketing it to Language Learners:tm:, but programmers seem to love it and it's nice to get some positive feedback.

DeepL is actually pretty limited in what it supports. Unless I've missed a new language, Nuenki supports all of DeepL's languages.

Some of the additional ones are supported via Claude only and, where permitting, Groq. Groq is far faster than Claude; in languages that DeepL supports, DeepL handles visible text and Claude handles text that you haven't scrolled to yet. Claude-only languages are a bit of a worse experience.

It's pretty easy for me to add a language. It's all stored in a centralised toml file, which happens to be open source - https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-languages/blob/maste... - and it's about a 20 minute job to add a language, test it, etc. Then it's about half an hour and 5 USD to benchmark whether Llama is any good at it, and if so enable Groq and make the experience a bit more pleasant. I'm currently working on improving the translation quality benchmark (https://nuenki.app/blog/the_best_translator_is_a_hybrid_tran...), because people seem to like it and there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.

That 20 minute number is without updating the big language cloud on the website, which is a bit finicky; iirc I haven't added Vietnamese to it yet.

If anyone here has any requests, I'd gladly add them!

A request to add Tamil, a widely spoken and one of the earliest classical languages! Thanks!!

Good tool, I like it so far.

My biggest progress in English was when I started to read the English internet (HN, Reddit, etc.). I used an browser extension to translate words that I didn't know.

I'm learning Spanish now, but there is no content that interests me. Maybe the Spanish Wikipedia sometimes.

So this extension gives me that language exposure.

I like your approach here, thanks for posting

Duolinguo tries to follow the input hypothesis. For instance, it barely teaches any grammar but simply asks its users to translate sentences. Unfortunately that's very ineffective. Compared to reading or watching live conversations, the amount of input in unit time on Duolingo is too little. In the meantime the sentences lack sufficient context for Duolingo users to build up intuitive understanding of phrases. Take Duolingo Japanese for English speakers, for instance, it's really hard to learn the meaning and usage of Hiragana words in those short sentences.

That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day, just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine. It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or reading some readers.

I completely agree with everything you have mentioned in the first paragraph.

You NEED to consume tens of thousands of words repeatedly used in different contexts for the brain to make those automatic connections. Random sentences do not maintain the context which would have otherwise helped you figure out the possible meaning of some words in the following sentences/paras. That is one of the biggest flaws of any translation method.

The thing is, the input hypothesis all by itself is not enough. It's arguably close to where the modern paradigm of second language acquisition started, but it's not where we still are nearly 50 years later.

For example, one big thing that Duolingo's method completely misses out on is the importance of a rich communicative context. This was implicitly there in Krashen's original monitor model, but wasn't fully appreciated until closer to the turn of the century.

Yeah I think Duolingo is a great vocabulary expanded. But it's not going to get you to a conversational level.

Nothing but attempting actual conversation will get you to a conversational level of fluency.

> I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.

I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation exercises in a foreign language learning course such as Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.

From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.

I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words" and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to understand what is really going on and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.

I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process: it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency, by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least, by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her running "learning streak".

Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign language learning course. Effortless, magical learning processes simply do not exist.

> If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

This is where comprehensible input shines.

- you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences

- the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus

This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.

I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed to recognize the patterns in the language and store the sequence information somewhere.

If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful. However, I believe if you are capable of doing that, comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck. It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days of CI-based learning than the previous six months of memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating random sentences.

It's also just a hell of a lot more fun.

Yep!

My own experience mirrors yours. My first thought in seeing this was “…why?” Duolingo is a gamified app that feels like learning a language but actually teaches you next to nothing while driving engagement. I get why they got stuck on that path, but why copy it?

They might have found it useful enough to attempt their own spin on it, I guess.

I don't think that Duolino is absolutely useless. But my reason for learning languages might be different from those of others. Some people want to be able to say a few words in the language they are learning. I want to read novels, poetry and philosophical texts.

The approach you take and the kind of vocabulary you want to acquire will differ accordingly.

Yeah, I've seen my wife's time with the owl not translate into understanding much of the Spanish she sees around town.

I learned Sanskrit by translating the Bhagavad Gita (https://gita.pub), and I experienced a similar jump in comprehension to what you described. At first I needed to look up every word, even the ones I'd seen many times, but eventually (after many many repetitions) I finally started having an intuitive idea of what the words and sounds meant.

It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.

I have seen some people do this successfully. But I find the BG to be too complex as a learning tool. It is too dense for me to concentrate on the words rather than the content.

I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of laghukathā collections over the last couple of years and read from them as time permits.

I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:

- a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama

- a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of Lingva Latina.

The Valmiki Ramayanam is a much more accessible document than the Gita to learn Sanskrit from as an advanced learner after completing the basics. There's the aspect of a story that unfolds progressively which is nice and engaging, as opposed to the deep metaphysical stuff in the Gita.

The first section of the Ramayanam is the Sankshepa Ramayanam, or, the Ramayanam in summary. This gives the outline of the whole story which then is expounded in detail in the subsequent sections.

What sounds nice, and works, in poetry may not work when narrated in prose.

So, I am avoiding the first four sargas of the Balakanda entirely in my guide. The story starts with a description of Ayodhya and then moves on to Dasharatha and his family. I want to keep things simple and linear so that the story has momentum and readers feel like continuing the story.

I will have to find a way to incorporate all the side stories without damaging the momentum. Will probably add them as "side quests" at the appropriate juncture.

> after completing the basics

I have to disagree here. Best to jump in directly using glosses (will start with an English one. Might add a Hindi one at a future date). This fetish for basics is a big hurdle that I have personally experienced.

You will never be confident enough to start reading the Ramayana no matter how much you study the language because it is a game of vocabulary.

You need vocabulary to understand things. And the only way to acquire vocabulary is to read a lot.

In my experience of having learnt Sanskrit via what I now realize is the comprehensive input method (thank you for introducing that term to me via your comments on this thread), I absolutely think that the "basics" - enough to recognize the seven (eight if you count the sambodhana) vibhaktis (declensions) and the simple past, present, future and the subjunctive tenses - are required in order to get past the huge roadblock of parsing a word.

Once parsed, I can look up the meaning of the word on ashtadhyayi.com or elsewhere, but not before.

Sanskrit grammar is complicated enough for basic knowledge of the cases and the tenses/aspects/moods to be less useful than one would otherwise assume. You have sati-saptami prayogas, krdantas are often uses as adjectives while basic text books talk about them in limited contexts. It is a huge mess.

Take this story (https://www.adhyeta.org.in/sa/k/samskrita-chandamama/198404/...). Assume you have a gloss available for some words. Do you really need to know the pratyayas for the nouns and verbs for you to be able to understand the story?

I read a story by Roberto Bolaño recently where the Spanish-speaking protagonist reads novels in French, a language he cannot speak. He said that even though he couldn’t understand most of the words, he usually understood the plot. For some reason your comment made me think of this.

Ah, is Lingva Latina the one with Caecilius and his family? I had a Latin class in 7th grade and remember having a book of that same name, and I somehow remember the main father character's name. They had a dog too, I want to say his name was Cerberus, haha. "Cave canem"—"beware of dog"

Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete, discipuli!" to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"

The fact that all these years later I still remember some things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.

In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other languages), which is a similar "get actual language input rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method, and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!

Caecilius who, spoiler for a decades old Latin textbook, dies when Vesuvius erupts, is from the Cambridge Latin Course. The dog, who survives, is in fact named Cerberus.

Yikes. How many others grew up with Caecilius? He has lived rent free in my head for 35 years lol. Him and his damned canus.

I am not sure about the names of the characters. But a Roman family is definitely involved in the first part (Familia Romana).

> I like to think it's worked

It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days every few months, read something, and then disappear.

You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences in the applicable context.

i don't know why people are taking Duolinguo and relatives as the definitive course to learn a language... they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency'

some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages

[0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/

edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive joke) if you are using something like uBlock!

Frankly, people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up.

This happened to me about ten years ago.

I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking around. There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff:

- Alexander Argüelles

- Steve Kaufmann

- Luke Ranieri

I might be missing a few others.

You first have to know what your problem is, before you can solve it.

> no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages

True. In culturally homogeneous countries, you don't need four languages to make yourself understood.

It becomes somewhat necessary in places like mine where different groups of acquaintances/relatives/friends speak different languages and finding a single language at the intersection of those groups can be hard.

> You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up.

is that Duolingo fault or users? because that happen in any hobby. heck, take indie gamedev.! hundreds give ups for a single released game. we could also say that there are people who tried Duolingo and years later they are fluent because the app was the kickstart

you have to be quite naive/lazy to stick ONLY with Duolingo for a year or 2 and expect that you will be fluent. there's also different ways of approaching the app... like each lesson allowing one to read or discuss it with the community; meta-thinking stuff like "am i learning or just rushing through lessons?" etc.

i heard podcasts about psychologists suggesting that fluency is subjective and it happens at +4 years time span of active engagement after mastering the basics

i think Niklas Luhmann’s essay on communication is quite relevant here; https://www.unisalento.it/documents/20152/2157613/LUHMANN-Wh...

Fluency is a different topic. In the initial stages, I am more concerned about the size of my vocabulary and my ability to understand what is written than trying to speak or listen. This is where reading lots and lots of material in the target language helps.

I have seen lifelong scholars of the Sanskrit language struggling to speak in Sanskrit because they are simply not used to it.

> people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. [...] There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff [linguistics/pedagogy]

That's true, but the opposite extreme can be even worse. In YouTube and Reddit I see so many people procrastinating in their quest for the perfect learning method instead of just sticking with any of the good enough methods they already have. I know because I've also kind of fell for that trap myself sometimes.

In fact, I imagine that the average Hacker News user is far more likely to fail at language learning because they procrastinate on linguistics and pedagogical theory and not because they churned 10,000 hours at a slightly suboptimal learning methodology.

This is generally because of a lack of definite purpose. If you were serious about reading ancient Latin literature, you would use YT to try to figure out a reasonable way to achieve the purpose and then put the theory into practise instead of continuing to watch these people talk about the same things over and over. Imagine Vermeer, Moebius or Frazetta continuing to watch art tutorials on YT in their 30s and 40s instead of working on their craft.

For some people, it is because they are unsure of which method works for them. So they wander from one theory to the other.

The rest simply enjoy the meta aspect of the journey more than the journey itself.

>they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency

Sure, they've got that fig leaf covering them.

Orbeg's Lingva Latina is so good, especially if you use the supplemental exercises and stories as well. It's a shame it didn't catch on as much, the material for modern languages is now outdated and it seems no one is working on newer editions. Deutsch Nach der Naturmethode, Français par la Méthode Nature and English by the Nature Method are excelent at teaching the basics, but I hear criticism over the vocabulary often.

Things are much better today, I feel. If the publishers do not feel that there is a market, then the gap must be filled by enthusiasts. Some time for creating the content and $6/m on DO, and hundreds/thousands of people can benefit.

It's pretty hard to do it with as much quality as Orberg did. He deliberately wrote each chapter to use the most universal vocabulary and grammar possible, and built upon that foundation, so much so that pretty much any speaker familiar with the latin alphabet can just pick it up and read start to finish. It's not a coincidence that all of these books start with a chapter on family: "father" is notoriously consistent among all languages descended from Proto Indo European

It is possible, but requires serious, dedicated effort like anything else. I am attempting this with Sanskrit because I have not found anything remotely resembling this that is easily accessible.

I’m very interested in Sanskrit, and working on an application to learn it (and many other languages).

If you have any interest in app based review (not courses - I specifically try to work with input) I would love to get feedback on the Sanskrit experience.

I posted a bunch of comments about it in the past few days, I don’t want to take over another apps thread, but there are so many cool languages being learned here

learning spanish currently and I disagree on the grammer part. I never made any progress with spanish until I found a program that started with drilling all the grammer rules. after that my learning took off

In my experience, knowledge of grammar gives you a false sense of knowledge of language. You might know what the form of the word is, but you may not grasp its meaning in context, or be able to use it in your own sentences.

Grammar is the analytical part of language. It is not the language itself.

Try reading Spanish texts for a few days without doing these drills and you will notice a massive increase in relative comprehension.

I agree with you but learning grammer gives you a scaffolding to understand, and allows you to freely construct sentances even beyond what youve previously encountered.

Obviously knowing grammer isnt going ti get you all the way there, probably not even 10 percent, but its a much much sturdier foundation than "donde esta la biblioteca", etc

*está (ALT + 130) :)

Yeah I'm aware. Also that alt thing doesnt really work on any of my windows compyters I had to install I third party keyboard software.

Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in. Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good offers.

That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?

Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.

Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach? I tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which of these is The Sun?".

Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".

Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners, you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a listening-first approach and contextual translations with vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other contexts.

[0] https://www.latudio.com/

Do they have a version that's not a mobile app? Or will it at least work on the desktop/web browser? I'm not going to use something like that on my phone.

Not at the moment.

Too bad. I'll see if the mobile app works on my desktop but otherwise that's a nonstarter.

I built https://nuenki.app, which follows a fully immersive approach by immersing you while you browse the web. It translates entire sentences at your knowledge level into the target language, and you hover for definitions/the original sentence/etc.

I feel that Duolingo has the same issue. Not enough immersion.

for Chinese (which duolingo is garbage) study stroke order, then get children books and the Pleco app.

Skritter is good for stroke order

Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.

Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.

Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).

If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.

I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.

Agreed, and the sad part is the gamification - while helpful for motivation - actively works against learning in other ways. Duolingo clearly doesn't want their lessons to be actually challenging because that would get in the way of the cycle of "just smash out a quick lesson to continue your streak, then get on with your day". Learners need to embrace failure and be encouraged to spend more time with the material, but the company has been steadily and purposely moving away from that over time.

Have a friend, who is on his 7th or 8th year of every day using DuoLingo (DL) "learning" German. His German is still terrible. Phrase structure goes all overboard, verbs are not adapted to time, person and whatever else. It is a bit painful to see. People also say that some languages just have terrible lessons on DL. Maybe German is one of those.

I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads. It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic Chinese is better learned elsewhere.

An even basic Chinese is better learned from a Chinese-specific app like Lingodeer or HelloChinese.

I tried all three when I was first getting started. I didn't end up going with any of them (I bought a textbook instead - gamification just isn't my jam), but I was at least fairly impressed with Lingodeer and HelloChinese. Both were clearly made with love. And I've met several more advanced learners who got started with them. By contrast, for all its users, I've yet to meet a single person who went with Duolingo and subsequently made it to an intermediate level in Chinese. I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere, but overall it seems that people's success rate with that app is bleak.

I actually really like this take. Despite the fact that most language learners hate on it, Duolingo has great product market fit, and I think it's for this reason. It's in the toilet time distraction/edutainment market as much as it is in the language market

The gamification is what made it work for me. I had 2 months to learn some Turkish before a trip and once I realized it was a game I beat everyone else in my cohort every day. When someone would come up on my heels I'd make sure to spend 30-60 extra minutes that day. I still know Turkish better than any other language and I've been immersed in Spanish for 3 years.

I am getting ads on clothes.

For the curious, here's an article from the developer on why they built LibreLingo https://dev.to/kantord/why-i-built-librelingo-280o

who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and learn a foreign language ... :D

The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.

> some of the things that you prioritize

watching reels first thing in the morning in bed

In bed?! You gotta multitask if you want to get things done, try on the toilet next time.

on the toilet ? I only go to the toilet on company time

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I shit on company time.”

If you are spending 30 minutes on the toilet, language fluency is not your biggest problem

But learning how to ask the chemist for proctosydol in French may pay off dividends

if i spend 30 minutes on the toilet, standing up again is my biggest problem

But your nearest proctologist is going to have a new client soon.

I read Hacker News on the toilet.

Sorry—TikTok FTW

10x more effective than coffee

Exactly, and I just happen to prioritize sleep until I have to go to work!

Is their something in your evening routine you'd be willing to sacrifice in order to free up your morning?

who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and develop software to learn a foreign language

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.

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

The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary

Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are rather aligned.

However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.

Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.

I find Duolingo is pretty good for vocabulary in a "slow" context.

The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.

Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.

No, the best way to learn a language is comprehensible input. Every other language acquisition method is bootstrapping that eventually needs to segue into actually using your target language to read or listen to things, unaided.

What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.

If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.

Duolingo is sorta like flashcards and I think it makes a good easy entry into learning

But flashcards that connect words and concepts are still much better than flashcards where you merely translate.

I think you're mistaken?

The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.

If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.

People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.

The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.

And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.

And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...

duolingo doesnt do grammar but it does translation. Unless you want to become a translator then theres no point in learning how to translate from language A to B. What most people want is to understand and speak which is a different skill than translation

So, like, learning to figure out what someone said, or say what they want in another language. Sounds a bit similar to translation. Saying it doesn't transfer can be claimed about anything. Talking 1:1 with a tutor isn't talking 1:1 with someone else, but it's a question of how much transfers.

Depends on the context whether it's a good task. Duo seems to aim for low friction and beginner level (A1 ish), high adherence / engagement. It's an app, they can't just say "read this text and think about it", feedback and assessment matter. They ab test like crazy, and have multiple task types, I'm guessing translation works in the real world for their purposes (low friction, app, beginner).

The received wisdom that translation bad comes from the pendulum swinging away from grammar translation.

Cool... but nothing will ever beat Anki + Immersion. Here's one guide most Japanese learners follow: https://learnjapanese.moe/

i bet 99% of people will wash out of the 30 day routine, me being one of them. there are better ways to start than drinking from the firehose of "simple anime"

Wish there were similar pages for other languages, I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.

> I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.

You could give Refold a shot! https://refold.la/how-to-learn-russian/

(disclosure: I also used to work there.)

I don't think it's accurate to say that this is a guide "most" Japanese learners follow. There are some good (and some arguable) ideas there, but it's just one guide out of several, and most learners probably don't even browse the internet for such things and just learn Japanese in class or something.

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".

I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.

Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.

On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.

Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.

(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)

I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.

You've twice written about what is the wrong way to learn a new language -- what's your right way? Why did you use Duo' instead of 'the right way'? Perhaps that explains why one might create a OSS version of Duo.

Comprehesible input. find something basic you can understand and immerse your self in it. Often this is childrens books/shows or similar level designed for adults.

at the start you use a translation dictionary to look up ever word which is boring - which is why approaches like duolingo where they give you around 2000 common words to memorize quickly are useful. However the goal is to learn just enough of that list that you can find something you understand to start the real learning on.

Maybe “immersion” works if you already know the language and are going for fluency, but I don’t see how it can get you from zero to one. I’ve tried as an adult and failed to learn my wife’s native language and no amount of “input” at any speed or level helps. It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.

I'm like three days from my one year Duo streak. I've gone from understanding none of my wife's native language to being able to eavesdrop on phone conversations a bit, and to have short exchanges. I've probably spent half an hour daily on average. Sometimes a lot more.

I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.

Comprehensible input works really well and was popularized by a video that went viral a few years ago entitled “How to acquire any language NOT learn it!” [0]

The method described in the video involves focusing on listening for the first year by having someone read magazines and books to you in the target language, pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning of words you don’t understand. This method works quite well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will consistently meet with you and practice like this before you have reached a certain level of understanding, and very few people want to learn this way because they see it as a waste of time.

One of the key aspects of this model is that you should not be translating between your native and your target language, which is what you usually do on apps like Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo doesn’t work. The reality is that the method that works is the method you use consistently over time. Once you get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illApgaLgGA

I don't think your experience here is weird - just seems like you had a good environment for practicing a bit with your wife, which I think is more important than any other aspect of the learning methodology. Now, nitpickers might argue that "better" methods would have achieved much more in less time, but eh.

Try to force some more exchanges with your wife. Make a day of the week the day you only speak her language (for at least a few hours, but don't give up from the frustration when vocabulary runs short - keep it going even if you need to point and sign).

Doubles as a silly/fun couples activity.

Comprehensible input is not immersion.

> It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.

Things you don't understand are not comprehensible to you, so this was not experience with comprehensible input. If you don't know anything at all, you can at least collect words.

Look into "graded readers." They're basically children's books, except native children are fluent and would find them primitive.

What you're looking for is a situation where you understand 98% of what is going on, and you're baffled by the last 2%. If that situation is two- and three-word sentences spoken slowly, then that's the input you should be looking for (and which Duolingo isn't bad for.) The goal is to walk away from that thing you knew 98% of, but now with the last 2%.

Anecdotally, download comic books in your target language. The pictures help enormously in getting you to that 98%.

I’ve been studying Japanese for over a year now with the ultimate goal of being able to have basic conversations, and have been using the immersion method.

My way of dealing with the fact that hardly any input is actually comprehensible is to actually translate, at leas in the beginning. I got a couple of vocabulary books and a grammar book (aimed at passing the N5 and N4 [A1 and A2 equivalent] language exams), and drilled the vocabulary and grammar with a redsheet and an anki deck. The thing is though, that I only need to translate the word/grammar concept the first couple of times I see it, after that it is much quicker (and better for remembering) to judge if how well you intuitively know the word/grammar concept from the anki deck (or if you are able to fill in the blank with a red sheet). Over time you can build up your vocabulary and grammar and the input gets gradually more comprehensible.

While drilling vocab and grammar I also listen to pod-casts, usually while walking my dog, or at the gym. It is helpful even if you don’t understand most of it. Usually—at the beginning—I am able to pick up a couple of words I know, which reinforces them, but also I get used to the pronunciation and the rhythm of the language. After a year I am able to comprehend maybe 60-70% (on a good day) of some pod-cast episodes aimed at beginners. But at the beginning it was maybe 5%.

I think what Duolingo gets wrong is that after you are introduced to the word or a grammar concept, you keep translating it. This is at best a waste of time, and at worst, prevents you from getting an intuitive understanding of the word/grammar. I think another mistake of Duolingo is the fact they spend too much time on learning a single word or grammar, repeating it too many times at the beginning. What I prefer is to dedicate some time with the word/grammar, find connections (also with the kanji spelling of it), and then move on. Most likely I will remember it after a couple of exposures that session, and if not, SRS should do the trick the following weeks.

The method that worked for me: A 90 day course for learning the basic of the grammar and some thematic vocabulary (better than duolingo as it has whole conversation, both written and spoken). An awful lot of reading book, listening to shows, sporadic speaking and writing. Learned English that way without ever travelling to an English speaking country.

I've learned English by scrolling endless memes on Imgur (back when it used to be an image storage for Reddit), and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the topics that interested me (tech and car reviews - like LTT and Doug DeMuro). But that only developed my passive vocabulary (reading and listening). I only really learned speaking English once I started working remotely for an australian company, and further improved the fluency after moving abroad (to the Netherlands).

I'm currently doing German lessons on Duolingo, and what I dislike the most is that it keeps shoving "useless" words into my face (the words that are irrelevant for me and that I'll most likely never use) - I wish there was an option to choose the topics that I find interesting so that it'd mix the words that more relevant with the everyday use words to better taylor the vocab for me. Another shortcoming is that it never actually explains the grammar rules, you can only try to analyze the examples yourself, trying to notice any patterns. Some are good in that, others are bad - so why don't they spare us that mental gymnastics and provide at least minimal explanation?

Using AI for conversations is really interesting approach - it generally speaks the language correctly (not like classmates).

Next time pay enough for a class or have a good private tutor and all you've said becomes true.

But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.

No, private tutors are definitely better but they are no silver bullet. Having a great private tutors often and long enough to exercise sporadic conversation and gain confidence in language use - a class a few times a week at least - is also a prohibitively expensive solution suggestion for most people, making it a non-solution.

You also end in a false dichotomy.

This site is full of web developers telling people they get what they pay for but then call tutors "prohibitively expensive".

You want that education, invest in it. With time and money. Of course, the "a few minutes per day in the commute for 9.99" feels attractive and it even gets you to a basic stage but then it's what we already discussed.

Private tutoring for 1 hour, 3 times a week at the current rates offered by local freelancers where I live would be ballpark 1000 USD per month for a long time. If you start nitpicking about quality and put in some more serious hours I wouldn't be surprised if you hit two grand.

Language should not be reserved for people that can throw that kind of money monthly at their random hobbies, and suggesting that this is "the solution" is grotesque at best.

I don't know what kind of hours and dedication that private tutoring is but you could do online classes with good tutors for way less than that.

You can't chase me with the "it's only reserved for people with money". There's ways to invest well and less than those numbers. Those numbers may not be bad either if you compare it with how much people invest in other types of education in the US, which I presume is what you're talking about.

> [learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages

I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.

The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.

> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach

That's not better than Duolingo, no.

Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to

* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)

* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)

* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly

* lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons that give more control over subtitles, eventually only foreign subtitles or none)

* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now

You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.

Translated stories are sometimes called Graded Readers, you can buy them aligned with most common language levels (CEFR, JLPT, etc)

Subtitles though, tricky. The sites that sync with Netflix are probably better than whatever Netflix offers, or whatever you can get that comes with your video files. Subtitles for entertainment are often abbreviated, which is fine for your native language, but it doesn't help if you want to look up a sentence. You need the crowdsourced ones. YouTube can be better in this regard, especially if they're automatically generated. There are also lists of video games floating around that rank games based on the availability of a script, replayable dialogue, that sort of thing. See Game Gengo for a Japanese example [1] (great channel, he also does lessons with all the vocab + grammar in context using games).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXICXCSIfrQ

A big shootout and kuddos to Language Transfer. I love their method (since I loved Michel Thomas, we see the influence).

"Don't try to remember, don't do homework, but repeat with the two other students. It is of our responsibility [the teacher] to make you understand the language. What you know, you don't forget" (para-phrasing)

And it works (for me© and surely for more software engineers).

https://www.michelthomas.com/

I've used Pimsleur on and off for a while and it's great, because even with sporadic usage I can still more or less remember what I learned and most of the time I just need a bit of a refresher in terms of using the right case or conjugation so I don't get I/you/they/it mixed up.

Hours into Duolingo I'm repeating total nonsense like "the man is a boy" and "the turtle has green pants," but with Pimsleur, after the same amount of time, it's right into practical stuff like "I would like something to eat" or "I don't understand X but I do speak Y."

Having an extensive vocabulary of random words isn't particulary helpful except to extrapolate meaning out of conversations you don't fully understand, and almost certainly cannot contribute to.

You need very little grammar in the first place. And if you learned your native one, it becomes easier to just store the difference (leaks may still happen). Coherent input where previous words are repeated while you learned new one are best (watch subtitled movies, and you can pick a lot if you’re focused on that).

Probably especially with a related language. I remember high school French (vaguely) abd it was probably a pretty good 4 years of high school French. But I also remember memorizing a ton of complex tenses and the like, many of which I probably rarely use in English, couldn't name, and would probably be hard for a lot of people to parse if I did, especially conversationally and mixed with negation.

Yep, French has a lot of rules! But they are grammar rules only. So while rote memorization is hard, a good tutor can hel you with the basic understanding. At the end of the day, it’s just practice. With english, you have to practice spelling and pronunciation, with French you have to practice grammar.

I see people say they get nonsense phrases in Duolingo a lot but I never seem to get them. For example, a lesson I'm doing right now has phrases like "Quand est-ce que vous partez aux Etas-Unis?" (When are you leaving for the United States?), "Tu as ton ticket? (Do you have your ticket?), "Nous cherchons un bon hôtel à Paris." (We are looking for a good hotel in Paris).

How are these nonsense phrases? Seems like some useful things to know as a traveler.

Maybe it's the different language courses. But I also did a lot of Esperanto and it had similar quality phrases to learn as this French course.

You’re not saying how far in the course you are or at what level.

The basic stage stuff is trash. You’re not even getting “ou est la biblioteque” or “donde esta la biblioteca”, you’re getting “la tortuga es verde” or “un homme ne pas femme” or something.

Adding one more:

* https://www.latudio.com/ - listening first approach, pause and show sentence if you don't understand, practice words you didn't get later, 4 types of exercises, scripted conversations being one of them

And a possibility of a one-time purchase.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder

This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.

If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.

The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.

> This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.

I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar".

In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.

You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language!

Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network.

Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.

A very interesting point, I stand corrected. When I think about it, my brain usually does strongly prefer to consciously create a set of "rules" about a knowledge base rather than unconsciously memorize a set of ready-made samples. But that might be just me.

> Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone.

Also, if you're looking for entertaining reading in your target language, grammar books are going to be interesting to you. The goal during language learning is to find interesting content that you understand, and your target language's grammar is a known hobby of yours.

Good luck learning Finnish without understanding the grammar.

I feel like it's the opposite. Most people who speak languages with complex grammar natively can not clearly explain the grammar to you, because they use the correct grammar intuitively, and they have learned to do so by having a ton of input in that language.

This is a bad example because it's probably more wordy/complex than it needs to be but I couldn't begin to name the various grammar being used in: "I would not have gone to Paris except that a friend decided to give me a free ticket."

Good luck getting a 3 year old Finnish person lecturing you on Finnish grammar - Even though the kid can easily ask for a ice cream in both past, present, and future.

Weirdly enough, a 3 year old kid is not the same as an adult. The same learning methods do not necessarily apply.

> I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar"

In this claim you implicitly say that you are focusing on "learning by memorizing grammar" if you do not are focusing on "learning by example" - hence the dichotomy, that is false.

The parent commenter never talked about grammar.

> 2) speech from day one.

.. is something I can't fully agree with. The exception being if the target language only has sounds which you are familiar with already (as in _really_ familiar - your native language already have them). Otherwise you'll simply train your brain to pronounce badly, because in the beginning you can't hear the differences. That's something which will be hard to fix later. And it takes time to hear the differences, your brain literally needs to grow new connections. There are other reasons too for doing a lot (a lot) of listening when you start a new language.

> ... target language ...

> your native language already have them

It seems like there is a strong underlying understanding that learning a new language is done from a source language towards a target language.

The book I am referring to argues that learning a language is about embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task.

The most natural embodiment og a language is speech.

This is fundamentally another way of looking at language learning than what most people think about having had Spanish in high school or what not.

It might not be for all.

I did not at all in any way mean to say that learning a language should be from a source language towards a target language. Quite the opposite really. I completely agree with the statement ".. embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task". That matches my own anecdotal experiences, at least.

What I wanted to say was that even though babies can hear and differentiate between all the sounds of every language on earth (and yes they can), and young children too - what then happens is that the brain will after a time simply keep what's needed for the child's language and discard the rest. Which is why adults will have problems hearing certain sounds of a target language, unless those sounds already exist in that person's language(s). That takes time. Native English speakers, for example, are in my experience generally unable to hear the difference between certain vowels in my native language even though said vowels are as different as night and day for me. It seems to take up to two years for that to get fixed, depending on the person and also age. And in the meantime the pronunciation will be wrong and the person is unable to hear it and thus can't fix it. And later it's so hard that it won't, as a rule, get fixed.

My wife can't hear the difference between certain consonants in my language even though she's fully fluent otherwise. She has to watch my lips. After all these years. The reason is simply that those differences don't exist in her native language. On the other hand, very young people can easily do it and will get the pronunciation right at first try.

But you have to start speaking at some point. Very few non-natives can differentiate between some sounds in my language and if they waited with speaking until they could they would never get there.

Does it really matter? You can always take a diction course later if it is that important. I’ve never bothered myself to learn the different sound for ‘th’ in English, nor the exact spanish flow.

Ah yes, I agree. There are biases from previous language experience.

I am learning Polish currently, that has "complex consonant clusters". I come from a vowel heavy language, and I use a lot of time with my partner to learn to pronounce these sounds.

The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion.

My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a level of conversations with native speakers or being able to engage with media.

Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not speaking a language but moreso learning about it academically.

There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial. It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and barely be able to speak the language at all with someone... which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?

I love the hobby of studying languages and things like Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they can't speak very much even after a long time investment, which is damn shame.

My point is neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods.

> and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people

Is this really how language lessons are taught in US high schools? I've learned English and French in high school, and we were forced to speak all the time.

* Read a story together (who's reading aloud is frequently switched), then the teacher asks questions about the story and picks students to answer. The student answers, if there's errors the teacher fixes them, and the student repeats the corrected answer.

* When you learn new grammar, the teacher starts a sentence, and a student has to finish it using the new grammatical structure (or similar exercises). This was followed by homework, where all those exercises happened again, in writing.

By year 3, we also did lots of essay-style writing, which is where you really drill down into learning the language. Essays were graded and discussed.

In my opinion, this is the best (and also most expensive) way to thoroughly learn a language, it can only really be improved by cutting down the size of the class to ideally 2-3 students - which, of course, makes it even more expensive.

We did do those kinds of things. For example, speaking with a partner or having to give a 5 minute talk to the teacher on something.

The problem is that it's grossly inefficient time-wise, and the content of "conversations" was always very, very simple. "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation. It's boring and most students learn the vocab for the upcoming chapter's test, then forget it after.

I'll concede that with 3 semesters of German, were I to pick it up again, I would probably do so pretty quickly given that the teachers paid a lot of attention to our essays.

It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.

Diligent self-study with attending a language exchange or another environment to speak/practice the language will yield much greater results much faster. You can study the same textbooks at your own pace, you can find additional material and study groups, and you can hire a tutor at times to fill in gaps.

I think if you're a college student it's fine since you have to pick a class anyway (I had to take 3 semesters of any language), but as an adult where time is significantly more precious, I can't recommend it. In a sibling comment I went over what I do use.

> "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation.

That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.

We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think our teachers realized that most students will learn little from that. It was always student teacher interactions, but in a way that required everybody to pay attention/participate. The teacher would ask a question, waited a few seconds so everybody could begin forming a response, and then pick a student to answer.

Not listening and mentally preparing an answer risked getting picked, failing, and getting admonished/ridiculed - and the teachers were (naturally) pretty good at calling on students who had drifted off. If you were paying attention, you also constantly compared your prepared response with what other students were answering, which made you think about correct grammar, ect.

I think if you have the resources to do 5 hours of language lessons a week, this is the best way. If you're learning independently, your way is probably more effective in terms of time and money. I've saved your other comment, I really should get back into Spanish...

In my four years of US high school Spanish in South Florida, I don't recall a single time we read complete stories or newspaper articles. It was entirely grammar and vocabulary in isolation. When there was speaking exercises the teachers did not make an effort to have the native speakers speak with the non-native speakers.

The only thing close to what I'd now call "Compelling Comprehensive Input" that I recall is a single week where we watched a Friends-style miniseries about an English speaker moving to Spain.

You would not be surprised ik spreek geen spaans.

> That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.

After trying for years to learn my wife’s native language, I haven’t really gotten past the “my name is _” and a few other key phrases. I’ve got maybe 10 phrases memorized and I think that’s all my brain can hold at this point. Language learning is not for everyone.

Every human learns a language from birth; there's no inherent reason why learning a second one "can't be for everyone".

The thing is that it requires a lot of time and studying. At least 30 mins per day is the bare minimum, but 1-3 is much better for results.

I don't personally feel like language learning is easier for me than other people. I just focused on putting the time and studying in diligently over many years.

> Language learning is not for everyone.

That's certainly true, but there's probably another effect at play here: language learning is extremely time intensive, and you don't progress if you're not practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even lose progress again.

You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of maintenance effort.

> It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.

Yup. Motivated students learn the language in the classroom (+ self-study) just fine. Unmotivated students don't, but they are not motivated anyway.

That's interesting to me. From my perspective, I didn't find Duolingo great, but it did give me some vocab and basic sentences, and left me feeling more competent than I actually ended up being once I was living where they speak the language I was learning.

Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to the point where I was having short conversations in that second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.

However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can do things like play D&D in my second language. I still don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still, though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational, and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.

Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature of yours?

> neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods

What should one do instead?

I can only tell you what worked for me: it's input. Read. Start using any brute-force method to learn the basics, like the 100 most common words. Then start reading stories aimed at toddlers (or especially written for language learners, there are apps), and keep going to more complex input as you progress.

Do not worry about grammar; you will learn it intuitively as you move from simple sentences to more complex blocks of text. Do not worry about learning word lists after you have the basics; learn words in the context of the text you're reading.

(I have no qualifications besides being a self-taught English and Chinese speaker, so take my input for what it's worth.)

internet_points posted good advice a comment or two above. Duolingo _is_ ok as a starting point, but (as was said before), move on as soon as possible. As a poster above did, I also spent way way too long on Duolingo, chasing the 'streak'. And got nowhere. I already had a foundation when I started, but I got no farther in a year or more of daily Duo. All progress stopped. When I finally switched to graded input instead, and deleted everything Duo from my devices, things finally picked up again. I could have used the time I wasted on Duo to get input instead, it's something which actually works (when the input is compelling and something which can be mostly understood).

There is no one magic solution. Every person I know who has learned a language to an advanced degree has used a variety of methods, diligently, over a long period of time, depending on their current needs. I can give a brief overview of some tools that I find to be efficient in terms of time and payoff, in no particular order.

1. SRS - Spaced Repetition Software, for flashcards. Anki is the gold standard. It's open source and free on every pc/android/etc except iphone where it's $20 I think. I recommend finding a good starting deck with about 3k to 6k words to help build your core vocabulary. In my case it was "Evita's 5k Korean". For about 6-8 months I grinded 20 new words per day, which means about 30-50 minutes of Anki depending on if you missed a day or not and thus had a backlog. If you have less time I recommend 5 or 10 new words per day.

2. Find trusted resources for grammar and structured learning. You might have to hunt around but for Korean, I found some excellent websites, Youtubers, and textbooks like Korean Grammar in Use I-III. These materials really are the core of your studying. Vocab doesn't help much if you don't know grammar and you certainly can't say anything without vocab. These are how you get to output, i.e. writing and speaking correctly.

3. Find graded readers if possible. Roughly, these are texts designed around 90% comprehension which is a sweetspot for learning new words naturally through context. Unfortunately at the time I couldnt find any for Korean, but I've watched friends use them for e.g. Mandarin Chinese and learn quite a lot of vocabulary in a short time.

4. Find someone who can correct your writing in some form. Whether that's a private tutor or a friend who's native language is your target language and their target language is your native language. In the past I found some dedicated learners through HelloTalk who would trade journal entries with me. I would correct their English and they would correct my Korean. It goes without saying that you need to practice output in your target language when possible, both in writing and in speech.

5. Find a good language exchange and/or friends who speak your target language. By good, I mean a structured language exchange that enforces pairings and language usage. In Seoul I find that most "language exchanges" are excuses to drink and and chat, mostly in English. There was one language exchange that 1:1 Korean language-only pairings for 1 hour, then I repaid that with 2-3 30minute pairings of 2-3 people in English. This is where you put your textbook/solo studies to practice by actually speaking (and hopefully getting corrections). Eventually I hit a plateau and got tired of having similar conversations, plus paying $10 per event. I also found a few lifelong friends who are studying English and thus we can ping each other for random questions.

6. Find some spaces or groups that are -only- in your target language. With the internet it's easier than ever now with Discord. For example, my friend learned a lot of French by hanging out in French speaking gaming servers on discord. There are also apps like Hilokal and HelloTalk, but I haven't used them in a while so I can't speak to their quality anymore. Lastly there are offline options depending on your area. In the US I used Meetup to find language groups and in Korea I use, well, a korean equivalent to find groups in niches I enjoy.

7. Lastly, and this isn't a tool, but "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus. In learning a language, you will make mistakes and you will say things that sound stupid. It's okay. It's unavoidable and you make good progress by learning from these mistakes, so long as you reflect on them and understand why the mistake occurred. The people who focus on being perfect and making zero mistakes in learning a language, in my experience, do not go very far.

These are some great tips. Having consistent daily exposure to your target language I think is important. Compelling graded readers can make spending that time every day enjoyable and not feel like a chore. A stress-free positive learning environment helps quite a bit with the subconscious process of language acquisition; it's what Krashen calls the "Affective Filter Hypothesis".

Post critical comments on HN obviously.

> recently started to learn another language with Duolingo

Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.

>the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"

Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.

Research has figured out that grammar is the wrong thing to focus on in a classroom. There are better ways to teach in a classroom that work. However many schools are not following the latest research so you need to find a good one.

grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have had around 50 hours in the classroom.

English grammar (my native language) has always been a mystery to me. Any time I hear about participles or present perfect or infinitives or passive voice etc… my eyes glaze over and I have no idea what any of it means. In school I failed those units.

Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn’t be a very effective path for me…

It's funny, but I always found English grammar (also my native language) to be completely pointless, but I find myself really enjoying learning about Latin grammar, and as a result marveling about how weird English is. It's fascinating that one subsystem in our brain can completely understand our native language's grammar, and yet another part finds it unfathomable.

In high school French class, I had the same problems with grammar in that language.

For example, to teach plus-que-parfait my teacher used English language analogies and they were all useless for me. Again, I failed that part of the course but my grades were high enough to pass without it.

This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.

As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to instead build a foundation first, and many other little things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term learning.

I was under the (possibly incorrect) impression that Renshuu was very beginner unfriendly and WaniKani skips the most basic stuff (hiragana et al) and is “just” to learn kanji which ofc is important. Was I wrong?

On WaniKani: that’s correct. In their FAQ (I think?) they link out to an article on Tofugu (aiui run by the same people) which gives you a couple good anki decks to learn hiragana and katakana. I started wanikani without knowing either, and found it manageable at the start by referring back to a hiragana chart. At some point I went through the decks, and after about two weeks I could read hiragana well enough to leave them behind.

Certainly not a complete resource for learning the language, but very effective for learning (to read) the kanji.

I’ve always wanted to learn Japanese, thanks for the tips!

I have started learning japanese roughly 6 months ago, and I luckily stumbled upon this fantastic Anki deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782

It focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary through listening comprehension. The creator has put an immense amount of effort into it, to a point where I cannot believe its free. I highly recommend it.

Did you create an account just to shill this?

If you are interested I created an open source web app for learning kanji with SRS using open dictionary data.

https://shodoku.app/

I am a year into learning Japanese my self, and kind of wanted to learn vocab and kanji at the same time (and also see example sentences for the vocab which I can put into my anki deck). My method is when I start a new kanji I pick a few words that contain that kanji, bookmark them (and maybe add to my anki deck), and then when it is time for a reading review if I can remember how to pronounce those word I rate it as good.

Thanks for sharing, I'll check it out. I am currently using Wanikani +Tsurukame to learn Kanji, from your description your approach sounds similar with more customization?

I just had a look at it, love that it also teaches the stroke order, this is something I have no tool for at the moment.

If you are happy with WaniKani, you should probably just keep using WaniKani. It is a fine app (though a bit pricey). But I talked about the difference a bit in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43839879

The gist of it is that I like studying vocab and components (radicals) at the same time as the kanji. I kind of swap out the on/kun-yomi reading practice with bookmarked vocab, if I can remember the pronunciation of a couple of words with the kanji, I mark it as good. I also think writing the kanji helps remembering it (although I‘m not strict about it; personally if I screw up the stroke order, or add an extra tail, etc. I still rate it as good). I am also a fan of self rating rather than input evaluation.

My learning finally picked up speed again when I started using CCI (Compelling Comprehensive Input). How easy it is to find material differs a lot between languages. Way way back in time I learned English that way, though I didn't think of it as "learning" back then - I was so focused on what is now called "compelling input".

However, you'll need some kind of foundation, otherwise it'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach" in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I talked to had never heard about the guy.

When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge mistake was to switch to Duolingo.

I'm trying to look up what this CCI thing is, but I don't seem to get further than simply "use the language". Do you have a good resource that explains how to apply the method or, if applicable, an example of a CCI course?

That's basically all it is. Find compelling content that is basically comprehensible at your level and consume it. You'll need to translate it, but you don't need that to be rigorous or to perfectly understand it. As long as you comprehend it in the end, you'll start to learn the patterns of the language subconsciously.

It's essentially a move from memorization and learning language as if its math to how children naturally learn language through exposure.

Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet.

Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.

Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.

Because duolingo is designed for addiction (that's how they make money), not actual learning (learning would mean you'd stop using the thing, no good for stakeholders).

There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.

For a start, almost every other app succeeds at not treating you like a toddler and not resorting to emotional manipulation.

I have to disagree in that you would stop using the app if you learn a language. Learning is a lifelong task and becoming proficient in a language does not mean you will stay proficient in a language. It takes constant refreshing in order to keep sharp.

Is Duo the best thing on the planet? No, does it serve a purpose? Yes. The reality is that, if people see their skills improving as a result of using the app (gamification etc included) then it doing its job.

> There is no sole app that makes you go from 0 to C2, but there are infinitely superior tools that actually make you learn, and not the self-complacent pretend-like-learning pastime that duo is.

This I strongly disagree with. Nothing can _make_ you learn other than your own willingness to do so. If you have the desire to learn, you will. If you do not, you won't. It is that simple and that is applicable to any subject.

> Learning is a lifelong task and becoming proficient in a language does not mean you will stay proficient in a language

Agreed, but most people see it anyways as a journey from point A to point B, and then it's done. Also, most people just settles for good enough, not continuously improving.

> if people see their skills improving as a result of using the app then it doing its job.

Problem being that duo tricks you into believing you are learning when you indeed are not. I feel encouraged when I understand something for first time, not when the godam owl gives me a high five because I matched a word with a picture.

> Nothing can _make_ you learn other than your own willingness to do so

Well, I am really willing to be a world class piano concertist and astronaut. Doesn't mean I'll become one. Motivation + habits set the baseline, the mimimum needed, but they are not remotely enough. Success would be pretty darn easy then.

> Because duolingo is designed for addiction

For people who have trouble keeping up hobbies, that's a feature. Even if duolingo isn't the ideal way to learn, it's a lot better than something I give up on or forget about after a week.

Looking to apps to learn language outside of spaced repetition and talking to someone over video seems pretty naïve to begin with.

There are a lot of things an app can do for you. Spaced repetition is the easiest one. However there are a lot of other options if you get creative. Most of them are a lot more work though. (though chatbots should now be easy as well to implement)

I agree, for me Duolingo was great to learn the basics of Spanish, enough so that I could move on and practice in real life.

I agree i can speak passable spanish with my wife's family. i learnt exclusively on duolingo.

I don't know if its the best way but it kept me motivated to come back and put in some work in a fun environment. which i belive is the biggest problem to solve for any sort of learning.

The suggestion is that it's likely that you did much of your learning from speaking to your wife's family, with duolingo giving you a kickstart and the confidence to do so.

Having conversation partner(s) to practice with generally trumps any other learning method for languages.

I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners.

With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though.

You can also sign up to in-person classes.

I think books are probably the worst way to learn a language

I learned French and my experience from best to worst ways to learn were:

1. 1-1 lessons with language teacher (by far the most effective way to learn)

2. audio lessons (Michel Thomas Method)

3. Visiting France a lot, interacting with French people (my wife is french) (and yes, for me this was less impactful than listening to audio lessons)

4. Duolingo (did a year of doing it daily, did almost nothing for me except a bit of vocab)

5. School (3 years of French in school was about equivalent to listening to 5 hours of Michel Thomas audio lessons)

Schools vary a lot. Some schools are really good, but a lot of them are bad. Schools are typically held back by those who don't care and so disrupt the class. (this isn't always bad, for kids learning how to deal with other kids is itself an important lesson - home school kids tend to do well on tests with much less time spent in study, but they always show a lack of meeting diverse people in my experience)

Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much.

Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.

Many language learning books used to come with audio media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with cassette tapes.

Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.

I am old enough to remember them. Comparably, you got maybe 4 hours of media - meaning sentences from the book being read and short boring dialogs. You cant compare it to what is currently available. It is like comparing a puddle of mud to Atlantic Ocean. And I mean it in a positive way - those audio tapes were almost nothing comparably.

Beyond projects like Dreaming Spanish, you have around infinite amount of French, Italian, Spanish or German Youtube about whatever topic you want to. There are even dedicated playlists for total beginners you can start to consume with zero knowledge. You have thousands of shows on Netflix in foreign language with various difficulty - some actually suitable for beginners. Some you have already seen in own language, so you can understand them more easily.

For major languages, there are dozens if not hundreds of podcasts with simplified news, "for beginner" discussions. Some of them are useable with literally miniscule amount of knowledge.

Italki, LingQ, Languagetransfer, StoryLearning...

People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine.

If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.

To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.

You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.

Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.

> but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.

Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort.

That is just not how it works.

Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.

You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.

Yeah, that's fair -- you can view Duolingo as just, basically, a fun game, and you do learn something.

But I do think there's space for something equally entertaining (not anki decks!) and more effective.

I learned Spanish decently well, and I think one of the most helpful things I did for that was just hanging out with people, speaking Spanish, and drinking -- not grueling at all, very fun!

What's the app equivalent of that?

Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.

> and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.

If you have that, you don't need the other things.

One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language.

(You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)

There's AI slop (or hastily human generated slop, hard to tell) in Duolingo so I won't advocate for its quality, but I've been trying to use several different flagship models for language learning (with a native speaker on speeddial to fact check things) and they get stuff wrong a lot. LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning. They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want, and are fine at translation, but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience.

I and my wife used an LLM to translate something she had written, she could have done that herself but she doesn't feel up to a task like that yet (due to the target audience). And I myself am far away from being able to translate that kind of text to my native language.

In general the translation was good, but the wording felt a bit unnatural, and to my surprise it got some basic grammar wrong - specifically, using the wrong grammatical gender for some nouns (sometimes there are valid variants, but not in the cases I'm referring to), and also using pronouns where a native never would - where it's too hard to immediately see what the pronoun refers to. In the end I had to massage the output a lot before it was acceptable, and we spent hours before the output was acceptable (changing the input to try to coerce a better translation, and after that refreshing the translation manually to fix grammar errors, wording, and as mentioned, overuse of pronouns).

> LLMs are absolutely not ready to be your sole source for language learning.

> They seem perfectly competent at communicating in whatever language you want

These two sentences contradict; that's the only thing you want for language learning.

> but for example, explaining grammatical concepts of one language in another language they have been surprisingly incompetent at in my experience

Doesn't matter.

The two sentences do not contradict. Using LLMs alone would be bad. However they can be used with other things. Most people are get fluent in a language use several different methods to learn.

It isn't clear if LLMs are good. The formal studies cannot possibly be done so don't bother looking. (a few early studies might be done, but not enough to draw conclusions). And of course LLMs may well change in the future so even if you have a conclusion it may not apply to what we see next year.

I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output. Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.

There are two things to say here:

> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.

This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.

> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.

My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)

If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.

Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point.

It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.

Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.

I like how this type of critique pops up when someone sits down and makes a free/libre version of an app with a flawed premise.

Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).

One thing duolingo should he is after every 5 ten minute sessions it should be a ten minute "slow news in the target language" session. There are lots of other options on this line. Really every duolingo style app needs to tell people sooner "you are done, go find something else", either do that by refusing to let them use the app (that will make the VC's unhappy), or give them a different style of study that is more useful than flashcards.

What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?

> What are the modern methods

It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall

> what's to back up they're better?

Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")

In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach.

One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau...

It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books.

Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed.

It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org

Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.

is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?

I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time.

Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.

I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.

My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English.

Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried.

Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)

No worries - I was exaggerating for comic effect. I don't speak the local language like a local, but I do do it all day at work.

I often wish the locals here would refuse to use English, but I enjoy speaking other foreign languages when I get the chance, so I understand when they want to do the same.

I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.

unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.

Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.

That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end up only translating words in always the same sentences.

That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.

You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation.

Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.

You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it all for the first time and looks for "app I can download and use" will do.

They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher.

Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here.

To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card.

More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.

I wrote https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.

Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification.

I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.

> Duolingo is obsolete.

I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more.

I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.

Every time Duolingo comes up, people express their weird standard for it: If it can't take you all the way, it's useless. Which applies to literally every method for learning a language.

And when you press someone on their alternatives to Duolingo, most of the criticism falls apart. The OP's pitched alternative is a classroom where the teacher points down and says "this is a table"? That doesn't compete with an app I'm using on the metro.

Another alternative people pitch is consuming content in the language, something I was able to do after using Duolingo (read the news).

No, it is because Duolingo is an addictive trap optimized for "engagement" (not learning) that requires you an absurd amount of time to progress very little, because it is explicitly designed to be ineffective with the looks of being effective (that's how they make money).

Want alternatives? Among apps, LingQ, for example, or LanguageTransfer. Among not apps, Lonely Planet phrasebooks and StoryLearning graded readers.

There are really many good options if one bothers to search.

That was simply an example of what's actually used in schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo. (Though it must be said that this particular school I mentioned has a very good track record in churning out able speakers, though this is not something a casual learner would want to try. It's basically full time. Very, very hard.)

For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources.

Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.

I just wrote this in another comment, but the hardest part of language learning is the daily practice.

Learning how the language works is the easy part. But only through the daily practice part do you develop the skills to read, write, and speak on the fly.

So the question comes down to: what are you willing to do every day to get that practice in? Especially when you're a noob well under the level needed to do (or stay interested in) more interesting things like read the news.

That's what Duolingo helps people with. And it's already compatible with the things you mention, like reading comics.

You might be falling into the trap of looking at people who aren't motivated to do anything but use one app on their phone and then pretending they'd otherwise have the motivation to learn through an ideal you have that requires more motivation.

When I started Duolingo I didn't even see myself as someone who would or could learn a language, so trying to read comics in Spanish was never on the table (much less a phrasebook, ugh), not an alternative that Duolingo was shutting down. Yet after months I realized I could incidentally read BBC Mundo. I'd wager most people are in this camp since Duolingo is such a "might as well" opportunity very much unlike your proposed alternatives where you assume everyone is super motivated.

Daily practice is very important, yes, but languages are genuinely difficult beasts on their own.

Thousands of words and grammar rules that you need to grasp real time. Just mindless or Duolingo-ish daily practice doesn't take you nearly there.

Also every time Duolingo comes up people criticize it based on where the free tier was years ago.

Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM. Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can run locally totally trash Norwegian grammar. And they even claim it (both written forms!) as one of the languages they explicitly trained on.

Oh yeah good point but I'm doing English to Spanish and these languages are well represented in the big models.

Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.

I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.

I'm not sure exactly what method they're using, but inference costs for speech to speech models are pretty significant so it does make some sense to charge more. The LLM-based text explanations for translation problems are also in the super premium tier though, and those can't be that expensive, so maybe it's just an attempt at market segmentation.

The LLM based explanations actually explain what is wrong with the user's specific answer, not a generic explanation. They are of the form:

"You entered X, because of Y grammar rule you should instead enter Z".

So they aren't something that can be pre-generated for all possible inputs. Some of these questions are free-form input.

That's fair. I've just been screenshotting the page and asking Gemini what I did wrong for free but I guess Google has deeper pockets than Duolingo so they can eat the cost of that for longer.

One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language.

For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.

I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.

Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.

There is nothing wrong with learning via translation.

What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.

> Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages

No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.

While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:

- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials

- at what point you should move on from Duolingo

> but that they do not communicate two things clearly: > this alone won't make you a fluent speaker

Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.

> at what point you should move on from Duolingo

I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.

> Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.

Most users don't read blog posts - they interact with the app. If critical information about how to use the product effectively is buried outside the main experience, that's poor communication.

Also, it's worth remembering: Duolingo is a language-learning app for people all over the world, many of whom don't speak English well enough to even understand their blog.

> I won't blame them for assuming common sense.

It's not about "common sense" either. Language learning is not intuitive for most people - especially first-timers (who their target audience are by the way). Many users assume that completing a Duolingo "course" means they are "done."

It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then it is absolutely productive.

I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages in such a lazy way.

TFA might work for my use case.

My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless.

Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.

The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).

So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.

Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language.

Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.

It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space

Sadly the authors of LibreLingo were last seen being lead into the back of a white van by an enormous green owl

I have to say Duolingo has some of the best corporate humor I've seen.

Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose customers over stupid jokes.

That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly, most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality. They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on. After a couple of years you start really wondering what are they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's just community?

been using Duolingo in the 10s and last year, I gave up because the course seems very repetitive. Even if I got the answer right 10 out of 10 times, the same question kept coming. It almost looks like the app is trying very hard to make me stay as long as possible, instead of study as effecient as possible.

So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?

Which course?

The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".

In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).

> In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).

They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.

German and Arabic course.

So in other words, the course is programmed by a human?

Well I hope with today's AI tech the course should be highly customizable. I don't want to learn "The cat is a viking" 100 times.

Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually learning.

Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.

For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.

That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.

I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.

Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.

It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.

The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.

0: https://www.wanikani.com/

1: https://www.tofugu.com/

Shameless plug: I created a free and open source alternative to WaniKani https://shodoku.app/ using open dictionary data and the same SRS system as anki.

It actually has a very different learning philosophy from WaniKani so it is not really an alternative.

* shodoku teaches writing as well as reading, the point being that writing it helps you remember it.

* You learn components (radicals) and vocabulary at the same time as the associated kanji.

* The order doesn’t need to be by simplicity. This is deviates from both WaniKani and Remembering the kanji.

* You rate your self, just like anki.

I find it is actually more important to learn the kanji in the words you are learning, if a new kanji has three new components, it is not hard to simply learn these new components at the same time (and create a story / connection of them). And learning the reading of the kanji is easier if you learn words containing it. So what I do is I bookmark a couple of words each time I start a new kanji card, and during reading review, if I remember how these words are pronounced, I rate it as good.

Here is my general approach, I attempted to learn Japanese in many different ways and the one I outlined before allowed me to finally break into being conversational.

1. Go through hiraganas a few times (however you prefer, I would write a few down on paper and try to memorise them but now I'd probably just get an Anki deck for it)

2. Once you feel generally comfortable with that, move to words (100 or so) using hiraganas only (try not to get words converted from kanji to hiraganas but actually common words that are always written in hiragana - use ChatGPT to generate a deck for you)

3. Once you feel you arw comfortable, move to the most common 1000 kanjis. There are tons of decks but I really liked the G-Anki one. Go through it once.

4. At this step, you can read and speak much more than you imagine, time to practice it. Here you would move to writing, reading or speaking (depending on personal goals and preferences). I found a tutor which spoke in a way I could understand and that I felt I could relate to (and I wanted to learn a bit of Kansai dialect, so that also helped). I did that on Preply as it is easy to see people's introduction videos and trial a few if needed.

5. As you write, read or speak with natives, every time you use a word you didn't know but you think you should (be picky, add a phrase which seems simple but don't get but don't necessarily add some extremely technical jargon you'd never use ever, at least not for now).

6. Keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint. This stage, if you did the Anki decks daily, you could reach it in 1-2 years, depending on your inclination, how much Japanese you were previously exposed to, etc.

I am now at my 5th year, still learning with anki decks, speaking to my tutor (who became a really good friend) and adding new words. I started reading some short stories fully in Japanese, and almost played through Pokemon Scarlet completely in Japanese. I still cannot follow animes without having to stop and read the text but that's not my goal for now.

Good luck and keep it up!

You can skip ahead full units by passing a test, and I recommend always doing it if you can.

I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30 minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often able to skip two or three units in a row.

Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an easy, gamified supplement to serious study.

> the same question kept coming

I was under the same impression, but later the problem disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of sentences that you should already understand.

I used the app for 6 months (granted this was around 5 years ago) and the problem never disappeared for me.

To answer the question, it depends on which language you're learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most resources for English-speaking learners.

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the recent announcement that Duolingo is replacing contractors with AI.

https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...

If DuoLingo is currently a thriving company, I am convinced it is exclusively because of branding momentum. I think Match.com's trajectory foreshadows the fate of DuoLingo. In the 00's, Match.com used to be the premier "try to meet a not-weird-fuck to date online" system. Then in the early 2010s, Tinder-style dating apps consumed the market. Shortly after, match.com started doing some really fucked up business practices because their niche market got swallowed up in a larger general market by a superior "free" product.

Duolingo's users are sticky so long as the brand ideology holds: "if you want to learn a second language, play duolingo".

Also, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn also founded ReCAPTCHA. Every idea this man has capitalized on has been made obsolete by the advance of AI.

I'm guessing that's why this hit the front page today.

Going to plug Language Transfer again, an excellent free app that is a much better way to learn a language than the DuoLingo approach.

So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?

Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.

Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.

Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.

The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.

It's not really a podcast.

It's closer to courses like pimsleur or Paul noble where a teacher and student are speaking and there is pause before the student answers in which you are supposed to answer.

The thing I love about LanguageTransfer is how he explains _why_ something works a certain way. I find it easier to remember some grammar when I know the background evolution. He also makes an effort to map between languages which is the biggest contrast to things like pimsleur, which try to be more immersive.

No, it’s a series of audio activities framed as a conversation between someone who knows the new language and someone learning. You pause the audio and play the part of the student when required and it focusses on the positive language transfer aspects between languages and how they can be used to build up sentences and phrases.

Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and comprehension are all practiced and developed through the courses and, for me, it has been the most effective way to learn Spanish.

After just a handful of lessons I was able to structure many useful sentences based on the teachings that we weren’t taught directly but that I was able to create a fresh as needed in the moment.

Language transfer is rather good. I'm not quite sure what it does differently, but there's a reason people recommend it.

I learned French, German, Sesotho, Japanese, with a mixture of classroom teaching and full immersion. I decided to learn Spanish with Language Transfer. It is by far the best system I have ever used (short of immersion; the absolute best way to learn Japanese was to fall in love with a Japanese woman in Japan).

I have been supporting it with monthly donations for about 4 years now, because I believe it is such an important tool.

I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.

Spanish after hours looks great, thanks.

Do you just watch / listen to random videos or is it more structured?

I am planning a trip to Mexico soon, so I have been listening to how to Spanish, and mextalki podcasts. The latter is pretty difficult to follow, though I feel you need to listen to real native speakers speaking at a normal pace to have any chance of understanding locals.

SAH seems great because she does seem to speak normally and not too slowed down (or it just sounds quick to me :))

Yes! Language transfer is amazing imo. I found it here on hacker news and it's probably the most effective tool I have found for learning languages.

For Spanish, over the years, I have taken formal immersive classes, finished the Duolingo tree and the reverse tree, spent time in Spanish speaking countries etc. My level of Spanish was good but clunky and I made a lot of mistakes. After finishing about half of the course, I found I was making far fewer mistakes.

I love the etymology background he gives, I love linguistics so it keeps me interested, maybe not for everyone.

I completed the Paul noble learn Italian course, so that I could compare to language transfer. In my opinion language transfer was much better, I found Paul noble's a bit slow and less engaging, for me personally.

I used it for Spanish too, and it really gave me confidence. I went through the course once and was able to travel through rural Panama for two weeks. I plan to redo the entire course (total about 15 hours) soon, to freshen things up after five years.

I think it needs to be supported with other techniques (speaking to natives, watching Spanish TV or movies, etc.), but for taking in and understanding the language it can't be beat.

up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I wish there would have been more content though

My wife and I used it for Spanish as well and it’s a game changer for sure. I can now have a surpassingly decent (if simple) conversation with Spanish speakers based on this app and some supporting vocab learning

Thank you! Is there any advantage to using the app instead of just playing the audio files directly?

I found this in the app’s description:

> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone locked.

> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings

The app is really basic, in a good way. There are no ads or unnecessary permissions. It's just a basic media player that lets you download the audio files for offline playback and tracks whan you have already listened to.

I find I pretty convenient.

I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.

I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.

But overall, great work !

The app could use some spinners, when actions lead to a delay. I clicked on the landing page on the only available purple action button and nothing seemed to happen. I already checked my uBlock Origin, whether it is blocking something, but it does not. Already wanted to reload the page, when finally something visually changed, and the course was loaded. Simply a little spinner/animation would make this way less confusing.

I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.

One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".

> For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".

buenos dias does mean good morning. it literally means good day and can be used as such but most often used as "good morning"

It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.

It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.

Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.

Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.

The reason is the App Store (and Play Store) value things like DAU (as a proxy for "quality"), IAPs (because they get a cut), no real interaction (too risky), etc. The end result is "real language learning" doesn't align with "launching a top mobile app". This is also the reason none of games are hard (can't let people uninstall) and nothing unique shows up anymore (it's impossible to compete)

Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store

It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any meaningful way whatsoever.

Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.

A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.

Completely agree, when Duolingo started, I took the Spanish course and actually got something out of it. The lessons, comments were super helpful. I've tried it again last year and I couldn't believe my eyes that most of it is gone. It feels exactly like an addictive game, making you focus on the game part of it, not learning. And the fact that you can buy out of failures is just WTF.

Same, I now speak fluent Spanish and have lived in Spain but I started with Duolingo (although just watching loads of films was by far the best way to learn once you get that far!).

Agree. Duolingo lost most of its appeal when the discussion forums were taken offline.

It was really nice to discuss the sentences with other learners and the creator of the course.

And it was always fun to open the thread for the sentence "I love you" in the language that you were learning.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978

Not FOSS, but for anyone who may find it useful, I launched a language learning project I've been hacking away on for a few months. Any feedback most welcome! https://langsesh.com

Can anyone recommend a solid resource for learning Tagalog?

Being a far less popular language than the standard "big boys" that most apps, web sites, books etc tend to offer, it's been a lot of false starts for me or simply feeling a bit lost when a resource throws me directly into a scene to learn dialog without having any of the foundational knowledge first.

I plan to spend a year or two (at least) in the Philippines in the not too distant future. While most Filipinos understand English, I feel like learning at least some Tagalog would go a long way in fitting in and feeling less like an outsider.

I really don’t want to be doing self promotion in someone else’s thread, but I have Tagalog support on https://phrasing.app. I just posted some demo videos this morning in comments if you check out my profile

The problem is that Duolingo optimises for time spent on the app, not for progress in the language. The majority of experienced language learners do not recommend it.

If I’m going to spend a thousand hours learning a new language, I’m willing to pay for professional study material.

>professional study material

What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent dictionary app

App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about language learning would consider great. If you are going to pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't about language learning, but it has native content in your language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your money.

There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.

I would probably include duo lingo when I started - but I wouldn’t say “hmm I wish there was something worse but free”.

something like https://michelthomas.com/landing-page/mt-spanish/#start-span...

or https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin-american/

I am personally quite happy with the Teach Yourself study materials as first step when picking up a new language.

If I could change one thing about Duolingo, it would be to allow the user to turn off all the gamification completely. I don't care about fake internet gems, knowing how to speak Chinese (or whatever) is it's own reward, so stop wasting my time with bs!

Nevertheless, Duolingo is an amazing and convenient starting point for unlocking the learning of new languages.

Make your way through the entire course as fast as you can, while also listening to music, talking to people, talking to chatGPT, reading books, etc in the target language as soon as you can manage.

Protip: learn your 3rd language using your second as the language of instruction.

Yeah, I've used Duolingo and always end up doing the same stuff, but it's way too easy to just tap through and not actually learn anything real. Got me thinking - you think anything can really replace just talking to people and living with the language day to day?

This space seems like one of those areas where it would be really hard to break in because their whole selling point is having had hundreds or thousands of people record and annotate an enormous amount of voice input, which I assume has to be hand polished for every single exercise?

I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience not to be very janky in the end.

I can recommend https://polski.info for Polish. Not FOSS, but at least non-commercial.

I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project in particular.

But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.

Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]

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[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.

[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.

Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?

I agree with your overall point - I'd also like to see more novel FOSS projects rather than knockoffs of proprietary software - but at the same time, there's a lot of value in FOSS clones for a few reasons.

The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better. Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually less janky overall than Win11.

Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are another good example of my point, the former being largely superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity, and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly less of a risk with FOSS.

Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie, not to mention tiling window managers.

I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front page.

That's a really good point, thank you.

Blender is another good example – incredible product with a great community. It's becoming the default choice for 3D now, unless you're working for a company that already uses something else. (As an aside, I don't use it much but really enjoy reading the release notes as they're well written, engaging and show how they're regularly delivering real value.)

Don't want to seem like I'm being down on open source - I'm not, it's genuinely a beautiful thing, but I would love to see more innovation and not just copying existing things. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, like someone complaining about how there's no good new music but never listening further than top 40 radio.

Nice to see this pop up, not that I mind giving Duo money every month for my kids account.

Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out there... Im getting closer...

I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!

Please Duo hear my prayers...

Anyone as experience with feedback on https://www.rocketlanguages.com/ and https://babbel.com/ ?

I’m mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two have voice recognition it seems.

I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on. Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking a class.

I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.

I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.

For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.

Related ongoing thread:

Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 - April 2025 (43 comments)

The signup button just spins indefinitely :(

Hope this takes off! Early Duolingo was very community focused and lots of fun, and proves people are really motivated to participate if you make the UI easy enough.

it's interesting how they had a huge community when they wanted everyone contributing new lessons and fixes.

Has anyone tried both LibreLingo and Duolingo? I'm curious if the open-source approach makes learning feel more natural?

But why? These apps are ineffective. If you want to learn a language, don't waste your time on Duolingo or this...

Really hope they can do something about the UX; well built OSS generally lacks good UI/UX.

How about gamification in LibreLingo ? It's number one Duolingo feature.

This language thing reminds me of Willian James Sidis.

I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.

Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:

- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")

- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);

- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;

- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.

- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;

- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.

- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.

My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.

Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).

I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.

Great to see a FOSS app for language learning! Kudos.

However, I think apps that focus on one particular language and how to learn that language are better than a one-size-fits-all approach like Duolingo. The structure and grammar of languages like Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and French (I've learned all 4) are all significantly different from each other. Or at least different approaches for language groups (French and Spanish, which I also speak, are similar enough to warrant the same approach).

It's a bad idea to imitate Duolingo, which has become VC without a purpose.

The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.

Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.

I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.

Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.

So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.

Anyone have any suggestions for learning Korean? I have Hangul characters down and know some words/phrases from my partner, but would like to dive in a bit more.

Hot take y'all but what if, just what if,

coded applications with injected content are ~GASP~ not the way humans learn language.

I know that this LibreLingo project is probably somebody's baby, and if it works for them great. Heck, if it works for you, great! But for anybody who really wants to (durably) learn a new language, aren't the results already in? Immerse yourself in the language, be around people. At the very least, listen to native speakers on YouTube or something. Read articles/books. Struggle at it, like a baby! That's not pejorative either; babies are the world's premier language learners.

All language apps are destined to become essentially an SRS app, which at that point you might as well just use an anki.

I disagree, the old HelloChinese course was great for covering Chinese character writing, as well as exercises with Pinyin and only Chinese characters, etc.

Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.

old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer app is alternative that right now is better for Asian languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while learning.

How is it different from SRS? If you need to learn the strokes for thousands of characters you will need something like SRS.

Spaced repetition is a highly effective method for learning languages, particularly for vocabulary/character acquisition, but it is not the only method and particular implementation of it in the software, really matters.

It is the only method in that it is a generic term. Without spacing there will be too many words to review at once. Without repetition it will be hard for people to learn things in one try. Spaced reputation is required to scale. But do language learning apps need to scale to handle a lot of information? Technically no, but the incentives around making apps make it so that SRS will added and dominate the product.

I will agree with you that the implementation matters, but ultimately anki will cover one's needs for SRS and open source efforts should go towards improving anki.

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Having trouble understanding why you thought it was acceptable to steal their business name, and concept, and software application design.

Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?

Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add the word libre?

>Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?

You don't know about LibreOffice, really? Your post is so ridiculously ironic I'm having trouble determining if it's satire.

How about "Google Word", "GoogleWord", or "Rosetta Stones"?

A lot of FOSS projects were sued for these things, see GAIM/Pidgin, etc. Newcomers should understand that is a copyright violation.

They call the package LibreOffice though... So... Yeah?