For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower.
I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo.
Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference.
When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that.
IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)
> For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower.
Interestingly, this is indirectly mentioned in the Linkedin post: "I've always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop)"
"Mobile-first" anything has always been a race to the bottom for everything: attention spans, information density and nuance, target demographic. Not just with Duolingo , but also with:
- Investing (Robinhood leaning into meme stocks and "gamification")
- Gaming (Angry Birds going from $3 lifetime purchase to a pay-to-win, micro-transaction hellscape)
- And of course, the first casualty, human communication (280 characters instead of an essay or open letter.
I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise.
I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.
Agreed. Even Seedlang was of limited use to me past a certain point, I just think it did a much better job at the same niche as Duolingo.
For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start.
I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that when I learned other things later on, instead of being actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what it actually meant.
It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was able to bridge the meaning between words and was actually understanding and following entire conversations.
My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I probably should take some courses for that though. But I am at least fluent which is great.
I think this kind of understanding is really important too, if speaking to native speakers of a language.
You're level may be basic and not super fluent, but if you can make yourself understood you can have a conversation. But if your listening comprehension is not good enough and the person is not slowing down (or if it's multiple native speakers speaking at a natural cadence) then you're lost.
I speak three languages and I'm learning a fourth. Don't study grammar, ever, it's a waste of time. Grammar rules always fall into one of two categories: the ones that are so obvious that you would have learned them after two examples anyway or the ones that are too vague and complicated to be useful.
For an example of the latter look up people making flowcharts for the subjunctive or for the ga/wa distinction.
Or, for that matter, find me the place in an english grammar that explains why you get "on" a train, but "in" a car.
For me, it's been helpful to understand grammar in German and I don't consider it a waste of time. Your experience seems to be different and I'm glad you enjoy it that way.
I couldn't tell you why this is a rule, but at least to my Canadian English speaking ears, if you said "Joe walked into a train", I'd think that Joe walked across some train tracks and was struck by the train, not that he boarded it.
Because you "walk into" things and get hurt. Like walls, or trees. The notable exception is buildings, or less tangible things like a spotlight.
Trains, ships, and busses are a weird kind of middle ground between on/in.
Thinking about it, I believe the principal difference is if there is something significant (more significant than the roof of a train) above your head? It seems to be very subjective and though, any time I think I've gotten it figured out another example/edge case comes out.
Humans don't learn the grammar by "understanding the theory". Humans learn the grammar by using the language repeatedly.
But a book on theory can be mass produced and sold to everyone who wants to learn a language. Can't bottle and mass produce an actual experience of using the language for years. So theory it is.
That's a big generalization. Do you have any data to back up that first claim?
For German, knowing grammatical cases {Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive} has been helpful as an on-ramp to using the language repeatedly correctly.
I used Duolingo maybe ten years ago to get myself up to approx A1, mid-A2 level German. Back then every new piece of grammar actually had an explanatory page that you could study before jumping in to the quiz games. As the enshittification began, they made these harder to find so that instead encountering a new linguistic concept in the quiz felt like a cruel guessing game.
For beginners to German these days, I heartily recommend the free “Nicos Weg” course from DW that goes up to B1 at least. Also has, unusually for language classes, a cast of likeable characters played by reasonably good actors carrying a consistent, building storyline throughout the lessons.
> Back then every new piece of grammar actually had an explanatory page that you could study before jumping in to the quiz games.
These still exist but they're hidden in a little unlabelled button at the top right of the unit overview and I don't think they ever mentioned it to me or do any hinting to go look at them. It's silly cause they're quite useful. I guess they just want people doing the lessons (playing the game) and not boring them with asking them to read about grammar.
At least it's still clearly labelled "guidebook" in the web version (which has always been better than the app in some ways). But the content is dumbed down and enshittified too. These days it just contains a couple of random phrases from the unit rather than any actual pedagogical content.
It's a big button that looks like a notebook at the top of the screen. It's not hidden at all. As I recall it used to be only on the desktop and not in the app, but it's readily available in the app now
I did every German module on Duolingo in a 5-month preparation for moving to Germany for my job, and I got the coveted Golden Owl to prove my proficiency...
... only for me to get to Germany and realise very early on that I would need to do a basic A1 language course.
The app was gibberish; the pronunciations were wrong, the genders were misleading, and the daily interactions they tried to drill in me were far from useful.
The overinflated proficiency instilled in me by the app, made me genuinely believe I could interact easily with a German - a delusion I was quickly and painfully made aware of, much to my chagrin.
I like that Duolingo gives me some kind of curriculum and guides me through new concepts so I'm exposed to new words and study them for a few days at a time. But you have to be intentional with your learning to actually learn. Learning a language is hard, and Duolingo knows people will stop using their app if they challenge people too much and the app becomes a place to feel bad about how little Spanish you know. So their lessons are designed to be passable and not frustrating rather than a method of learning.
Some techniques I use is not looking at the words when they're being read out to practice my listening (though sometimes the TTS voices make things unnecessarily difficult to understand), and I also try not to look at the word bank before trying to translate a sentence in my head first.
My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out from cold storage would makes sure you've actually got them locked into your memory.
Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're forced to type everything.
Seedlang seems cool though, I'm gonna give it a download later.
Seedlang also has a curriculum design (and one that I think makes more sense).
> My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out of nowhere would makes sure you've actually got them locked into your memory
Seedlang does this too. There's a gigantic library of all the exercises and you can go through them and put them in your review lists. Each time you review an exercise, you rate the exercise as 'hard' or 'easy', and depening on the rating, that exercise will then show up more or less often in the future. Eventually if the interval gets to be a year long, it'll give you the option to retire an exercise.
Each time you do a lesson, it'll list all the exercises from that lesson and you can choose which ones you want added to your review queue. It's really nice. Lots of control over your own spaced-reptition needs.
> Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're forced to type everything.
> My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while.
I am paying, whatever you're thinking does this is not doing it very well. Occasionally there will be lessons that claim to target "weak skills" but I don't believe they're doing anything very sophisticated to determine what a "weak skill" of mine is because they're always a cakewalk.
I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo.
Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference.
When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that.
IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)