Have you successfully learned a foreign language with Duolingo, or is it just a meme?

Have you successfully learned a foreign language with Duolingo, or is it just a meme?

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guidetojapanese.org/grammar_guide.pdf
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You cannot. But completing a tree is a good start (for certain languages, some duo courses are bad). A tree is probably equivalent to 2 years of a high school language course here.

I've find terrible mistakes in the spanish course even in the most basic sentences. So probably most of the courses are shit.

Meme, of course.

>2 years of a high school language course

You're not fluent but you're somewhat competent at this point desu.

I'm learning German with Duolingo and I feel it's much too easy, like I'm not really learning but just playing a game. Not sure what the retention of all this will be.

I've yet to meet a person who learned a language all by themselves other than english with all that adhd going on in modern generation

Duolingo is shit tier.
Check your mother tongue out.
You would know what I mean.

European languages are pretty good on duolingo from what I've heard.

I guess it's okay for an intro but the only real way to learn a language is using it. Find a friend from interpals, post/read generals on Sup Forums, and read news and watch TV/movies from that country.

I got partway through the Portuguese tree but I quit when I decided I wanted to learn European Portuguese rather than BR. I chat online with my tuga friends a lot, usually in PT, and I'll send them voice clips where they'll correct me which helps a lot with accent.

I can't stress chatting online with people enough. Reading news is great and all but you won't learn how people actually talk.

Also finding grammar exercises (to memorize inflections and conjugations in all the tenses and cases) is important, and so is grinding vocab with Anki.

i managed to learn basic italian(reading, not having a conversation) but yeah, it's mostly a meme

You can't learn a language if you don't have a conversation. Duolingo is a shit meme.

It's laziness and lack of interest for human diversity (why should I bother learning another language while the world speaks English lmaoooo), rather than a medical problem.

How do you choose a language to learn? I only know english, never had the opportunity to learn another growing up and have no idea what to pick because everyone seems to speak english these days.

>from what I've heard
american barging in with a meaningful reply again

ancestry, a country you wish to visit, memes, I don't know, find a connection to a language and learn it

>I can't stress chatting online with people enough
Nice if you want to talk a faulty language full of slang, mistakes and memes.

it is shit and they make it way too easy. because they want to retain the user base obviously. they just make you feel good about yourself. but it could be a good starting point. anyway, if anyone is really motivated they don't need a fucking duo lingo or whatever. duolingo is as an easy game for lazy people.

>use Duolingo to learn Chinese
>already find mistakes

You have to find a relevant interest first (learning for business, literature, religion, travels, a gf, etc.) then learn the language. Learning it just for the sake of learning won't work. You will lose motivation.

is right, but the best is having friends who speak the language.

I took 4 years of German in high school because muh heritage, but I'm not great at it because I've never had much of a chance to use it with natives.

I got far in Portuguese because I have portuguese friends who I chat online with on a daily basis. I chose it specifically because I have friends who are native speakers, even if they're already fluent in English it gave me the chance to learn another langauge.

Just make sure the people you talk to are willing to help. Some people really hate their own languages and don't want foreigners learning it at all.

>Some people really hate their own languages and don't want foreigners learning it at all
Who?

>slang
Some of it is useful, though, since you will want to learn how people actually talk.

Sometimes you can sort out what is and isn't "proper" by asking natives questions, too. Like a Portuguese friend of mine thought "nigga" was just a casual term for a ghetto black guy that anyone can go around using, I pointed out that it comes from "nigger" and he thanked me because if he went to the states he would have gone around using it thinking it was okay to say and probably would have gotten beaten up.

There was a Swede that wanted to change Swedish for English. He was super serial.

Even for learning languages for reading purposes only, duolingo is a shit resource. It gets even worse for listening as it is nowhere near the length and the speed native speaking is done.

I've mostly had that experience with people from Northern Europe. A lot of people see an effort to speak it as a waste of everyone's time if you're not completely fluent, and in other cases I've seen people (especially the dutch) say "my language is so small and obscure, I can't imagine why anyone would want to learn it."

Thanks for the advice chaps. Are there any that are useful to know where the population rarely knows english? Brazil, russia, spanish america, places like that.

>since you will want to learn how people actually talk
Yes, nothing better than learning slang without knowing it's slang, and then using that slang when applying for a job, writing an essay for college, or talking in public.

"How people actually talk" is a meme, because there is no standard "people".

You can't learn a language with just Duo. I found it helps you stay in the game on those days when you can't practice a language seriously and it does teach you some new words.

...

The problem with online chat is that even natives don't know how their language works most of the time. Sure, they know how to use their language in nearly every situation but they will hardly know why some grammar points are the way they were, or any other technical aspect of it. Take for example English, how would you effectively explain to, let's say a Japanese person, when to use perfect tense and such?

>the most fluent English speakers are the most cucked people

It's ok to skip the basic courses.
People don't realize that you actually get to pay 500€ to learn things like greetings, A1 and A2.1 are in most of the cases a waste of money.

Duolingo is mostly useful with two kinds of of languages: languages that don't use the latin alphabet and languages that are close to yours.

With the first ones you can pretty much use it as a tool to become more or less good at reading.
With the second ones it's easy to reach a basic level and directly skip to read stuff.

I won't deny that there are courses that are pretty bad (It seems to me that they rushed for the Chinese course and didn't bother checking all the possible translations, which are admittedly a lot for Chinese->English) but it isn't as bad as some people say.

They have recently added short stories for portuguese/spanish/french/german and I find them pretty cool. They added spanish podcasts too.

As with ANY language resource you have to know how to use it.

Italy and unironically France, if you intend to spend some time there.

That problem becomes even more interesting when the native English speaker writes "your" for "you're".

If you're a little familiar with the language, you can separate formal and informal speech. For example with French you'd know not to use things like "kiffe" or "meuf" in formal situations.

I think Clozemaster is better for familiar languages. I tried the Italian course, knowing some Spanish, and it was way faster in comparison with Duolingo.

ahahahahhahah

>Clozemaster is better for familiar languages
It isn't free though isn't it?

Chatting with natives isn't really the only thing you can do, but I do think it's an important part of learning.

Spain too.

The Portuguese speak pretty good English, at least the younger ones do especially compared to French and Spanish people, and in my experience they're pretty excited when foreigners try to speak Portuguese.

It's free it just has a pro version with some extra features.

Oh cool, I'll check it out.

>for certain languages, some duo courses are bad
which ones are the good ones?

Jesus, duolingo treats you like you're a retard. Japanese takes a good 90 minutes a day for 4 years. 20 minutes a day would take fucking 18 years

>If you're a little familiar with the language, you can separate formal and informal speech
Yes, but sometimes you really can't guess that it's Internet-speak. Like with "it's pure cringe" or "epic fail" in English: you may not understand that it's incorrect speech, because the words "cringe" or "fail" effectively exist (as a verb).

You don't learn just with Duolingo, it's much better as a side thing to your main studies.

...

>"epic fail"
Did you just come out of a 10 year coma?

German was pretty good in my experience, but you need something else to learn the grammar rules.

I used Duolingo along with Assimil for German.

I found Duolingo on desktop at least to be helpful with memorizing declension. I think it had much to do with all the nonsense sentences.

>10 year
Too old.

I believe context can also help you determine whether something is formal speech or not. These two phrases are something you'd encounter on 9GAG but not on a university lecture.

Duolingo is only useful if you already know the language and its rules somewhat and need to expand your vocabulary.

It caters to the "I know a few sentences from [Insert foreign language here], I'm bilingual!!1!!1!" crowd, what did you expect?

This, one of the very good things of Duolingo is that it often has sentences that you cannot translate using context. Pic related

Wie geht es dir, und warum lernst du Deutsch?

A thing that's really lacking in Duolingo: there is no list of words that you have already "done", like in Memrise.

I'd like to go back and learn the whole list sometimes, because some words come and go too fast. Also it would help in tracking your progress concretely (you know 3,273 words...), which is useful when you have to take language tests that certify your A2, B1 or B2 level.

Hence the problem of learning a language with fellow Internet memers as a primary source, instead of university lectures. That's my point.

>A thing that's really lacking in Duolingo: there is no list of words that you have already "done", like in Memrise.
There is though? I think you can access it only via desktop though. And the review exercise is still pretty bad if you ask me.

my program has been:

>A1
duolingo + random curses all over internet

>A2 - B1 (or even B2)
clozemaster + duolingo for practice (and lingvist if you know english)

>B2+
read books, listen videos with subtitles and chat with friends

2 years later, I feel good enough with French now (B2 level maybe), and I'm reaching B1 on German (still struggling tho)

Ich lerne Deutsch, weil ich einmal nach Augsburg fahren möchte. Aus welcher Stadt kommst du?

I've improved my french language reading comprehension, but not my writing or speaking

Huh, I only use the mobile app so it doesn't appear. Thanks for the tip.

A good book to practice at a B2 level or more is the Bible. Not that I'm a biblefag, but the text is well-known, universally translated and full of useful vocabulary, so you learn a lot by reading the chapters you already know.

I dont know man, I try to pick original french ones, but I may give it a try; I already read quite easily "le petit prince" (lovely book), and now I'm starting "les fourmis". I looked for "la nuit des temps" but couldn't find any free pdf

yes I actually did

find a qt online/traveling and learn her language to impress her

Try the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, each sentence is very short so it's easy to read. La Bruyère is less dry, but harder.

thanks m8, I'll definitely read those

came here to say this
it doesn't really matter if it's effective or not because the quality control is nonexistent. there's mistakes and bad sentences everywhere

i know that the japanese course is shit and the esperanto course is awesome

How is the Russian course btw?

Holy fuck, you really are stuck in 2008

It's not good, but I've been doing Russian for a couple of weeks and I am at the point were I can sound out and identify basic words. I don't want to be fluent so much as be able to communicate when I go to visit in a few years, so I am hoping that I can get that much from it.

I think anyone could learn a language fully, but it has helped me a lot with Swedish and French.

Pls respond

what's a good site for learning Japanese then?

guidetojapanese.org/grammar_guide.pdf

Wicked. Thanks lud.

>bothering learning third world languages when you already speak english

>but you need something else to learn the grammar rules.

Learning the german grammar is impossible. Not even native germans understand it. They just remember when to use which word

...

It's equivalent to one language course at university. I'm saying that as a guy who completed the French tree on Duolingo and then took two French courses during my undergrad.

It definitely helped me, I feel. During the first class I was ahead of everyone else (got an A+ in the course), but on the second one I only got a B-.

>t. brainlet

What the heck are you talking about Hans.

Very few speakers of any language know the academic explanation of the rules, it is not unique to German. I can write correct Slovak yet I don't really remember any grammar texts from school.

Its only marginally worse than Rosetta stone.

If I want to learn Mandarin such shitty lil programs are the only way for me. If I can't read basic shit and don't understand basic structure I won't be able to learn from hearing and reading like I did with English. No other way around that hurdle besides taking even shittier irl courses.

that's for every language

When I stated teaching foreign students, sometimes I didn't understand grammar rules either and had to look it up

my latest case was explaining the differece and when to us Isto/isso/aquilo, este/esse/aquele and, essa/esta/aquela.
The last two groups are male/female, but the first one is neutral, which supposedly doesn't exist in Portuguese.
Also xste/xsso are very nuanced, and most languages don't even have a direct translation for both.

Then there's German which doesn't even have have a difference between this/these/those.

>Its only marginally worse than Rosetta stone.
I find Rosetta Stone the worst app by far, way worse than Duolingo 2bh.

Its more user unfriendly and archaic but probably more robust when actually teaching you shit

>Then there's German which doesn't even have have a difference between this/these/those.

What? Of course we do.

What's are the translation for these/those and this/that in German?

I've used it for Italian

Would Duplingo be helpful for a native Spanish speaker to learn Italian?
Also any good resources for learning Russian?

Pretty sure it's diese/das and dies/das.

"diese" and "jene" are the classical translations for "these" and "those", although "jene" is rarely used in everday speech nowadays. Usually we use "solche" to express the concept of "those".

Bien, j'ai appris le français pendant quatre ans au lycée, mais j'ai beaucoup oublié et lorsque j'ai passé mon bac, je pouvais pas vraiment tenir une conversation entière et authéntique.

Quand je me suis remis à apprendre le français en suivant un cours de révision à la fac j'ai aussi utilisé duolingo. Donc je crois que c'est bien pour se familariser avec la langue étrangère, apprendre des bases et établir un lexique élémentaire, mais évidemment duoling va pas suffir pour complèment maîtriser une langue.

Thanks.

suffire*

Nice.

Duolingo me semble très bien si on l'utilise comme une source secondaire, en apprenant avec un livre à côté pour la grammaire, pêh.

Ouais. Aucune source isolée suffit pour maîtriser une langue

terrible idea, you'll be slightly put off the language/culture/countries forever and will remember her every time you hear it
t. knower

this after things go to shit of course, if it's your wife then hey good for you