Duolingo is awesome. It’s made language learning possible for me where it used to be impossible. I wanted to pick another language up so casually that I wasn’t willing to put in the effort that other tools require, and Duolingo gives me a way to pick up the basics. I’m confident that in a couple of years I’ll be able to progress to more serious methods for developing conversational skills.

And it would never have been possible if I wasn’t able to use Duolingo to slowly but surely learn a new alphabet and basic present tense grammar.

I think the issue is the target audience. HN has a lot of educated global folk that have had to learn other languages. Duolingo is not the ticket when you need to learn a new language. It shines specifically when the language learning is not a requirement.

This makes several assumptions, namely:

1. That Duolingo has the ability to teach a language to the US Foreign Service Institute standard. I have reasons to doubt that. Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics.

2. That an hour of Duolingo is equivalent to an hour of US Foreign Service Institute tuition. I don't have first-hand experience of the FSI. However, I have recent experience of learning a language (German) outside Duolingo. After watching ~40 short grammar videos and taking 65 hours of 1:1 tuition, my command of the language is WAY further along than that entire Duolingo French tree from a while back, which took many more hours.

Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

My point is that how many people here have put in the requisite time to even find out. I’d wager less than 0.01%. Duolingo have come out and said their long term aim is for each course to get you to B2 standard eventually. I’d say they’re not there yet but they’re on their way. The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re looking at this from an English perspective. The Duolingo English language test is widely accepted at universities as a demonstration of English proficiency so they must be doing something right in that regard.

> Several years ago I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo and I am in no way proficient: I can understand a bit but I can't really formulate a sentence beyond the absolute basics.

What do you mean by “completed the French tree”. Do you mean you went through and unlocked every lesson once. Or did you gold every single lesson? There is a significant difference. You unlock extra vocabulary and the lessons became more focused on writing and listening comprehension when you complete the higher levels of each lesson. This is now baked into the new format as you go along.

> Now, there's clearly a significant cost difference between the two approaches. My point is that an hour of study isn't really a good metric when it comes to comparing methods of study.

I disagree with this. Hours of study is an important metric. You need proficiency on a standardised test along with hours studied for a true measure of method efficiency. And as you mentioned cost is also a massive factor. Most people cannot afford 65 hours of one to one tuition.

With Duolingo I can do half an hour in transit, but the remembrance is not great.

I do think there are more effective ways of learning a language. Probably the most effective and not so well known is Pimsleur.

Half an hour of Pimsleur asks so much focus of me, and im tired after, but I learn quickly.

It's an audio class that has a very smart way of repeating and reproducing conversations. The repetition is done in a way that it advances the conversation and slightly alters the repetition so it forces you to use your active focus & memory.

(no affiliation)

In your defence, the 480 hours is also only for group 1 languages. If you are learning a harder language it may take many more hours than this. Category 5 languages take 2200 hours. 15 minutes a day is totally reasonable for a category 1 language. For a category 5 language, not so much as it’s going to take you about 20 years. But I strongly suspect that the main problem is not the “15 minutes a day” but the fact that people are not expecting (or willing) to do it for years.

The “low effort” is made possible by Duolingo segmenting lessons into tiny chunks.

It doesn’t lower the total hours necessary because that would be witchcraft.

The takeaway is that Duolingo has definitely made learning the basics possible where every other popular alternative has failed for many people.

But I'm not disputing that Duolingo has uses and that its helped a lot of people.

What’s your purpose here?

It’s been communicated that Duolingo is the only thing that works for me and others, and you continue to make time to berate the tool. It comes across that you’re a language learning snob, a gatekeeper, or both.

Kindly let me enjoy myself in peace.

Duolingo is slower than other methods, and it only progresses through the basics of any language. It only covers the fundamentals of some languages. Fluency necessitates other mediums, and this is obvious to any user. Nobody thinks they’re fluent after Duolingo. Duolingo covers the hardest part, the beginning, of learning a language.

If at this point you say that you have met Duolingo-ers who claim fluency (but lack it) then we circle back around to the top-level comment. It’s your word against mine, and I say there’s no way you know many people who have spent the hundreds of hours required to learn a language. 10 years of daily lessons for an English speaker just to learn Spanish. (Spanish is the only Duolingo course that holds a candle for any level of fluency.)

The point is that nobody would adopt Duolingo when they needed to speak well quickly. Its target audience is people who casually want to learn a language and don’t have the motivation to use better tools. These people effectively have no other option, and shitting on the only thing that works for them makes you a gatekeeper and a snob.

I am telling you that I personally know many people (10+), who said "I saw that you can use this Duolingo app to become fluent in French/Spanish/Japanese, and all it takes is 15 minutes a day! That's perfect!" Because they saw it in the advertising. They did not look up how many years that would take, they did not grasp the fact that they are being gamified, they did not grasp the fact that they were learning in a slow and inefficient way, and they were 100% excited to learn a language quickly and painlessly entirely because of Duolingo's promises. And cost ("why would i pay hundreds of dollars for a course when Duolingo is free!").

So yeah, Duolingo's marketing definitely makes it seem like becoming fluent is "easy" if you use their app. And it isn't. That doesn't make it useless, that doesn't mean it's a waste of time if it helps you learn things about the language or move on to a different program.

I am not "shitting" on anyone, I'm pointing out a pretty obvious marketing angle by Duolingo that does dupe people, and I really don't see how that's gatekeeping.

You can’t seriously blame Duolingo for portraying itself positively in light of the difficulty of language learning. With 15 minutes a day, you can make progress. That’s not wrong. “Hey you lazy piece of shit who isn’t willing to buy a Spanish textbook, we have an app for you to learn to count to three in Spanish” wouldn’t do very well.

You use the word “dupe” as if the point of advertising isn’t to portray the most positive technically correct aspects of a product. People settle on Duolingo because becoming fluent is easy. It’s that simple. It’s the easiest path to fluency. Duolingo won’t get you all the way there (and it may even give you some bad habits), but it’s the lowest effort route through the hardest part. It’s a slow route, but it’s the only route if you’re too low-motivation to take a harder route.

You’ve clearly learned a language through better means, and you’re shitting on a tool that others use. Not only that, it’s the tool with the lowest barrier to entry. You’re the definition of a gatekeeper.

You're making a lot of assumptions about other people. Not everyone is as savvy as you. I know people who used Duolingo to learn French so they could move to Montreal. It didn't work. They can't have conversations and they can't remember vocabulary or syntax outside of specific cues. Is that "Duolingo's fault?" not entirely, but they definitely were under the impression that "15 minutes is all I need!"

Duolingo is great at getting you to use the app. That's fantastic. Use it if you find it helps. Just don't expect it to make you fluent by itself.

Terrible planning on the part of said Montreal people has nothing to do with Duolingo. I’m sorry that their plan didn’t work out. Ironically, their forced immersion has probably done wonders for their French.

Sorry you caught the brunt of my frustration. You seem reasonable. Duolingo’s great lol.

Well you're definitely passionate about Duolingo so you must be happy with the results!

I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun. It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve.

It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time.

At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old. When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me.

Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy.

For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.

It’s a pretty simple formula.

They work to understand something and then experience it repeatedly by reviewing it to move it long term memory.

Maybe this approach lays bare and trivializes some plain truths about learning which some academia would prefer to keep as a mystery of butts in seats for hours to measure competency.

Skills based and competency based learning is not always a strength of many of the naysayers I’m against Duolingo type tools (mobile learning apps).

The proof is in the pudding when it comes to usage. An app doesn’t have to be the best or most efficient or most effective. But if it meets the more in their hand than anything else, it can trend to a large advantage over time. Asking if people can pick something up, keep it up long enough on average to make it stick be a threat to the building of physical campuses.

Self-directed learning is also different to learning the theory of language learning vs the practical learning to swim by learning not to drown, then float, then move.

Coincidentally, this is also a major reason why Duolingo switched to “the path” (something else that gets flak on here). Spaced repetition is now built in by default. With the old layout a lot of users would complete a level and move on in an effort to complete the tree, rather than levelling up each level in a section before moving on.

Over the last couple of years, I've invested some serious time into learning Portuguese, first in Duolingo and then in an actual classroom. Duolingo was definitely helpful for reading proficiency, but did almost nothing for my conversation skills (let alone pronunciation). The real classes helped with the conversation skills, though I ended up supplementing them with a spaced repetition app for vocabulary drilling. Grammar is still lacking.

Another Duolingo language that I've spent quite a bit of time on is Yiddish, and I find that I can now read it quite well — but only in the exact font the app is using. I'm not entertaining much hope of ever being able to write or speak it.