Duolingo (was: Re^4: Googlish approach to voting/XP?)

[Bod]

The content is automatically generated and not very didactic

Traditionally, this has not been the case. Real people put together the courses to produce quality learning. IMHO, there is a deeper issue with Duolingo. It teaches one to translate, not to understand the target language. Duolingo is great for getting started with a language but, in the absence of speaking with fluent speakers, other apps are needed to attempt to become fluent. That's why I use Rosetta Stone daily - it teaches only using the target language.

[Happy-the-monk]

Just to second the notion, as a family member among several long-time active Duolingo users here.

The app is much better than portrayed above, and it serves the pareto principle:

You put really little time and effort in, but as you do it constantly, your vocabulary, sentence structure and understanding of idioms improves greatly, and if you also do the speaking trainings it offers, so does your ability to speak.

They don't pay me, I am no employee, the app runs w/o complaints in a browser with a working add-blocker, too.

So the one downside I see here is that it is not as good as immersing yourself physically in a foreign country for years. But then what is?

The other is that you up your screentime by the time you want to spend learning.

Cheers, Sören

[talexb]

Interesting .. I'm approaching a year on Duolingo, working on Italian, but the last few weeks I feel like it's running out of things to teach me. My reading comprehension is quite good, but I wouldn't be able to handle a simple conversation, and that's my goal -- to understand the spoken word and to be able to converse.

[karlgoethebier]

Too good to be true: …and yes, my last name is real… See also Luis von Ahn and Carnegie Mellon University, the place where some Lisps originally come from.