Native Speaker Tries Duolingo (Chinese)
Вставка
- Опубліковано 16 тра 2024
- What will happen when a native speaker "learns" Chinese on Duolingo? Come along for the reaction video!
~TIME STAMPS~
0:00 || My background
0:51 || Download and setting up
1:59 || Module 1, Lesson #1
3:44 || Checkpoint #1
4:48 || Module 2, Lesson #1 (lot's of info here!)
8:28 || Checkpoint #3
13:01 || Info on Pinyin and grammar
14:17 || Final Thoughts
TL:DR - Duolingo seems like a pretty capable app to teach Chinese overall, with accurate information and a pleasing interface, although you'll want to go somewhere else to learn pinyin and writing specifically. Grammar is also somewhat simplified as the app focuses on simplicity instead of going in depth on any given topic. Duolingo's biggest strength is it's price (FREE) and the community they've built for language learners. It's easy to stay consistent and motivated when using Duolingo. Their biggest weakness is an over-simplified structure that emphasizes quantity over quality. But then again, there really isn't any other app on the market that you can solely rely on to learn a language. Not that I know of, anyways. Cheers! 加油!
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#duolingo #duolingochinese @duolingo
I looks funny how he has Chinese settings in phone and learning nihao
🐵😂
Nihao is hello
@@kalebtaylor2016 mate this is lowkey fan behavior big red flag
你好
@@Vinn.official did you know that joke exists? they invented it when humans first existed!
Duolingo gives you the weird sentences to force you to think about the grammar given the vocab you must use.
Yeah Idk what’s with them
“The tricycles be eating cookies”
@@friendlyneighborhoodgoober When I was doing Finnish I got “Hänella on mies” which means “He has a man”
@@friendlyneighborhoodgoober Hänellä*
'The man is in the fridge' is by far my fav one in the Irish course. Lol
I got the sentences:
"I cook my insects"
"My spider eats your flies"
They're the weirdest so far and I'm barely into checkpoint 1
LMAOOO
I think u r learning either Russian or German.... R not u
@@ninatakakuwamzurikamaeliud7042 portuguese actually to speak to my family
When I started the korean it was very insistent on asking me about "child milk"
@@renmare393 😂😂😂😂😂
I feel like every video i watch of a native speaker trying duolingo says something along of the lines of "this is just for entertainment, i'm not critiquing duolingo" and i think the reason for that is the collective fear we as a society have of the duolingo bird
😂😂😂
Underrated comment 😂
I had no idea where you were going with that, I am so glad I kept reading to the end
lol
Words of Wisdom
I am so fluent in saying hello , goodbye, you, good, again,meet
And that’s all you need
They just start much slower on this course than with a lot of other languages, because you really have to get used do the characters vs pinyin, instead of just having a different configuration of the same alphabet your own language uses.
I think Duolingo is useful for learning a language that is similar to your native one where there are little or no changes to grammar rules and the focus is purely on learning vocabulary and pronunciation. If you’re learning a language that is totally different to your native one and you have to learn totally new sounds for the alphabet, new grammar rules, sentence structure, formalities etc, Duolingo just doesn’t give you any information to really understand the language you’re learning. I guess everyone has a different experience with it though!
Duolingo is always garbage
I agree. I'm using it to learn German and it's pretty good but even then I still need other sources especially for grammar. At the end of the day it's a tool. Use it wisely and with other tools as needed and it can get you pretty far esp if you're an absolute beginner.
@@english3082 YOU ARE WRONG! My friend learned to speak Finnish only with Duolingo. His language ability is basic but he can understand and be understood on a basic level, which is pretty good for a free app: we just had an hour of conversation in a cafe two weeks ago. My friend has tried learning Finnish from teach-yourself books and comprehensive language courses but always gave up because they were too difficult: Duolingo gave the encouragement he needed to carry on and the level he could cope with. Duo definitely got him to survival proficiency even though at that level Finnish grammar is way more difficult than learning another Romance language.
Of course, Duo is not perfect - what app is? - but for a free app it is pretty darn good to get you started so you can move on to more demanding lessons. If you are serious about learning a language, you must use lots of different sources: that is true to other language courses as well as Duolingo! If you find Duolingo always garbage, it makes me question your ability to use the app effectively. Or perhaps you have been brainwashed to believe Duo is bad because of all the videos on UA-cam that slang it after using it for an hour, and then go on promoting something else (they are affiliated with). I have watched a lot of those videos myself and most of them criticize Duo of being too simple - because they are not at the level Duolingo is aimed at (complete beginners and false beginners) and because they don't know how advanced the level gets at the end... Maybe you are one of those people?
Naturally, more popular languages and languages that the developers speak themselves, like Spanish, are better than some obscure ones. For example, Duo has many cute Spanish Stories and podcasts designed to practice comprehension, but most languages do not, which is one of my pet peeves because I found them a fun way of learning when I'm tired of "drills". There's also the problem of which dialect you are learning, for example, there are several native Englishes, two "Spanishes" and two Portugueses and a few Chinese languages or "dialects" that are correct - mixing them would be confusing.
Honestly to me it looks pretty good to start from scratch, but then eventually you have to move on and study from other resources, mainly videos where they only speak the language
I learned a lot of Russian from it and thought they intuitively introduced Cyrillic and grammar
I'm Chinese. Keep going. 继续加油
I thought UA-cam was blocked in China
@@uwempiredcll7049 I'm from Malaysia
@@uwempiredcll7049 Taiwan?
This is so funny lol
well he is too homie
As someone who is currently learning Chinese, I have to choose randomly the uncommon words, because I forget how to pronounce it 😅
At the end of the day, you get used to it, and it's pretty satisfying when you read a sentence (even if it's simple) and you understand it!
Rosetta stone helps alot with speaking Chinese
Around 16:00 and 16:20, he discusses learning to write characters, and recommends writing them out because tactile learning is useful. My experience though is that really writing things out with a pen and paper gets painful really quick. Over the years, what I do is trace out the strokes with my bare finger on the table or any surface. This is enough for me to exercise whether I know the character components well enough to recognize it the next time, but I don't have to concentrate so much about making the strokes nicely shaped and meeting each other in the right places, or looking nice and balanced in the square. It makes learning Chinese less of a mental burden (and it won't make your hand hurt after a few dozen characters). It works for me, and keeps me enthusiastic about studying Chinese characters.
for me, i recently got a digital pen tablet so when i review a lesson, i write the characters out using that until i can do it well instead of doing the pinyin. it gives the same feeling of satisfaction as to when i can read a sentence. But obviously relying on this wouldnt work very well as first trying to write out the character can be very stressful. so i still do a page of writing the character out over and over again. But it is very good for as to not forget how to right the charcter
Yeah I just use a tablet with Microsoft one note. I've memorized 2k words this way
@@peter6531 if you search the word on line dictionary, it does show you the stroke which makes it easier to write the word out.
I just use a whiteboard and Dry-Erase Marker. Dry-Erase markers actually write very legible characters too.
@@smawlliemcgee how long did it it take u to memorize 2k? And how many did u learn a week?
7:50 I tried Duo in my native Dutch once just to see how far I’d get into it. “Have you met that very important rhino yet?” is my favorite Duo-ism ever
I know practically nothing about dutch but I do know that rhino is just nosehorn but with a different spelling
The problem I found was often it is easy to guess the right answer to questions because the options are all very different to each other . It is hard not to start thinking "ah, airport is the one beginning with a j". Then when it suddenly wants me to type airport in Pinyin and I have no idea at all.
Just try to created the sentence in your head before looking.
In the Japanese version too, they use romanisation, especially when introducing new Kanji and while teaching kana, but I've never seen them mention it as Romaji.
Yes your too correct I'm also trying to learn Japanese but it is the biggest course in duolingo so learning japanese from another platform may take fewer time 👍🏻
@@arunavsingh4866 i'd recommend using japanese textbooks & studying on your own, but there are better sites than duolingo that can teach you as well. rosettastone (to name one) is very popular
@@reichigo I'm already using that thanks ☺️ have a nice day
I picked up Japanese on Duolingo quite a few years after my couple years of Japanese classes, and I have to say that the stripping of context from common Japanese phrases really slows things down. The literal translation sometimes differs from the conventional/traditional translation, so you would always have to resort to the comments section to figure out why X translates to Y in this case.
It's not avoidable, bit it could be mitigated just by having a preface of some sort explaining these phrases, rather than cost unaware learners their hearts/attempts.
That and a couple of other issues reinforce my belief that Duolingo is great for brushing up and understanding another language at a surface level. If you want anything more, you'd have to immerse yourself in the culture with supplementary books, shows, publications, history lessons, and best of all: native speakers.
I started using duolingo for mandarin about a week ago. I took two semesters of mandarin in high school 8 years ago, so it was surprising to see how much I can remember so quickly. Out of all the languages I've tried learning, mandarin is my favorite. It's just unfortunate that my school stopped offering it because no one was taking it. I think they were afraid of the characters.
Yoyo Chinese on her site has one of the best resources to pronounce pinyin and tones
I’m learning German, and what I use (I don’t expect to be fluent, I just want to know some and I’m hoping that when I go to Highschool they will give me the option to learn German there) is Pimsleur to listen and repeat, then duolingo to learn words, more spelling, and sentences. I like Pimsleur, because you can do something while you listen and repeat
I really hope that you get along with the gendering of the nouns. For example: der Baum, die Katze, das Buch.... I guess this chapter is quite difficult to understand for non-native speakers. But how are you doing?
Do you have any questions you've always wanted to ask a german, but never got the opportunity? Don't hesitate to ask me 😉🤗
@@donata9993 I agree with the gender thing, it's pretty hard. PD: I'm learning German too
I’m learning German tooooo
Learning german as well, the gendering of the nouns is becoming a hell for me
Yeah I’m Italian-American and started and Italian Duolingo to brush up my skills, and I got some of the weirdest sentences. One I remember was, “The woman in the purple pants is a clown.” I was like WHAT😂
When you test out using test points they assume you already know what you are doing
You really have to do it step by step
Also remember Chinese is fairly new they are still making a lot of improvements
When I started it was a lot different
It is a lot better now
Tips are a great addition
My brother studied languages at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in California. The pace of study was intense. Students had to master the language course in 36-64 weeks. Psychologically it was very difficult, but fortunately he was helped by Yuriy Ivantsiv's book "Polyglot Notes. Practical tips for learning foreign languages”. The book " Polyglot Notes" became a desk book for my brother, because it has answers to all the problems that any student of a foreign language has to face. Thanks to the author of the channel for this interesting video! Good luck to everyone who studies a foreign language and wants to realize their full potential
He mentioned once that he likes how they teach the words separately, instead of only together (dian/hua) and later that they only asked for the character with the pinyin, not the meaning (fen). They always do that. I've been doing that course for a while now and they always only teach pinyin separated, so I have to look up what those words mean on their own. They really should improve on that part because its very usefull and google translate just isnt sufficient
Oh, man, I didn't know the little chat with others function was even a thing lol.
I started to try to learn Chinese and like you brought up, they don't really teach you the words, they just teach you to recognise the sound of a character lol.. and there being no slow talk function for most of them made it pretty dang frustrating too
You are literally STUNNING ✨😍
My friend, I have to disagree with you. I believe you are one of the most qualified Mandarin teachers on UA-cam because you have a master-level command of both Mandarin and English. You are uniquely qualified to teach us the most effective way to go about learning Mandarin. I've gone ahead and downloaded Duolingo simply because of your review in this video. I will also be watching your other videos in this series because they are so informative. Thank you buddy, and I hope to see you become one of the most popular Mandarin teaching channels on UA-cam 👍
Thank you so much for this video! I've been learning Chinese with Duolingo everyday since December and had never even thought to click on "Tips." There's a wealth of useful information there! So, thanks again. Just yesterday I was too quick and translated 'baba he mama' in Duolingo as a "mother and father." Duolingo promptly said that was wrong. So changing the order, as you did in the example, doesn't always work. Another Duolingo weakness that actually doesn't occur with Chinese but with many other languages is Duolingo's spellchecker when you type in a translation. Duolingo very often confuses real errors with misspellings. You conjugate a verb incorrectly and Duolingo lets it pass as a "misspelling." And then, quite often, actual harmless misspellings are interpreted as errors.
I like that they tend to read to comments. There have been several times when I was looking up an issues, and I saw people complaining it didn't accept something, which I used, but was taken as correct. Also they give you the character and the pinyin, and when you clock the character it gives you the word verbally so you can tell if it's right or not
I am using this app to learn Chinese. So far, it helps me. You've done a nice review too. Thank you! Keep it up 😉
I used doulingo after 5 months of just watching tutorials on you tube. And I like it's holistic approach, since I was only interested in pinyin before but now I'm memorizing characters 😊 thanks for your channel! You're very kind to us learners 🙏
You're delightful and I really enjoy your video!
I like that you mention using duolingo as a review tool, because I think it's far better for reviewing or practicing a language you're actually *learning* elsewhere. I took French 1 & 2 in high school 6-7 years ago and have only used duolingo since then. But those two years taught a lot about grammar and verb conjugation, and I can't imagine trying to learn all this new vocabulary while also piecing together those basics. I am glad duolingo has expanded a lot since I started using it, and it definitely does a much better job now at teaching language as opposed to just vocab words. But if I tried to learn a language with a completely different alphabet than what I know, I would be absolutely fucked. No *chance* I actually learn the language by trying to use words in a sentence that I don't know how to say, write, or translate.
I don't quite know how to articulate this further, but there is a difference between learning and memorization, and I think duolingo counts both as learning. It is certainly useful though, and I'm glad it is so popular and so many people learn and/or practice language when they can do it in such an engaging way.
Great video! I completely took the lack of an explanation of pinyin for granted! I learned pinyin as a kid, so I overlooked that.
Some learners might find it easier to learn the characters faster without the emphasis on pinyin. Learners unaccustomed to tonal languages might have some difficulty without an explanation about tonality, in which case I think an intro to pinyin would definitely help.
Are you of Chinese descent? I know some people like to learn characters quickly, but the emphasis on pinyin is really on emphasis on pronunciation, not necessarily reading pinyin. But definitely do what works for your learning style!
@@ABChinese Nope. I'm Latino and just beginning to learn Mandarin. There is a lot of Asian influence, mostly Chinese and Taiwanese, in my home country of Paraguay so that's where I learned the basics of pinyin.
Yeah, you're totally right. Pinyin is a pronunciation tool, and thank goodness for it! I see pinyin as like training wheels for learning the various tones used in the vocabulary. So I'm trying to learn how to speak and read without the training wheels now. Again, I think this difficulty comes from me not being used to tone languages.
@@nikolas4965 This explains it! I was just asking for the explanation/use of pinyin because it's confusing to me. I've been memorizing the characters and its sounds just based on hearing. My mother tongue is tonal.
Hello ABChinese!
I just came across your channel and so glad you made this. I downloaded Duolingo and was curious about its effectiveness.
Thank you for the disclaimer in the beginning.
What I love about Duolingo is that my whole family can do it together while learning different languages. My son is learning Japanese, my daughter is learning Hindi and Spanish and I'm learning Chinese but will be brushing up my German and Spanish eventually. Right now Chinese is plenty and I want to focus on that. I appreciate what you said about the stroke order and how important it is to write things out. I think when I have gone through the lessons completely a couple of times I will look around for another app to work on brush strokes and maybe fill in any gaps in my learning. Thank you for your videos.
I started learning Mandarin with Duolingo just over a week ago and this is my first experience learning any Asian language. I learned some French, Spanish, and German in school and between these learning experiences, I definitely see a bigger advantage with Duolingo so far. I agree it seems weird not having the definitions right away but it feels more like immersion which is helping me to remember the characters along with the pinyin and definitions because the repetition reinforces each word. What has been the most difficult though is when it teaches you one specific way to say something and then changes it out of nowhere without ever learning the new words or why they're their. Like in one lesson I was being taught to translate "My last name is Wang" so I was using Wo xing Wang (I don't know how to do accents in the comments). Then I get the same prompt but my answer was wrong because this time it wanted me to use wo de xing shi shi Wang (the first shi looks like FF but stuck together kinda). Also, when selecting the xing shi combination, that was the only one that didn't make any sound so I had to look up what the second character sounds like. That's the only one that didn't make a sound but now I've had a couple of instances where I got an answer wrong because they threw a new version of the same sentence at me.
Won't be the last time. The further you go in Duolingo Mandarin, the more you run into lessons where you have to mind-read. The voice said "ta1", is it 他,她,它? Or you have to memorize the exact translation they used because they didn't allow for normal synonyms and paraphrases, or worse, they forgot to allow frigging punctuation. Endless trouble from the stupid-ass assumption baked deep into their architecture that characters just have one reading. Problem sentences that were reported years ago and never fixed. New audio at one point that literally had the wrong sounds, like every "jue" was a "que" or something like that. Add in systematic problems like the skill that would re-crack every other day no matter how much you practiced, and ugh, it's raising my blood pressure just thinking about it. I gave up a 1 year streak because it was just pissing me off worse every single day. Duolingo is pretty great but as of 2020 Duolingo Mandarin was a flaming pile of moldy underpants.
I Must say this......
I’ve never been so happy finding this amazing channel!
Thank you. I lived in China for 5 years and asked my Chinese teacher how you know what tones you use with the different characters. That you learn pinyin first in China.
Good point on not being too picky for a FREE app. I agree you should start writing the characters too as you encounter them ( tactile learning ). And the "Speak" feature didn' t work on my IPhone in May 2021.
Update: The Speak feature is now working on my IPhone in June / July 2021. Not sure what the issue was.
For what it's worth, I knew almost no Mandarin before starting, and I didn't have any more trouble with the pinyin than with the tones themselves. I knew about Mandarin being a tone language though, so maybe I was already looking to associate the tones with the pinyin tone marks.
I appreciate you giving credit where credit is due with Duolingo. It seems like a lot of people criticize it, but as someone who is new to learning Chinese, and have never met anyone who knows Chinese, it is hard to know where to start. With Duolingo I jumped right in and feel like I am learning a lot and I don't have to worry about creating lesson plans for my self. I just log in and start "playing".
The quality really depends on the course, but the ranking systems and the forum for each individual exercise are excellent in any language to keep you motivated and get more vital information that may not be covered in tips.
Feels like it's a trend to hate duolingo, but honestly, especially considering it's free, it's a really good app.
Should it be your only learning resource? No - obviously it's not perfect, but it will still help you way better than most other apps, and keep you motivated more than just learning on your own. (and cost a fraction of actual language courses)
Glad to see you giving it a fair shake, instead of just looking for "gotcha's" like I've seen in quite a few other videos.
My new favorite youtuber
I've actually been using Duolingo to learn 3 languages, including Mandarin. Hopefully, my Mandarin will be good enough to convert to in Mandarin when I finish the course. I am currently up to the 'Family 1' skill.
Also, I am pretty sure that at 8:20 in the video, the reason that your speaking question didn't work is because I think that you may of pressed the 'Can't speak now' option, which turns off the speaking excersises for an hour. Hope that helps!
I've checked almost all your videos for language learning apps to find the best sources to improve my Chinese. Honestly, this video wasn't as deep, critical, and comprehensive as the others. But I still like what you do, because it's fun, informative, and helpful to improve my path to get better in Chinese. Cheers.
Very observant! This was the first video that kickstarted the whole series so I didn’t know what I was doing back then😂
@@ABChinese I think It would be great if you have an updated (or more deep) 2022 version of this video, since Duolingo is being the most used app globally. 😁
@@queenofcoldness7683 I think I will next year;)
I started learning Chinese for fun. I watch Chinese dramas and movies to pair it with duolingo, so that I can understand different speaker tones and how the pronunciation can vary from different sources.
I used Chinese Skill app. And it helped me a lot before I began on person classes.
Duolingo seems to work similarly with regard to showing the pinyin, but only having character selection.
It was honestly the best way to learn, because I was advanced in my beginner class in that I bypassed pin yin and jumped straight to characters. They also had a stroke practice section.
From this video, I find Chinese Skill App much better.
this was entertaining to watch . nice vid 😆
I'm studying Japanese and I gotta say, it's always super intersting to see chinese words and notice the similarities in pronunciation and kanji/hànzì, the one I especially noticed this time was "phone", the Japanese word being "denwa" 電話! (also 分 is "fun", 万 "man" 用 "you" and I just realized that all of these look like English words while writing them out...)
I think the App has some work to do to figure out the best way to go about teaching languages that utilize characters. I would also like to see some introduction videos added to the start of each module (or whatever each section is called).
I want to learn Chinese & Korean, so when I started on Duo those were the first modules I looked at & tried. I felt like the way it starts with having to guess the characters & no explanation wasn’t the best approach for me, I am the sort of person that really needs to break things down & I don’t like feeling lost.
However, I will note that the Tips section & being able to click on characters to get more information were very helpful. But I still felt like I needed more to get me started so I decided to stop & focus instead on starting with a language that was a simpler transition for me & that I could engage with more casually throughout my day. Since I am bilingual (Spanish/English), I went with Portuguese for now :)
At the end of the day, I think Duolingo is particularly well-suited for casual learning. The more complex or less familiar a language may be for us, the more foundational work we may have to do - that is if you’re really looking to LEARN the language & not just using the App for the Streaks, rewards & challenges, lol
Thanks for your review! It was helpful to get your thoughts & I had NO IDEA about the chat 💬 & comments/feedback features.
You definitely helped me figure out where I want to start & how I want to approach my learning once I go back to learning Chinese.
From what people have said, I definitely want to get some foundational skills so I will look for some additional tools & resources.
I will also reference the Tips & Chat feature & dedicate some time to writing everything down in a notebook that I can refer back to as I go through the modules.
Hi, i'm here thanks your comment in the Discuss of Duolingo. I really love this app because as a French, i learn Chinese on the English fondation. So I learn a language and also review my second language main ^^
I really important to hear some native people what they think about an app who should learn a unknown language, thanks !
Glad I could be of help!
I didn't know any pinyin when I started on duolingo chinese, but I found that the lessons in between each section helped, and the constant repetition of each character helped to understand. They also eventually make it harder by saying like... is it hao or hao with different tones
Thank you because I didn’t know wtf pinyin was when I started Chinese on Duolingo lol 😂
Ok unrelated but I’m learning Japanese and it makes me so happy to see some of the characters in Chinese that I’ve already learned and be able to say “oh! In Japanese that’s pronounced fun or pun! It means minutes!”
i have a separate notebook for each language i am learning off duolingo. for Japanese and Chinese I do the duo lingo lesson one time through to give myself the first introduction to the new terms and characters in the lesson, then i take notes on the new characters. For Japanese I write the stroke order, the definition, and the On-yomi and Kun-yomi. For Chinese I write the stroke order, definition, radicals, and if applicable the traditional version of the character as well just for reference. Then I go back and I finish studying the lesson in the duolingo app, but now i have notes to suppliment which can help me write in the future. After i get a lesson to gold on duolingo i write grammar examples and example sentences at the end of my notes, then i move on to a new duolingo lesson and start the process again!
Cool video. I am using Duolingo to learn more Chinese. I took some in college, very introductory. Now I'm using Duolingo. Goal is to do it for a whole year and get through all of unit 2&3 . Sharing on my UA-cam.
I am an American woman learning Chinese. I self-studied in my teens for awhile but not seriously. Ten-ish years a later, I downloaded Duolingo for fun. I probably take for granted that I learned pinyin in my teens and understand the tones of Chinese. If I didn't already have that foundational knowledge, it would have been a whole lot harder. Also when I studied before, I never learned any Chinese characters - only speaking. I like seeing the characters and I'm starting to recognize them in other places. I wouldn't be able to write them without taking some other class on strokes, but it's nice to occasionally read something and know what it means. I'm progressing through the app, and it's getting harder. A lot of characters are starting to look similar and I think I know "qi" in three different tones. Remembering which one is which AND the correct character assigned to each is now my struggle. I also did not know there are three characters for "Ta" and couldn't figure out why sometimes I would get it right when I answered "he" and then other times they would tell me it's "she". I had to Google to realize that while the word is said the same way, when it's written, there is a distinction between he, she and it (thing or animal regardless of whether gender can be determined). It blew my mind that all these years, I thought there was no distinction made.
I love Duolingo for Chinese. I am learning a lot. It provides a good base by associating the ping-yin phonetic sound with the character. I think it is very well thought out.
7:00 I didn't know that!! I will have to check that out. Thanks for a helpful video 🙂x
This was actually hella entertaining to me ! ( American learning Spanish btw!)
I love at 10:12 how you read the sentence as "他的妈妈...” I do this ALL the time when learning Chinese with an app. It's so weird that when reading I'll swap 我，你 and 他/她 without realising it but I never do this in conversation. I feel a lot better to see native speakers make the same mistakes! I wonder why so many people do this....?
I like how you brought up the fact that Duo doesn't reach Pinyin. I'm used to it as I was taught with it as I learned Chinese growing up, but for my parents they still struggle with Pinyin because they were never thought to read Chinese using it, neither did my uncles, aunts or older generations. They all learned under the Bopomofo or Zhuyin method of reading Chinese. They still struggle sometimes with differentiating when zh- or ch- or c- are used because they never needed to "spell out" the pronunciations
Duo's dependence on Pinyin is why it won't work for me either. I learned Yale romanization as a child, then Bopomofo as a teenager, and both of them (especially the latter) approximate the sounds of Mandarin much better than Pinyin. In fact, some Pinyin letters are so far off the sounds they're supposed to represent that they seem, at best, arbitrary and, at worst, a deliberate attempt to make Mandarin more difficult than it needs to be.
tbh I find duolingo a fun little app to use in combo with other things. right now I'm actually language laddering Catalan using Spanish since that's the only way duolingo offers it. It's helped reinforce grammar points i've leaned through other means and given me a vocab base I can take to other learning methods. Catalan also has very few readily available resources so it's a decent start.
This is my first vid im seeing of yours, your accent is so good, almost non existent
I started the duolingo course knowing what pinyin was, but not knowing the sounds it made and I found it fairly intuitive to figure out what they meant :)
I lived in Guangzhou for 4 years and can speak Chinese to about HSK4 level (probably a bit lower now). I was able to do most things (apartment hunting, solving problems in the apartment etc) by myself.
I recently tried Duolingo Chinese and was able to test out the whole course.
Reflections: some of the options where obviously wrong e.g. I had a sentence about going to work and the extraneous words were 西安 and 熊猫,
I think Duolingo can give you a good basis in the language and expose you to grammar points but you should supplement it with other things, and there is a point at which it probably won’t help you much.
Also, you should learn the target languages vocabulary before using Duolingo.
i am thinking about living in China for the sole reason of language immersion so that i can do business with China in the future. do you think it is worthwhile? sorry for any mistakes english is not my first language either😅
I could listen to your sped up voice speaking Mandarin all day ahahaha 🤣🤣👏
Thank you for this great video. I agree with to a great extent. Unfortunately duo lingo stopped the comment section. I am learning different languages with it. In the moment preferably Japanese. I tried Chinese as well, but it was too confusing together with Japanese. Teaching grammar is the big draw bag of Duolingo. You need additional resources for that. And other languages are tought much worse than Chinese and Japanese. But the gamification keeps you going, and that's a very good thing.
I know this is an older video and Duolingo changes constantly, but it’s important to know that features like slow speech, stories, etc vary not only by target language but also the way you access the app! There’s differences between PC browser, iOS, and Android versions for the same language. It works best to alternate between PC and your mobile devices to get all the content
Came across your channel just by chance. I am 69 years old and fluent in two languages namely English and Afrikaans which is spoken in South Africa and is similar to Dutch and German. I have been using Deolingo for 38 days now and can't believe the progress I have made in Mandarin. I never thought that I would ever learn characters but I have learnt quite a bit. My problem is still however the listening part. Most of the time I read the characters to see what is actually been said.
The speak just seems to be too fast. Hopefully this would come later. Any suggestions for me to improve my listening skills.
The Korean doesn’t have tips but recently it has a new feature that practices stroke order/writing.
Try the online version. It has tips and I use the online version for better understanding.
I have a question. I currently use pin yin when learning mandarin, and i just connect the spelling in pinyin to the individual symbols. I have a growing curiosity though if there is a way to understand the sound of the symbols without pinyin. To simplify, is there any structure to the mandarin characters that are build like english words, where certain letters, in this case stroke, make specifics sounds that can be joined to make the symbols sound. Or am I just thinking into it too deeply.
Your language is soo hard 😃 but unique and good 😃
I personally like it as I started learning Mandarin and I find it helpful to memorize the characters
2:43 Yes, I had to learn pinyin outside of Duolingo, and IMO everyone should do that if you don't wanna build bad pronunciation habits since Duolingo's audio output doesn't give you enough input to understand how chinese sounds you might not have in your other languages are different.
I'm glad I worked on that really early on.
Very interesting review. I used Duolingo for Chinese. I found I could turn off the pinyin if I wanted. For me, the problem was I'm very competitive and resorted to using the hints far to many times to achieve my goal. I know, that's my fault, and not the app. What the app did do for me was fuel my desire to learn Chinese. So I reached out to people I know in my community and found a tutor. She's been here in the US for some thirty years. She has taught Chinese to American Chinese students. She has been wonderful. We are focusing on pinyin and couple it with Duolingo. All that said, I've completed all the courses in Duolingo except the final challenges. (I just don't feel ready for that, yet.) I'm currently on summer break, and will spend it focusing on tones, pronunciation of pinyin, and building my vocabulary before my tutor and I return to continue in the fall. Though pinyin is not technically Chinese, Knowing pinyin will allow people to communicate using a keyboard and definitely improve speaking.
Just came across this video and enjoyed your insights.
谢谢
Even though these points line up, they are not connected. Because they are not connected and the points are distinct values, this function is a discrete function.
You can write the above discrete function as an equation set like this:
A Discrete Function
discrete and continuous functions
You can see how this discrete function breaks up the function into distinct parts. For this particular function, it is telling you that at x = 1, the function equals 1. At x = 2, the function equals 2. And at x = 5, the function equals 5.
Discrete functions are used for things that can be counted. For example, the number of televisions or the number of puppies born. The graph of discrete functions is usually a scatter plot with scattered points like the one you just saw.
his eyes are- beautiful T~T
take it
duo started to teach how to write hanzi and learn the different pinyin sounds + tones as of October 20th2023
2:55 Duolingo is a good, because it is not teaching pinyin, only characters with speaking. Mutch faster and better than the original way (to me)
Faster doesn't necessarily mean better. As a Westerner who speaks either a Germanic or Romance language and has zero experience with Chinese, how else if not pinyin or bopomofo would you understand the concept of tones? Because in Chinese tones are very important to be understood.
@@katya_fhs Thats why important to watch a lot of series and interviews. :)
I want to learn Cantonese, Hokkien and other types of Chinese~~🇹🇼🇭🇰
I'm pretty sure there's like 302 languages in China.
I think Cantonese and other variations of Chinese are written the same but pronounced differently, so I guess you'd have to look up the pronunciations for Cantonese to learn Cantonese if you know Mandarin and viceversa
@@trubiso i think cantonese uses traditional characters and mandarin Chinese
simplified
@@nienke169 Mandarin in Taiwan uses traditional characters. When people in HK write in Cantonese, their choice of vacabulary and sentence structure will vary greatly compared to mandarin. Mainland speaker who don't speak Cantonese cannot really read that. But it is only an informal way of writing used in e.g. text messages between friends. When they write official stuff (signs, laws, textbooks) they write standard mandarin in traditional characters, which is understandable to everyone.
Keep it up dude
Thanks Tyler! Glad to hear from you😀
谢谢你。
Thank you for looking at this. I've heard a lot of people say this program is a terrible resource. I agree with you that writing the characters is a tremendous help in memorizing them.
If you see this and decide to comment on it, do you have a resource you recommend for learning strokes?
Thanks again!
The course updated so you can learn stroke order
Hello Chinese is the best for getting started to learning Chinese
In Duolingo Japanese they have “excuse me I am an apple”
I think (having used duolingo to learn European languages) the earlier course material has a slow speaking text-to-speech to ease you into the language, then they eventually remove the slow voice option. Mostly used duolingo on a computer, not phone.
Great videos!
Earworms also has a variety of languages to learn. They don't teach writing, but it is repetitive and uses 2 languages. Alternating from one to the other. You can get a booklet or the digital booklet depending how you buy it. They are audio books though not applications and cost money to buy them, but some offer a deal for all 3 levels of a particular language. However, they only teach the basics.
Duolingo seems popular, but it isn't always so accurate.
I've been doing some Chinese on Duolingo since before 2020.
Duolingo has changed drastically since then imo.
I'm curious how you'd like it now
Nice video! Is duolingo chinese good for travel vocabulary?
I'm learning Chinese and use Duolinguo for a while, but a found a much better AP now called HelloChinese, and it has native speakers talking and a lot more.
Also, I am Brazilian and found easier to get the pronunciation (an more) from a native Brazilian teacher I found on youtube. And he spent 2 hours explaining the "b p m f" and tones in a way that makes thinks 'click' for me now. And for what I see am dropping Duolingo now.
Awesome 👏
Am actually using Duolingo and its quite helpful now I only need actual people to practice with
I once tried the Duolingo for my native language for fun and it gave me some words even I didn't know(e.g. "Kuli", which apparently means pen) and some of the words I did know had weird translations(e.g "будний день" was "Alltag"). For anyone wondering, it was from Russian to German(I'm bilingual).
lmao Kuli is a pretty common word, how couldn't u know that if u have German as a native?
@@snowflake4099 Maybe it's an accent? Where I come from we say Kugelschreiber.
Does Duolingo have an option for Traditional characters? Or is it Simplified characters only? (I live and work in Taiwan, so Traditional characters would be more useful)
I'm starting my journey in learning Chinese, too! (From scratch as in zero (ling haha)) wish me luck!
Good luck!👻
It becomes intuitive, and the symbols start to make sense after repeated exposure...
I struggled the first several lessons until I saw that pinyin was described in the 'tips' section.
You're right, they don't really go in depth with the intonations or pinyin markings. I kind of figured it out based on the symbols and there was one tips page
Can we appreciate how S-tier the translation of Duolingo is? 多邻国 duo lin guo = many neighboring countries. That might be the most awesomely perfect brand translation ever. McDonald's gets fricking 麦当劳 maidanglao = barley faces work. F-tier sound match. F-tier meaning.
@Smit Shilpatul Yes, the original name is fake Latin for two languages as you say, but they had to find a way to write it in Chinese, which requires characters, which usually have meaning. So companies generally have to worry about getting close to the sound of their name, but also get characters that mean something nice. Sometimes, they'll make a compromise: 星巴克 xing ba ke = Starbucks. They directly translated the word 'star.'
Just for clarity 多邻国 = official branding in Chinese for Duolingo, where the parts are
多 duo = many
邻 lin = neighboring
国 guo = country
There is a "Slow Talk" option in Korean but after some time it no longer shows up
The duolingo app is a bit different to the duolingo site (may include apps on bigger screens like ipads). Like you mentioned, there's the ability for things to be spoken in a slower mode, and there's the ability to type from scratch rather than keywords. I think it's just because of the lack of space.
It also varies between languages. The slow mode and the type from scratch mode is there in French lessons on iOS.