@@JuanMPalacio And Evan has been openly critical of Duolingo and some of their practices in the past, so I'm sure he feels he can maintain that honesty by not taking a sponsorship
My niece LOVES French but her school wasn't great. She used Duolingo for a year, almost never missed a day. At the end of the year they had a French exam. She got 89% in written and 97% spoken, top of the class by a huge margin. It's not first rate, but it sadly beats the average French teacher :(
It’s nice to hear that it went quite well for her. I think that Duolingo is a great resource to make learning on your own outside of class a lot easier. I used it while learning French during upper secondary and high school (well the Swedish equivalents). Now I’m using it while taking German classes at the university I take my masters degree at.
I am a father and my kid is 9yrs. He used to have interest in French when he was 5 but then lost interest in languages as well as studies. Is it too late for him to get back to learning French and achieving some degree of proficiency provided that he is also trying to learn English side by side? Many say that native like fluency rarely comes for late starters. He's not native to both these languages. Nobody in his circle speaks French. Thanks in advance for the answer. We're from a from 3rs world country.
Duolingo or other language apps (pick your app) is kinds of like doing homework that most HS students never do. 🙂For "speaking" IMO nothing, nothing beats Pimsleur.
@@whiteandblack2005 I have heard that if a child is conversational in a language before puberty, they can learn to speak it like a native eventually. It's not too late, especially if you kid already knows some french.
Wow! When kids practice a language a lot more outside of class they do better in testing‽ That's astounding! Let's crap on the language teachers, it must be them holding back the kids that don't practice. 🙄
I'm baffled by how little you learned in your Spanish class at school for the first 8 years. I went to school in Germany and learned Spanish for 3 years, two of which in a "Leistungskurs" (intensive course witj 5 lessons per week). By the beginning of the second year, we read our first novel, wrote text analyses about political topics and so on. Grammar was taught at high speed 😅 French and Latin classes were similar, but 5 years each with less weekly lessons. Plus English starting in primary school of course. I love languages and feel very grateful that language education in German schools is quite good (as opposed to many other aspects of the German school system).
Agree! With three years of language learning in school (2 or 3 hours a week) we are proficient. We can understand and speak with native speakers. Also helps my European country does not dub 90% of the tv content!
That's quite common in a lot of nations really. Look at the French skills in Anglophone Canada or the English skills in Colombia or Japan. The overwhelming MAJORITY of Anglophones in Canada have like 7 years of French and speak essentially none at all.
US schools need to follow your example. After 6 years of Spanish 5 days a week, I still couldn’t speak it. 1 year with Duolingo and UA-cam and I am nearly B2 holding weekly conversations with native speakers. We are definitely doing something wrong.
I am also baffled as an American who grew up in a different state. In my high school, I learned all the tenses in 7 years of school. I also read an entire novel in Spanish. I'm a Spanish teacher right now, and I'm happy to say for my state, the curriculum has improved a lot. An emphasis is made now on having students USE the language as much as possible with each other, and trying to immerse them as much as possible while in the classroom (as well as you can). I think a major part of why the US is so awful at language teaching is because, outside of class, solely English is spoken everywhere. You can hear a lot of Spanish depending on where you live, but you're not watching movies, TV, or listening to music in the target language like how Europeans are continuously hearing English (a common target lang.) all the time outside of class. I do think Duolingo for Spanish is excellent as a supplement to Spanish classes. In the US, you have to actively search for foreign language content yourself to improve... even as a college major, I did SO much outside work to become nearly fluent in Spanish. I would not be where I am if I hadn't done that.
American schools won't do this because the cost far outweighs the infinitesimal likelihood of the vast majority of Americans ever needing to use a second language.
Unfortunately, I think Duolingo can only replace school for a few languages where they have all the features, like Spanish and German. For most languages, Duolingo cannot replace (even bad) classroom education.
i took years of classroom and it just didnt work for me. Duolingo has got me much more functional in shorter time. biggest issue i have with duolingo is my ear training is poor, but read/write im kinglol
Chinese on Duolingo is atrocious, I've literally heard it pronouncing the wrong tones on a regular basis. I quit Duolingo for Chinese because I felt that it was holding me back
For the languages that are less developed on the app, there are also less opportunities for classroom study. For example, I have been learning Gaelic on the app but there is no Gaelic teacher for thousands of miles from where I live in East Asia. In my UK high school, the only options for study were French, German, and Latin. If you wanted to learn Chinese, for example, there was no options. What Duolingo offers is not supposed to take you all the way in any language. Instead, it takes you through the beginning stages to the point where you can reasonably decide if studying that language is something you are really ready to commit several years of your life, and a big chuck of your income, to doing.
Just to give a little experience myself, I didn't choose Spanish for GCSE but had done it on Duolingo for a while and now I've got an 800 day streak. The Spanish teacher in my school let me sit the GCSE exam, and although results day is a few weeks away, all the mock exams I sat, I achieved an A*, which puts you in the top 10% of the cohort, and I'm towards the end of the A2 duolingo section.
UK schools use block scheduling (as you call it) and would generally have 1-2 hours a week for Y7-9 (middle school), 3 hours a week for Y10-11 and 5 hours a week for Y12-13 (highschool). Once you factor in the missed learning hours at the end of Y11 and Y13 the average student would get 560 hours over 4 years - almost exactly the same classroom time as a US highschool student
I think I would have had about 78hrs of language per year. Someone doing GCSE might have 390hrs in a single language, assuming 2hrs x 39weeks x 5 years
@@sie4431 It's 38 weeks in a standard school year, and you'd only do 5 years if you chose the subject for your GCSE options (or were forced to choose it). That's the other thing that Evan didn't mention - some people do ZERO hours in the equivalent to US high school
I like these Duolingo videos. Sometimes I get so frustrated trying to learn a language, I cancel learning that language, and then I start all over again at A1.
I did A level French and yes it does take you to a B1/B2 level almost no one in Britain takes language classes at A-level, out of roughly 90 people taking French in my year only 3 went on to do A-level, it would be much worse in other schools where a language isn’t compulsory at GCSE so the majority of Brits only spent 3 years with a foreign language
I would have liked to take A-level French, but it was not available due to timetabling restrictions. A-levels either had to be chosen from a "sciences" group, or an "arts and humanities" group. Taking a language A-level alongside science A-levels was not accommodated. This is an area where maybe the Baccalaureate system is better than the A-level system.
My daughter has been learning Spanish at school from when she started reception. They focus on speaking. The problem is she may go to a secondary school where they don't do Spanish. A few adults I know learnt new languages at university both formally and informally. What helped them was going to live in the country for a year.
As a Swede, who started learning English at the age of nine, I am baffled by how English speaking countries don't incorporate the teaching of a second language in schools more seriously. I guess that may be a vestige of the old colonial attitude, that you could speak English wherever you went in the World. Which is still mostly true, but English isn't spoken everywhere. (Missionaries still make the effort to learn languages.) In Sweden, English is compulsory, just like math and geography. We then have a choice of adding a third and fourth language. I took French for six years, and then also Italian for 3 years. (Picked up some German on the side.)
@@ingela_injeelaIt’s nothing to do with a colonial attitude. I started French 50 years ago at age 11. I didn’t understand a word, other children had already done several years, I hadn’t. I didn’t know the basics, I hated it, and I knew no French speakers. UK TV and music was monolingual, mainly American. Our home had no foreign language connections. It seemed pointless. At university I met French speakers, and started learning, moved to Montreal for two years but had a poor experience. Roll on 30 years, I do Duolingo for 8 months, then Busuu for 2 months, then LingQ. I have a B2 level, I can understand podcasts in French and I am learning German. In my view, a child needs a reason to learn something, school can only be a springboard. Today children have access to videos and podcasts in French, whereas I had zero resources outside school. I also think the English are bery shy about speaking a foreign language due to lack of confidence. It’s a shame as languages are wonderful.
Honestly, I learnt more German on Duolingo in 10 months than I did in 5 years of school. I think the worst part of why language learning in school was so ineffective for me was because we'd never stop and cyclically review past things like vocab basics and always had to trudge along to the next topic regardless of us actually remember or understanding what came before. There was seriously a point where I knew how to say chlorofluorocarbons (I believe the acronym is FCKWS) in German but not the basics like month names. Admittedly, I probably should have been reviewing the content in my own time but I didn't know that or how to do that when I was 11. Would have been so much more useful if this review process was hard built into the way languages are taught in schools like Duolingo. Speaking exams too were kind of silly, mostly like your Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, we were just given paragraphs to memorise and recite regardless of actually knowing what the words meant.
Can I just say though, that people often use Duolingo to learn a language they first learned in school. And I don't know about any of you, but when I used it (and other self-study methods), I found that I progressed quite quickly precisely because I was reactivating language that I had previously forgotten. When I tried brand new languages from scratch, it was a far slower process.
That effect is precisely why I tried Spanish on Duolingo, a language I knew almost nothing about. With some caveats, it works. I can also say that 2 hours per unit is a pretty pessimistic estimate. Spanish units are just not that big, and maybe they'll only go into 120 minute territory by section 6 ( section 5 is where skills 5+1 lessons instead of 4+1 lessons long). I timed myself, and 2 hours per unit must be pretty slow for section 5. (my data comes from about a year ago when a unit had 2 skills, so I basically divided my measured times by 2)
Don't me started on rewards for perfect attendance, its utterly offensive to me that this is rewarded when its down to pure luck and encourages parents to send kids to school while sick. Nobody chooses to get sick, have family drama, etc that may impact their attendance. The only reason I think this exists is in order to condition people as adults to ignore their health problems and make themselves worse by working while sick.
Learnt more French vocabulary and grammar in 20 days on Duolingo than the entire first year of learning English back in middle school. It is definitely a good tool if you know how to use it
I am a father and my kid is 9yrs. He used to have interest in French when he was 5 but then lost interest in languages as well as studies. Is it too late for him to get back to learning French and achieving some degree of proficiency provided that he is also trying to learn English side by side? Many say that native like fluency rarely comes for late starters. He's not native to both these languages. Nobody in his circle speaks French. Thanks in advance for the answer. We're from a from 3rd world country.
@@whiteandblack2005 I would say it's never too late to learn languages. I started learning English at the age of 14 as my third language and managed to get a 7.5 in academic IELTS at 18. And for fluency, for most people it's not really necessary to be native like to communicate effectively nor easy to achieve if you are not in an environment where speaking the language is mandatory.
Learning German on Duo vs learning in school I definitely have found Duolingo has helped a lot more but I do still feel it doesn't use enough that I would actually use
I did Spanish in UK high school and after 4 years we were definitely expected to read like a newspaper level and be able to conjugate and everyone else in my class could give and receive directions (except me but I struggle with those in English too) definitely enough to get you through a holiday.
There is nothing worse than teaching foreign languages in a soviet school. I graduated from school in 1992, studied English from the fourth to the eleventh grade, and after graduation I did not know it at all. I couldn't understand speech, did not know tenses, could only read the simplest texts. In just one year, I learned English much better from a self-study book than in seven years at school.
I did Alevel spanish in a uk state school/Sixth Form and the minimum level required to even just pass is B1/B2. You have to watch an entire film (I watched Pan's Labyrinth) and analise it, linking it to historical context of Spain's history. You also read and watch a play (I watched La casa de Bernarda Alba by Frederico Lorca) and analise/contextualise to Spanish history. Then there's a speaking exam you do about a topic of your choice but you have to talk about something important and back it up with research ONLY from Spanish sources. The level of the content is really advanced during A levels.
Ikr even the rest of the speaking exam outside of the research project, you need to learn so much history, politics, culture from everywhere where that language is spoken not just Spain, it's more complicated than just learning the langauge right?
@amydoughty2746 gives one the opportunity to properly deep dive doesn't it ? Access the websites of the natives . Enjoy their UA-cam/Books/Films/Netflix
No, it doesn't teach the general rules for things like tenses so that u can craft your own sentences. Duolingo helps u learn vocab and specific instances of words. Theres a lot of things french classes have taught me that Duolingo hadn't explained, but its great for staying motivated to learn a language in your spare time.
Duolingo DOES teach tenses and conjugation, even if it doesn't explicitly explain them all the time. I assume it's trying to mimic learning a language organically. I learned Spanish in the classroom and French in Duolingo, and I kind of prefer the Duolingo approach in this regard. Even better would be informal initial exposure followed by classroom polishing... which is literally how we learn our native tongues.
@@TheRealE.B. No, it very much does not explain anything in the majority of courses. If you do the Spanish course starting from (US) English, it actually provides you with conjugation tables in the unit hints. Whereas if you want to learn Italian it doesn't even provide you with all of the key sentences (neither starting from German nor from English and neither course lets you advance beyond A1 even though English has significantly more content). If you start from English there also is a mismatch in verb tenses with Italian. Also... in which context would adults organically learn a language without any explanation? Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the daily dose of language learning, but it is a constant source of irritation when Duo doesn't explain anything or mistranslates.
I agree…..I was on and off learning French for 10 years and kept getting so far and giving up…but the gameified element of DuoLingo keeps me coming back….but it’s not great at teaching…so the real benefit of it is in keeping me thinking about French, which makes me find other better learning techniques…..I do 20 minutes DuoLingo a day but I do an hour of more traditional structured French, but it’s the commitment to DuoLingo which has inspired that commitment and continues to do so.
How much and how thoroughly Duolingo teaches grammar seems to depend on the language, but of all the popular languages I've had a go during the last 5 years, every course have had a skeleton grammar lesson. Before I could find separate icons for books and a grammar lessons, which I had to point out to my friend. Now the grammar lesson is more visible, on the unit title bar - but some people still manage to miss it! At one point, Duolingo would give a surprise lesson drilling a particular grammar point, which isn't part of the path/tree and I could take it or skip it without it affecting my progress. I quite liked that feature but it seems Duo has taken it away. I don't understand how can you say that Duo doesn't teach you make your own sentences? It teachers basic sentence structure and verb conjugations, rules for forming plurals etc. For example, Duo teaches you S+V+O sentence 'Mark opens the door." All you need to do is to replace the words with correct gender somethig without changing the word order and voilà, you have made your own sentence. All you need is vocabulary. The boy + eats + fish. (Duo sentence) I + like + beer. (My own sentence.).
Tbf, highschools in Japan are only aiming for A2 in English. Over 8 years of English at school, and this is like 2 English subjects, which would be at least 4 hours a week. Only to end up with A2 as a goal. And honestly, the students couldn't even reach it. Heck, some English trachers are barely B levels
Indeed, and English is actually useful being the International language of the world. Why 90% of American students are learning the language of the invading army of illegals?
I'm a language teacher in the US. In my district it's only offered at the HS level and is completely elective, with no requirements for it at all. With that, it's meant to be "an easy, fun class" Also in the US explicit grammar instruction is becoming less and less common. Focusing on comprehensible input (CI) is much more common, with even level 1 students only a few weeks into school are often reading full pages in the language, though they are simplified to be comprehensible. My students at the end of their 3rd year have also only had about 330 hours of class. Plus with 12 week summer breaks, there are large losses of language in that time.
I get that CI can help getting a grasp of the language, but imo explicit grammar instructions are necessary to actually start forming sentences on your own and not just repeating what you heard because you don't know how to use the grammar in completely new situations/contexts with new vocabulary. I guess it could work with English because it does not have much grammar and is a stupid but undercomplex language (even though we did get that in English class beginning in grade 4 until grade 10 after which we were basically done with grammar anyway). But with other languages I just can't believe you can actually learn it without thorough grammar explanations. I've been learning Korean partly in self-study, partly in standard class structure for around 6 years now (I'm at B2 currently) and need to look up tons of info for each new grammar structure I want to learn because you need the right context, with what kinds of words you can use it, etc. When I just hear a new grammar used I still often assume that you can use it for other things and with other words than what is actually true. I tried Duolingo with Korean and I could only "study" so much until it got way too annoying that nothing is ever explained (besides other issues) except in one small sentence that does not at all cover even the most basic info and all the most necessary uses.
@@Tessa_Gr explicit grammar instruction can be helpful but can also be a hindrance. The problem is the rules are often taught long before students are ready for them as they haven't yet acquired the language to properly use them. When I was in school I could conjugate in every tense the language has, but I couldn't put together more than a few sentences of original thought. And despite my writing/speaking being technically strong I had to take frequent pauses to do the conjugations mentally because while I had learned them I hadn't yet acquired them. With CI the focus is put on comprehensability rather than perfection. The goal is acquiring the language not just memorizing rules and vocab lists. My level 1 students can write multiparagraph stories that are completely original, not simply regurgitating what we read in class, but the language is far from perfect. It is however understandable even if it is sometimes awkwardly phrased. I think both have their place. I delay explicit grammar instruction to the second half of the course, when most students already understand and use the concepts well without being directly taught. Just as we acquired our first language without being directly taught grammar rules until much later when we're in school. Then the grammar is explicitly taught to fill in any gaps in their acquisition.
@@Tessa_Gr I will note that I teach Spanish and I only fluently speak English and Spanish, though I also study German and Italian. Languages with overall similar grammar structures, despite some differences of course. I know CI teachers of less related languages who do not teach explicit grammar but instead do pop-up grammar lessons when a concern arises. And I do not think grammar instruction is bad. It should be included but I do not think it should be the whole focus of the class as it sounds like my own and Evan's classes in school were.
I am a father and my kid is 9yrs. How similar are Spanish and Mexican and which one is tougher? My kid used to have interest in French when he was 5 but then lost interest in languages as well as studies. Is it too late for him to get back to learning French and Spanish and achieving some degree of proficiency provided that he is also trying to learn English side by side? Many say that native like fluency rarely comes for late starters. He's not native to both these languages. Nobody in his circle speaks French or Spanish. In 10 days, my son has learnt 7 Mexican small sentences. Albeit from Google translate. How to go about learning languages? Thanks in advance for your response. We're from a 3rd world country.
@@ninimeggie4771 I assume your students are of the caliber who learned to speak English natively and do so properly by default. Rural students aren't always so fortunate. I went to school with people for most of my years growing up who didn't have the greatest proficiency with properly speaking English in a comprehensible manner combining accent, low/finite vocabulary, and a seemingly hardwired slang, so It wasn't pleasant listening to them speak, let alone in another language they had no interest in at all in the first place.
As someone who has been studying German for the past year and a half with Duolingo, I can confidently say that I was able to reach B1 with help from Duolingo and some outside resources like books and watching movies. Where I went to school, we didn’t even get to take a foreign language until middle school, and even then we only did it once a week where I went. The main problem with this model is that it doesn’t stick well and there wasn’t enough guideance, so I’d say we need to change the way we structure language learning if we want people to retain their knowledge better. My next goal is to get to B2 in German by April, so hopefully with reading and studying more, I’ll get to that goal! Good luck with your language journey in Spanish learning, Evan! You’re a real inspiration to me with your language learning journey!
Getting some friends to speak with is a great help. I play on a Online TTRPG server. Surprisingly a lot of the users on the server are German so over the course of the Great Coof(When i found the server) we became good friends and some of them are more then willing to spend time tutoring me on the language off hours while we just game together or hang out in VC
In school we didn't learn languages until year 7 where we started Spanish and year 8 where we did French. I did Spanish until A Level. I can't tell you what my abilities were other than that I was fairly decent at reading it, I was able to talk to people in Spanish and that I gave a speech about Pan's Labyrinth 😆 Of course I then basically stopped learning it and have lost most of what I knew. I always go on holiday to Greece and haven't been to Spain since our school trip, so really Greek was what I needed. I've been learning it on Duolingo for a few years and while it has definitely helped, I feel like my understanding is all over the place. It has literally only just got round to teaching me the words for "hotel" and "airport" and "bar" lol. I found that the way I learned in school made way more sense in the way it progressed. Duolingo has given me zero speaking practice and very few examples of phrases I would actually need to say, so I don't feel confident saying anything in Greek yet.
What I recommend when I was studying Spanish and Mandarin Chinese (I still am studying these languages), I did classes in my university when I was there, I got books in those languages, I also used different language apps such as Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, I also watched a lot of movies, and I try to speak to people (i.e. coworkers, family, postman, etc.).
I'm from Germany and had three years of spanish and if I remember correctly it was to be expected to be at level B2 at the end of those three years. At the beginning of my second year my class went to spain for a week and some of my class could have full conversations with the locals there and at the very least everyone could read spanish and understand and speak basic spanish with them. Sometimes the lessons were quite fast but the result spoke for itself. I could speak and read spanish on a B2 level after those three years (I'm not really good at learning languages). Now I'm not on that level anymore, probably not even A1 or barely but I also haven't used spanish in 9 years.
@@Serenity_yt Yeah I tried to learn it again but I had no real goal so I stopped again. Now I learn japanese because I'm actually interested in that and have a goal that I want to reach.
@BlackKnight2895 Yeah the goal is important. For me it always fluctuates once I've used it again and noticed how bad it was I'm more motivated but then it takes a while before I use it again so my level in anything more advanced kinda ebbs and flows
I wish the UK education system offered a wider range of languages, I'm on day 463 of Japanese on Duolingo but if it was available when I was doing GCSE's I would have 100% taken it
I'm currently learning Korean and if I don't don't study every day I quickly forget things. It makes me realise why I was terrible at learning languages at school. You'd have maybe 2 or 3 lessons a week and outside of those lessons I'd never think about the language (apart from when I was doing homework) so by the time the next lesson came around, I'd forgotten most, if not all, of what we'd learned.
I spent 5 years learning French in school, can barely remember a word of it! I am now learning Spanish on Duolingo and I can honestly say that as soon as that new word has left that screen, I can’t remember that either😂. Hey ho, some people just aren’t meant to be good at languages, my husband is quite good though, so at least I know I’ll get fed and get a beer on holiday 😂😂😂
The key aspect here is repetition and consistency. You may forget that new word as soon as it's gone the first time, but if you keep at it eventually that new word will no longer be a new word and it'll begin to stick.
I think it is about finding a good method to get yourself to learn a little bit daily for a very long time, both vocabulary and grammar. I'm not good with languages at all but I'm learning with anki which has really helped. It's a free app for making flashcards and after learning something for the first time the app programs when it should be repeated again (the more often you get it right the longer it waits until you get the same card again). It's honestly amazing, I'm really bad at remembering anything but learning just for 3-5 minutes every day with vocabulary, grammar and example sentences really helped a lot.
Duolingo kinda killed my motivation for language learning when they removed the discussion page. I used to be able to just look through that after every question, and whether I got it right or not, seeing people discussing the question and why the correct answer was correct was always interesting, which helped motivate me and I actually learned from it. Now I'm just keeping my streak up with easy lessons that I can blast through in less that a minute in the hope that it will someday get good again, while wasting the time and motivation that I could be using to try to learn a language through different platforms.
I'm in Scotland and I did a Higher (B1) in German. We definitely didn't do enough speaking, but my writing and reading were still solidly B1 about 15 years later when I decided to start working on German again. I tried to start Duolingo German from the start to fill in vocab gaps and quickly gave up because my previous studies had taken me way past the level where you still translate in my head, so doing it for the Duo exercises was frustrating and boring when I understood the German on an innate level.
I took French from grade 5 through grade 12. Grades 5,6,7 it was simple vocab. Grades 8-11, all I did was conjugate verbs.... it bored me to tears. Grade 12 French, I magically had to know how to read literature in French. Even though I had had to learn it in prior years, it was never taught. I ended up failing the course, mostly because I couldn't get the context of what was written. In high school, I had 2 teachers ONLY to teach me 5 years of French...
language learning is really interesting, I took french for 5 years in school but can not say I speak any french, other than being able to count however far I want in it lol, however as a norwegian I also took English from 4th grade onwards and I am just as fluent in english as in my native, but I cannot tell you how I did it. It's definitely a mix of schooling, film, tv, music, youtube and reading/writing that eventually got me there, but I cannot recall ever *trying* to learn it, which I just think is super fascinating
10:40 The Lego analogy is actually a very accurate representation of the UK foreign language teaching - we are taught to memorise hundreds of words and phrases without learning how to construct our own sentences using basic grammar.
@@kevinjohnlancaster8333 Perhaps extremely grammar heavy teaching is not the best technique, but at least you can construct your own sentences with the vocabulary you do know I guess. Vocab is easy to pick up.
I know you are quite expressive (verbally and with hands) when you talk English, but it ramps up when you are saying VPN things I cannot understand in Spanish! A joy to watch.
What I like about Duolingo is that it's free. There's a whole philosophy behind it, as the founder wanted to make it free for people, who just can't spare even a dollar. The founder (Luis von Ahn) comes from the Gutamalan upper class and he wanted to give everybody access, regardless of their social status, which obviously translates to money. There's a philanthropist philosophy behind it - and that's why people who CAN afford it, are asked to pay. I really, really like that concept.
I took 4 years of Spanish in HS/College and the only reason I’m somewhat proficient in it is because I threw myself into full immersion on two different continents for months at a time. I tried online courses for German and learned almost nothing after several months of daily lessons.
13:27 - I started out on Duolingo by sometimes spending up to two hours maximizing my lessons and repeating the fun "flirting" lessons on the multi-lane tree. On the single-lane curriculum, I have become super casual, and I just do the single lesson per day, which takes me between 5 and 10 minutes per day.
The new system is much better. I start from the second circle in a unit and go until i finish the first circle of the next one (because new content is very motivating) basically a unit a day
@@TheJayWay101 When they first did the change, I felt discouraged, so I hopped around various languages for about two months, and then I finally returned to German.
I was going to write a funny comment, but actually I'm going to mention another tidbit that people don't talk about a lot: In addition to all of the stuff with Eurocentrism and varying quality among Duolingo's languages, there's also user effort. Two people can progress the same amount through a Duolingo course and have drastically different learning outcomes if one person is just speedrunning through the lessons while the other is actually taking the time to read the tips and practice saying the words. Just like two people in the same school classroom can have different learning outcomes.
Duolingo is solid I tried learning Dutch and I have picked up their gender phrases quickly because of the way Duolingo puts its up... Duolingo combined with a free language channel course which are many on YT and studying the specific language through Movies, songs and or dramas and note down key phrases, slangs and others can actually help in perfecting the language. It might not sound organic but it is still better than nothing... I think Duolingo is good and effective... Plus if you get native language speakers to communicate on top of all that then it becomes a bonus... .
For me, one year of studying French with Duolingo was far superior to five quarters of the college French courses that I needed to earn my B.A. But now I'm using Pimsleur, which challenges me in ways that Duolingo didn't, such as listening and speaking without seeing the words written.
it drives me absolutely mad that Duolingo doesn’t let you HIDE words at will. It would be such a useful feature. I want to listen and answer questions and then see the words.
I like Pimsleur. It's great for getting that basic fluency of key phrases down. That can be a problem though, because you end up with a repertoire of phrases that you can say at a level that makes people think you're much better than you are. And then they answer you at full speed and you fall to pieces.
@@joepiekl I love Pimsleur! Best program for learning "speaking" by far. Nothing else even comes close for "speaking". One comment, there is no language app on its own that will get you there. If you use Pimsleur you still have to supplement it with comprehensible input - like reading and watching videos in the target language. I also didn't start Pimsleur until I already had an active vocab of around 2000+ words -- that way I already knew many of the words so was really focused on learning to speak and sentence structure than also having to learn vocab at the same time. Made it much easier. Plus with Pimsleur once I got 2/3 of the way into the 80 hour course -- I felt I had to go through each lesson at least twice (at that point) -- until I figure I'd gotten it down really well I didn't move on to the next lesson (so in the end the 80 hour course was actually more than 120 contact hours for me) -- I think that's the mistake most people make with Pimsleur they figure they can go through each lesson once and keep chugging quickly along to finish the course and the problem with that is you forget (or didn't really learn things). Pimsleur got me to ~B1 "speaking" level proficiency. At the end had present tense nailed, fairly good at past tense, and ok at future tense. I can easily construct intermediate level sentences in past tense, and basic sentences in past and future tenses.
For 3 years i have been learning Spanish in school, and this summer I decided to dedicate to learning Spanish everyday. It is only 2 months (out of 3) since i started, and I can confidently say my level of Spanish is now better than after those 3 years of Spanish.
Australian here - I did 4 years of German at school (year 5-8) but I don’t remember any of it. My German teacher for the first 3 years was great and had actually spent time in Germany but then she left and the new fella had no class control. Now my old school learns Cantonese which they start in year 3
Strange but true story. In secondary/high school I learned Spanish from age 11. I loved it, but when we got to year 3 (13 yo) we changed teacher to a lovely Spanish lady who was probably a good teacher, but her English came with an inpenetrable accent and she would insist on giving her lessons in English. So I stopped going, bought a Rosetta Stone course and some books and taught myself!
It's taking me longer because I keep using up my hearts and I'm too broke for auper duolingo. Currently continuing my longest streak ever at 58 days thanks to you. I'm still struggling like MAD with German Grammar
18:08 - There is a really cool video about Conan O'Brien taking a professional language course while doing his traveling remotes. I highly recommend you watch it on UA-cam.
If say comparing a level in the UK I think we should compare them with AP in the US (who got 4&5s) which in my case (AP German) would also be around B1-B2 level imo
I learned Spanish as third language in school in Germany, after English and Latin. We read a book in Spanish in the second year. My English teacher basically got rid of our English books, instead we got recent articles, songs, we analysed speeches from politicians. Lots of reading and understanding, then answering questions. Our teacher told us, we learned the basics in the first years, now we need to use it. Some years later I worked for the UK branch of a German company. My coworker actually attended the same school 5 years earlier and had the same English teacher. Which shows, how good this teacher truly was. And yeah, I restarted to learn Latin and Japanese (which I started to learn in uni) with duolingo. As new languages I began to learn Welsh and Finnish. I still don't feel secure talking in those. But at least in Finnish I understand a lot when I hear native speakers talk.
When I decided to learn Spanish, I watched so many kids movies, telenovela, news. My Amazon account was in Spanish. You need to do more than just Duolingo
I took Spanish 6 years starting in the 7th grade. I am still fluent 52 years later in both written and spoken Spanish. The real difference is my desire to learn Spanish & seeking out opportunities to use it. My classmates couldn't have cared less about learning any language.
Hii, I took an A-Level in French. I'd say the B2 level is pretty accurate since we are required to read literature and watch films that we write analysis essays on. We were also required to do an "Independent Research Project" where we pick a topic related to France, research it in detail and you need to know it in enough depth to answer questions about it on the spot in your speaking exam. It's definitely a world of a difference between GCSE French and A-Level. It's quite helpful when you read an article or watch the news and you're surprised that you can understand it to a certain extent (if you keep practicing of course and don't just stop using the language).
I did a level spanish and german and yeah it does give you b2 but so few people actually do an a level language a lot of schools don't even run the course anymore and even in schools like mine where a gcse language is compulsory the amount doing a language went from 240ish in year 11 to 7 (not including native speakers to didn't do the course, just sat the exam at the end for a free a level). And having a gcse language be compulsory completely backfires half the time coz nobody wants to do one, in my school at least 70% of the year group had to do foundation tier (caps you at a 5(high C)) just to have a chance and passing and so all the higher tier students had to have lessons with the foundation so instead of learning the subjunctive which is supposed to covered at gcse we were still sat there revising the present tense at the end of year 11. Also didn't help that in order to do a second language at gcse and therefore later a level, I had to do one after school for 2 years but I mean at least everyone in that class knew what the present tense was 🤷♀️
i love watching these videos and comparing it to my own experience in school in australia i really find the whole topic interesting of how different countries look at language learning in school and even what languages different countries choose are most important for their students to learn
I took French up until GCSE. I was a C student across the board in most of my subjects finding that I needed more alternative styles of teaching and learning than what my school could provide. I personally found that I never gained a strong foundation in conjugating verbs, so when it came to the tests where we were required to essentially memorise a paragraph length of text to answer each question (both in writing and speaking), I found it very hard to wing it if I had forgotten what I prepared. Particularly when it came to speaking I found it very impractical as we weren't practising back and forth conversations but instead the more unnatural monologue answers to five separate questions and even then we weren't learning to talk about topics we'd use in our every day life. We kind of jumped from learning how to order in a restaurant and facts about ourselves to talking about the environment
My Duolingo experience has been very positive, I'm even a Super subscriber. I've dabbled with German, did some Spanish for upkeep, and am into French for a vacation. These were all great, robust programs. However, I have also 25k xp in Swahili and let me say, it is less than robust in Duo. I understand it takes a lot of time and money to build out these programs, but the difference from Swahili to French was jarring. Swahili does not have stories, podcasts, etc. I would love to see some of the "smaller" languages built out to match the more popular ones.
In my home country, we had 9 years of German and 11 years of English. No one from my class learned much of either, including me. I learned English by myself in my early 20s. Also, funny enough, I moved to Germany later in life and then to Canada. My German is really bad. I tried learning it but it’s so hard to maintain 2 foreign languages as an adult.
Duolingo is an excellent supplement to formal education. I did Duolingo Portuguese before I arrived in Portugal, and as a learning method, it worked really well for me, but then of course I had to set out to learn the language properly. There are exercises we did at school (I did French at school) that would still be really useful to me.
I’ve done 800 days of Spanish but need to up the pace…. I find the repetition really helpful… Confidence and accents are really something I didn’t understand at school where it was an academic exercise. I also wasted a lot of time with maths not really learning anything.
I took three years of Spanish in high school (Texas independent school district), then in college I took Spanish as my foreign language credits for my English degree. I ended up getting so interested in comparative grammar that I minored in Spanish. When I graduated, I still wasn't fluent - probably not much past B1. Now, 20 years later, I'm on Duolingo Spanish and finding it pretty easy, as I remember a lot of vocabulary, but realize that I have a HUGE advantage on new Spanish learners because I started already knowing how to conjugate irregular verbs. I think if I found leer - to read - as a new learner, the whole leo leas lee lemos leen would confuse the HELL out of me. Also, my profesora in college was a Spanish contesa, and we all learned the vosotros tense. I live in Texas, where Mexican Spanish actually treats vosotros as a kind of dirty tense, and nobody can explain it to me. :)
In the Dutch speaking half of Belgium we start French lessons in 5th grade (10 y/o), all the way to the end of high school. I'm 37 now and I can barely hold a simple conversation in French. (at age 12 we also start with English, but we were often ahead of the lessons, cause of popular media and then the internet). Also did 4 years of Latin and 1 year ancient Greek, but those were optional
I took Spanish from middle school through high school (so 5 years). For us, we were reading unadapted novels starting in Spanish 3. We learned the grammar and such. However, we did not learn how to speak. So, when I tried to take a placement test in college, they said I was already past Spanish 4, but again couldn't have a conversation. Having taken German in college, I do think universities are better at language instruction than our high schools.
This is interesting to listen to in comparison to learning ASL (from a reputable source in the USA which is shockingly not as common as you would think). Granted, I did start ASL 1 in college at A2 so I was a bit ahead of the game. However, by the time I was in ASL 6 (last course I could take), I was at C1. -That said, I was only at C1 because of all the work I had done outside of class: going to deaf events, interning as an interpreter, practicing with music, etc. The class teaching style was not at all like spoken languages in the states. I took one French class, similar description of how Evan describes. My ASL teachers taught basics in ASL 1, and added topics between levels 2-6. Between 1-3 levels, we signed more ASL grammar but more like English. Ex: My clothes I hung where? On the line. In ASL 4-6, we were encouraged to be more visual with our sentences (which allows for that C level comprehension) Ex: (using specific hand shapes to visually show where the clothes are hung). If I hadn't started at A2 nor had I done so much outside of class, I probably would have found myself in B2 by ASL 6.
It might have changed since I graduated High School, but, as far as I know, no regular school in Texas, up through 1997, had any foreign language instruction at all before 9th grade.
it's not papá but papa without stress on the last syllable. Also in the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish you said 'baja dios' which would be something like 'bring god down'. I lol so hard. A C2 level Spanish speaker here. Suerte :)
The sweet thing about Duolingo is just learning the language without the terminology of how languages work. I only learned Spanish in 7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. We did a lot of work with conjugation tables.
I absolutely hate this about it. Some languages you DO need to actually know how they work, and Duolingo just... refuses to tell you. I have found some nice videos on UA-cam, tho.
This sounds about right. I took 4 years of Japanese in my American High School. It was mostly just learning the 3 forms of characters, or alphabets, that the language has. Year 1 was learning Hiragana. Year 2 was learning Katakana. Year 3 was changing between the 2 and learning new words and better sentences. Year 4 was learning Kanji and how to form better sentence structure. I would say at the end, I was about an A2. Duolingo, for me, is as bad or even worse than American schools, as its just brute force and teaching yourself. I cannot learn this way.
I learned three languages from a young age because I grew up in Belgium. A fourth in international kindergarten and later in international school. English. Those were the best years to learn a foreign language. I'm still amazed today that I managed to graduate from high school e.g. with passing Spanish. But at a Canadian (international) high school. I was never into taking any language courses online. Imo, a month-long stay in Mexico or even Spain is much more beneficial.
In High School in California, I fulfilled the foreign language requirement with computer programming back in the 70s. In College I actually took 1 year of French to fulfill the requirement. I remember very little of it, but Duolingo has fixed that.
@@violet_broregarde I am not going to disagree. Also, for my performing arts requirement in college, I took Judo. I didn't have to do anything but go to the classes and learn Judo, no performance necessary.
I'm a bit old, so I got to secondary when they were changing things in the system. Said that, we always had texts to read (like short poems, news clip, an act from a known play, a short tale or some paragraphs from something longer) AND audio/video by native speakers. We had to listen and say what they were saying or answer questions or even transcribe the text. Same for texts, we read & then worked on it. Sometimes we had some comic strips too. I always felt it was good, but it depended on how interested you were.
Yea. From my experience the 2nd language classes I took in school many years ago didn't teach me much, except for some cultural appreciation and how to ask for the bathroom. Duo has definitely taught me more.
I am an American who took Spanish from 6th grade until I graduated. During that time, I spent 1 year (junior year of high school, year 3 out of 4 at age ~15-16) at an international school in Europe doing level 10 coursework and took the IGCSE exam at the end of the year in Spanish before returning to the US for my final year in HS. I was probably A2 in written Spanish and an A1 in spoken ability before my move, and was probably in the B1 category in both written and oral categories (I think I got an A or an A* on my IGCSE exam) from just the one year of the different education style. After I moved back to the US, I gradually lost the language and steadily declined in ability, even during my university courses (in America still) taking Spanish across 3 semesters. Now I’m at an A1 level in my mid-20’s, still having retained more than most of my peers in the US, which I definitely attribute to that year in the international skill and learning how to utilize the language as opposed to just studying the language.
Evan, can you do a video about Duolingo for schools, please? Maybe see if you can find a teacher or a student that uses in as part of classroom learning, and interview them. I am really curious how and how well it works!
I love duolingo ❤ that app helps so much to understand the language and speak it, i know i need more study but understand videos y programs is really good for me in this point. Thank you for the 📹
This is the first time I've watched an EE video about Duolingo since I started using Duolingo myself, and that context has been super useful for understanding this. I do not like the Duo model of language learning because it doesn't fit mine. I like a nice verb table (definitely the shoe!!), and Duo prefers to teach me irregular verbs by drip feeding one person at a time - the very rare time they provide a formal "tip" I screenshot it. I have a Linguistics degree so I tend to prefer formal scaffolding rather than organic acquisition. That said, six weeks of Duo was enough to get me through a recent holiday in Spain along the lines of "mi llave no functiona" and "fanta limon, por favor" and even "esta plata contiene champignones? soy alergica". At eight weeks I've finished A1. How good is an A Level? Well, within a fortnight of finishing my A Level German I was in Germany working as a translator (DE>EN).
I really struggled with the American phrases and grammar on Duolingo when learning Dutch. But I've progressed with my Spanish a lot more than I thought I would!
For me, the most effective way to learn after a few basics is immersion, attempting to do everything in the new language and you're not going to get that in school. I did learn in high school to use children's books and learn songs, and I still use that as much as I can.
Duolingo has started to have repeat-after-me speaking lessons in the Japanese course. The only problem is that you can't pause. If you pause, it thinks you're done. So I have to rehearse the entire sentence until I can say it without pausing before answering the question.
Best thing my K-12 Spanish classes did for me was when I went to college I took a Spanish placement test, and I did well enough on it that I only needed to take like 3 or 4 more classes to get a minor!
I’m from the UK and I got an A in Spanish at A Level. I’d put myself at about a B2 as I’m continuing learning Spanish on duolingo to maintain what I learnt. I also got an A* in A Level Latin so this helped with Spanish as the languages are closely linked! I love duolingo but it’s pretty different to learning in UK schools!
I took three years of Spanish in public school and two years of Spanish in college, and even learned more after I graduated, working retail in an area with a lot of Spanish speakers. My grammar is good and I can even understand several native speakers at church if they get into what they're saying and switch back to their native language, but it wasn't until I was trying to help a customer with a credit card transaction that I realized I had toddler level Spanish without knowing any words for SHAPES. I wanted to tell the customer "press the green triangle" because that's what I usually said in English, but ended up saying "press the green button" because it was close enough and I never learned the word for Triangle. I should also note that I grew up, live in, and went to school in Texas, and despite only taking about 5 years of total Spanish classes (two of which felt like repeating knowledge I had already gained), I was very basically fluent by graduation, reading passage from Don Quijote, 3rd grade level literature, and writing letters to native speakers. Different states have different levels of availability to the language and I think that also can help or hinder the ability of a student to immerse themselves. For more fun: my dad is fluent in Spanish but never took it in a formal class. He learned it from speaking with native speakers who would frequent his store, and he could catch shoplifting teenagers who thought he didn't speak the language. My mom and brother took French, and would bounce their knowledge off of each other, but as there is not much opportunity to speak French in Texas both lost the language after he graduated high school.
I've been playing duolingo in german for about 3 months now, around 2-3 hours a day in average, and i'm almost done with the entire german tree and the golden levels. If i have some extra time i watch some youtube videos, and some other helpful stuff, you know the deal. So far i have to say that it has built up my base deutsch insanely quick (keep in mind that i've started from zero). My comprehension is noticeably better, and i can even speak a little bit with people, although it's still incredibly difficult to form sentences without my brain working in fifth gear before constructing each sentence. In my oppinion, duolingo is a great asset if you are starting from scratch, and up to a decent A2 level. It gives you a nice introduction to the language and gets you very close to that intermediate side of the things. This is the most realistic as i can be. I'd probably say that my deutsch is currently somewhere around low to middle A2. Still have a long way to go.
One big reason why I was looking into taking classes in languages is the feedback you get in a real class that you can't get in an app. In the early 2000s, I used to have CD-ROMs (not Rosetta Stone, though) that would teach you in various languages different phrases but it gave no feedback, so it seemed not too different than the old book/tape combos people used to use.
In New Brunswick, Canada, you have to take a French class every year from grade six to grade eleven (if you don't take French Immersion, which I personally did- which still only got me to a B2 level of speaking, I basically relearnt French on my own). My younger brother started learning French on Duolingo like two weeks ago and he said it's literally taught him more than any French course he's completed. Considering he's only two weeks in and still possesses little knowledge about the language, it's very disappointing that our school systems couldn't even teach him that.
I'm shocked you're not offered sponsorship by Duolingo. The amount of PR you've given them, you should.
Why pay him when they can get pr for free 😅 (cynical I know!)
Idk I kind of think his analyses have more credibility if he’s not sponsored
It’s probably in Duolingo and Evan’s best interests to not have a sponsorship, because then the videos may seem biased and unreliable.
@@JuanMPalacio And Evan has been openly critical of Duolingo and some of their practices in the past, so I'm sure he feels he can maintain that honesty by not taking a sponsorship
The video wouldn’t be as genuine if it was sponsored by duolingo
My niece LOVES French but her school wasn't great. She used Duolingo for a year, almost never missed a day. At the end of the year they had a French exam. She got 89% in written and 97% spoken, top of the class by a huge margin. It's not first rate, but it sadly beats the average French teacher :(
It’s nice to hear that it went quite well for her. I think that Duolingo is a great resource to make learning on your own outside of class a lot easier. I used it while learning French during upper secondary and high school (well the Swedish equivalents). Now I’m using it while taking German classes at the university I take my masters degree at.
I am a father and my kid is 9yrs. He used to have interest in French when he was 5 but then lost interest in languages as well as studies. Is it too late for him to get back to learning French and achieving some degree of proficiency provided that he is also trying to learn English side by side? Many say that native like fluency rarely comes for late starters. He's not native to both these languages. Nobody in his circle speaks French. Thanks in advance for the answer. We're from a from 3rs world country.
Duolingo or other language apps (pick your app) is kinds of like doing homework that most HS students never do. 🙂For "speaking" IMO nothing, nothing beats Pimsleur.
@@whiteandblack2005 I have heard that if a child is conversational in a language before puberty, they can learn to speak it like a native eventually. It's not too late, especially if you kid already knows some french.
Wow! When kids practice a language a lot more outside of class they do better in testing‽ That's astounding! Let's crap on the language teachers, it must be them holding back the kids that don't practice. 🙄
I'm baffled by how little you learned in your Spanish class at school for the first 8 years. I went to school in Germany and learned Spanish for 3 years, two of which in a "Leistungskurs" (intensive course witj 5 lessons per week). By the beginning of the second year, we read our first novel, wrote text analyses about political topics and so on. Grammar was taught at high speed 😅 French and Latin classes were similar, but 5 years each with less weekly lessons. Plus English starting in primary school of course. I love languages and feel very grateful that language education in German schools is quite good (as opposed to many other aspects of the German school system).
Agree! With three years of language learning in school (2 or 3 hours a week) we are proficient. We can understand and speak with native speakers. Also helps my European country does not dub 90% of the tv content!
That's quite common in a lot of nations really. Look at the French skills in Anglophone Canada or the English skills in Colombia or Japan. The overwhelming MAJORITY of Anglophones in Canada have like 7 years of French and speak essentially none at all.
US schools need to follow your example. After 6 years of Spanish 5 days a week, I still couldn’t speak it. 1 year with Duolingo and UA-cam and I am nearly B2 holding weekly conversations with native speakers.
We are definitely doing something wrong.
I am also baffled as an American who grew up in a different state. In my high school, I learned all the tenses in 7 years of school. I also read an entire novel in Spanish.
I'm a Spanish teacher right now, and I'm happy to say for my state, the curriculum has improved a lot. An emphasis is made now on having students USE the language as much as possible with each other, and trying to immerse them as much as possible while in the classroom (as well as you can). I think a major part of why the US is so awful at language teaching is because, outside of class, solely English is spoken everywhere. You can hear a lot of Spanish depending on where you live, but you're not watching movies, TV, or listening to music in the target language like how Europeans are continuously hearing English (a common target lang.) all the time outside of class. I do think Duolingo for Spanish is excellent as a supplement to Spanish classes. In the US, you have to actively search for foreign language content yourself to improve... even as a college major, I did SO much outside work to become nearly fluent in Spanish. I would not be where I am if I hadn't done that.
American schools won't do this because the cost far outweighs the infinitesimal likelihood of the vast majority of Americans ever needing to use a second language.
Unfortunately, I think Duolingo can only replace school for a few languages where they have all the features, like Spanish and German. For most languages, Duolingo cannot replace (even bad) classroom education.
But, you will find it quite hard to find classrooms outside of university that will tech those other languages.
i took years of classroom and it just didnt work for me. Duolingo has got me much more functional in shorter time.
biggest issue i have with duolingo is my ear training is poor, but read/write im kinglol
@@An_Attempt Even Latin and Japanese, which are the 4th and 5th most popular languages to learn in high school, have very poor courses on Duolingo.
Chinese on Duolingo is atrocious, I've literally heard it pronouncing the wrong tones on a regular basis. I quit Duolingo for Chinese because I felt that it was holding me back
For the languages that are less developed on the app, there are also less opportunities for classroom study. For example, I have been learning Gaelic on the app but there is no Gaelic teacher for thousands of miles from where I live in East Asia. In my UK high school, the only options for study were French, German, and Latin. If you wanted to learn Chinese, for example, there was no options. What Duolingo offers is not supposed to take you all the way in any language. Instead, it takes you through the beginning stages to the point where you can reasonably decide if studying that language is something you are really ready to commit several years of your life, and a big chuck of your income, to doing.
As a native spanish speaker, i absolutely loved this sponsor
Just to give a little experience myself, I didn't choose Spanish for GCSE but had done it on Duolingo for a while and now I've got an 800 day streak. The Spanish teacher in my school let me sit the GCSE exam, and although results day is a few weeks away, all the mock exams I sat, I achieved an A*, which puts you in the top 10% of the cohort, and I'm towards the end of the A2 duolingo section.
UK schools use block scheduling (as you call it) and would generally have 1-2 hours a week for Y7-9 (middle school), 3 hours a week for Y10-11 and 5 hours a week for Y12-13 (highschool). Once you factor in the missed learning hours at the end of Y11 and Y13 the average student would get 560 hours over 4 years - almost exactly the same classroom time as a US highschool student
I think I would have had about 78hrs of language per year. Someone doing GCSE might have 390hrs in a single language, assuming 2hrs x 39weeks x 5 years
@@sie4431 It's 38 weeks in a standard school year, and you'd only do 5 years if you chose the subject for your GCSE options (or were forced to choose it). That's the other thing that Evan didn't mention - some people do ZERO hours in the equivalent to US high school
I like these Duolingo videos. Sometimes I get so frustrated trying to learn a language, I cancel learning that language, and then I start all over again at A1.
I did A level French and yes it does take you to a B1/B2 level almost no one in Britain takes language classes at A-level, out of roughly 90 people taking French in my year only 3 went on to do A-level, it would be much worse in other schools where a language isn’t compulsory at GCSE so the majority of Brits only spent 3 years with a foreign language
I would have liked to take A-level French, but it was not available due to timetabling restrictions. A-levels either had to be chosen from a "sciences" group, or an "arts and humanities" group. Taking a language A-level alongside science A-levels was not accommodated. This is an area where maybe the Baccalaureate system is better than the A-level system.
My daughter has been learning Spanish at school from when she started reception. They focus on speaking. The problem is she may go to a secondary school where they don't do Spanish.
A few adults I know learnt new languages at university both formally and informally. What helped them was going to live in the country for a year.
@@ib9rt I went the other way ... wanted to do French, Biology and Maths, ended up doing French, Geography and History because of that restriction.
As a Swede, who started learning English at the age of nine, I am baffled by how English speaking countries don't incorporate the teaching of a second language in schools more seriously.
I guess that may be a vestige of the old colonial attitude, that you could speak English wherever you went in the World.
Which is still mostly true, but English isn't spoken everywhere.
(Missionaries still make the effort to learn languages.)
In Sweden, English is compulsory, just like math and geography.
We then have a choice of adding a third and fourth language.
I took French for six years, and then also Italian for 3 years.
(Picked up some German on the side.)
@@ingela_injeelaIt’s nothing to do with a colonial attitude. I started French 50 years ago at age 11. I didn’t understand a word, other children had already done several years, I hadn’t. I didn’t know the basics, I hated it, and I knew no French speakers. UK TV and music was monolingual, mainly American. Our home had no foreign language connections. It seemed pointless. At university I met French speakers, and started learning, moved to Montreal for two years but had a poor experience. Roll on 30 years, I do Duolingo for 8 months, then Busuu for 2 months, then LingQ. I have a B2 level, I can understand podcasts in French and I am learning German. In my view, a child needs a reason to learn something, school can only be a springboard. Today children have access to videos and podcasts in French, whereas I had zero resources outside school. I also think the English are bery shy about speaking a foreign language due to lack of confidence. It’s a shame as languages are wonderful.
Honestly, I learnt more German on Duolingo in 10 months than I did in 5 years of school. I think the worst part of why language learning in school was so ineffective for me was because we'd never stop and cyclically review past things like vocab basics and always had to trudge along to the next topic regardless of us actually remember or understanding what came before.
There was seriously a point where I knew how to say chlorofluorocarbons (I believe the acronym is FCKWS) in German but not the basics like month names.
Admittedly, I probably should have been reviewing the content in my own time but I didn't know that or how to do that when I was 11. Would have been so much more useful if this review process was hard built into the way languages are taught in schools like Duolingo.
Speaking exams too were kind of silly, mostly like your Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, we were just given paragraphs to memorise and recite regardless of actually knowing what the words meant.
Can I just say though, that people often use Duolingo to learn a language they first learned in school. And I don't know about any of you, but when I used it (and other self-study methods), I found that I progressed quite quickly precisely because I was reactivating language that I had previously forgotten. When I tried brand new languages from scratch, it was a far slower process.
That effect is precisely why I tried Spanish on Duolingo, a language I knew almost nothing about. With some caveats, it works. I can also say that 2 hours per unit is a pretty pessimistic estimate. Spanish units are just not that big, and maybe they'll only go into 120 minute territory by section 6 ( section 5 is where skills 5+1 lessons instead of 4+1 lessons long). I timed myself, and 2 hours per unit must be pretty slow for section 5.
(my data comes from about a year ago when a unit had 2 skills, so I basically divided my measured times by 2)
Don't me started on rewards for perfect attendance, its utterly offensive to me that this is rewarded when its down to pure luck and encourages parents to send kids to school while sick. Nobody chooses to get sick, have family drama, etc that may impact their attendance. The only reason I think this exists is in order to condition people as adults to ignore their health problems and make themselves worse by working while sick.
Learnt more French vocabulary and grammar in 20 days on Duolingo than the entire first year of learning English back in middle school. It is definitely a good tool if you know how to use it
I am a father and my kid is 9yrs. He used to have interest in French when he was 5 but then lost interest in languages as well as studies. Is it too late for him to get back to learning French and achieving some degree of proficiency provided that he is also trying to learn English side by side? Many say that native like fluency rarely comes for late starters. He's not native to both these languages. Nobody in his circle speaks French. Thanks in advance for the answer. We're from a from 3rd world country.
@@whiteandblack2005 I would say it's never too late to learn languages. I started learning English at the age of 14 as my third language and managed to get a 7.5 in academic IELTS at 18. And for fluency, for most people it's not really necessary to be native like to communicate effectively nor easy to achieve if you are not in an environment where speaking the language is mandatory.
Learning German on Duo vs learning in school I definitely have found Duolingo has helped a lot more but I do still feel it doesn't use enough that I would actually use
Yeah one of Duolingo's biggest flaws besides them not teaching you grammar is that they teach you a lot of useless, unpractical things.
I did Spanish in UK high school and after 4 years we were definitely expected to read like a newspaper level and be able to conjugate and everyone else in my class could give and receive directions (except me but I struggle with those in English too) definitely enough to get you through a holiday.
There is nothing worse than teaching foreign languages in a soviet school. I graduated from school in 1992, studied English from the fourth to the eleventh grade, and after graduation I did not know it at all. I couldn't understand speech, did not know tenses, could only read the simplest texts. In just one year, I learned English much better from a self-study book than in seven years at school.
I did Alevel spanish in a uk state school/Sixth Form and the minimum level required to even just pass is B1/B2. You have to watch an entire film (I watched Pan's Labyrinth) and analise it, linking it to historical context of Spain's history. You also read and watch a play (I watched La casa de Bernarda Alba by Frederico Lorca) and analise/contextualise to Spanish history. Then there's a speaking exam you do about a topic of your choice but you have to talk about something important and back it up with research ONLY from Spanish sources. The level of the content is really advanced during A levels.
Ikr even the rest of the speaking exam outside of the research project, you need to learn so much history, politics, culture from everywhere where that language is spoken not just Spain, it's more complicated than just learning the langauge right?
@amydoughty2746 gives one the opportunity to properly deep dive doesn't it ? Access the websites of the natives . Enjoy their UA-cam/Books/Films/Netflix
No, it doesn't teach the general rules for things like tenses so that u can craft your own sentences. Duolingo helps u learn vocab and specific instances of words. Theres a lot of things french classes have taught me that Duolingo hadn't explained, but its great for staying motivated to learn a language in your spare time.
Duolingo DOES teach tenses and conjugation, even if it doesn't explicitly explain them all the time. I assume it's trying to mimic learning a language organically.
I learned Spanish in the classroom and French in Duolingo, and I kind of prefer the Duolingo approach in this regard.
Even better would be informal initial exposure followed by classroom polishing... which is literally how we learn our native tongues.
@@TheRealE.B. No, it very much does not explain anything in the majority of courses. If you do the Spanish course starting from (US) English, it actually provides you with conjugation tables in the unit hints. Whereas if you want to learn Italian it doesn't even provide you with all of the key sentences (neither starting from German nor from English and neither course lets you advance beyond A1 even though English has significantly more content). If you start from English there also is a mismatch in verb tenses with Italian. Also... in which context would adults organically learn a language without any explanation? Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the daily dose of language learning, but it is a constant source of irritation when Duo doesn't explain anything or mistranslates.
I agree…..I was on and off learning French for 10 years and kept getting so far and giving up…but the gameified element of DuoLingo keeps me coming back….but it’s not great at teaching…so the real benefit of it is in keeping me thinking about French, which makes me find other better learning techniques…..I do 20 minutes DuoLingo a day but I do an hour of more traditional structured French, but it’s the commitment to DuoLingo which has inspired that commitment and continues to do so.
How much and how thoroughly Duolingo teaches grammar seems to depend on the language, but of all the popular languages I've had a go during the last 5 years, every course have had a skeleton grammar lesson. Before I could find separate icons for books and a grammar lessons, which I had to point out to my friend. Now the grammar lesson is more visible, on the unit title bar - but some people still manage to miss it! At one point, Duolingo would give a surprise lesson drilling a particular grammar point, which isn't part of the path/tree and I could take it or skip it without it affecting my progress. I quite liked that feature but it seems Duo has taken it away.
I don't understand how can you say that Duo doesn't teach you make your own sentences? It teachers basic sentence structure and verb conjugations, rules for forming plurals etc.
For example, Duo teaches you S+V+O sentence 'Mark opens the door." All you need to do is to replace the words with correct gender somethig without changing the word order and voilà, you have made your own sentence. All you need is vocabulary.
The boy + eats + fish. (Duo sentence)
I + like + beer. (My own sentence.).
Tbf, highschools in Japan are only aiming for A2 in English. Over 8 years of English at school, and this is like 2 English subjects, which would be at least 4 hours a week. Only to end up with A2 as a goal. And honestly, the students couldn't even reach it. Heck, some English trachers are barely B levels
Indeed, and English is actually useful being the International language of the world.
Why 90% of American students are learning the language of the invading army of illegals?
I'm a language teacher in the US. In my district it's only offered at the HS level and is completely elective, with no requirements for it at all. With that, it's meant to be "an easy, fun class"
Also in the US explicit grammar instruction is becoming less and less common. Focusing on comprehensible input (CI) is much more common, with even level 1 students only a few weeks into school are often reading full pages in the language, though they are simplified to be comprehensible.
My students at the end of their 3rd year have also only had about 330 hours of class. Plus with 12 week summer breaks, there are large losses of language in that time.
I get that CI can help getting a grasp of the language, but imo explicit grammar instructions are necessary to actually start forming sentences on your own and not just repeating what you heard because you don't know how to use the grammar in completely new situations/contexts with new vocabulary.
I guess it could work with English because it does not have much grammar and is a stupid but undercomplex language (even though we did get that in English class beginning in grade 4 until grade 10 after which we were basically done with grammar anyway). But with other languages I just can't believe you can actually learn it without thorough grammar explanations.
I've been learning Korean partly in self-study, partly in standard class structure for around 6 years now (I'm at B2 currently) and need to look up tons of info for each new grammar structure I want to learn because you need the right context, with what kinds of words you can use it, etc. When I just hear a new grammar used I still often assume that you can use it for other things and with other words than what is actually true.
I tried Duolingo with Korean and I could only "study" so much until it got way too annoying that nothing is ever explained (besides other issues) except in one small sentence that does not at all cover even the most basic info and all the most necessary uses.
@@Tessa_Gr explicit grammar instruction can be helpful but can also be a hindrance. The problem is the rules are often taught long before students are ready for them as they haven't yet acquired the language to properly use them.
When I was in school I could conjugate in every tense the language has, but I couldn't put together more than a few sentences of original thought. And despite my writing/speaking being technically strong I had to take frequent pauses to do the conjugations mentally because while I had learned them I hadn't yet acquired them.
With CI the focus is put on comprehensability rather than perfection. The goal is acquiring the language not just memorizing rules and vocab lists. My level 1 students can write multiparagraph stories that are completely original, not simply regurgitating what we read in class, but the language is far from perfect. It is however understandable even if it is sometimes awkwardly phrased.
I think both have their place. I delay explicit grammar instruction to the second half of the course, when most students already understand and use the concepts well without being directly taught. Just as we acquired our first language without being directly taught grammar rules until much later when we're in school. Then the grammar is explicitly taught to fill in any gaps in their acquisition.
@@Tessa_Gr I will note that I teach Spanish and I only fluently speak English and Spanish, though I also study German and Italian. Languages with overall similar grammar structures, despite some differences of course.
I know CI teachers of less related languages who do not teach explicit grammar but instead do pop-up grammar lessons when a concern arises.
And I do not think grammar instruction is bad. It should be included but I do not think it should be the whole focus of the class as it sounds like my own and Evan's classes in school were.
I am a father and my kid is 9yrs. How similar are Spanish and Mexican and which one is tougher? My kid used to have interest in French when he was 5 but then lost interest in languages as well as studies. Is it too late for him to get back to learning French and Spanish and achieving some degree of proficiency provided that he is also trying to learn English side by side? Many say that native like fluency rarely comes for late starters. He's not native to both these languages. Nobody in his circle speaks French or Spanish. In 10 days, my son has learnt 7 Mexican small sentences. Albeit from Google translate. How to go about learning languages?
Thanks in advance for your response. We're from a 3rd world country.
@@ninimeggie4771 I assume your students are of the caliber who learned to speak English natively and do so properly by default. Rural students aren't always so fortunate. I went to school with people for most of my years growing up who didn't have the greatest proficiency with properly speaking English in a comprehensible manner combining accent, low/finite vocabulary, and a seemingly hardwired slang, so It wasn't pleasant listening to them speak, let alone in another language they had no interest in at all in the first place.
As someone who has been studying German for the past year and a half with Duolingo, I can confidently say that I was able to reach B1 with help from Duolingo and some outside resources like books and watching movies. Where I went to school, we didn’t even get to take a foreign language until middle school, and even then we only did it once a week where I went. The main problem with this model is that it doesn’t stick well and there wasn’t enough guideance, so I’d say we need to change the way we structure language learning if we want people to retain their knowledge better. My next goal is to get to B2 in German by April, so hopefully with reading and studying more, I’ll get to that goal! Good luck with your language journey in Spanish learning, Evan! You’re a real inspiration to me with your language learning journey!
Getting some friends to speak with is a great help. I play on a Online TTRPG server. Surprisingly a lot of the users on the server are German so over the course of the Great Coof(When i found the server) we became good friends and some of them are more then willing to spend time tutoring me on the language off hours while we just game together or hang out in VC
Das ist ja cool, einfach deutsch über Duolingo gelernt.
Mein Respekt!
In school we didn't learn languages until year 7 where we started Spanish and year 8 where we did French. I did Spanish until A Level. I can't tell you what my abilities were other than that I was fairly decent at reading it, I was able to talk to people in Spanish and that I gave a speech about Pan's Labyrinth 😆
Of course I then basically stopped learning it and have lost most of what I knew. I always go on holiday to Greece and haven't been to Spain since our school trip, so really Greek was what I needed. I've been learning it on Duolingo for a few years and while it has definitely helped, I feel like my understanding is all over the place. It has literally only just got round to teaching me the words for "hotel" and "airport" and "bar" lol. I found that the way I learned in school made way more sense in the way it progressed. Duolingo has given me zero speaking practice and very few examples of phrases I would actually need to say, so I don't feel confident saying anything in Greek yet.
What I recommend when I was studying Spanish and Mandarin Chinese (I still am studying these languages), I did classes in my university when I was there, I got books in those languages, I also used different language apps such as Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, I also watched a lot of movies, and I try to speak to people (i.e. coworkers, family, postman, etc.).
I did not expect the sponsor in Spanish😂 10/10
I'm from Germany and had three years of spanish and if I remember correctly it was to be expected to be at level B2 at the end of those three years. At the beginning of my second year my class went to spain for a week and some of my class could have full conversations with the locals there and at the very least everyone could read spanish and understand and speak basic spanish with them. Sometimes the lessons were quite fast but the result spoke for itself. I could speak and read spanish on a B2 level after those three years (I'm not really good at learning languages). Now I'm not on that level anymore, probably not even A1 or barely but I also haven't used spanish in 9 years.
Same here I'm trying to keep it up to somewhere between A2/B1 with Duo bc I do occasionally use it at work but it's hard 😅
@@Serenity_yt Yeah I tried to learn it again but I had no real goal so I stopped again. Now I learn japanese because I'm actually interested in that and have a goal that I want to reach.
@BlackKnight2895 Yeah the goal is important. For me it always fluctuates once I've used it again and noticed how bad it was I'm more motivated but then it takes a while before I use it again so my level in anything more advanced kinda ebbs and flows
I wish the UK education system offered a wider range of languages, I'm on day 463 of Japanese on Duolingo but if it was available when I was doing GCSE's I would have 100% taken it
I'm currently learning Korean and if I don't don't study every day I quickly forget things. It makes me realise why I was terrible at learning languages at school. You'd have maybe 2 or 3 lessons a week and outside of those lessons I'd never think about the language (apart from when I was doing homework) so by the time the next lesson came around, I'd forgotten most, if not all, of what we'd learned.
I spent 5 years learning French in school, can barely remember a word of it! I am now learning Spanish on Duolingo and I can honestly say that as soon as that new word has left that screen, I can’t remember that either😂. Hey ho, some people just aren’t meant to be good at languages, my husband is quite good though, so at least I know I’ll get fed and get a beer on holiday 😂😂😂
The key aspect here is repetition and consistency. You may forget that new word as soon as it's gone the first time, but if you keep at it eventually that new word will no longer be a new word and it'll begin to stick.
I think it is about finding a good method to get yourself to learn a little bit daily for a very long time, both vocabulary and grammar.
I'm not good with languages at all but I'm learning with anki which has really helped. It's a free app for making flashcards and after learning something for the first time the app programs when it should be repeated again (the more often you get it right the longer it waits until you get the same card again).
It's honestly amazing, I'm really bad at remembering anything but learning just for 3-5 minutes every day with vocabulary, grammar and example sentences really helped a lot.
Duolingo kinda killed my motivation for language learning when they removed the discussion page. I used to be able to just look through that after every question, and whether I got it right or not, seeing people discussing the question and why the correct answer was correct was always interesting, which helped motivate me and I actually learned from it. Now I'm just keeping my streak up with easy lessons that I can blast through in less that a minute in the hope that it will someday get good again, while wasting the time and motivation that I could be using to try to learn a language through different platforms.
I'm in Scotland and I did a Higher (B1) in German. We definitely didn't do enough speaking, but my writing and reading were still solidly B1 about 15 years later when I decided to start working on German again. I tried to start Duolingo German from the start to fill in vocab gaps and quickly gave up because my previous studies had taken me way past the level where you still translate in my head, so doing it for the Duo exercises was frustrating and boring when I understood the German on an innate level.
I took French from grade 5 through grade 12. Grades 5,6,7 it was simple vocab. Grades 8-11, all I did was conjugate verbs.... it bored me to tears. Grade 12 French, I magically had to know how to read literature in French. Even though I had had to learn it in prior years, it was never taught. I ended up failing the course, mostly because I couldn't get the context of what was written. In high school, I had 2 teachers ONLY to teach me 5 years of French...
language learning is really interesting, I took french for 5 years in school but can not say I speak any french, other than being able to count however far I want in it lol, however as a norwegian I also took English from 4th grade onwards and I am just as fluent in english as in my native, but I cannot tell you how I did it. It's definitely a mix of schooling, film, tv, music, youtube and reading/writing that eventually got me there, but I cannot recall ever *trying* to learn it, which I just think is super fascinating
10:40 The Lego analogy is actually a very accurate representation of the UK foreign language teaching - we are taught to memorise hundreds of words and phrases without learning how to construct our own sentences using basic grammar.
Exactly the opposite of my education where grammar was king with very little vocabulary
@@kevinjohnlancaster8333 Perhaps extremely grammar heavy teaching is not the best technique, but at least you can construct your own sentences with the vocabulary you do know I guess. Vocab is easy to pick up.
I know you are quite expressive (verbally and with hands) when you talk English, but it ramps up when you are saying VPN things I cannot understand in Spanish! A joy to watch.
What I like about Duolingo is that it's free. There's a whole philosophy behind it, as the founder wanted to make it free for people, who just can't spare even a dollar. The founder (Luis von Ahn) comes from the Gutamalan upper class and he wanted to give everybody access, regardless of their social status, which obviously translates to money. There's a philanthropist philosophy behind it - and that's why people who CAN afford it, are asked to pay. I really, really like that concept.
This is something that has been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve learned more in a year with Duo and other online resources than in 6 years in school!
I took 4 years of Spanish in HS/College and the only reason I’m somewhat proficient in it is because I threw myself into full immersion on two different continents for months at a time. I tried online courses for German and learned almost nothing after several months of daily lessons.
13:27 - I started out on Duolingo by sometimes spending up to two hours maximizing my lessons and repeating the fun "flirting" lessons on the multi-lane tree. On the single-lane curriculum, I have become super casual, and I just do the single lesson per day, which takes me between 5 and 10 minutes per day.
The new system is much better. I start from the second circle in a unit and go until i finish the first circle of the next one (because new content is very motivating) basically a unit a day
@@TheJayWay101 When they first did the change, I felt discouraged, so I hopped around various languages for about two months, and then I finally returned to German.
I was going to write a funny comment, but actually I'm going to mention another tidbit that people don't talk about a lot:
In addition to all of the stuff with Eurocentrism and varying quality among Duolingo's languages, there's also user effort. Two people can progress the same amount through a Duolingo course and have drastically different learning outcomes if one person is just speedrunning through the lessons while the other is actually taking the time to read the tips and practice saying the words.
Just like two people in the same school classroom can have different learning outcomes.
Duolingo is solid I tried learning Dutch and I have picked up their gender phrases quickly because of the way Duolingo puts its up... Duolingo combined with a free language channel course which are many on YT and studying the specific language through Movies, songs and or dramas and note down key phrases, slangs and others can actually help in perfecting the language. It might not sound organic but it is still better than nothing... I think Duolingo is good and effective... Plus if you get native language speakers to communicate on top of all that then it becomes a bonus... .
I just published a Duolingo app review in our student newspaper last month.
Learning how to learn is the key to everything.
Im British and did French and German at A Level and I would say B2 for a strong student checks out
For me, one year of studying French with Duolingo was far superior to five quarters of the college French courses that I needed to earn my B.A. But now I'm using Pimsleur, which challenges me in ways that Duolingo didn't, such as listening and speaking without seeing the words written.
I always look away from the text in Duolingo to try to comprehend it just by ear
it drives me absolutely mad that Duolingo doesn’t let you HIDE words at will.
It would be such a useful feature. I want to listen and answer questions and then see the words.
I like Pimsleur. It's great for getting that basic fluency of key phrases down. That can be a problem though, because you end up with a repertoire of phrases that you can say at a level that makes people think you're much better than you are. And then they answer you at full speed and you fall to pieces.
@@joepiekl I love Pimsleur! Best program for learning "speaking" by far. Nothing else even comes close for "speaking". One comment, there is no language app on its own that will get you there. If you use Pimsleur you still have to supplement it with comprehensible input - like reading and watching videos in the target language. I also didn't start Pimsleur until I already had an active vocab of around 2000+ words -- that way I already knew many of the words so was really focused on learning to speak and sentence structure than also having to learn vocab at the same time. Made it much easier.
Plus with Pimsleur once I got 2/3 of the way into the 80 hour course -- I felt I had to go through each lesson at least twice (at that point) -- until I figure I'd gotten it down really well I didn't move on to the next lesson (so in the end the 80 hour course was actually more than 120 contact hours for me) -- I think that's the mistake most people make with Pimsleur they figure they can go through each lesson once and keep chugging quickly along to finish the course and the problem with that is you forget (or didn't really learn things).
Pimsleur got me to ~B1 "speaking" level proficiency. At the end had present tense nailed, fairly good at past tense, and ok at future tense. I can easily construct intermediate level sentences in past tense, and basic sentences in past and future tenses.
8:20 - In my public school experience, perfect attendance holders were called bench warmers, which is quite literally what they did.
See you next time you talk about Duolingo, Evan "The Duolingo Guy" Edinger.
For 3 years i have been learning Spanish in school, and this summer I decided to dedicate to learning Spanish everyday. It is only 2 months (out of 3) since i started, and I can confidently say my level of Spanish is now better than after those 3 years of Spanish.
Australian here - I did 4 years of German at school (year 5-8) but I don’t remember any of it. My German teacher for the first 3 years was great and had actually spent time in Germany but then she left and the new fella had no class control.
Now my old school learns Cantonese which they start in year 3
Strange but true story. In secondary/high school I learned Spanish from age 11. I loved it, but when we got to year 3 (13 yo) we changed teacher to a lovely Spanish lady who was probably a good teacher, but her English came with an inpenetrable accent and she would insist on giving her lessons in English. So I stopped going, bought a Rosetta Stone course and some books and taught myself!
It's taking me longer because I keep using up my hearts and I'm too broke for auper duolingo. Currently continuing my longest streak ever at 58 days thanks to you. I'm still struggling like MAD with German Grammar
18:08 - There is a really cool video about Conan O'Brien taking a professional language course while doing his traveling remotes. I highly recommend you watch it on UA-cam.
I sent you the link to my Duolingo app review on our student newspaper to your Instagram.
If say comparing a level in the UK I think we should compare them with AP in the US (who got 4&5s) which in my case (AP German) would also be around B1-B2 level imo
Myself and my mother have just realised we both follow you.. This makes me want to relearn my languages
16:27 - I love those three-sentence paragraphs in German that test my comprehension.
I learned Spanish as third language in school in Germany, after English and Latin. We read a book in Spanish in the second year.
My English teacher basically got rid of our English books, instead we got recent articles, songs, we analysed speeches from politicians. Lots of reading and understanding, then answering questions. Our teacher told us, we learned the basics in the first years, now we need to use it.
Some years later I worked for the UK branch of a German company. My coworker actually attended the same school 5 years earlier and had the same English teacher. Which shows, how good this teacher truly was.
And yeah, I restarted to learn Latin and Japanese (which I started to learn in uni) with duolingo. As new languages I began to learn Welsh and Finnish.
I still don't feel secure talking in those.
But at least in Finnish I understand a lot when I hear native speakers talk.
When I decided to learn Spanish, I watched so many kids movies, telenovela, news. My Amazon account was in Spanish. You need to do more than just Duolingo
I took Spanish 6 years starting in the 7th grade. I am still fluent 52 years later in both written and spoken Spanish. The real difference is my desire to learn Spanish & seeking out opportunities to use it. My classmates couldn't have cared less about learning any language.
Hii, I took an A-Level in French. I'd say the B2 level is pretty accurate since we are required to read literature and watch films that we write analysis essays on. We were also required to do an "Independent Research Project" where we pick a topic related to France, research it in detail and you need to know it in enough depth to answer questions about it on the spot in your speaking exam. It's definitely a world of a difference between GCSE French and A-Level. It's quite helpful when you read an article or watch the news and you're surprised that you can understand it to a certain extent (if you keep practicing of course and don't just stop using the language).
I did a level spanish and german and yeah it does give you b2 but so few people actually do an a level language a lot of schools don't even run the course anymore and even in schools like mine where a gcse language is compulsory the amount doing a language went from 240ish in year 11 to 7 (not including native speakers to didn't do the course, just sat the exam at the end for a free a level). And having a gcse language be compulsory completely backfires half the time coz nobody wants to do one, in my school at least 70% of the year group had to do foundation tier (caps you at a 5(high C)) just to have a chance and passing and so all the higher tier students had to have lessons with the foundation so instead of learning the subjunctive which is supposed to covered at gcse we were still sat there revising the present tense at the end of year 11. Also didn't help that in order to do a second language at gcse and therefore later a level, I had to do one after school for 2 years but I mean at least everyone in that class knew what the present tense was 🤷♀️
i love watching these videos and comparing it to my own experience in school in australia
i really find the whole topic interesting of how different countries look at language learning in school and even what languages different countries choose are most important for their students to learn
I took French up until GCSE. I was a C student across the board in most of my subjects finding that I needed more alternative styles of teaching and learning than what my school could provide. I personally found that I never gained a strong foundation in conjugating verbs, so when it came to the tests where we were required to essentially memorise a paragraph length of text to answer each question (both in writing and speaking), I found it very hard to wing it if I had forgotten what I prepared. Particularly when it came to speaking I found it very impractical as we weren't practising back and forth conversations but instead the more unnatural monologue answers to five separate questions and even then we weren't learning to talk about topics we'd use in our every day life. We kind of jumped from learning how to order in a restaurant and facts about ourselves to talking about the environment
My Duolingo experience has been very positive, I'm even a Super subscriber. I've dabbled with German, did some Spanish for upkeep, and am into French for a vacation. These were all great, robust programs. However, I have also 25k xp in Swahili and let me say, it is less than robust in Duo. I understand it takes a lot of time and money to build out these programs, but the difference from Swahili to French was jarring. Swahili does not have stories, podcasts, etc. I would love to see some of the "smaller" languages built out to match the more popular ones.
In my home country, we had 9 years of German and 11 years of English. No one from my class learned much of either, including me. I learned English by myself in my early 20s. Also, funny enough, I moved to Germany later in life and then to Canada. My German is really bad. I tried learning it but it’s so hard to maintain 2 foreign languages as an adult.
Duolingo is an excellent supplement to formal education. I did Duolingo Portuguese before I arrived in Portugal, and as a learning method, it worked really well for me, but then of course I had to set out to learn the language properly. There are exercises we did at school (I did French at school) that would still be really useful to me.
I’ve done 800 days of Spanish but need to up the pace…. I find the repetition really helpful… Confidence and accents are really something I didn’t understand at school where it was an academic exercise. I also wasted a lot of time with maths not really learning anything.
When in previous videos you said you had 9 lessons a day, I never realised that was the same 9 lessons every day
They change every year. Some every semester. Some every marking period
I took three years of Spanish in high school (Texas independent school district), then in college I took Spanish as my foreign language credits for my English degree. I ended up getting so interested in comparative grammar that I minored in Spanish. When I graduated, I still wasn't fluent - probably not much past B1. Now, 20 years later, I'm on Duolingo Spanish and finding it pretty easy, as I remember a lot of vocabulary, but realize that I have a HUGE advantage on new Spanish learners because I started already knowing how to conjugate irregular verbs. I think if I found leer - to read - as a new learner, the whole leo leas lee lemos leen would confuse the HELL out of me.
Also, my profesora in college was a Spanish contesa, and we all learned the vosotros tense. I live in Texas, where Mexican Spanish actually treats vosotros as a kind of dirty tense, and nobody can explain it to me. :)
In the Dutch speaking half of Belgium we start French lessons in 5th grade (10 y/o), all the way to the end of high school. I'm 37 now and I can barely hold a simple conversation in French. (at age 12 we also start with English, but we were often ahead of the lessons, cause of popular media and then the internet). Also did 4 years of Latin and 1 year ancient Greek, but those were optional
I'm glad you are doing well in your foreign language classes.
I took Spanish from middle school through high school (so 5 years). For us, we were reading unadapted novels starting in Spanish 3. We learned the grammar and such. However, we did not learn how to speak. So, when I tried to take a placement test in college, they said I was already past Spanish 4, but again couldn't have a conversation. Having taken German in college, I do think universities are better at language instruction than our high schools.
22:20 - If you want more of that challenge you seek, I recommend you check out music in your target language with synchronized lyrics.
This is interesting to listen to in comparison to learning ASL (from a reputable source in the USA which is shockingly not as common as you would think). Granted, I did start ASL 1 in college at A2 so I was a bit ahead of the game.
However, by the time I was in ASL 6 (last course I could take), I was at C1. -That said, I was only at C1 because of all the work I had done outside of class: going to deaf events, interning as an interpreter, practicing with music, etc.
The class teaching style was not at all like spoken languages in the states. I took one French class, similar description of how Evan describes.
My ASL teachers taught basics in ASL 1, and added topics between levels 2-6. Between 1-3 levels, we signed more ASL grammar but more like English.
Ex: My clothes I hung where? On the line.
In ASL 4-6, we were encouraged to be more visual with our sentences (which allows for that C level comprehension) Ex: (using specific hand shapes to visually show where the clothes are hung).
If I hadn't started at A2 nor had I done so much outside of class, I probably would have found myself in B2 by ASL 6.
It might have changed since I graduated High School, but, as far as I know, no regular school in Texas, up through 1997, had any foreign language instruction at all before 9th grade.
it's not papá but papa without stress on the last syllable. Also in the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish you said 'baja dios' which would be something like 'bring god down'. I lol so hard. A C2 level Spanish speaker here. Suerte :)
Been waiting all morning
The sweet thing about Duolingo is just learning the language without the terminology of how languages work. I only learned Spanish in 7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. We did a lot of work with conjugation tables.
I absolutely hate this about it. Some languages you DO need to actually know how they work, and Duolingo just... refuses to tell you. I have found some nice videos on UA-cam, tho.
This sounds about right. I took 4 years of Japanese in my American High School. It was mostly just learning the 3 forms of characters, or alphabets, that the language has. Year 1 was learning Hiragana. Year 2 was learning Katakana. Year 3 was changing between the 2 and learning new words and better sentences. Year 4 was learning Kanji and how to form better sentence structure. I would say at the end, I was about an A2.
Duolingo, for me, is as bad or even worse than American schools, as its just brute force and teaching yourself. I cannot learn this way.
Amazing outro dude, 6 seasons and a movie!
my fav youtuber
I learned three languages from a young age because I grew up in Belgium. A fourth in international kindergarten and later in international school. English. Those were the best years to learn a foreign language. I'm still amazed today that I managed to graduate from high school e.g. with passing Spanish. But at a Canadian (international) high school. I was never into taking any language courses online. Imo, a month-long stay in Mexico or even Spain is much more beneficial.
In High School in California, I fulfilled the foreign language requirement with computer programming back in the 70s. In College I actually took 1 year of French to fulfill the requirement. I remember very little of it, but Duolingo has fixed that.
how tf does a programming language count as a foreign language that's insane
@@violet_broregarde I am not going to disagree. Also, for my performing arts requirement in college, I took Judo. I didn't have to do anything but go to the classes and learn Judo, no performance necessary.
I'm a bit old, so I got to secondary when they were changing things in the system. Said that, we always had texts to read (like short poems, news clip, an act from a known play, a short tale or some paragraphs from something longer) AND audio/video by native speakers. We had to listen and say what they were saying or answer questions or even transcribe the text. Same for texts, we read & then worked on it. Sometimes we had some comic strips too. I always felt it was good, but it depended on how interested you were.
11:02 That’s a dirty mind you’ve got there!😂
2:46 - I love your impression of every elitist billionaire snob ever.
Yea. From my experience the 2nd language classes I took in school many years ago didn't teach me much, except for some cultural appreciation and how to ask for the bathroom. Duo has definitely taught me more.
I am an American who took Spanish from 6th grade until I graduated. During that time, I spent 1 year (junior year of high school, year 3 out of 4 at age ~15-16) at an international school in Europe doing level 10 coursework and took the IGCSE exam at the end of the year in Spanish before returning to the US for my final year in HS. I was probably A2 in written Spanish and an A1 in spoken ability before my move, and was probably in the B1 category in both written and oral categories (I think I got an A or an A* on my IGCSE exam) from just the one year of the different education style. After I moved back to the US, I gradually lost the language and steadily declined in ability, even during my university courses (in America still) taking Spanish across 3 semesters. Now I’m at an A1 level in my mid-20’s, still having retained more than most of my peers in the US, which I definitely attribute to that year in the international skill and learning how to utilize the language as opposed to just studying the language.
Evan, can you do a video about Duolingo for schools, please? Maybe see if you can find a teacher or a student that uses in as part of classroom learning, and interview them. I am really curious how and how well it works!
I love duolingo ❤ that app helps so much to understand the language and speak it, i know i need more study but understand videos y programs is really good for me in this point. Thank you for the 📹
This is the first time I've watched an EE video about Duolingo since I started using Duolingo myself, and that context has been super useful for understanding this.
I do not like the Duo model of language learning because it doesn't fit mine. I like a nice verb table (definitely the shoe!!), and Duo prefers to teach me irregular verbs by drip feeding one person at a time - the very rare time they provide a formal "tip" I screenshot it. I have a Linguistics degree so I tend to prefer formal scaffolding rather than organic acquisition.
That said, six weeks of Duo was enough to get me through a recent holiday in Spain along the lines of "mi llave no functiona" and "fanta limon, por favor" and even "esta plata contiene champignones? soy alergica". At eight weeks I've finished A1.
How good is an A Level? Well, within a fortnight of finishing my A Level German I was in Germany working as a translator (DE>EN).
I really struggled with the American phrases and grammar on Duolingo when learning Dutch. But I've progressed with my Spanish a lot more than I thought I would!
For me, the most effective way to learn after a few basics is immersion, attempting to do everything in the new language and you're not going to get that in school. I did learn in high school to use children's books and learn songs, and I still use that as much as I can.
Duolingo has started to have repeat-after-me speaking lessons in the Japanese course. The only problem is that you can't pause. If you pause, it thinks you're done. So I have to rehearse the entire sentence until I can say it without pausing before answering the question.
Best thing my K-12 Spanish classes did for me was when I went to college I took a Spanish placement test, and I did well enough on it that I only needed to take like 3 or 4 more classes to get a minor!
I’m from the UK and I got an A in Spanish at A Level. I’d put myself at about a B2 as I’m continuing learning Spanish on duolingo to maintain what I learnt. I also got an A* in A Level Latin so this helped with Spanish as the languages are closely linked! I love duolingo but it’s pretty different to learning in UK schools!
I took three years of Spanish in public school and two years of Spanish in college, and even learned more after I graduated, working retail in an area with a lot of Spanish speakers. My grammar is good and I can even understand several native speakers at church if they get into what they're saying and switch back to their native language, but it wasn't until I was trying to help a customer with a credit card transaction that I realized I had toddler level Spanish without knowing any words for SHAPES.
I wanted to tell the customer "press the green triangle" because that's what I usually said in English, but ended up saying "press the green button" because it was close enough and I never learned the word for Triangle.
I should also note that I grew up, live in, and went to school in Texas, and despite only taking about 5 years of total Spanish classes (two of which felt like repeating knowledge I had already gained), I was very basically fluent by graduation, reading passage from Don Quijote, 3rd grade level literature, and writing letters to native speakers. Different states have different levels of availability to the language and I think that also can help or hinder the ability of a student to immerse themselves.
For more fun: my dad is fluent in Spanish but never took it in a formal class. He learned it from speaking with native speakers who would frequent his store, and he could catch shoplifting teenagers who thought he didn't speak the language.
My mom and brother took French, and would bounce their knowledge off of each other, but as there is not much opportunity to speak French in Texas both lost the language after he graduated high school.
I've been playing duolingo in german for about 3 months now, around 2-3 hours a day in average, and i'm almost done with the entire german tree and the golden levels. If i have some extra time i watch some youtube videos, and some other helpful stuff, you know the deal. So far i have to say that it has built up my base deutsch insanely quick (keep in mind that i've started from zero). My comprehension is noticeably better, and i can even speak a little bit with people, although it's still incredibly difficult to form sentences without my brain working in fifth gear before constructing each sentence. In my oppinion, duolingo is a great asset if you are starting from scratch, and up to a decent A2 level. It gives you a nice introduction to the language and gets you very close to that intermediate side of the things. This is the most realistic as i can be. I'd probably say that my deutsch is currently somewhere around low to middle A2. Still have a long way to go.
One big reason why I was looking into taking classes in languages is the feedback you get in a real class that you can't get in an app. In the early 2000s, I used to have CD-ROMs (not Rosetta Stone, though) that would teach you in various languages different phrases but it gave no feedback, so it seemed not too different than the old book/tape combos people used to use.
In New Brunswick, Canada, you have to take a French class every year from grade six to grade eleven (if you don't take French Immersion, which I personally did- which still only got me to a B2 level of speaking, I basically relearnt French on my own). My younger brother started learning French on Duolingo like two weeks ago and he said it's literally taught him more than any French course he's completed. Considering he's only two weeks in and still possesses little knowledge about the language, it's very disappointing that our school systems couldn't even teach him that.