I've been subscribed to both you and Evan for a good while. I saw this video when you posted it, thought you made some really good points and moved on. After watching Evan's response just now I was confused. Had I not noticed all the ill intent that Evan is saying you had? From my memory you hadn't criticized him directly, you were just using his experience as an example to explain your points on DL. So I came back here and, sure enough, it's as I remember it. I honestly don't see the video as an attack like Evan seems to have taken it. Most of the video is not even about him. And if all you wanted was to use him for attention, by making a response video he made sure that you get that attention 😅
Yep, exactly the same feeling as me. I was truly confused after Evan s video. Especially because I was much more familiar with his videos, but I didn't feel like he was in any way attacked. If anything, his video was the one attacking.
Same experience here, realized that only now. I moved on after Lamont's video and found it great, especially because I got the same experiences (though I have a few people at my workplace, who seem to use Duolingo as a supplement effectively). When I saw Evan's video, my initial response was, that he's kinda right, though I didn't take Lamont's video as an insult to him. There was a particular part of Evan's video though, where I thought to myself "Now, that's just getting really insulting really fast". Now I'm confused and feel like I understand both of you guys lol xD
I felt the same way - Evan continued going on about some unnecessary or even flat out wrong things regarding this video. And as someone who typically likes Evan a lot, it left a sour taste. This video however, did not. I think it was wrong for him to have responded publicly the way he did, while insinuating a lot of things that are clearly not true...
Duolingo isn't THAT bad if you're an absolute 0 comprehension beginner, it gives you a nice easy and basic starting point as well as the confidence to move into other, perhaps more challenging forms of learning.
Yes, it was very important for me as a short first introduction to Irish about three years ago. For a language with a limited number of free beginner resources, and a very very limited amount of comprehensible input materials, Duolingo was a logical place to start.
How I got into learning spanish(I was also learning it at school, but school lessons in any language(obligatory ones High school and before), usually can`t teach you a language) was through duolingo and watching television shows in spanish, first with English subtitles, then later with spanish subtitles and without.
Duo is basically a way that I find what I should study elsewhere next lol it was my introduction and it is the only to my partner use since they are not able to put much effort into language learning and aren't in a rush
Yeah, but on the other hand, if I were to start another language I would choose something like Pimsleur or Language Transfer focused only on sounds and speaking.
It's a good start. But after being given the same small group of words for over 3 hours in the Japanese course it's just a waste of time. I've learnt far more with other apps in less time
Back in 2006 I met a German girl while on vacation in Hamburg. We became really close friends and started talking a lot on msn messenger. At some point I decided that I wanted to learn her language and the way I learned to understand and speak German really well was by getting a list of the 1000 most commonly used German words and then I learned 10 new German words from that list every single evening for 100days. Then when I knew those 1000 words I started watching German TV and I mean ONLY German TV for about 6 months to understand how people used those words to build sentences. Then I went back to Germany in 2007 and 2008 and spent the summer there both times. At the end of 2009 I spoke German really well according to the German people I met. Many of them were shocked when I told them that I was Swedish. They said my German accent and sentence structure was perfect. Sadly I lost all contact with that German friend of mine and I haven't spoken a word of German since then. Today I can still understand a lot of German, but I can't speak a word of it. Because the words are so far back in my memory that I don't know the words until I hear somebody else say them.
@shahrazade26 Just checking - are you joking? I am asking for real because it sounds like you're joking. This person described how they became fluent in German very quickly, and I'd believe them, because what they did was essentially the perfect methodology... and then you say "Maybe Duolingo can refresh your German skills." Again, I am actually asking because you could be 100% serious, or 100% joking and there are no tells as to which one it is. 😂
You had immersion which I think is the best way to learn a language, but before it, you have to know at least 50% about what you're watching or listening to.
I think the biggest problem except for removing the forums, which probably taught me the most of any feature of the app, is just how many times you repeat the same node before moving onto the next and never have I encountered very long sentences making use of the words I've been taught.
Duo is what it is…a gateway drug to the world of language learning. I think it’s a good thing overall to get people interested, it’s still loads better than classic language learning in an American classroom setting which is a total joke. I have over a 1000 day streak, and I can’t let it go. The owl has me in his talons. But I look at it for what it is, language entertainment. It takes me less than 5 minutes a day to keep my steak going, and I have had many people find me on the leaderboards and ask me about it, which gives me an opportunity to explain to them how I actually learned Danish. If all Duolingo does is open the door for people who are unaware of immersion learning, then it is an overall force for good in the language learning universe. You are very good at analogy Lamont, the whole journey by foot, bike, plane thing is perfect! great video sir!
I agree 💯 with this. Duolingo does have its merits but it needs to be seen for what it is. The gamification aspect helps keep motivation up, it's a quick and fun way to keep different writing systems fresh in your mind, and it's an easy source of dopamine. It's definitely not something you should rely on as your sole source of language learning -- unless you really really enjoy long walks to the airport.
@@emiliasky6117 I have a premade deck of 8,000 sentences I found on Anki. I try to add to it with my own cards, but I have limited time to sit in front of a computer. I mainly immerse in Danish content on Netflix. Getting rid of subtitles has finally seemed to work for me, my comprehension is improving rapidly.
It's not a gateway drug though. It's just a drug, and the only way to satiate your habit is more DuoLingo. If it was a gateway drug, we'd see thousands of people saying DuoLingo helped make them fluent. Anyone who has ever learned a foreign language to fluency realizes DuoLingo did nothing for them on their journey.
@@emiliasky6117I would personally go on UA-cam and see what they have. I think there are a lot of good Danish learning UA-cam channels out there. Though, I’m not 100% sure, cuz I haven’t looked much into it ^^
Duolingo is like a fancy flashcard that keeps me from completely losing vocabulary when I have only a few minutes per day to dedicate to the language. a "better than nothing" option
If duolingo would not be such a fkn grind it would be actually helpful. But translating "this student is seven years old" 57times doesnt make you fluid
Sure, as a language geek I’m also ambivalent about Duolingo (but still use it) but as an educator I wouldn’t dismiss an approach to learning (anything) that people find fun, engaging and rewarding. People are very different in what drives them.
I also liked it at the beginning but the problem is, ANYTHING can be made to be engaging. Literally anything IF (and it's a big IF) you don't mind sacrificing what it actually is that you're doing. e.g. "Do you want to get thin fast, but don't want to stick to a boring diet? Well I've got a diet you CAN stick to... I call it the Lamont diet... you can eat WHATEVER YOU WANT WHENEVER YOU WANT!" Customer: "But then I will stay being overweight?" Me: "The advantage of the Lamont diet is that ANYONE can stick to it!" To me, that's what Duolingo has become. It has sacrificed learning for "being engaging".
@@daysandwords I agree. Any skill learning needs involvement and dedication. Duolingo came from being an quite overly praised learning tool with a gamification system to become just a game about languages. Better play Chants of Sennaar or one of the many videogames who don't pretend to be learning courses but just entertainment with a language theme. Or in the other way better use more serious learning methods not emphasizing on the obsolete and basic audiobooks/flashcards courses. It's just like the fact people don't play Zacktronics games to learn programming or automation. Better remove our dusty Arduino board from the drawer and start reading documentation. All in all, even if academic methods have their own drawbacks, we can't get away with them to learn at least the basics. On most skills, it shows in advanced levels when someone learned using shortcuts and as a learner it can be difficult to correct those habits.
@@daysandwords "It has sacrificed learning for "being engaging"." Totally agree on this. I used Duolingo for a long time. At the beginning, I started with French. As a Spanish speaker, it was easy to learn and the first tree I tried help me to get a simple overview of the language (about a month or so). It was a shorter version of the tree almost 5 years ago. After that, I went to the reverse tree: learning Spanish from French. I took advantage of native speakers in the Forum section, speaking about how they say things in French. And I could ask questions in French. After 3 months, all the Duolingo work was just repetitive and less meaningful. It was just to keep the numbers, to feel engaged. Not learning, but keep going on the app. I was able to read in French, I could understand some TV shows. I couldn't speak a phrase (speaking is not the strength feature in Duo). So, in the end, not so useful. My experience with Korean was even worse. Not having anybody to teach you grammar on Korean properly is really a demeanor for that language. And the quality of your learning depends on the person in that specific course. Mostly, languages different from English, Spanish or French are terrible: not well reviewed, lots of errors, few options for every sentence... So: without discussion, without other benefits and with a lot of disadvantages, you should better spend time in other sites or resources. The only good thing I see in Duo nowadays is: easy access. You can take your phone everywhere and try some sentences, it's better when you are on the bus and you want to do something but not as demanding as a podcast or when you are waiting on a line for your grocery shopping. Other than that, I don't see any benefit. And this one is really not that great to invest your time in it.
People want everything to be fun and engaging, and effortless, but the truth is our brains need the effort, they need to feel that they work. CI is about reading and learning what interests you, but if you don't like medicine you won't learn useful phrases about health and in case of emergency which might be incredibly useful if you intend to go to a country where your target language is spoken. You really want to know how to draw out money from ATM in Japan. How to buy basic stuff anywhere. Ask where the embassy is. And foremost: where's the toilet :P Not everything in learning languages is fun, some things are just plain boring but useful and for that reason worth learning. It might not be fun when you learn it, but when it comes handy - then the real fun begins. :)
@daysandwords The idea that you can't effectively learn with duolingo is provably false. The evidence is that people do it literally all the time (I'm sure the developers have their own evidence but nevermind that). Tools for learning exist on a spectrum and it's certainly not the worst (depending on HOW you use it). It's absolutely not all I use but I can definitely confirm that I've memorized and learned to use quite a few words and phrases in Russian using it. I'm not fluent but conversational at a basic level at least. It's a fun way to drill words and phrases. I'd something is working for someone they should probably ignore a random UA-cam naysayer. Your best indicator for what works is your own results (I'm pretty aggressive and broad in how I use it unlike a lot of people probably but still).
The thing about Duolingo is that it rewards the wrong things. It's engagement with the app, not the language. I don't like how that blasted owl seems to want so much of my freaking attention. I also think it doesn't push knowledge boundaries very well. I agree that it's very easy to see progress down the path but not make meaningful progress at all. That said, I don't have a lot of similar resources for Welsh.
It’s shocking how sad the selection of learning resources for Welsh is. I also got started with SSIW and felt pretty good about myself after one year. Then, I went to the get-together when they celebrated being recognized by the Senedd or something of the kind. And you know, I was the only idiot stuck at talking about stupid walls and going to the tavern because every single person there had previously learned enough Welsh somewhere else to hold an actual conversation. The most frustrating part of the evening was the singalong at the pub later. Wasn’t familiar with the songs, couldn’t read the bloody lyrics (having been told from day 1 not to try to read anything)… Duolingo is far from perfect, but I’ve finally picked up enough to read a book of short stories that I bought well over a decade ago. I’ll take that over nothing.
Duolingo is kinda like the island of lotus eaters from Greek myth. You take a bit of the sweet lotus and you don’t even realize you’ll be stuck there. It takes a lot to figure out that there’s a whole world of things you could be doing instead, and some people never get that far
Haha. No, I realised after two weeks what Duolingo can and can not do. I stayed anyway for the motivational feature. ☺️ But, and that's very important, people should get informed about what they're doing. Fortunately, there are Duolingo Facebook groups for example.
I tried a few of the Spanish options, let me just cut to the conclusion, the one you want is Dreaming Spanish. It's the closest to what you will be wanting to actually do -- understand native speakers. They have specific content for learning Mexican, Columbian, Argentinian, Chilean or European (Spain) Spanish to help you refine your ear for where you plan to actually be.
I still cannot get over the sheer about of time one Duolingo tree takes. I can feel a marked difference in my comprehension and vocabulary if I spend one hour studying a podcast. I've recently started learning Russian, and I'm less than 20 hours in total, but I've focused it on listening and reading comprehension and I'd would hazard a guess I've got at least 500 words under my belt, if my Memrise deck is to be believed, and I'm starting to understand A1 speech without subtitles. (Thanks Russian From Afar!) I cannot imagine spending over 100 hours on something and have so little to show for it. Respect your time, because Duolingo doesn't.
That's it. I tried to finish the German tree in a month for a video a year or so ago, and I realised it was going to take like 5 hours a day. Personally, I think I COULD read Harry Potter after that (Swedish helps obviously) but still, 150 hours when you could just do an Anki deck in like 5 days of 2 hours.
With the old tree configuration it was possibile to make a speedrun, jumping as far as you could get (directly testing on units without practicing them and spending otherwise useless lingots) but this was like a mountain marathon to reach the Airport.
That is indeed tough to answer, because a) what language are we talking about? In French it's almost possible for anyone with fluent English (not quite, but 100 words would put you close). b) what's your tolerance for "ambiguity", that is, for not knowing quite what's happening. Mine is very high with audiobooks, not so high with series, and most people's is very low for books. But if you pair the book WITH the audiobook, then you can do it in most languages immediately But honestly, I'd recommend just reading one first. Like, the first one takes about 8 hours of audiobook (and make that 5 if you listen at 1.6x which is super easy for a native speaker of English) and then that significantly increases your chances of tolerating it in a new language and actually learning something.
For my Japanese learning, I mainly just used Duolingo as a means of keeping track of the days I work on the language. I spend far more time using things like Wanikani, textbooks, and immersion content. The progress I see with those other resources is far greater than the time I spent on Duolingo.
@@genericascanbe3728 I found it helpful for getting to the point where I could read most hiragana and katakana, at least with what they had around 4 years ago, and while I'm sure there are better resources, I think it does a good enough job at that. But when it came to then perfecting my ability to read hiragana and katakana and learning to write them, I found just writing out all of them over and over from memory (and correcting after each attempt) really effective, and after months of Duolingo, I was able to finally remember the last couple hiragana I kept confusing and the several katakana I never remembered, plus I could write them almost as naturally as I could write the Latin alphabet. For kanji, I highly recommend starting out by using spaced repetition with an order that puts basic kanji before the more complex ones that contain those ones as components (e.g. 日 and 月 before 明), and making yourself both remember the meaning of the kanji and be able to write the kanji from the meaning. I did that to start out, and only did it for maybe a month or two, but it taught me how to break down a kanji when looking at it and understand the kinds of components I should expect to see in them. Before I did that, they were just a bunch of lines and shapes, and if I saw a new kanji and had to reproduce it, I'd have to go line-by-line, comparing mine to the original as I went. Now I can glance at a kanji and just write it down, maybe looking back once or twice if there are a lot of components in it.
7:32 he is trying to use the vocabulary he acquired from duolingo to make a direct translation rather than one that makes sense. this actually works for more german than you’d expect but sadly this one is not an example. and this particular case is quite telling of how far duolingo can take you because because the phrase he’s trying to say (and variations of it) are quite common in everyday speech and media (sonst noch etwas).
talking on the not uncommon 1:1 german-english translations, i will encounter a combination of words in german that seems very odd, z.B. “laufende Nase”, it makes me take a pause and think “what…? a running🏃♂️ nose??? but a nose has no legs??” but then comes the “WAIT… i know what that means, thats exactly how we say it in English!!” 😂😂
I can’t believe I’m being used in a thumbnail for views. Gonna tell my mom I’ve finally made it Also my comment on reading Harry Potter after the German tree was made 6 years ago before Duolingo aligned with CEFR so it’s definitely further along now. I still preferred starting with the other books I mentioned as they were enjoyable and educational :) Also find it a bit weird you photoshopped my views to be nearly twice as high. Why. That video does not have 2.9m views lmao
Cheers for watching and replying Evan! Honestly I very nearly contacted you beforehand just to not be all "UA-camr drama" about it but this video had already gone through so many changes, I thought I needed to just get it done. Thanks for being (seemingly) cool with it. But to the issue - do you think that it's fair to say that with Duolingo, it's going to take a very long time to get to the stage that you can read your own material and learn from them? That's really my biggest gripe with it; yeah it's fun, it's free(ish)... but it started out reasonably slow and only got slower. As for the thumbnail - yep, guilty as charged. It's just a weird thing that certain tiny factors make people more likely to click. 2.9M seemed like the right number... not really sure why. As you can see from my views, I need to do everything I can, including simplifying the title of your video. Initially I actually used the thumbnail from your very recent video about the updates, but I thought that was a bridge too far, since that's not the main video I was talking about. Anyway - I hope you're well, and check out Dreaming Spanish, best thing that's ever happened to Spanish learners. 😉
@evan I appreciate that you didn't come here flaming me but I don't really see how it's any LESS deceptive to be all like "lmao" and "gonna tell mom I've finally made it" (basically acting like things are cool) if you're actually hating this and seemed to be quite annoyed by it (based on your video). I don't know why you would comment on mine at all. You accused me of pretending to like you so as to be win sympathy... But here you are pretending to be fine about this when you're obviously PO'd. I've got some videos on the horizon so it might be a while before I get to your response, but I feel that we both just misunderstand each other. We have different styles and the same words seem to mean different things to us, so now we're beefing. I'm sorry about that. Yes, I used your face to get views, and yes, it was deliberate. I am deliberate with what videos I make, because I can't afford not to be. You pointed out yourself that my older clickbait didn't work. Basically I've gotten better at it. We can talk all day about whether Duolingo made you fluent or not but to be surprised that a smaller UA-camr used your face for views... Really? Dude it's happened to ME and I haven't even cracked 100K subs. That is this platform. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens again (certainly now because you responded to it). I _genuinely_ hope you are well, and I hope your stay in Germany was or is going well. Lamont.
@@daysandwords Halli hallo, so my initial reaction was shock and using humour as a coping mechanism as I worked out my feelings on it all. As I sat on it and thought about the video, it did cause me genuine upset and hurt. So yeah I was really trying to “be cool with it,” but then my shock wore off. Sorry for the perceived deception there. I will say there have been some comments from some of your viewers on my video which I’ve found incredibly nuanced and insightful. Ones that were better able to convey your history of things and better intentions except for the whole using me out of context to make a point thing. Most still agreed with my point that you could’ve done that a bit better. The thing is, besides the ultra low-quality “react channels” that throw one of my videos on and then pause every 5 minutes to pretend they’re adding any value to my video they’re stealing, I honestly do /not/ have anyone using my face/videos for views ever. (I will note, your video was HIGHLY transformative and incredibly well-edited featuring loads of added value so I absolutely do not place your video anywhere near those channels.) I’m not really a large enough UA-camr for that to be worthwhile for most people (I’m not really bringing them clicks), but I suppose within this one niche, maybe so! Also, the videos I make aren’t like… big debatable topics; most are just “here’s my experience” which is really hard to…make a video arguing against or for? Because you can’t really argue with someone else’s experience. (Though you did.) You can share your own, sure, but most everything I make (outside of say… the recent video) I strive to make them as inoffensive as possible to /avoid/ that type of response at all costs. This is what caused such intense levels of shock and upset that of all the niches I make videos in, the duolingo one felt so innocent to me, so devoid of controversy and safe. I feel like I make way less “personal” content these days out of an intense anxiety of someone using it against me in bad faith. So to have a video brutally going through everything I’ve uploaded and attempting to inherently discredit my personal journey through strategic cuts I found abhorrent (even if that was not your intent). There were so many points you made I felt like I could’ve agreed with or at least been able to say “well we just have different definitions of things” as I’ve never claimed to have mastery in the foreign languages I’ve learned, as I felt like in every single video I’ve made that you used, I’ve always signified the exact level of fluency I’m talking about. You even left in the bit I said as such. My concession of “soft yes” in that video 5 years ago was pretty much making the exact point you were. But you painted it as disingenuous while then basically saying the same thing? I hope you’re able to see that this along with you using that recent clip of me saying “I couldn’t speak the language” which referred to my recent 2 years of not actively learning German to mean I couldn’t speak it at all at the time of my OG video really solidified to me that you weren’t “making a mistake” but were deliberately misconstruing me for your own content. I couldn’t agree with that. Hence my response. Saying “that is the platform” and I should expect people to use my face and name for views I find a bit of a deflection here though. Whenever celebrities get harassed in public or private and people online say “that’s the price of being famous” I really, /really/ disagree with that sentiment and believe it shows a very large lack of empathy. If you wouldn’t like that type of behaviour then regardless you shouldn’t condone it. So to contribute to that and say “that’s just the way it is; it’s happened to me” I find that sad. I feel like sure, it’d be different if I was purporting myself to be a professional language coach or something like that, and let’s say I was using my position to convince others to trust in me to get them to sign up for my course, because then sure, I think you’d have grounds for… let’s say “protection of the space” from this bad actor. You’d really want to convey that we’d all need a lot more “proof” this guy is who he says he is and is in this case an absolute mastery C2 fluent guy! But in my case, in that video as well as every video since, I’ve always conveyed the reality of my personal language-learning journey and that has /never/ been someone in the C1 or C2 range. I think the inherent discrepancy here comes from our different niches and styles. My niche is for the average person who’s interested in learning enough of a language to be able to engage in it by using it at shops and restaurants, expressing themselves, and consuming foreign media, not necessarily mastery. I’d absolutely be a bad channel for mastery as I am not that at all and… sigh… I really feel like I’ve said as much multiple times recently and in the past. I try to be realistic about my own journey. From what I’ve learned from your insightful viewers’ comments is that your channel is more in-depth. More, let’s say, for like “well how can I learn MORE of the language, and learn more efficiently to be GOOD at this language and make locals be like DAMN OKAY WOW.” That’s cool as hell man, and definitely a very important niche for the people that would like to move from the “minimum effort to engage in a foreign language” to more serious efforts. On this topic though, I will say, I don’t know if you’ve considered this before, but before previewing my video, I asked a friend of mine to watch yours first to ensure they had the full context, and they told me after finishing your video, their overall feeling was demotivation. They didn’t feel motivated to continue learning a foreign language at all, not just on duolingo, but at all. I’m sure that’s not the feeling you’d want to instil in a viewer, right? I know you created a follow up video about what you use instead of duolingo which is great, but that one video of me alone was so negative that someone like my friend felt like not only was her slow growth on duolingo pointless but the growth of her language in general. Even though she knows me and has had chats with me on the topic, your inclusion of that bit of me saying “I couldn’t speak the language” while saying it was about me EVER speaking the language even made her confused until she watched my video. Your editing is very persuasive, eh? I personally have worked with solely 1 (at time of writing unless I’m forgetting one?) language sponsor which was featured in my recent video you used B roll from, and when chatting it out with them (and all possible (and failed)) sponsors, I stipulate that I can’t pretend I’m not using rivals too. So many sponsors require not talking about competitors in the content (makes a lot of sense), but I couldn’t do that honestly as I do and will continue to learn on duo. But I worked out with the brand (and a future one hopefully?) how I ADD these in to my routine and how they add value to what I’m already doing. Even when duo’s being a bit shite with their updates, I still do admit I’m using the app still / AND / I add in the sponsor. In your case, I guess you don’t really have to worry about that as even though you used it in the past, you’re now against the use of duolingo, so you can authentically be like “duo’s shit, but ayyyy this spon ain’t bad.” But from my perspective the optics of that isn’t great… but that’s probably because it’s my perspective as someone whose channel is NOT all about language learning. It probably makes more sense in your niche, and so my comments about it probably come from a lack of understanding of YOUR space so apologies for that. In completely tangential comments, otherwise you seem like an overall right chap. You’re clearly a well-rounded lad (at least by just looking at online things) in that ya know, you’re working on your fitness, you’ve got a family you’re taking care of, etc. I personally have no beef with /you/ just with your (in my opinion) dishonest use of my language-learning journey in your video. We disagree about some things in the space as is natural, but we absolutely agree with a LOT of things that could have been interesting to explore had you (as you told me in your original comment you planned on doing, but didn’t) actually messaged me prior to talk about. We could probably agree that once you clear that A1-A2 area, duolingo would be VASTLY improved if you supplement it heavily with other media. But… as you know as you’ve got my videos downloaded in your timeline, I’ve pretty much said as much too. I said it with positive intentions whereas I personally feel your video repackaged my own but things were said negatively. Does that make sense? You can disagree! I do apologise for my tone in my video as lord almighty is it SHARP. Sarcasm is how I write rebuttals and in this case it was just… a bit biting when if I’d focused more on say, the type of thing I’ve written here, it would’ve been less harsh. I talked about this in a comment I made on my own video, but I do mean it when I say I do also hope you continue to learn languages and enjoy doing so and also continue trying to help people succeed! We’re both in places where we actually can motivate and inspire people to learn a foreign language which I can assume is something both of us enjoy 🙂 At the end of the day, you’ll always have a better english accent than me. Would kill to sound Aussie 😅
@@ski2miYeah and if I'd translated these thoughts directly from my native language, as well as making jerky and awkward mistakes for THREE HOURS STRAIGHT, then I'd admit that I wasn't fluent in English.
Great video, the plane analogy especially is very useful. A serious language learner needs to realize that there will always be a level of frustration that comes with language learning which is normal and even desirable... reading native materials, regularly looking things up, the endless cycle of learning something, forgetting it and learning it again might not always be *fun* but that process is the entire point, that is the process you're looking for. And the satisfaction you get after grinding at that and finally being able to comprehend *actual* native content you like is something the tiny daily dopamine hits you get from tapping the lever of the skinner box of Duolingo can't compare to. But you have to be serious about it and want to actually comprehend the language.
@@AA-lz4wq It isn't incompatible you use it as a supplement to engagement with actual text and audio and an SRS but the question then is why bother with an app that is inferior to those things? If you like doing it anyway ofc you should do it but it just isn't very effective if you're serious about learning the language. Also esp for non-European languages (though I can only speak for Japanese) the sentences are really not very native like and the robot pronunciation frankly sucks. Though I haven't used it in years so maybe it got better, idk.
What Duolingo fundamentally does for me is keep me interested in learning the language. There are days when I am just not motivated to learn anything from anywhere. However, because I do not want to lose my streak, I reluctantly get in at least 5mins that day to keep my streak going. And these could happen for a few consecutive days. And I believe this sustains my interest in learning the language (If I do not engage in learning for days, I could totally lose Interest). Then within a day or a few, I would get really curious again and continue learning from other resources as well.
I started with a language course because I felt bored, and duolingo supplementing it. But then, always being worse than some other students in each class that I joined and not speaking as well when visiting Spain motivated me to turn it into an obsession. So one day I found that I could skip 10 units at a time in duolingo, then I dropped it altogether. It was just a chore that didn't help me. I stopped taking courses as well, having skipped five during it. And now, some two years later since I started, I speak it rather well, I can also read Monte Cristo and I only have to look up between 1..5 words per page, if I feel that they're important to the context. I don't really need to know what 'mesana' means (it's 'mizzenmast' in English). More importantly, I found that I could just travel five stops by public transport to partake in language exchanges. Way better. I also started with my own :D:D On to Portuguese then, this time without Duolingo.
Hi I'm from Germany. I'm learning Japanese on Duolingo and I have ADHD. My goal is it to understand enough Japanese so I can listen to Podcasts and stories in Japanese( because that is how I learned English). Duolingo kept me learning while other apps did not. duolingo is not perfect I'm missing so much (like grammar and vocabulary) on duolingo, but I have other apps to. But Duolingo really important for me, it's keeping my learning day after day after day. And the biggest achievement is that i deleted all other games on my phone and the only game I'm playing now is duolingo😁. After not even one year Japanese learning on duolingo I started looking for short stories for language beginners and Podcast in Japanese.
Your videos aren't garbled. They're exceptionally well-structured and I appreciate that. I have had absolutely no experience with Duolingo. I avoid social media as much as possible and the interactivity of notifications alone would put me off, never mind the cutesy game aspect and it dishing out dopamine hits that will get you addicted.
I have been using Duo for beginner Japanese. I find it's format is fantastic for the writing system -- spaced repetition with a combination of listening, pattern matching, and tracing. I imagine it would be similar useful for other alphabets/abjabs/syllabaries. The actual language lessons though are useless. I've been drilling "She's a cool lawyer" for like 5 days with no end in sight.
I also did not understand why it kept giving me the same questions over and over again. I think it would have been better if I had paid and got endless lives. That way, I would have played more since there wouldn't be negative leverage.
I guess that I can say that I've been "lucky" to study two languages that aren't on Duolingo (Slovak and Ho-Chunk). However, just for shits and giggles, I decided to do a speed run on Duolingo in Greek, a language I didn't know a damn thing about. After the first six hours, I just noticed that everything was a constant loop. Yes, some words were sticking in my head, but many of those words weren't useful, such as teaching nouns and verbs that would rarely be used, while never mentioning commonly-used words. And this is the problem, that Duolingo on purposely leave common words later in the tree so that you are stuck to it. In addition, I think that Duolingo's "plug and play" approach helps someone memorize certain phrases, with the idea of "plugging in" words, but it doesn't do anything to help you form your own sentences.
I like Duolingo. I feel it helps me stay consistent even on lazy or busy days. I do about 15 minutes in the morning and 15 in the evening but move on to other resources after duo. I take actual language classes at local colleges too. Duolingo is more of a warm up for me and I don’t obsess over it. If I felt it was useless I have no issue with kicking it to the curb. I am high intermediate in Russian and Spanish in large part thanks to Duolingo. The streak creates a habit of daily exposure to the target language and I think that was the key for me. I have tried learning before but with the other resources I was using it was easy to miss a day, and then a week, month, and then I would say F-it and I would move on to something else. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for Duolingo I would not be speaking my two new languages right now.
The best language resources are the ones you will actually use. If there's too much of a barrier to that you're not gonna use it and you're not going to get anywhere.
@@ketchup901 what makes you an authority on something being useful to me or not ? I speak four languages, two of them I would not speak if it wasn’t for duolingo. That’s pretty useful to me.
@@ketchup901 There is a saying that the best (insert subject) resources...are the ones you actually use. If it sits on your shelf, it isn't magically going to get in your brain. There are loads of programs that are more efficient at teaching, but they can be too content heavy. My memory isn't good enough and neither is my attention span, to use those exclusively. Duo is not very efficient and at the moment, that is working for me. Should anyone use it exclusively and expect the world from it? Definitely not. That is nothing new. Use other resources and maybe take breaks away, but keep up the duolingo during that time to keep the language in your life? That sounds useful. I don't know how many times in the last 20 years I have used a standard program diligently for a week, take a break, and next thing I know it has been a year. Yeah, haven't gotten very far. Still, I have been chipping away for 88 days with Duo, and in that time I have finally broached topics I had been avoiding for a long time. I have other resources and books. The plan is to go ahead and take breaks from all that like before, but keep the Duo streak so Arabic stays in my life. There are other ways to do that minimum, but this is what I am using now. My breaks in between studying a program are shorter. That's a win.
Commenting since I commented on the other one and this deserves the comment boost. This makes sense to me, because by the time Duolingo came out I was already beyond anything it could teach me in my target language. Since then, I've seen friends who have a streak literally twice as long as I've been studying who are still at the beginner level of the language whereas I am much further. They haven't used anything else, though, because (and I think this is where the disconnect is) a lot of people using duolingo have a different definition of 'fluency' and of 'learning a language', and I *think* that's the point the other guy was making in his response to this video. I wanted to learn my language to have conversations with friends and to read books, which I think is a different use case than what you should use Duo for, at least according to people with high streaks, which seems to be more about 'being exposed to a language in time they would have otherwise spent doomscrolling' than something like reading complex books.
Yeah, and I MAY (probably not) but may, make a response to Evan's response... but just quickly, MY whole point in this video is that you can't just be like "Oh making ONE mistake doesn't mean you're not fluent"... He doesn't make one mistake. He can barely string three words together, and he's clearly thinking in English (because he says "I mean" when he accidentally says the wrong German word). NO ONE has THAT definition of fluency. Literally no one. And the fact that this was 5 years ago makes no difference since he's seemingly still claiming NOW that he was fluent THEN. Like I am a slow runner now... I was faster 6 years ago. So I don't say I can run a 21 minute 5K now, but I'll challenge anyone who says I couldn't do it BACK THEN. But Evan is doing the opposite, he's like "I am, and was, fluent, and I did it through Duolingo." I'm prepared to admit that Duolingo did SOMETHING, but not MOST of it. And it took so long that I would wonder why anyone would bother.
@@daysandwordsAt some point in that livestream, someone asks him if he thinks in German and he flat out states that he's thinking in English and translating. It's so bizarre to see him get so defensive about the fact that this probably wouldn't be considered "conversationally fluent" to most people and that his Duolingo video probably mislead people into having higher expectations than reasonable. The thing that really annoyed me though about Evan's response was that the entire argument relied on the retroactive weakening of his previous position from "I got fluent with Duolingo in 2 years" to "I'm just a hobbyist who does this for fun and I ultimately don't care about whether this method can get you to a high level" to make it look like you're just too stuck-up to respect his casual approach. All while implicitly maintaining that his fluency claims were still true all along. That was either dishonest or extremely sloppy of Evan. That video was just a complete strawman. He also completely misunderstood your airport analogy. I think your video was infinitely more fair and objective than his.
@@rpstneureis yeah he completely misunderstood the airport analogy, which I personally thought was brilliant. He also spent a lot more time doing more personal attacks. I'm not going to lie, I went into that video expecting something like 'hi, maybe you have an off expectation of duolingo, here are some ways it's actually really great and here is why I use it the way I do" and instead it was jokes about this youtuber' acting like a reddit moderator and using him for clout for his comparatively lower subscriber count' 😬. I don't know, I didn't expect that from him 😩. Either way, I don't think any points were really made since his argument was strawman, there's very little point in responding unless they can actually have a conversation to discuss the merits of each, but it doesn't sound like that other guy would even be willing to do that. I do think when a lot of people say fluent, they actually mean "someone of my target language can figure out what I meant eventually" like if you need help in the grocery store and you say "alcohol... Liquid... Cleaning... Please... Where?" instead of "where's the hand sanitiser?" (I have done this. This is me. I just never would have called myself fluent because I achieved sanitisation.)
I was using Duolingo as one resource to learn Hungarian (among others), but I am proud to say that I was one of the rare folks who did quit when they removed sentence explanations. It pushed me over the frustration tipping point and I said to myself, “this is no longer sufficiently valuable, I’m not going to allow it to rob me of any more of my valuable language learning time”! My annoyance allowed me to resist till I got over it! I was actually already frustrated by the fact that even before the change removing sentence explanations (and therefore severely reducing the value of the app) Duolingo was not helping me very much with one if the most difficult aspects of Hungarian: sentence order. In Hungarian there is one sentence order that is considered “neutral” and correct, various other sentence orders that are correct but put the emphasis on one particular element of the sentence and of course many wrong possible sentence orders too. Duolingo doesn’t of course include the concept of neutral sentence order and can’t identify if the order you’ve specified would be the neutral one or not. So it was already frustrating and inadequate for Hungarian.
I was already fluent in two languages when I started learning Spanish on Duolingo. I did it for 1-2 years on a daily basis but when I spent one year in Spain and visited a Spanish school, I realized how little difference it made. Duolingo is good if you wanna pick up some words for a holiday so you're not completely lost in a foreign country. That one year in Spain was way more effective although I barely practiced speaking. Interestingly I became fluent in English without the intention to do so. I was and am obsessed with English songs and video games, that's why I listened to content surrounding those topics until I understood. For Japanese I looked up many different methods of learning but in conclusion I think understanding it is the first step. Though I have to admit that I'm also practicing writing and reading at the same time since it's so different from the languages I can speak.
As someone who used Duolingo to learn Finnish, I can agree with the whole video and will keep using it. Not as my only way to do it, but as complementary material that gives me a broad view of the language. But for learning, I actually need to do more. As my English and Spanish teachers taught me. To learn a language you need to write in it, read in it, and especially TALK and SPEAK it. Just using Duolingo will not be able to give you the learning experience you NEED. And I was aware that Duolingo wouldn't be my only resource for learning Finnish. For the Evan part, as a German native speaker, I am NOT attacking or trying to slander him, I just want to be honest, the part where he tried to speak German was a tough watch. And he thought he got the right word, but he didn't. "Anything else" is "irgendwas anderes"/"irgendwas -" not "irgendwas übrigens".
Exactly. And there is lots of nuance that this video is missing, for example, I only touch on Hawaiian vs Spanish, but Finnish sits somewhere in the middle. I assume you're using FinnishPod101? As for Evan's German, yeah, he accused me of "combing through the three hours to find the one part where I was lost for words". Well, umm, no actually. Had I have wanted to embarrass him, I could have shown 20 bits EXACTLY like that. Trying to think of the German word for an English word in your head and then saying it, EVEN IF it were the right word, is just not fluency. Anyone who's ever gotten anywhere near fluency knows that thinking IN the language is only one step towards that, but it's a necessary step.
same, i will not stop using duolingo i'll just stop wondering 'maybe the paid plan has something planned who knows' i had never heard anyone says that you can *concentrate* on duolingo for languge-learning before evan, and in any case nobody that actually did, so a qualitative review of his progress seems like a good idea i am glad other people can approximate his level of german as i really don't know german and had never heard him speak it as i don't watch his livestreams i genuinely watched his videos though and took what he said mostly at face value it's a shame he took it personally with his reply, and i'll try to understand his side of the story but bottom-line is still that the premise of this video seems right, and the arguments and evidence still stand
Me Suomalaiset Arvostamme ulkomaalaisia, jotka opiskelevät kieltämme. Ulkomaalaiset valittaa sitä etteivät saa työtä, vaikka he eivät edes usein osaa kieltämme. ♥️Rakkaudella Tampereelta.
I heard there was a study that if you want to remember something it is better to take a break before you dive into the contents again. The longer the break the longer you retain the information. So I would think a daily streak would be counter-productive to this.
Hey, thanks for this video I found it interesting and really like the flight analogy. I think the idea of “fluency” in the online language learning community is always a tricky one. It is a very subjective thing that some people believe to mean a near-native kind of level, whereas for others it is a lower B1 level. For me it’s a level where the speaker can express themselves relatively comfortably in a range of scenarios, even if they have an accent and make some mistakes, something around a B2 level I guess. I feel like some people use the term “conversationally fluent” to pepper the fact that they are not really that confident or proficient in the language, in fact Evan even says “for the most part conversationally fluent”. Regardless of that, the notion that Duo alone could bring you to fluency is quite ridiculous. I imagine, though, that it leads to more people, who would otherwise be uninterested, into language learning, which is definitely a positive thing.
Yeah, he was saying "conversationally fluent" to temper that... and that's fine... but that's my Swedish haha. I can't explain what my Honours thesis was about in Swedish, but I can tell you how I learned Swedish. Evan couldn't remember the word for "else", and when he did, it wasn't actually the term he was looking for. He was more like... conversationally "emergency" helpful, that is, if NO ONE had spoken English and someone was bleeding out, then Evan's German might have been slightly useful. My point isn't that he wasn't good or that he was lying or exaggerating. Simply that Duo wasn't working, because it doesn't work.
@daysandwords I just think the term “fluent” is generally problematic, as it’s hard to quantify. I know you weren’t trying to make it out as if his German wasn’t good, unfortunately it was more just the result of the fact he had mainly been using Duolingo and also for him it was a hobby. All things considered he is verg good and has probably inspired countless others to dip their toe in the boundless ocean that is language-learning. Just imagine if he had a streak of hundreds of days through immersion learning and been in the air all that time instead of on his feet.. the only thing with that though is that often people who learn through immersion and get crazy results “no-lifed” it and spent hours each day consuming content. So, even if input-based methods are far more effective it’s hard to compare since sometimes people will only spend like 5 minutes on Duolingo.
@@daysandwords also haha yeah, I get you. I’m at a point where I could probably describe myself as fluent in Spanish, yet have struggled in the past with complicated political discussions.
Yeah but Evan did actually say that it was more like an hour a day. The other thing is, a lot of people think that I only want to talk about things that take up 2-3 hours of your day. But I have two kids, of very different ages (which takes even longer than when they are of similar age). My Swedish learning at 33 years old was definitely unusual but I had a job and two kids... it's certainly not impossible.
@@daysandwords it’s great that you managed to find time for language learning despite those things! I imagine things like listening to audio passively would be helpful in such situations
Excellent video! You are absolutely correct. Have been using it for almost a year now. The lessons just keep repeating like going on a merry go round! Thanks for the enlightenment!
Thank you for this. I always try to point new language learners in the direction of better materials and study methods, sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't. I live in Norway currently and I've been studying Norwegian for about two years using primarily native material. Am I fluent? Gosh no, but I can listen to native content with about a 70-80% comprehension rate and it goes higher with subtitles, and I can function more or less fine in Norwegian society as long as people don't speak too fast or use obscure vocabulary. My goal for next year is to reach C1, ambitious but we'll see. Meanwhile though, another American I know here has solely been trying to learn with Duolingo. He's been here longer than I have I can see his frustration. I try to tell him there are better ways to learn, but he seems to think if he sticks with Duolingo he'll finally become fluent, meanwhile he can barely order a coffee in Norwegian. I feel bad for him, he's a smart guy, but I think he's bought into the Duolingo hype. Maybe I'll show this to him.
I'm totally with you on this. One thing I think you haven't covered tho is what I see with my sisters. Namely that even tho I talked with them about the fact how ineffective and slow Duolingo is and what other way better options they have - they still stay with it - because... well... because duolingo is cute and what they desire is not learning a language but finding an excuse why they are not learning a language, something so that they can say "but I am learning so much" while not really learning... and not really getting there. Stupid, but totally human. :( I gave up after realizing that. Duo is their proof for them that language learning is an impossible task and it is NOT their fault that they cannot succeed.
11:17 not even a certain carpenter would walk over the pacific ocean, not when he has a buddy that can call down burning chariots from the sky and give people a ride 🤣
I think it can be summed up pretty easily - Duolingo works really well up to a point (around A2 in my experience if you're familiar with CEFR) but then it's quite useless at actually teaching you anything particularly useful past that. In your analogy it's like walking to your car that's parked a street or two away to then drive to the airport. But it's still a good tool for other things past that point such as reminding you to keep practicing, filling gaps in grammar and vocabulary knowledge, etc. Plus it can be hard to know where to start without it sometimes, and if you can't afford/justify spending a lot of money on something better such as storylearning then it's a genuinely useful tool.
"In your analogy it's like walking to your car that's parked a street or two away to then drive to the airport." Yeah if you walk at like 100 metres an hour. It COULD be useful for what you're describing, if it didn't stupidly throttle the speed at which you can go through the lessons. Do you want to move beyond "The boy has an apple."? No worries! Duolingo will get you beyond that... in 6 weeks.
Also high key, Duolingo’s marketing is absurdly good - like idk who runs their Twitter but even in my somewhat niche jjk manga reading community, duo steps in and posts memes that only we relate to - and ofc related to the idea that duo is trying to make sure you’re on top of language learning
I've practiced Spanish on Duolingo for years and now I'm in Colombia meeting tons of folks and comfortably having hours long conversations & teaching English classes to folks that don't know any English yet. Yes, Duolingo works, and it was 80% responsible for my knowledge in Spanish, supplemented by UA-cam, books, podcasts, songs, movies, and practicing with native speakers making up the other 20%.
"and it was 80% responsible for my knowledge in Spanish, supplemented by UA-cam, books, podcasts, songs, movies." But how could you possibly know that DL was 80% responsible for your knowledge? All the other stuff you described there, by sheer volume of words, contains orders of magnitude more. The DL just helps you to actually squeeze the juice out of those things. But the juice still came from those things. I think this comment has put the misunderstanding so succinctly as to inspire a second video in me about why people FEEL that Duolingo works even though it doesn't.
@@daysandwords right? I would love to say that my current level in Spanish is due to my diligent daily study. but let's be honest. It's because I moved to Mexico a couple years back. The study is great, and I know people who move to Mexico and learn no Spanish largely because they aren't studying to prepare themselves for interacting with the people who live here, but can I really say that 80% or even 50% of what I actually know comes from apps and study courses? Probably not.
@@daysandwordsI think the video is 'great right? Yes I do, but I gotta say I've started using duolingo for the past 10 months ago, for free. I get the pay to win aspect. But I've actually learned so much German in these past months to year. This does not apply to everyone, but I can speak it FLUENTLY by just keeping up around a 80 day streak, I can easily have conversations with my German friends and family now because I grew up in america and I speak english, so I decided I would learn german. I made that promise, sure the updates are bad but I've learned so much, it's a great learning app but the paywalls are horrible.
@@daysandwords I remember in the 2000s there were equivalent "Rosetta Stone works" people. Many people learned languages with those tools, but it's presented to you in this neat little package that gives the impression that this is what language learning should be like. If you're a beginner, you just slog your way through it and accept that language learning really is this confusing and slow, when in reality it doesn't have to be.
Agree 100%. What frustrates me is Duolingo's false promises. Their catchphrase is literally "The world's best way to learn a language". Then you get people every day posting on Reddit, wondering why they can't understand native speakers after having a 900+ day streak. It's sad, really, knowing that they could have been fluent in that same amount of time if they had used more effective resources. My Spanish skyrocketed when I gave up on Duolingo and started focusing on comprehensible input (God bless Dreaming Spanish). Now I'm at B2 and I can read or watch almost anything I want. I'm starting Polish and looking forward to using the same process. 80% input, 10% output, 10% focused vocab/grammar study has been very effective for me.
900 day streak doesn't mean much. It could be doing like 50 lessons and practice (repeating)... What is """important""" (or was before they completely fucked up the XP system) was XP amount. I had like 25k in Spanish by the time I went to university (so equivalanet of 2500 lessons, finished the tree, repeated a lot, used other sources) - and I was at B1 level. Some people might use Duo every day for 5 minutes - 900 days = 4500 minutes = 75 hours? Basically A1-A2 level. If they spent 1 hour per day for 900 days, they would definitely be B1 (in combination with other resources, when duolingo tree ends :D )
People can't understand a language because they are just doing tasks for keeping a streak instead of actually learning, practicing and repeating things. And to be honest, after a while you can solve the tasks from feeling without any knowledge of the language if you get used to what the duolingo expects from you in every course equally. Like as, i literally could just go to any random language course and get a 30-50% accuracy on the highest check point without knowing anything about the language at all. And it's only because duolingo teaches you how to satisfy the website's tasks instead of teaching you the language.
@@BeSk9991 You definitelly need other sources for any level. Duolingo is only good for being a practice tool that you use as an addition to a real learning method.
Duolingo is like walking to the airport ...... on a treadmill. You feel as if you are walking , but you aren't getting very far, even if the machine says you have done 6 miles today and are on a 90 day streak.
I just finished 2 years subscribed to the Family plan. I won't be renewing because my 4 family members (who don't know each other) all recently quit DL within weeks of each other after 2 years piggybacking on my account. Why? Because they all thought it was a complete waste of their time. Each had travelled overseas to a country where the language they were learning is primarily spoken, and they were so disappointed in just how little they could converse with the locals (speaking and listening) Me however, I treat DL as one of those mindless apps you spend time on each day when you're bored. I think if I get to the end of the courses, (I am learning 5 languages simultaneously) I will still not be able to speak any of the languages. But I won't have felt like I'd wasted as much time as if I played Angry Birds every day for 4 years straight.
I can tell you why even if duolingo is lengthy and there are better options for language learning, it is worth it. It is because how easy it is to build a daily habit especially for people who are learning a new language casually. 'casually' is the key word here. Most of the people who are learning languages using this app are otherwise busy people who just want to learn a language as a hobby. Now, it is a great gateway to language learning. Those who find language learning fun after using this app, they will automatically seek for better, faster ways to learn that language.
"Those who find language learning fun after using this app, they will automatically seek for better, faster ways to learn that language." Will they though? I mean what if I could find an example of someone who learned German for 4-5 years before still completely sucking at German, only to then take up Spanish using exactly the same app, despite their OWN ADMISSION that the app is significantly worse than a few years back? If I could produce such an example, surely we'd have to admit that not all people (and I would argue, not even MOST people) will seek for a real language learning method?
I think the focus with Duolingo should just be maintaining a habit. I don't think it's effective if it's the only tool you're using to try to learn a language, but it does help initially with creating a daily habit. I still maintain my Duolingo streak for fun, but there's no doubt I've learned much more German from reading books, listening to music, watching movies and taking more comprehensive courses.
I've had a streak on Korean Duolingo for almost 500 days now. But that's the thing, I never expected to actually learn Korean through it. It's more of a motivational thing for me, and 2-5 minutes a day isn't going to take up much of my time anyway. And especially not considering I usually have 10-20h of a variety of input/output during the week without including Duolingo. The only other thing I'd say Duolingo has been helpful for is shadowing, because I absolutely hate siting down and shadowing, but somehow doing that with Duolingo doesn't bother me as much. So at least my accent in Korean isn't horrendous (not good either, by any means, but I'll take what I can get).
I'm a JLPT N2 holder here, who, coming from a non-Duolingo user background who hold the certificate (and I don't really think it's that good of a benchmark test anyway, just ask Bunsuke about this) I was introduced to this app two or three years ago by my brother. Anyway, I noticed that at most it will be somewhere around N4 to N3-ish level of proficiency. Maybe N2, but that's debatable. At most, it will help to reach N3, but I doubt it would be possible at all without reading practices, some hints about the word patterns (what's usually called "grammar" or 文法 ) etc. I'm so beyond Duolingo that practically I was just skimming the materials and play it for the points when I was thinking "what the f am I doing? This is pointless!" Yeah, it's really as you said in the analogy of crossing the ocean. I would say it's *at most* would only cover one-fourth of the distance.
I saw the title and came here in defense of duolingo. After the video I guess I'm breaking my 450 day streak. I bought a book in spanish today and I think I'll focus on that for now instead
Even with the smaller languages, you'd be surprised how many good free resources are out there. Scottish Gaelic for example, there's whole playlists from Gaelic with Jason that can take you from beginner to upper intermediate, the BBC have a tonne of free resources, SpeakGaelic, LearnGaelic, not to mention more and more creators from Scotland that have started making content in Scottish Gaelic. Duolingo might be good for establishing an interest in a language but like you say it is incredibly bad for getting results in a timeframe that isn't stupidly long.
in the back of my head i knew duolingo wasn't really working, but i didn't want to accept it. this got me to finally delete that green bird that's been living on my phone screen for years.
I wanted to learn japanese on duolingo. Ended up learning kataka and hiragana by myself....beside that duo just taught me the basic sentence building and words
I used to use Duolingo as my structured grammar supplement along with immersion, but I got sick of doing tons of variations of the same translation exercise forever unto eternity. I then switched to using the FSI free course (free, I think it’s a govt thing. kind of like Pimsleur but with a textbook) and I enjoyed that way more since it actually helped with constructing sentences on the spot and it was more enjoyable, albeit more dry. But obviously, the most important element to acquisition is comprehensible input, and the grammar course you pick, if you pick one at all, is an irrelevant aspect of the plane ride.
That walking to the airport analogy was absolutely genius! I found your page years ago for “exposing” things that were exaggerated in the language learning community. And I’m glad you’re still doing it.
I never went after Evan because I don't think he's doing it deliberately. I think he acknowledges that his German wasn't good... but then I'm thinking "Ok so, "conversationally fluent using JUST Duolingo..."...Something here doesn't fit."
@@daysandwords I wholeheartedly agree. In the years I’ve been following you, you’ve never been malicious to another content creator or language learner. I feel your approach is always, “there’s better options to achieve your goal.”
Completely agree. After getting to decent proficiency in French I realize that the fastest flight to a new language is 1) absorb basics of the grammar to some level, 2) stuff a few hundred vocabulary in my head, and then 3) immerse immerse immerse, via reading galore and videos fully in that language and audio and repeating plots in the new language and so on… complete immersion is not given by apps at all. And it’s the only way there.
@@daysandwords I think a lot of the reason why Evan uses Duolingo is the sunk cost fallacy. He has spent so much time and he has seen some results so surely it must work, else was he just wasting his time? And it's clear that Duolingo fosters that sunk cost mentality with the streak
I have ADHD and it's really hard for me to stay motivated in learning. Duolingo is structured like a game which allows me to stay motivated and keep playing.
Honestly basically everyone has ADHD these days... and yes, I have an ADHD diagnosis too. This comments section has a few people talking about how it's the WORST thing for their ADHD. It may keep you playing, sure... it's designed to be addictive... but that's just the problem. Motivation and consistency are good, but not if you keep on doing waste-of-time things. I'm super motivated to watch lots of MLB at the moment... I could do it for hours a day for the next 6 months. At the end, I'd be an expert in something that doesn't help me at all.
I have about 1100 days of streak and I completed the whole italian tree and about half of the portuguese. I'm spanish, so it should be kind of easy to learn these two. I can only understand when an italian or a portuguese talk but I don't feel confident at all to talk, so I decided to try different methods for next year. Hopefully I can stay as consistent
I agree with you about DuoLingo. During covid, I used the app to redo a few of the languages I already knew: German, Italian and Latin. But I didn't get much out of it. I also did a bit of Welsh, because a few years before I had learnt a bit of it with "Say something in Welsh". Problem with that was that it was only spoken language and while the Welsh think their language is completely logical when you write it, I as a Dutch woman found that not to be the case 😂. I liked 'Say something....' though, because it builds up the language very nicely: you learn a few words and verbs and make sentences with it and they give you lots of different combinations with those words. So right from the start you can expres a lot of different things and then it builds from there. Now I am searching for a good online course in Welsh which includes writing. I learnt nothing new by using DuoLingo. So I stopped very soon. I also didn't like the game element.
Thank you! Honestly it went through three iterations, each of which were unrecognisable from the other two, so it ended up being maybe a bit "too much video" in one video.
Keep preaching brother, you are absolutely right, especially when you described comprehensible input, that's exactly how it feels, to me it felt like a ship in the mist going nowhere xD, but it is actually the safest way to get somewhere
Just wanted to say before/if you end up doing a response to Evans video, I’m looking forward to what you’ll have to say bc Evans response was, well, very strange, to put it simply. Looked to me like he was accusing you of saying things you didn’t say, being insulting, making false equivalencies, and using “everyone has a different definition of fluency” as a shield. I don’t agree with every single thing about your video but I do appreciate it and it rly made me think, bc I resonated with a lot of what you said.
I have a degree that says I know German, and after school spent 30+ minutes a day on German Duolingo for 2, maybe even 3 years. I had the Golden Owl. I then watched a video about comprehensible input (and a video you made about 10? things you can do better than Duolingo) and bought the first Harry Potter book in German and signed up for italki. Not only did I do it in German, but Swedish and Norwegian at the same time, and I made more progress in a few short months than all that time in school and on Duolingo. I learned how to learn and that made a world of difference.
Relatable. I never got far with DuoLingo, but I did do a French degree. When I moved to France for a half-year, I quickly realized I knew almost nothing. Many years later I learned about comprehensible input, and started aggressively using podcasts and shows, and doing much more *repeated listening*. This produced major improvements. Studying language like it's math gets you basically nowhere.
@@analogpark8059 I was absolutely not proud of my ability. The handful of times I had the opportunity to speak to Germans, it went nowhere except embarrassment. The killer was I'd see videos like Evan's with claims of how they got "fluent" using Duolingo and I didn't understand what I was doing wrong.
"I learned how to learn and that made a world of difference." Exactly!! I've fallen in love with the process of learning how to learn, and frequently fall down deep rabbit holes that take me away from actually learning my TL for a few days (or more), but I always come back to it with renewed interest and new skills that I can apply. I'm continually adding tools to my language-learning toolbox, some that I can use right now, some that I'm not quite ready to employ - yet.
@@thereal_vertixx2964 Honestly, it would depend on their situation. What language are they trying to learn? What resources do they have easy access to? How much time and effort do they have (or are they willing) to devote to learning the language? WHY are they learning that particular language? There's no magic one-size fits all language learning approach. I think that it's important to take the time to look at different approaches and different tools and assess how you might use them, not just how they're 'meant' to be used by the person selling them. I am most definitely NOT an expert in this area. I look for things that work for me and the way my brain works. Realistically, what works for me may drive someone else absolutely bonkers.
Watching Evan's response video made me realize how dumb and biased he actually is - I am amazed that his response to your well thought out video was to childishly make personal attacks and misrepresentations of everything you said. Love your video and so glad you made it, I hate the idea of new learners watching Evan and thinking his approach is good. He really doesn't realize how much he is harming other learners language journeys!
Ì wouldn't agree that Evan's videos are particularly harmful, really, BUT... on the topic of being an adult... that response... wow... my 12 year old is actually more mature than that.
I'm not at all saying that people are not allowed to use Duolingo for 5 minutes a day, or even learn a language for 5 minutes a day. But Evan used it for nearly an HOUR a day (average) for four years and then couldn't make a basic sentence. Using Speakly and GermanPod101 for that long, you'd be nearing C1 in German.
I'm kinda conflicted on that. I came around watching Evan's response only now and he does have a point. Though I agree regarding the personal attacks. I noticed that as well. I guess he was offended, which he has every right to be. His goal is very much different from Lamont's and I can understand why he doesn't agree with him. And I understand, it probably doesn't feel good seeing your face on another guy's thumbnail, with some claims you just don't agree with. No need for personal attacks of course. But tbh, I understand why he felt, you were being harsh on him, Lamont. Looking forward to your response :) Regarding Duolingo: I have used it in the past, especially with languages where there just aren't any other resources. But I can ascertain it really is slow, so if efficiency is your goal, you probably need to find something else. As a german, I have to say, Evan's German really is good. Especially when his goal is learning just for fun, as he says. It's far from perfect, but it's good. I understand why he doesn't feel the need to be judged by people with different goals, though, tbh. He has a point there.
I do think Evan has some good points, or at least, points that I can see how he would think are right, given what he's seen. My video is far from perfect, even in terms of what I wanted to make. There were mulitple bits re-written, and even the whole video was actually re-shot because the initial video just wasn't really... anything at all. It's a flawed piece of content, as basically every piece of content is, at least if it's not by James Jani. So some parts of it give the wrong idea, and since Evan is the central theme of the video, I can see why he was upset. But many many videos have been made about me, calling me far worse than anything I called Evan. And I just ignore them, because they are garbage. So I'm surprised that Evan went out of his way to make this long video that only brings more attention to my own. A UA-camr of his experience should know better. But anyway... I am learning about 60% towards a response now, still not certain that I'll do one.
Duolingo was good for me to just get reacquainted with Spanish for a few weeks. For context, I already learned Spanish as a young child, but never properly learned it and stopped speaking it once my non-English speaking grandmother passed. After leaving behind Duolingo, I very quickly went to meet ups here in NYC and found some people looking to learn English. We exchanged audios and that’s been the most helpful thing hands down I’m lucky there are people like that though, I’d imagine there aren’t a lot of Swedish people looking to learn English in Sydney…
This is why I recommend your channel for beginner language learners. While I think some of your techniques can be a little intimidating for beginners, I also think that beginners should have a solid foundation of what serious language learning looks like. Language learning is a balance dependent on each person, so not everyone will agree with every technique you present. However, you provide the most balanced and nuanced approach that I think is significantly more beneficial than big names like Matt or Ikenna. Kaufmann is another name I generally recommend for beginners but I think his videos tend to go into the philosophy which isn't as helpful as theory. I also like your videos because you provide a realistic approach to people who have a job or go to school, which is most of us. Some people might criticize you for being inconsistent over the years but that is your strength and I appreciate your honesty. It is more important to grow than to be right, which is exactly what language learning is all about. Thank you for working hard to provide useful and relevant advice to language learners and I hope there won't be any haters coming after you for being honest about Duolingo.
I finally quit when they wanted me to complete 50 quests to get my monthly badge, it seemed like I was just running on a hamster wheel and they wanted me to spend more and more time on the wheel to get a digital medal which has no real value and doesn't help me speak in portuguese.
wow this was a heads-up i did not realize i needed. i think ill still keep using duolingo because it gamifies a big task and helps with being consistent but ill definitely start looking for other options. today i hit my 200 day streak learning japanese, for context. huge thanks for making this!
There are 2 situations I have found Duolingo to be useful: 1: Learning the script to a new language (such as Japanese) and then binning the app after 1 month. 2: Encouraging the kids at my workplace to start learning languages! (I've managed to get 3 kids to learn with me which is cool as hell) It is almost useless in every other situation, lol.
I found it only moderately useful for learning Japanese script (well, kana, not kanji). It is, however, very good for Korean script. But Korean speakers i know say the Korean course itself is horrible, even by Duo standards.
I found it useful to learn the beginning stages of a language. Duolingo is very good material when you're at a point where you can't read basic sentences
I think Duo is good for drilling sentence structure (I’m learning Japanese) and for vocabulary, but it can’t be the only source. I’m sad they got rid of live classes. They were very good.
Japanese sentence structure on Duolingo is usually extremely strict compared to real life use. It's probably a good way to get the particles/SOV structure in your brain, but by intermediate level you will know how free the language really can be, but Duolingo due to its game app setup doesn't usually offer that freedom.
I chinese learning regiment has been esclusively the videos from Comprehensible Chinese since July this year, It's been quite effective ! Only input I can understand most of her intermediate videos very well, I also find myself thinking in mandarin sometimes, I can just feel the neurocircutry building up Plus it's very low effort, I'd advise anyone who wants to learn a language to use the comprehensible input method, hell even the straight up native input for 5 years in 10x better than 5 years of duolinguo
I find Duolingo super helpful for beginners! If it’s a foreign alphabet that you are studying, Duolingo definitely helps to get a better understanding of it. Duolingo also helps with structure! Tho it’s not useful long term!
Former language teacher here. I recently started playing with Duolingo, and I'm using it to re-learn some Turkish (that I have previously taken classes for), as well as starting to learn some Polish. I give myself homework like what I'd give to my students. I always used to listen to the radio in the past to learn languages, so I'm also listening to the radio again this time around. Duolingo can be a fun game, and if I learn some phrases while playing, that's great. I think you have to adjust your expectations when using an app like this. 😀
100 Day Duolingo Update: Let's start with the fun part. I am now able to say basic phrases like hello and goodbye to my Polish best friend in Polish. He introduced me to a family member where the only mutual language was Polish. We couldn't say much to each other, but they really appreciated the effort I made, and we ended up having a good time regardless. Sadly, the daily Duolingo grind has killed my motivation to keep playing with the app, and I think I'm ready to let the streak end. In the first month or two, I studied my languages consistently: I took notes, gave myself homework, and made a lot of effort when working on the listening exercises. After a while, I stopped doing all of those activities, and my learning has halted. There is some minor progress every day, but it's like nothing sticks without me teaching myself the languages. I still think it's possible for Duolingo as a support when learning a new language, but I see that I can't get it to work for me without using professional language teaching/learning methods at the same time.
I've been doing duolingo Arabic for 1 year. Some words get familiar but I don't believe it works. I've learnt other languages quicker through books and watching movies. Duolingo seems to teach sentences that isn't everyday used. I'm on it everyday But I feel I haven't learnt much in this time compared to my past learning of other languages. Duolingo is OK but not the best. It's good to hear an opinion from a fellow Australian
For learning German, the Berlitz German Self-Teacher is a good choice, in short it was originally developed for English speaking troops being stationed in post-WW2 Germany, it's a one-time payment for the book, it's German immersion in proper order written by an actual linguistics school, tests are only in German, don't have to worry about being punished for making mistakes, there's also a phrasebook and dictionary that you get buy in conjunction, and things you learn will actually stick. The number of times I've said something like "neither" and pronounced it as "Neder" (Neither = Weder), or wrote the German word when I would be writing in English, it literally trains you to think in the language, and learn it the same way a native speaker learned it, the same way you learn your native language in general, because that's how language is actually learned. Also, German isn't the only language they have.
I would contact them and just say that and if they try to say "too bad" just start making a tonne of noise on Reddit and Trustpilot and share those threads with them.
It's always incredibly sad to see people around me try to learn a new language and then give up completely after learning worse than nothing from Duolingo.
I did that with spanish for 2 years before I realized that my skills were still awful. I decided to get a Spanish teacher and focus more on communication and listening, rather than mindlessly learning vocab
holy shit yeah! i am not complaining about the self-reporting people that say they would do 0 progress in language-learning but thank god for duolingo it helped them get out of the house and walk towards the airport but there are so many people that i know that have been walking for hours and hours with duolingo and have internalised the conclusion that the issue is with them i think this includes Evan for a bit because in his video reply he clearly sees Lamont's video as a personal attack on his language-learning ability just because it is the easiest thing for you to do does not mean this is what 'clicks' with you and you must be bad at learning languages other ways and us 'actual language-learners' shit on you it's easy because it is a game but after basic sentences, it will be more and more game and less and less language acquisition honestly it is just baffling how after a period of external study your perceived level in the duolingo-space skyrockets even only for memorisation (which is basically what duolingo is mainly) you can blow duolingo out of the water with language comprehension you can also reach a level where you understand alternative translations for duolingo's one + a few hidden options
@@rickynoodles2816 Personally? I do vocabulary reviews and immersion for at least an hour everyday. (I occasionally study grammar, but I don’t stress out about it too much.) This year I plan on doing a language challenge every month on top of that. I’ve simplified this quite a bit since I don’t think writing a paragraph is going to help anyone. This channel has a ton of videos with great advice when it comes to language learning. So you’re in a good place if you need more help. Good luck on your language journey!
It's the videos that make you feel like a fool that are truly some of the most important ones to watch. You've provided an invaluable perspective. Thank you. For a while I've wondered what the 1 out of 10 who wouldn't recommend DuoLingo thought about it. I'll probably go back to line translation where I watch something in another language and try to deduce what's going on by writing down the subtitles, translating them , and writing an interpretation. Then check to see how close mine was to the real plot. Despite it being the slowest way to watch I vividly remember enjoying the episodes I watched of some Anime or Breaking Bad in Spanish.
I'm very interested in being fluent in French. Did some in high school, two semesters in college, tried some Pimsleur cassette courses (yes I'm old). I even did some Rosetta Stone for a bit. I found Duolingo through a friend and I love the gamey-ness and it satisfies some of my OCD tendencies. I have come to realize that just doing units everyday isn't going to make me fluent but it is helping with my vocabulary. After watching this video and confirming what I already suspected.....I really don't know where to go. I'm playing for premium but I'm not sure why anymore. And just like everything else on the intertubes.....there's SO many options for learning that it makes my head spin. After 1200 days on Duo I feel like I might have a base....but I've no idea where to go for the next steps. Sorry for the whine.
Woof. Lamont out here killing it again. I’m almost at 750 hours in Dreaming Spanish and can confirm Spanish learners ARE spoiled for choice and comprehensible input is where it’s at. I hope people get there sooner rather than later so they don’t look back with regret like I did when I reflected on time I wasted in Duolingo.
Once companies go public and have to answer to institutional shareholders it's only a matter of time before the product becomes a zombie just going after every possible dollar.
I can clearly see how Evans path got him there. I have a 300+ day streak on the owl studying Korean. And although Korean is hard in general, I definitely struggle with the speaking portion. Even with the speaking practice, it doesn't help speaking. I've learned alot about the alphabet and how to read it. It's great at that. I can read the language quite well. But it wasn't until recently when I started mainly using outside sources that my speaking and grammar have seen significant improvements.
Reminds me how after taking four years of American high school French, I still only tested into third quarter university French. In the US, most foreign language teaching in high school is complete crap. They teach it too slowly. I read most of Harry Potter in French and Italian! It helped me brush up on my French, barely used in a decade. And it made Italian I and II at the local community college really effective. Another decade later, I often surprise myself with how much Italian I still understand and can spontaneously speak, better than Spanish, in fact, which is a widely spoken language where I live. Yes, that says how much my effort to master Spanish has sucked. Young adult books seem a great way to learn. Has anybody some suggestions for reading other than Harry Potter? I'm HPed to death. I've considered Tolkien, which I enjoy enough to reread yet again. It would be cool to find some YA books quite popular elsewhere-not sparkly vampires, though. X-D
I speak Japanese and didn't use duolingo to learn it. Every person I've ever met who uses or has used duolingo doesn't actually know how to speak the language they're learning. Damn shame.
I learned spanish on duolingo. What i mean by that i learned the basic conjugation and a basic vocabulary. After i started using spanish at work is when i got fluent in it. Im learning vietnamese and i have the same issues that i had with spanish. At work i use Mexican spanish while duolingo taught different vocabulary. In vietnamese it uses the bac accent when all my frownds use the nam dialect. Get practice with a native speaker and you can excel where duolingo leaves off. What else do you except from a free resource.
People who are resolved to quit don't announce it. People talking and complaining are those who are still using and care about the thing. It's when they stop talking and complaining that they just quit. I would like to thank duolingo for their continued enshitification though, if they didn't go around removing decent features, I probably wouldn't have dropped it.
I did my undergrad in linguistics and we had to do a language at the same time, I did Russian, 2 of the 3 years of studying I had an English native speaker who have lived in Russia to study as my instructor and unfortunately the class was 60% in English and I didn't learn much (or retain much), my last year was with a native Russian instructor and 100% in Russian, I learning failed the class because I wasn't prepared, and this was with studying that language 3 hours a night. I could have been practicing with my Ukranian neighbors' grandmother that was slightly bored, but I was severely insecure and shy with new people then and was too scared to do it. Before undergrad I had tried to learn French, Spanish, and Italian on my own to varying degrees of success, most low, and I lived in California with French speaking family, it should have been easy, nope, my French family never spoke to us kids in French unless we already spoke it, which means only those that had lived in French speaking countries got the good treatment 😢😢, sad I know, but it was on ghe advice of a speech therapist from the 70s before speech therapy had any contact with linguistics and first language/second language acquisition theories. Then I move to Korea for a job, I'm there 5 years, I learn to read hangeul, no big deal, takes 1-2 weeks to learn, makes more sense that the Roman alphabet, lol, no joke. I don't actively try to learn the language, other than the necessary honorifics, that's my fault, but I do pick up and retain some things from coworkers. And that's when it dawned on me, I have to learn a language and retain it in context, like live contextual setting, with someone guiding me and maybe correcting me when needed, at least for the first part of learning the language, I would need more formal learning after, but to get my brain to switch and start thinking in the language and understanding people. Hence why doing a homestay abroad works so well, or doing a work/holiday time with a bunch of people that don't know your language so it forces you to use the target language of the country you're in (by the way, I've yet to find a country that has a work/holiday agreement with the US, I don't think it exists, I never learned about it till I moved to Korea and met Koreans and non-US foreigners that had done it, and that's why their language skills were so good from a certain country). I couldn't afford going abroad for a homestay when I was a kid, nor could I do a work/holiday since I was a US citizen, so it wasn't until I moved for work that I could've really used it, but I was stupid and didn't try hard enough. While in Korea, I met my husband, and he was from France, we eventually moved to France, I had been trying to study French for 3 years in Korea to prepare but I was getting stuck because I was trying to do Korean at the same time too in Korea, and my brain couldn't handle it. But once in France I was living with my husband's mom for 3 weeks just us while my husband started at his job in another part of the country and I'd go to him once we had an apartment there. Now my mother-in-law can speak English, not well, but enough to communicate, but it was decided she would only speak French for those 3 weeks. And low and behold, guess who finally started retaining and understanding a good amount of French in that time, lol, me, lol, and I cursed my French family back in California for never teaching us. I learned and retained enough for me to kinda pass my language exam for people under my particular visa in France (yes, it's true, for those on a family visa in France you have to take a language test within your first year of being in France, if you don't pass with A1 level you are required by the government to take a years worth of language classes, the government covers the cost but you don't get to pick where nor the teachers, so it sucks, I passed above an A1 level so I wasn't required to). Once I was over the hurdle of retaining and understanding I started taking formal classes, I could communicate no problem, but I had a hard time retaining unless I was using the grammar in context and in my everyday life, so formal classes sucked a bit, but I learned enough to pass a nationally recognized test at B1 level within 2 years of being in France. Now you may ask, why didn't I just learn French from my husband?.........you wanna know how notoriously bad learning from a romantic partner could go, lol, linguists have said it's bad enough where communication is more important than trying to learn the other person's language, so it's better to communicate in the language you're both comfortable in over a new language, I'm sure some people can and have done it, but I fell into the other category where it didn't work, my husband would give me long lectures on grammar instead of just teaching me words and phrases in context without bothering with the logistics of how to get there, lol, his mom was a better teacher, but then again she'd had kids, lol. If this is too long to read, my thoughts are, for really learning a language, homestays and work-holidays are really the only way to go to learn a language, unless you have family or neighbors that are willing to talk/teach in context, otherwise none of these gadgets work, they can supplement but should not be used as the main and sole way to learn a language.
Wow, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain your language learning journey. I read all of it, and it wasn’t too long! I’m lucky enough to have a partner who is patient and will help me speak their language. But I don’t think that is the common case.
I've said it before and I will say it again...your language learning content is some of the best I've ever seen. You talk about how brains acquire language. Your method REALLY works. I went from knowing two words in Swedish to testing at a B2 level in just over a year. It was constant inundation with the language. Audiobooks, written books, TV & Film, and daily work. I am SO surprised at how far I've come. I couldn't have done it without your channel. Thank you, Lamont. Would it be possible to go deeper into getting past the intermediate plateau? I'm at a place where I'm SUPER aware of how much I don't know and I can hear all my mistakes, but I feel like I keep making them and don't progress.
My hobby is learning languages and I have found no better way to start a language than Duolingo. Earlier this year I've become frustrated with the later changes and stopped using it, only to find out that other methods of starting a language are still worse. So, yes, Duolingo works, it's just important to say what it works AT. Of course it will not make you fluent in a language. But if you need to study the basics of a language in order to be able to engage with it, it's the best option I've found. Feel free to tell me what methods you think work better. I can now watch a Spanish TV show with subtitles after only doing Duolingo. I can pick up a Swedish, Czech or Italian book and be able to read it with a dictionary. Even for the languages I already knew Duolingo noticeably helped me. It structured my German grammar understanding and pronunciation after the school completely botched doing so. I had means of actively practicing writing French sentences rather than just reading and listening to it. It even boosted my English skills. Right now I'm working through a Korean tree. It really works much better for me than learning from a textbook. If you think I can do better than Duolingo, please share with me.
"But if you need to study the basics of a language in order to be able to engage with it, it's the best option I've found." I get that it only does basics but to me it just does them too SLOWLY. Almost like they're incentivised to keep you on the app as long as possible.
Just buy a damn textbook. It has all the same information, sorted, organized, and arranged for easy comprehension. Read it for 5 minutes a day. Then spend the rest of your time memorizing vocab and consuming content. Duolingo is garbage.
@@WhiteScorpio2 >If you've read my comment, you would know that I already did and that I've found it much less helpful than Duolingo. Then you're honestly using a textbook wrong. A textbook will explain all the grammar to you, and should have loads of examples sentences and exercises to practice on, which you seem to value. >And it's obvious why: practicing in putting sentences together is much better for learning the rule This is a misguided idea. You don't learn grammar rules via output practice. You learn grammar rules by reading and listening to content - you listen so much that you start developing an intuition for what sounds right or wrong. You can speed this process up by reading and learning about the grammar (like looking at conjugation tables for different tenses), but all the grammar drills in the world aren't going to make you fluent. You need to be able to comprehend before you output. >I've never spent any time in any of the languages I've learnt deliberately memorizing vocab. Well, you're missing out. Memorizing vocab is like the easiest thing to do to rapidly increase your comprehension, and it's basically THE limiting factor in reaching higher levels of fluency. Whenever I interact with a language, I never feel like my grammar is holding me back, it's always my active and passive vocabularies. >How would I consume the content if I don't yet understand the grammar? You should focus on learning the basic grammar of a language and it's ~100-200 most common words before consuming content. This can be done incredibly quickly though. And with western European languages, the overlap between languages is massive, grammar and vocabulary both. Learning the present, past, future tense, the basic conjugations, subject-verb-object word order, just enough of the basics to be able to survive once you start consuming. It sounds scary at first, but it gets very easy to consume stuff very quickly. And you start with stuff aimed at kids, not adult content. Think watching Peppa Pig and reading graded readers. >"Duolingo is garbage." >Why? You supposedly just watched a whole 20 minite video where Lamont just explained it to you.
@@WhiteScorpio2 I don't have time to get into a long winded argument with you over this. All I'll say is that immersion (consuming content) with supplement from a textbook (to understand grammar points and provide starting vocab) does everything you want. You say that after completing DuoLingo you were ready to consume content you wanted. This is a lie. DL leaves you at roughly a B1 level at best - and your listening and reading skills will be garbage, as you've only been exposed to simple single sentences with not context. Consuming a native level TV show takes a lot of practice to work up to. Reading an adult novel takes a 10k+ vocabularly size - DL does maybe 2k words by its own estimation, and it counts conjugations as separate words. My methods, memorizing 200 words and learning the basic grammar concepts, take no more than two weeks. Imagine being able to watch content in your target language in a week! Meanwhile, people like yourself slave over DL for months or years, so that they can finally graduate to attempting to watch or read content. I went from watching kids TV shows to soap operas and reading Harry Potter in less than 4 months. Solely by lightly reading a textbook as needed, doing daily Anki and learning 20 new words a day, and spending the rest of my time watching kids TV shows, reading graded readers, and otherwise consuming content. I mean this sincerely - no one who has ever learned a language to any level of real fluency thinks DL was that helpful. All the people who do think it's worthwhile generally suck at their target language. They think they know a language, but they're probably B1 or B2 at best, and severely overestimate their abilities. It takes thousands of hours to master a language - why would you waste 400+ hours playing a language learning game that's only useful for A1/A2 level learning? You should be able to move beyond DL in a few short weeks.
I did four months intensive duo in Spanish to get me through the basics fast. I then combined with conversation exchange until I didn't need it. A great kickstart to learning but your motivation is the most important as no miracle method exists.
Duolingo is a decent gateway to start learning. It gave me a start with the new alphabet and some basics and made me go to an actual language learning class where i had a leg up, but i found the actual class to be way more productive. I think its best used as a supplement to actually taking a class, or as a refresher if you don`t talk or read the language daily.
In Japanese it is a very decent way to review vocabulary topics you might have forgotten about. The extremely strict translation part of it is infuriating for such a contextual language, but if you already know in advance that it's not "the one way" it can be a decent refresher. There's very common words I embarrassingly forgot even existed because they don't come up in daily life enough, but Duolingo reviews reminded me about.
I will say I think the Duolingo French podcast is very good. The fact they regularly produce episodes with high quality audio and have the entire transcript for free has been a huge help. It gives me the benefit of expanding my vocabulary through reading while also acquiring the language naturally through listening. Other podcasts require that you pay for the full transcript, which is completely fair, but it's great that Duolingo does this for free. The only issue is that they only offer podcasts for French, Spanish, and English for Spanish speakers (I think)
"The only issue." It’s entirely useless to me. If they decide Arabic isn't worth their time, the resources will go to...music and math? Instead of LANGUAGE. Oh brother!
@foreverdreamwithinadream6871 - I'm interested in knowing how you came to the conclusion that only French and Spanish see any benefit with Duolingo? Personally, I agree with you that the stories are where it's at, BUT, big caveat... they're only in languages for which there are TONS of other resources, so then Duo rules itself out again. But your take is, I would say, somewhat strange - because why not German? German has stories. I'm fairly sure Portuguese does too, and maybe even Mandarin?
I've been subscribed to both you and Evan for a good while. I saw this video when you posted it, thought you made some really good points and moved on. After watching Evan's response just now I was confused. Had I not noticed all the ill intent that Evan is saying you had? From my memory you hadn't criticized him directly, you were just using his experience as an example to explain your points on DL. So I came back here and, sure enough, it's as I remember it. I honestly don't see the video as an attack like Evan seems to have taken it. Most of the video is not even about him. And if all you wanted was to use him for attention, by making a response video he made sure that you get that attention 😅
Yep, exactly the same feeling as me. I was truly confused after Evan s video. Especially because I was much more familiar with his videos, but I didn't feel like he was in any way attacked. If anything, his video was the one attacking.
Same experience here, realized that only now. I moved on after Lamont's video and found it great, especially because I got the same experiences (though I have a few people at my workplace, who seem to use Duolingo as a supplement effectively). When I saw Evan's video, my initial response was, that he's kinda right, though I didn't take Lamont's video as an insult to him. There was a particular part of Evan's video though, where I thought to myself "Now, that's just getting really insulting really fast". Now I'm confused and feel like I understand both of you guys lol xD
I felt the same way - Evan continued going on about some unnecessary or even flat out wrong things regarding this video. And as someone who typically likes Evan a lot, it left a sour taste. This video however, did not. I think it was wrong for him to have responded publicly the way he did, while insinuating a lot of things that are clearly not true...
when someone has a weak ego, they're more likely to perceive attacks on them, and are less willing to alter their viewpoint.
I also think Evan overreacted, but then again it's hard to imagine how you or I might react if someone produced a 20-minute video critiquing us
Duolingo isn't THAT bad if you're an absolute 0 comprehension beginner, it gives you a nice easy and basic starting point as well as the confidence to move into other, perhaps more challenging forms of learning.
Yes, it was very important for me as a short first introduction to Irish about three years ago. For a language with a limited number of free beginner resources, and a very very limited amount of comprehensible input materials, Duolingo was a logical place to start.
How I got into learning spanish(I was also learning it at school, but school lessons in any language(obligatory ones High school and before), usually can`t teach you a language) was through duolingo and watching television shows in spanish, first with English subtitles, then later with spanish subtitles and without.
Duo is basically a way that I find what I should study elsewhere next lol it was my introduction and it is the only to my partner use since they are not able to put much effort into language learning and aren't in a rush
Yeah, but on the other hand, if I were to start another language I would choose something like Pimsleur or Language Transfer focused only on sounds and speaking.
It's a good start. But after being given the same small group of words for over 3 hours in the Japanese course it's just a waste of time. I've learnt far more with other apps in less time
Back in 2006 I met a German girl while on vacation in Hamburg.
We became really close friends and started talking a lot on msn messenger.
At some point I decided that I wanted to learn her language and the way I learned to understand and speak German really well was by
getting a list of the 1000 most commonly used German words and then I learned 10 new German words from that list every single evening for 100days.
Then when I knew those 1000 words I started watching German TV and I mean ONLY German TV for about 6 months to understand how people used those words to build sentences.
Then I went back to Germany in 2007 and 2008 and spent the summer there both times.
At the end of 2009 I spoke German really well according to the German people I met.
Many of them were shocked when I told them that I was Swedish.
They said my German accent and sentence structure was perfect.
Sadly I lost all contact with that German friend of mine and I haven't spoken a word of German since then.
Today I can still understand a lot of German, but I can't speak a word of it.
Because the words are so far back in my memory that I don't know the words until I hear somebody else say them.
Nice story. Perhaps Duolingo can refresh your German skills.
@shahrazade26
Just checking - are you joking? I am asking for real because it sounds like you're joking. This person described how they became fluent in German very quickly, and I'd believe them, because what they did was essentially the perfect methodology... and then you say "Maybe Duolingo can refresh your German skills."
Again, I am actually asking because you could be 100% serious, or 100% joking and there are no tells as to which one it is. 😂
You had immersion which I think is the best way to learn a language, but before it, you have to know at least 50% about what you're watching or listening to.
I feel like somebody just told me I don't need to feel guilty for not smoking crack for the past 5 months and not wanting to smoke crack.
I think the biggest problem except for removing the forums, which probably taught me the most of any feature of the app, is just how many times you repeat the same node before moving onto the next and never have I encountered very long sentences making use of the words I've been taught.
I'm in a Facebook group for Duolingo, otherwise I chat with French people online.😊
Duo is what it is…a gateway drug to the world of language learning. I think it’s a good thing overall to get people interested, it’s still loads better than classic language learning in an American classroom setting which is a total joke. I have over a 1000 day streak, and I can’t let it go. The owl has me in his talons. But I look at it for what it is, language entertainment. It takes me less than 5 minutes a day to keep my steak going, and I have had many people find me on the leaderboards and ask me about it, which gives me an opportunity to explain to them how I actually learned Danish. If all Duolingo does is open the door for people who are unaware of immersion learning, then it is an overall force for good in the language learning universe. You are very good at analogy Lamont, the whole journey by foot, bike, plane thing is perfect! great video sir!
I agree 💯 with this. Duolingo does have its merits but it needs to be seen for what it is. The gamification aspect helps keep motivation up, it's a quick and fun way to keep different writing systems fresh in your mind, and it's an easy source of dopamine. It's definitely not something you should rely on as your sole source of language learning -- unless you really really enjoy long walks to the airport.
Learning Danish myself, any resources?
@@emiliasky6117 I have a premade deck of 8,000 sentences I found on Anki. I try to add to it with my own cards, but I have limited time to sit in front of a computer. I mainly immerse in Danish content on Netflix. Getting rid of subtitles has finally seemed to work for me, my comprehension is improving rapidly.
It's not a gateway drug though. It's just a drug, and the only way to satiate your habit is more DuoLingo.
If it was a gateway drug, we'd see thousands of people saying DuoLingo helped make them fluent. Anyone who has ever learned a foreign language to fluency realizes DuoLingo did nothing for them on their journey.
@@emiliasky6117I would personally go on UA-cam and see what they have. I think there are a lot of good Danish learning UA-cam channels out there. Though, I’m not 100% sure, cuz I haven’t looked much into it ^^
Duolingo is like a fancy flashcard that keeps me from completely losing vocabulary when I have only a few minutes per day to dedicate to the language. a "better than nothing" option
anki
I prefer Anki for that
if you acquire vocab you will not easily forget it
just make real flashcards...
If duolingo would not be such a fkn grind it would be actually helpful. But translating "this student is seven years old" 57times doesnt make you fluid
Sure, as a language geek I’m also ambivalent about Duolingo (but still use it) but as an educator I wouldn’t dismiss an approach to learning (anything) that people find fun, engaging and rewarding. People are very different in what drives them.
I also liked it at the beginning but the problem is, ANYTHING can be made to be engaging. Literally anything IF (and it's a big IF) you don't mind sacrificing what it actually is that you're doing.
e.g. "Do you want to get thin fast, but don't want to stick to a boring diet? Well I've got a diet you CAN stick to... I call it the Lamont diet... you can eat WHATEVER YOU WANT WHENEVER YOU WANT!"
Customer: "But then I will stay being overweight?"
Me: "The advantage of the Lamont diet is that ANYONE can stick to it!"
To me, that's what Duolingo has become. It has sacrificed learning for "being engaging".
@@daysandwords I agree. Any skill learning needs involvement and dedication. Duolingo came from being an quite overly praised learning tool with a gamification system to become just a game about languages. Better play Chants of Sennaar or one of the many videogames who don't pretend to be learning courses but just entertainment with a language theme. Or in the other way better use more serious learning methods not emphasizing on the obsolete and basic audiobooks/flashcards courses.
It's just like the fact people don't play Zacktronics games to learn programming or automation. Better remove our dusty Arduino board from the drawer and start reading documentation.
All in all, even if academic methods have their own drawbacks, we can't get away with them to learn at least the basics. On most skills, it shows in advanced levels when someone learned using shortcuts and as a learner it can be difficult to correct those habits.
@@daysandwords "It has sacrificed learning for "being engaging"."
Totally agree on this. I used Duolingo for a long time. At the beginning, I started with French. As a Spanish speaker, it was easy to learn and the first tree I tried help me to get a simple overview of the language (about a month or so). It was a shorter version of the tree almost 5 years ago. After that, I went to the reverse tree: learning Spanish from French. I took advantage of native speakers in the Forum section, speaking about how they say things in French. And I could ask questions in French. After 3 months, all the Duolingo work was just repetitive and less meaningful. It was just to keep the numbers, to feel engaged. Not learning, but keep going on the app. I was able to read in French, I could understand some TV shows. I couldn't speak a phrase (speaking is not the strength feature in Duo). So, in the end, not so useful.
My experience with Korean was even worse. Not having anybody to teach you grammar on Korean properly is really a demeanor for that language. And the quality of your learning depends on the person in that specific course. Mostly, languages different from English, Spanish or French are terrible: not well reviewed, lots of errors, few options for every sentence... So: without discussion, without other benefits and with a lot of disadvantages, you should better spend time in other sites or resources.
The only good thing I see in Duo nowadays is: easy access. You can take your phone everywhere and try some sentences, it's better when you are on the bus and you want to do something but not as demanding as a podcast or when you are waiting on a line for your grocery shopping. Other than that, I don't see any benefit. And this one is really not that great to invest your time in it.
People want everything to be fun and engaging, and effortless, but the truth is our brains need the effort, they need to feel that they work. CI is about reading and learning what interests you, but if you don't like medicine you won't learn useful phrases about health and in case of emergency which might be incredibly useful if you intend to go to a country where your target language is spoken. You really want to know how to draw out money from ATM in Japan. How to buy basic stuff anywhere. Ask where the embassy is. And foremost: where's the toilet :P
Not everything in learning languages is fun, some things are just plain boring but useful and for that reason worth learning. It might not be fun when you learn it, but when it comes handy - then the real fun begins. :)
@daysandwords The idea that you can't effectively learn with duolingo is provably false. The evidence is that people do it literally all the time (I'm sure the developers have their own evidence but nevermind that).
Tools for learning exist on a spectrum and it's certainly not the worst (depending on HOW you use it). It's absolutely not all I use but I can definitely confirm that I've memorized and learned to use quite a few words and phrases in Russian using it. I'm not fluent but conversational at a basic level at least. It's a fun way to drill words and phrases.
I'd something is working for someone they should probably ignore a random UA-cam naysayer. Your best indicator for what works is your own results (I'm pretty aggressive and broad in how I use it unlike a lot of people probably but still).
The thing about Duolingo is that it rewards the wrong things. It's engagement with the app, not the language. I don't like how that blasted owl seems to want so much of my freaking attention. I also think it doesn't push knowledge boundaries very well. I agree that it's very easy to see progress down the path but not make meaningful progress at all. That said, I don't have a lot of similar resources for Welsh.
another welsh learner!
@@randomize2225 Bore da! Could I ask what you use to learn? I've been trying to fight through Say Something in Welsh for nearly a decade.
It’s shocking how sad the selection of learning resources for Welsh is. I also got started with SSIW and felt pretty good about myself after one year. Then, I went to the get-together when they celebrated being recognized by the Senedd or something of the kind. And you know, I was the only idiot stuck at talking about stupid walls and going to the tavern because every single person there had previously learned enough Welsh somewhere else to hold an actual conversation. The most frustrating part of the evening was the singalong at the pub later. Wasn’t familiar with the songs, couldn’t read the bloody lyrics (having been told from day 1 not to try to read anything)… Duolingo is far from perfect, but I’ve finally picked up enough to read a book of short stories that I bought well over a decade ago. I’ll take that over nothing.
Duolingo is kinda like the island of lotus eaters from Greek myth. You take a bit of the sweet lotus and you don’t even realize you’ll be stuck there. It takes a lot to figure out that there’s a whole world of things you could be doing instead, and some people never get that far
Haha. No, I realised after two weeks what Duolingo can and can not do.
I stayed anyway for the motivational feature. ☺️
But, and that's very important, people should get informed about what they're doing. Fortunately, there are Duolingo Facebook groups for example.
I tried a few of the Spanish options, let me just cut to the conclusion, the one you want is Dreaming Spanish. It's the closest to what you will be wanting to actually do -- understand native speakers. They have specific content for learning Mexican, Columbian, Argentinian, Chilean or European (Spain) Spanish to help you refine your ear for where you plan to actually be.
I still cannot get over the sheer about of time one Duolingo tree takes. I can feel a marked difference in my comprehension and vocabulary if I spend one hour studying a podcast. I've recently started learning Russian, and I'm less than 20 hours in total, but I've focused it on listening and reading comprehension and I'd would hazard a guess I've got at least 500 words under my belt, if my Memrise deck is to be believed, and I'm starting to understand A1 speech without subtitles. (Thanks Russian From Afar!)
I cannot imagine spending over 100 hours on something and have so little to show for it. Respect your time, because Duolingo doesn't.
That's it. I tried to finish the German tree in a month for a video a year or so ago, and I realised it was going to take like 5 hours a day. Personally, I think I COULD read Harry Potter after that (Swedish helps obviously) but still, 150 hours when you could just do an Anki deck in like 5 days of 2 hours.
Native speaker here! I'll be happy to help if you ever have any questions :)
With the old tree configuration it was possibile to make a speedrun, jumping as far as you could get (directly testing on units without practicing them and spending otherwise useless lingots) but this was like a mountain marathon to reach the Airport.
That is indeed tough to answer, because
a) what language are we talking about? In French it's almost possible for anyone with fluent English (not quite, but 100 words would put you close).
b) what's your tolerance for "ambiguity", that is, for not knowing quite what's happening. Mine is very high with audiobooks, not so high with series, and most people's is very low for books. But if you pair the book WITH the audiobook, then you can do it in most languages immediately
But honestly, I'd recommend just reading one first. Like, the first one takes about 8 hours of audiobook (and make that 5 if you listen at 1.6x which is super easy for a native speaker of English) and then that significantly increases your chances of tolerating it in a new language and actually learning something.
А ты уже умеешь читать?
For my Japanese learning, I mainly just used Duolingo as a means of keeping track of the days I work on the language. I spend far more time using things like Wanikani, textbooks, and immersion content. The progress I see with those other resources is far greater than the time I spent on Duolingo.
Im using Duolingo, pretty much just too get down Katakana and Hirgana. I think it actually might be helpful woth those.
@@genericascanbe3728 I found it helpful for getting to the point where I could read most hiragana and katakana, at least with what they had around 4 years ago, and while I'm sure there are better resources, I think it does a good enough job at that. But when it came to then perfecting my ability to read hiragana and katakana and learning to write them, I found just writing out all of them over and over from memory (and correcting after each attempt) really effective, and after months of Duolingo, I was able to finally remember the last couple hiragana I kept confusing and the several katakana I never remembered, plus I could write them almost as naturally as I could write the Latin alphabet.
For kanji, I highly recommend starting out by using spaced repetition with an order that puts basic kanji before the more complex ones that contain those ones as components (e.g. 日 and 月 before 明), and making yourself both remember the meaning of the kanji and be able to write the kanji from the meaning. I did that to start out, and only did it for maybe a month or two, but it taught me how to break down a kanji when looking at it and understand the kinds of components I should expect to see in them. Before I did that, they were just a bunch of lines and shapes, and if I saw a new kanji and had to reproduce it, I'd have to go line-by-line, comparing mine to the original as I went. Now I can glance at a kanji and just write it down, maybe looking back once or twice if there are a lot of components in it.
@@genericascanbe3728I second that, I think the new kanji learning feature could potentially be useful too
I quit Japanese on Duoligo. Duolingo is good for basics, not so much for advanced stuff.
For android.. I've found Kanji Senpai is really good for learning how to write kanji.
7:32 he is trying to use the vocabulary he acquired from duolingo to make a direct translation rather than one that makes sense. this actually works for more german than you’d expect but sadly this one is not an example. and this particular case is quite telling of how far duolingo can take you because because the phrase he’s trying to say (and variations of it) are quite common in everyday speech and media (sonst noch etwas).
talking on the not uncommon 1:1 german-english translations, i will encounter a combination of words in german that seems very odd, z.B. “laufende Nase”, it makes me take a pause and think “what…? a running🏃♂️ nose??? but a nose has no legs??” but then comes the “WAIT… i know what that means, thats exactly how we say it in English!!” 😂😂
I can’t believe I’m being used in a thumbnail for views. Gonna tell my mom I’ve finally made it
Also my comment on reading Harry Potter after the German tree was made 6 years ago before Duolingo aligned with CEFR so it’s definitely further along now. I still preferred starting with the other books I mentioned as they were enjoyable and educational :)
Also find it a bit weird you photoshopped my views to be nearly twice as high. Why. That video does not have 2.9m views lmao
Cheers for watching and replying Evan!
Honestly I very nearly contacted you beforehand just to not be all "UA-camr drama" about it but this video had already gone through so many changes, I thought I needed to just get it done. Thanks for being (seemingly) cool with it.
But to the issue - do you think that it's fair to say that with Duolingo, it's going to take a very long time to get to the stage that you can read your own material and learn from them? That's really my biggest gripe with it; yeah it's fun, it's free(ish)... but it started out reasonably slow and only got slower.
As for the thumbnail - yep, guilty as charged. It's just a weird thing that certain tiny factors make people more likely to click. 2.9M seemed like the right number... not really sure why.
As you can see from my views, I need to do everything I can, including simplifying the title of your video.
Initially I actually used the thumbnail from your very recent video about the updates, but I thought that was a bridge too far, since that's not the main video I was talking about.
Anyway - I hope you're well, and check out Dreaming Spanish, best thing that's ever happened to Spanish learners. 😉
@evan
I appreciate that you didn't come here flaming me but I don't really see how it's any LESS deceptive to be all like "lmao" and "gonna tell mom I've finally made it" (basically acting like things are cool) if you're actually hating this and seemed to be quite annoyed by it (based on your video). I don't know why you would comment on mine at all. You accused me of pretending to like you so as to be win sympathy... But here you are pretending to be fine about this when you're obviously PO'd.
I've got some videos on the horizon so it might be a while before I get to your response, but I feel that we both just misunderstand each other. We have different styles and the same words seem to mean different things to us, so now we're beefing. I'm sorry about that.
Yes, I used your face to get views, and yes, it was deliberate. I am deliberate with what videos I make, because I can't afford not to be. You pointed out yourself that my older clickbait didn't work. Basically I've gotten better at it. We can talk all day about whether Duolingo made you fluent or not but to be surprised that a smaller UA-camr used your face for views... Really? Dude it's happened to ME and I haven't even cracked 100K subs. That is this platform. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens again (certainly now because you responded to it).
I _genuinely_ hope you are well, and I hope your stay in Germany was or is going well. Lamont.
@@daysandwords Halli hallo,
so my initial reaction was shock and using humour as a coping mechanism as I worked out my feelings on it all. As I sat on it and thought about the video, it did cause me genuine upset and hurt. So yeah I was really trying to “be cool with it,” but then my shock wore off. Sorry for the perceived deception there.
I will say there have been some comments from some of your viewers on my video which I’ve found incredibly nuanced and insightful. Ones that were better able to convey your history of things and better intentions except for the whole using me out of context to make a point thing. Most still agreed with my point that you could’ve done that a bit better.
The thing is, besides the ultra low-quality “react channels” that throw one of my videos on and then pause every 5 minutes to pretend they’re adding any value to my video they’re stealing, I honestly do /not/ have anyone using my face/videos for views ever. (I will note, your video was HIGHLY transformative and incredibly well-edited featuring loads of added value so I absolutely do not place your video anywhere near those channels.) I’m not really a large enough UA-camr for that to be worthwhile for most people (I’m not really bringing them clicks), but I suppose within this one niche, maybe so!
Also, the videos I make aren’t like… big debatable topics; most are just “here’s my experience” which is really hard to…make a video arguing against or for? Because you can’t really argue with someone else’s experience. (Though you did.) You can share your own, sure, but most everything I make (outside of say… the recent video) I strive to make them as inoffensive as possible to /avoid/ that type of response at all costs. This is what caused such intense levels of shock and upset that of all the niches I make videos in, the duolingo one felt so innocent to me, so devoid of controversy and safe. I feel like I make way less “personal” content these days out of an intense anxiety of someone using it against me in bad faith.
So to have a video brutally going through everything I’ve uploaded and attempting to inherently discredit my personal journey through strategic cuts I found abhorrent (even if that was not your intent). There were so many points you made I felt like I could’ve agreed with or at least been able to say “well we just have different definitions of things” as I’ve never claimed to have mastery in the foreign languages I’ve learned, as I felt like in every single video I’ve made that you used, I’ve always signified the exact level of fluency I’m talking about. You even left in the bit I said as such. My concession of “soft yes” in that video 5 years ago was pretty much making the exact point you were. But you painted it as disingenuous while then basically saying the same thing? I hope you’re able to see that this along with you using that recent clip of me saying “I couldn’t speak the language” which referred to my recent 2 years of not actively learning German to mean I couldn’t speak it at all at the time of my OG video really solidified to me that you weren’t “making a mistake” but were deliberately misconstruing me for your own content. I couldn’t agree with that. Hence my response.
Saying “that is the platform” and I should expect people to use my face and name for views I find a bit of a deflection here though. Whenever celebrities get harassed in public or private and people online say “that’s the price of being famous” I really, /really/ disagree with that sentiment and believe it shows a very large lack of empathy. If you wouldn’t like that type of behaviour then regardless you shouldn’t condone it. So to contribute to that and say “that’s just the way it is; it’s happened to me” I find that sad.
I feel like sure, it’d be different if I was purporting myself to be a professional language coach or something like that, and let’s say I was using my position to convince others to trust in me to get them to sign up for my course, because then sure, I think you’d have grounds for… let’s say “protection of the space” from this bad actor. You’d really want to convey that we’d all need a lot more “proof” this guy is who he says he is and is in this case an absolute mastery C2 fluent guy! But in my case, in that video as well as every video since, I’ve always conveyed the reality of my personal language-learning journey and that has /never/ been someone in the C1 or C2 range.
I think the inherent discrepancy here comes from our different niches and styles. My niche is for the average person who’s interested in learning enough of a language to be able to engage in it by using it at shops and restaurants, expressing themselves, and consuming foreign media, not necessarily mastery. I’d absolutely be a bad channel for mastery as I am not that at all and… sigh… I really feel like I’ve said as much multiple times recently and in the past. I try to be realistic about my own journey. From what I’ve learned from your insightful viewers’ comments is that your channel is more in-depth. More, let’s say, for like “well how can I learn MORE of the language, and learn more efficiently to be GOOD at this language and make locals be like DAMN OKAY WOW.” That’s cool as hell man, and definitely a very important niche for the people that would like to move from the “minimum effort to engage in a foreign language” to more serious efforts.
On this topic though, I will say, I don’t know if you’ve considered this before, but before previewing my video, I asked a friend of mine to watch yours first to ensure they had the full context, and they told me after finishing your video, their overall feeling was demotivation. They didn’t feel motivated to continue learning a foreign language at all, not just on duolingo, but at all. I’m sure that’s not the feeling you’d want to instil in a viewer, right? I know you created a follow up video about what you use instead of duolingo which is great, but that one video of me alone was so negative that someone like my friend felt like not only was her slow growth on duolingo pointless but the growth of her language in general. Even though she knows me and has had chats with me on the topic, your inclusion of that bit of me saying “I couldn’t speak the language” while saying it was about me EVER speaking the language even made her confused until she watched my video. Your editing is very persuasive, eh?
I personally have worked with solely 1 (at time of writing unless I’m forgetting one?) language sponsor which was featured in my recent video you used B roll from, and when chatting it out with them (and all possible (and failed)) sponsors, I stipulate that I can’t pretend I’m not using rivals too. So many sponsors require not talking about competitors in the content (makes a lot of sense), but I couldn’t do that honestly as I do and will continue to learn on duo. But I worked out with the brand (and a future one hopefully?) how I ADD these in to my routine and how they add value to what I’m already doing. Even when duo’s being a bit shite with their updates, I still do admit I’m using the app still / AND / I add in the sponsor. In your case, I guess you don’t really have to worry about that as even though you used it in the past, you’re now against the use of duolingo, so you can authentically be like “duo’s shit, but ayyyy this spon ain’t bad.” But from my perspective the optics of that isn’t great… but that’s probably because it’s my perspective as someone whose channel is NOT all about language learning. It probably makes more sense in your niche, and so my comments about it probably come from a lack of understanding of YOUR space so apologies for that.
In completely tangential comments, otherwise you seem like an overall right chap. You’re clearly a well-rounded lad (at least by just looking at online things) in that ya know, you’re working on your fitness, you’ve got a family you’re taking care of, etc. I personally have no beef with /you/ just with your (in my opinion) dishonest use of my language-learning journey in your video. We disagree about some things in the space as is natural, but we absolutely agree with a LOT of things that could have been interesting to explore had you (as you told me in your original comment you planned on doing, but didn’t) actually messaged me prior to talk about. We could probably agree that once you clear that A1-A2 area, duolingo would be VASTLY improved if you supplement it heavily with other media. But… as you know as you’ve got my videos downloaded in your timeline, I’ve pretty much said as much too. I said it with positive intentions whereas I personally feel your video repackaged my own but things were said negatively. Does that make sense? You can disagree!
I do apologise for my tone in my video as lord almighty is it SHARP. Sarcasm is how I write rebuttals and in this case it was just… a bit biting when if I’d focused more on say, the type of thing I’ve written here, it would’ve been less harsh.
I talked about this in a comment I made on my own video, but I do mean it when I say I do also hope you continue to learn languages and enjoy doing so and also continue trying to help people succeed! We’re both in places where we actually can motivate and inspire people to learn a foreign language which I can assume is something both of us enjoy 🙂
At the end of the day, you’ll always have a better english accent than me. Would kill to sound Aussie 😅
"so as to be win sympathy" @daysandwords - a MISTAKE?! (Mock horror.) I guess you learned English with Duolingo! LOL
@@ski2miYeah and if I'd translated these thoughts directly from my native language, as well as making jerky and awkward mistakes for THREE HOURS STRAIGHT, then I'd admit that I wasn't fluent in English.
Great video, the plane analogy especially is very useful. A serious language learner needs to realize that there will always be a level of frustration that comes with language learning which is normal and even desirable... reading native materials, regularly looking things up, the endless cycle of learning something, forgetting it and learning it again might not always be *fun* but that process is the entire point, that is the process you're looking for. And the satisfaction you get after grinding at that and finally being able to comprehend *actual* native content you like is something the tiny daily dopamine hits you get from tapping the lever of the skinner box of Duolingo can't compare to. But you have to be serious about it and want to actually comprehend the language.
How's that incompatible with duolingo or any other language app though?
@@AA-lz4wq It isn't incompatible you use it as a supplement to engagement with actual text and audio and an SRS but the question then is why bother with an app that is inferior to those things? If you like doing it anyway ofc you should do it but it just isn't very effective if you're serious about learning the language. Also esp for non-European languages (though I can only speak for Japanese) the sentences are really not very native like and the robot pronunciation frankly sucks. Though I haven't used it in years so maybe it got better, idk.
Normal, yes. Not sure how the frustration is desirable, though.
@@AA-lz4wqmore time spent in Duolingo means less time spent really learning the language AND fostering an addiction
@@jewelweed6880everything good comes with a struggle. Frustration is a sign of growth. If you aren't tired after gym you aren't progressing
What Duolingo fundamentally does for me is keep me interested in learning the language.
There are days when I am just not motivated to learn anything from anywhere. However, because I do not want to lose my streak, I reluctantly get in at least 5mins that day to keep my streak going. And these could happen for a few consecutive days.
And I believe this sustains my interest in learning the language (If I do not engage in learning for days, I could totally lose Interest). Then within a day or a few, I would get really curious again and continue learning from other resources as well.
I started with a language course because I felt bored, and duolingo supplementing it. But then, always being worse than some other students in each class that I joined and not speaking as well when visiting Spain motivated me to turn it into an obsession. So one day I found that I could skip 10 units at a time in duolingo, then I dropped it altogether. It was just a chore that didn't help me. I stopped taking courses as well, having skipped five during it.
And now, some two years later since I started, I speak it rather well, I can also read Monte Cristo and I only have to look up between 1..5 words per page, if I feel that they're important to the context. I don't really need to know what 'mesana' means (it's 'mizzenmast' in English).
More importantly, I found that I could just travel five stops by public transport to partake in language exchanges. Way better. I also started with my own :D:D
On to Portuguese then, this time without Duolingo.
Hi I'm from Germany. I'm learning Japanese on Duolingo and I have ADHD.
My goal is it to understand enough Japanese so I can listen to Podcasts and stories in Japanese( because that is how I learned English). Duolingo kept me learning while other apps did not. duolingo is not perfect I'm missing so much (like grammar and vocabulary) on duolingo, but I have other apps to. But Duolingo really important for me, it's keeping my learning day after day after day. And the biggest achievement is that i deleted all other games on my phone and the only game I'm playing now is duolingo😁.
After not even one year Japanese learning on duolingo I started looking for short stories for language beginners and Podcast in Japanese.
Your videos aren't garbled. They're exceptionally well-structured and I appreciate that.
I have had absolutely no experience with Duolingo. I avoid social media as much as possible and the interactivity of notifications alone would put me off, never mind the cutesy game aspect and it dishing out dopamine hits that will get you addicted.
I have been using Duo for beginner Japanese. I find it's format is fantastic for the writing system -- spaced repetition with a combination of listening, pattern matching, and tracing. I imagine it would be similar useful for other alphabets/abjabs/syllabaries.
The actual language lessons though are useless. I've been drilling "She's a cool lawyer" for like 5 days with no end in sight.
its format not it's (=it is)
@@prplt You will please excuse my phone's overzealous and not AI autocorrect.
I also did not understand why it kept giving me the same questions over and over again. I think it would have been better if I had paid and got endless lives. That way, I would have played more since there wouldn't be negative leverage.
@@Siegfried5846 Yep. Perverse incentives. Anything with preverse incentives will be ineffective; economics has shown this time and time again.
I guess that I can say that I've been "lucky" to study two languages that aren't on Duolingo (Slovak and Ho-Chunk). However, just for shits and giggles, I decided to do a speed run on Duolingo in Greek, a language I didn't know a damn thing about. After the first six hours, I just noticed that everything was a constant loop. Yes, some words were sticking in my head, but many of those words weren't useful, such as teaching nouns and verbs that would rarely be used, while never mentioning commonly-used words. And this is the problem, that Duolingo on purposely leave common words later in the tree so that you are stuck to it. In addition, I think that Duolingo's "plug and play" approach helps someone memorize certain phrases, with the idea of "plugging in" words, but it doesn't do anything to help you form your own sentences.
what resources did you use to learn slovak? i am trying to learn czech but i can’t find anything except duolingo
@@claudiabenak Is slovake eu website still online? In 2017 it helped me tremendously
I like Duolingo. I feel it helps me stay consistent even on lazy or busy days. I do about 15 minutes in the morning and 15 in the evening but move on to other resources after duo. I take actual language classes at local colleges too. Duolingo is more of a warm up for me and I don’t obsess over it. If I felt it was useless I have no issue with kicking it to the curb. I am high intermediate in Russian and Spanish in large part thanks to Duolingo. The streak creates a habit of daily exposure to the target language and I think that was the key for me. I have tried learning before but with the other resources I was using it was easy to miss a day, and then a week, month, and then I would say F-it and I would move on to something else. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for Duolingo I would not be speaking my two new languages right now.
The best language resources are the ones you will actually use. If there's too much of a barrier to that you're not gonna use it and you're not going to get anywhere.
"Staying consistent" doesn't matter if you're not actually doing anything useful. You should spend those 30 minutes doing something else.
@@ketchup901 what makes you an authority on something being useful to me or not ? I speak four languages, two of them I would not speak if it wasn’t for duolingo. That’s pretty useful to me.
@@tomtocz7284This is a video about how Duolingo is not useful.
@@ketchup901 There is a saying that the best (insert subject) resources...are the ones you actually use. If it sits on your shelf, it isn't magically going to get in your brain.
There are loads of programs that are more efficient at teaching, but they can be too content heavy. My memory isn't good enough and neither is my attention span, to use those exclusively. Duo is not very efficient and at the moment, that is working for me. Should anyone use it exclusively and expect the world from it? Definitely not. That is nothing new. Use other resources and maybe take breaks away, but keep up the duolingo during that time to keep the language in your life? That sounds useful. I don't know how many times in the last 20 years I have used a standard program diligently for a week, take a break, and next thing I know it has been a year. Yeah, haven't gotten very far. Still, I have been chipping away for 88 days with Duo, and in that time I have finally broached topics I had been avoiding for a long time. I have other resources and books. The plan is to go ahead and take breaks from all that like before, but keep the Duo streak so Arabic stays in my life. There are other ways to do that minimum, but this is what I am using now. My breaks in between studying a program are shorter. That's a win.
Commenting since I commented on the other one and this deserves the comment boost.
This makes sense to me, because by the time Duolingo came out I was already beyond anything it could teach me in my target language. Since then, I've seen friends who have a streak literally twice as long as I've been studying who are still at the beginner level of the language whereas I am much further. They haven't used anything else, though, because (and I think this is where the disconnect is) a lot of people using duolingo have a different definition of 'fluency' and of 'learning a language', and I *think* that's the point the other guy was making in his response to this video.
I wanted to learn my language to have conversations with friends and to read books, which I think is a different use case than what you should use Duo for, at least according to people with high streaks, which seems to be more about 'being exposed to a language in time they would have otherwise spent doomscrolling' than something like reading complex books.
Yeah, and I MAY (probably not) but may, make a response to Evan's response... but just quickly, MY whole point in this video is that you can't just be like "Oh making ONE mistake doesn't mean you're not fluent"... He doesn't make one mistake. He can barely string three words together, and he's clearly thinking in English (because he says "I mean" when he accidentally says the wrong German word). NO ONE has THAT definition of fluency. Literally no one. And the fact that this was 5 years ago makes no difference since he's seemingly still claiming NOW that he was fluent THEN.
Like I am a slow runner now... I was faster 6 years ago. So I don't say I can run a 21 minute 5K now, but I'll challenge anyone who says I couldn't do it BACK THEN. But Evan is doing the opposite, he's like "I am, and was, fluent, and I did it through Duolingo."
I'm prepared to admit that Duolingo did SOMETHING, but not MOST of it. And it took so long that I would wonder why anyone would bother.
@@daysandwordsAt some point in that livestream, someone asks him if he thinks in German and he flat out states that he's thinking in English and translating. It's so bizarre to see him get so defensive about the fact that this probably wouldn't be considered "conversationally fluent" to most people and that his Duolingo video probably mislead people into having higher expectations than reasonable.
The thing that really annoyed me though about Evan's response was that the entire argument relied on the retroactive weakening of his previous position from "I got fluent with Duolingo in 2 years" to "I'm just a hobbyist who does this for fun and I ultimately don't care about whether this method can get you to a high level" to make it look like you're just too stuck-up to respect his casual approach. All while implicitly maintaining that his fluency claims were still true all along. That was either dishonest or extremely sloppy of Evan. That video was just a complete strawman.
He also completely misunderstood your airport analogy.
I think your video was infinitely more fair and objective than his.
@@rpstneureis yeah he completely misunderstood the airport analogy, which I personally thought was brilliant. He also spent a lot more time doing more personal attacks. I'm not going to lie, I went into that video expecting something like 'hi, maybe you have an off expectation of duolingo, here are some ways it's actually really great and here is why I use it the way I do" and instead it was jokes about this youtuber' acting like a reddit moderator and using him for clout for his comparatively lower subscriber count' 😬. I don't know, I didn't expect that from him 😩. Either way, I don't think any points were really made since his argument was strawman, there's very little point in responding unless they can actually have a conversation to discuss the merits of each, but it doesn't sound like that other guy would even be willing to do that.
I do think when a lot of people say fluent, they actually mean "someone of my target language can figure out what I meant eventually" like if you need help in the grocery store and you say "alcohol... Liquid... Cleaning... Please... Where?" instead of "where's the hand sanitiser?" (I have done this. This is me. I just never would have called myself fluent because I achieved sanitisation.)
I was using Duolingo as one resource to learn Hungarian (among others), but I am proud to say that I was one of the rare folks who did quit when they removed sentence explanations. It pushed me over the frustration tipping point and I said to myself, “this is no longer sufficiently valuable, I’m not going to allow it to rob me of any more of my valuable language learning time”! My annoyance allowed me to resist till I got over it!
I was actually already frustrated by the fact that even before the change removing sentence explanations (and therefore severely reducing the value of the app) Duolingo was not helping me very much with one if the most difficult aspects of Hungarian: sentence order. In Hungarian there is one sentence order that is considered “neutral” and correct, various other sentence orders that are correct but put the emphasis on one particular element of the sentence and of course many wrong possible sentence orders too. Duolingo doesn’t of course include the concept of neutral sentence order and can’t identify if the order you’ve specified would be the neutral one or not. So it was already frustrating and inadequate for Hungarian.
Sunk cost fallacy is a real thing.
I was already fluent in two languages when I started learning Spanish on Duolingo. I did it for 1-2 years on a daily basis but when I spent one year in Spain and visited a Spanish school, I realized how little difference it made. Duolingo is good if you wanna pick up some words for a holiday so you're not completely lost in a foreign country.
That one year in Spain was way more effective although I barely practiced speaking.
Interestingly I became fluent in English without the intention to do so. I was and am obsessed with English songs and video games, that's why I listened to content surrounding those topics until I understood.
For Japanese I looked up many different methods of learning but in conclusion I think understanding it is the first step. Though I have to admit that I'm also practicing writing and reading at the same time since it's so different from the languages I can speak.
As someone who used Duolingo to learn Finnish, I can agree with the whole video and will keep using it. Not as my only way to do it, but as complementary material that gives me a broad view of the language. But for learning, I actually need to do more. As my English and Spanish teachers taught me. To learn a language you need to write in it, read in it, and especially TALK and SPEAK it. Just using Duolingo will not be able to give you the learning experience you NEED. And I was aware that Duolingo wouldn't be my only resource for learning Finnish.
For the Evan part, as a German native speaker, I am NOT attacking or trying to slander him, I just want to be honest, the part where he tried to speak German was a tough watch. And he thought he got the right word, but he didn't. "Anything else" is "irgendwas anderes"/"irgendwas -" not "irgendwas übrigens".
Exactly.
And there is lots of nuance that this video is missing, for example, I only touch on Hawaiian vs Spanish, but Finnish sits somewhere in the middle. I assume you're using FinnishPod101?
As for Evan's German, yeah, he accused me of "combing through the three hours to find the one part where I was lost for words". Well, umm, no actually. Had I have wanted to embarrass him, I could have shown 20 bits EXACTLY like that. Trying to think of the German word for an English word in your head and then saying it, EVEN IF it were the right word, is just not fluency. Anyone who's ever gotten anywhere near fluency knows that thinking IN the language is only one step towards that, but it's a necessary step.
same, i will not stop using duolingo i'll just stop wondering 'maybe the paid plan has something planned who knows'
i had never heard anyone says that you can *concentrate* on duolingo for languge-learning before evan, and in any case nobody that actually did, so a qualitative review of his progress seems like a good idea
i am glad other people can approximate his level of german as i really don't know german and had never heard him speak it as i don't watch his livestreams
i genuinely watched his videos though and took what he said mostly at face value
it's a shame he took it personally with his reply, and i'll try to understand his side of the story but bottom-line is still that the premise of this video seems right, and the arguments and evidence still stand
Someone has a good taste in target languages!
Me Suomalaiset Arvostamme ulkomaalaisia, jotka opiskelevät kieltämme. Ulkomaalaiset valittaa sitä etteivät saa työtä, vaikka he eivät edes usein osaa kieltämme.
♥️Rakkaudella Tampereelta.
I heard there was a study that if you want to remember something it is better to take a break before you dive into the contents again. The longer the break the longer you retain the information.
So I would think a daily streak would be counter-productive to this.
Hey, thanks for this video I found it interesting and really like the flight analogy. I think the idea of “fluency” in the online language learning community is always a tricky one. It is a very subjective thing that some people believe to mean a near-native kind of level, whereas for others it is a lower B1 level. For me it’s a level where the speaker can express themselves relatively comfortably in a range of scenarios, even if they have an accent and make some mistakes, something around a B2 level I guess.
I feel like some people use the term “conversationally fluent” to pepper the fact that they are not really that confident or proficient in the language, in fact Evan even says “for the most part conversationally fluent”. Regardless of that, the notion that Duo alone could bring you to fluency is quite ridiculous. I imagine, though, that it leads to more people, who would otherwise be uninterested, into language learning, which is definitely a positive thing.
Yeah, he was saying "conversationally fluent" to temper that... and that's fine... but that's my Swedish haha. I can't explain what my Honours thesis was about in Swedish, but I can tell you how I learned Swedish. Evan couldn't remember the word for "else", and when he did, it wasn't actually the term he was looking for. He was more like... conversationally "emergency" helpful, that is, if NO ONE had spoken English and someone was bleeding out, then Evan's German might have been slightly useful.
My point isn't that he wasn't good or that he was lying or exaggerating. Simply that Duo wasn't working, because it doesn't work.
@daysandwords I just think the term “fluent” is generally problematic, as it’s hard to quantify. I know you weren’t trying to make it out as if his German wasn’t good, unfortunately it was more just the result of the fact he had mainly been using Duolingo and also for him it was a hobby. All things considered he is verg good and has probably inspired countless others to dip their toe in the boundless ocean that is language-learning. Just imagine if he had a streak of hundreds of days through immersion learning and been in the air all that time instead of on his feet.. the only thing with that though is that often people who learn through immersion and get crazy results “no-lifed” it and spent hours each day consuming content. So, even if input-based methods are far more effective it’s hard to compare since sometimes people will only spend like 5 minutes on Duolingo.
@@daysandwords also haha yeah, I get you. I’m at a point where I could probably describe myself as fluent in Spanish, yet have struggled in the past with complicated political discussions.
Yeah but Evan did actually say that it was more like an hour a day.
The other thing is, a lot of people think that I only want to talk about things that take up 2-3 hours of your day. But I have two kids, of very different ages (which takes even longer than when they are of similar age). My Swedish learning at 33 years old was definitely unusual but I had a job and two kids... it's certainly not impossible.
@@daysandwords it’s great that you managed to find time for language learning despite those things! I imagine things like listening to audio passively would be helpful in such situations
Excellent video! You are absolutely correct. Have been using it for almost a year now. The lessons just keep repeating like going on a merry go round! Thanks for the enlightenment!
Great video! Really enjoyed the plane/flight analogy. I'll probably be stealing that one...
- Ben
I just trademarked it. 😆
I'm glad I saw this video. My yearly family plan for DuoLingo was going to renew next month, but now it isn't.
Thank you for this. I always try to point new language learners in the direction of better materials and study methods, sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't. I live in Norway currently and I've been studying Norwegian for about two years using primarily native material. Am I fluent? Gosh no, but I can listen to native content with about a 70-80% comprehension rate and it goes higher with subtitles, and I can function more or less fine in Norwegian society as long as people don't speak too fast or use obscure vocabulary. My goal for next year is to reach C1, ambitious but we'll see.
Meanwhile though, another American I know here has solely been trying to learn with Duolingo. He's been here longer than I have I can see his frustration. I try to tell him there are better ways to learn, but he seems to think if he sticks with Duolingo he'll finally become fluent, meanwhile he can barely order a coffee in Norwegian. I feel bad for him, he's a smart guy, but I think he's bought into the Duolingo hype. Maybe I'll show this to him.
I'm totally with you on this. One thing I think you haven't covered tho is what I see with my sisters. Namely that even tho I talked with them about the fact how ineffective and slow Duolingo is and what other way better options they have - they still stay with it - because... well... because duolingo is cute and what they desire is not learning a language but finding an excuse why they are not learning a language, something so that they can say "but I am learning so much" while not really learning... and not really getting there. Stupid, but totally human. :( I gave up after realizing that. Duo is their proof for them that language learning is an impossible task and it is NOT their fault that they cannot succeed.
Yes, I'm trying to work this out with somebody who I really care about, and it is a sad realization.
Seems like the streaks encourage sunk-cost fallacy
11:17 not even a certain carpenter would walk over the pacific ocean, not when he has a buddy that can call down burning chariots from the sky and give people a ride 🤣
I think it can be summed up pretty easily - Duolingo works really well up to a point (around A2 in my experience if you're familiar with CEFR) but then it's quite useless at actually teaching you anything particularly useful past that. In your analogy it's like walking to your car that's parked a street or two away to then drive to the airport. But it's still a good tool for other things past that point such as reminding you to keep practicing, filling gaps in grammar and vocabulary knowledge, etc. Plus it can be hard to know where to start without it sometimes, and if you can't afford/justify spending a lot of money on something better such as storylearning then it's a genuinely useful tool.
"In your analogy it's like walking to your car that's parked a street or two away to then drive to the airport."
Yeah if you walk at like 100 metres an hour.
It COULD be useful for what you're describing, if it didn't stupidly throttle the speed at which you can go through the lessons. Do you want to move beyond "The boy has an apple."? No worries! Duolingo will get you beyond that... in 6 weeks.
Also high key, Duolingo’s marketing is absurdly good - like idk who runs their Twitter but even in my somewhat niche jjk manga reading community, duo steps in and posts memes that only we relate to - and ofc related to the idea that duo is trying to make sure you’re on top of language learning
I've practiced Spanish on Duolingo for years and now I'm in Colombia meeting tons of folks and comfortably having hours long conversations & teaching English classes to folks that don't know any English yet.
Yes, Duolingo works, and it was 80% responsible for my knowledge in Spanish, supplemented by UA-cam, books, podcasts, songs, movies, and practicing with native speakers making up the other 20%.
"and it was 80% responsible for my knowledge in Spanish, supplemented by UA-cam, books, podcasts, songs, movies."
But how could you possibly know that DL was 80% responsible for your knowledge? All the other stuff you described there, by sheer volume of words, contains orders of magnitude more.
The DL just helps you to actually squeeze the juice out of those things. But the juice still came from those things.
I think this comment has put the misunderstanding so succinctly as to inspire a second video in me about why people FEEL that Duolingo works even though it doesn't.
@@gradient5319 yes
@@daysandwords right? I would love to say that my current level in Spanish is due to my diligent daily study. but let's be honest. It's because I moved to Mexico a couple years back. The study is great, and I know people who move to Mexico and learn no Spanish largely because they aren't studying to prepare themselves for interacting with the people who live here, but can I really say that 80% or even 50% of what I actually know comes from apps and study courses? Probably not.
@@daysandwordsI think the video is 'great right? Yes I do, but I gotta say I've started using duolingo for the past 10 months ago, for free. I get the pay to win aspect. But I've actually learned so much German in these past months to year. This does not apply to everyone, but I can speak it FLUENTLY by just keeping up around a 80 day streak, I can easily have conversations with my German friends and family now because I grew up in america and I speak english, so I decided I would learn german. I made that promise, sure the updates are bad but I've learned so much, it's a great learning app but the paywalls are horrible.
@@daysandwords I remember in the 2000s there were equivalent "Rosetta Stone works" people. Many people learned languages with those tools, but it's presented to you in this neat little package that gives the impression that this is what language learning should be like. If you're a beginner, you just slog your way through it and accept that language learning really is this confusing and slow, when in reality it doesn't have to be.
For me, Duolingo is perfect, I've been learning English there for 964 days and I'll never stop, thank you Duolingo 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
Agree 100%. What frustrates me is Duolingo's false promises. Their catchphrase is literally "The world's best way to learn a language". Then you get people every day posting on Reddit, wondering why they can't understand native speakers after having a 900+ day streak. It's sad, really, knowing that they could have been fluent in that same amount of time if they had used more effective resources.
My Spanish skyrocketed when I gave up on Duolingo and started focusing on comprehensible input (God bless Dreaming Spanish). Now I'm at B2 and I can read or watch almost anything I want. I'm starting Polish and looking forward to using the same process. 80% input, 10% output, 10% focused vocab/grammar study has been very effective for me.
900 day streak doesn't mean much.
It could be doing like 50 lessons and practice (repeating)...
What is """important""" (or was before they completely fucked up the XP system) was XP amount.
I had like 25k in Spanish by the time I went to university (so equivalanet of 2500 lessons, finished the tree, repeated a lot, used other sources) - and I was at B1 level.
Some people might use Duo every day for 5 minutes - 900 days = 4500 minutes = 75 hours? Basically A1-A2 level.
If they spent 1 hour per day for 900 days, they would definitely be B1 (in combination with other resources, when duolingo tree ends :D )
People can't understand a language because they are just doing tasks for keeping a streak instead of actually learning, practicing and repeating things. And to be honest, after a while you can solve the tasks from feeling without any knowledge of the language if you get used to what the duolingo expects from you in every course equally.
Like as, i literally could just go to any random language course and get a 30-50% accuracy on the highest check point without knowing anything about the language at all. And it's only because duolingo teaches you how to satisfy the website's tasks instead of teaching you the language.
@@BeSk9991 You definitelly need other sources for any level. Duolingo is only good for being a practice tool that you use as an addition to a real learning method.
Powodzenia ☺️
Duolingo is like walking to the airport ...... on a treadmill. You feel as if you are walking , but you aren't getting very far, even if the machine says you have done 6 miles today and are on a 90 day streak.
I just finished 2 years subscribed to the Family plan. I won't be renewing because my 4 family members (who don't know each other) all recently quit DL within weeks of each other after 2 years piggybacking on my account. Why? Because they all thought it was a complete waste of their time. Each had travelled overseas to a country where the language they were learning is primarily spoken, and they were so disappointed in just how little they could converse with the locals (speaking and listening)
Me however, I treat DL as one of those mindless apps you spend time on each day when you're bored.
I think if I get to the end of the courses, (I am learning 5 languages simultaneously) I will still not be able to speak any of the languages. But I won't have felt like I'd wasted as much time as if I played Angry Birds every day for 4 years straight.
I can tell you why even if duolingo is lengthy and there are better options for language learning, it is worth it. It is because how easy it is to build a daily habit especially for people who are learning a new language casually. 'casually' is the key word here. Most of the people who are learning languages using this app are otherwise busy people who just want to learn a language as a hobby. Now, it is a great gateway to language learning. Those who find language learning fun after using this app, they will automatically seek for better, faster ways to learn that language.
"Those who find language learning fun after using this app, they will automatically seek for better, faster ways to learn that language."
Will they though? I mean what if I could find an example of someone who learned German for 4-5 years before still completely sucking at German, only to then take up Spanish using exactly the same app, despite their OWN ADMISSION that the app is significantly worse than a few years back? If I could produce such an example, surely we'd have to admit that not all people (and I would argue, not even MOST people) will seek for a real language learning method?
I think the focus with Duolingo should just be maintaining a habit. I don't think it's effective if it's the only tool you're using to try to learn a language, but it does help initially with creating a daily habit. I still maintain my Duolingo streak for fun, but there's no doubt I've learned much more German from reading books, listening to music, watching movies and taking more comprehensive courses.
Where is the value in maintaining a habit that has no positive effect. You may as well maintain the habit of smoking weed every day.
@ketchup901 - exactly. That's why I quit my substantial streak. I was like "This does nothing."
This really put into perspective the meaninglessness of just doing duolingo. I gotta start taking language learning more seriously 😅 Great video
Thank you!
I don't understand why people are so down on duo lingo 💔 jag älskar duo lingo
@@MichellesdesignsEtcconveniently @daysandwords posted a 26 minute video to help you understand.
@@MichellesdesignsEtcdid you watch the video?
@@MichellesdesignsEtchave fun walking across the ocean
Literally got a Duolingo ad at the end of the video which I've never gotten before
I've had a streak on Korean Duolingo for almost 500 days now. But that's the thing, I never expected to actually learn Korean through it. It's more of a motivational thing for me, and 2-5 minutes a day isn't going to take up much of my time anyway. And especially not considering I usually have 10-20h of a variety of input/output during the week without including Duolingo.
The only other thing I'd say Duolingo has been helpful for is shadowing, because I absolutely hate siting down and shadowing, but somehow doing that with Duolingo doesn't bother me as much. So at least my accent in Korean isn't horrendous (not good either, by any means, but I'll take what I can get).
I'm a JLPT N2 holder here, who, coming from a non-Duolingo user background who hold the certificate (and I don't really think it's that good of a benchmark test anyway, just ask Bunsuke about this) I was introduced to this app two or three years ago by my brother. Anyway, I noticed that at most it will be somewhere around N4 to N3-ish level of proficiency. Maybe N2, but that's debatable. At most, it will help to reach N3, but I doubt it would be possible at all without reading practices, some hints about the word patterns (what's usually called "grammar" or 文法 ) etc. I'm so beyond Duolingo that practically I was just skimming the materials and play it for the points when I was thinking "what the f am I doing? This is pointless!" Yeah, it's really as you said in the analogy of crossing the ocean. I would say it's *at most* would only cover one-fourth of the distance.
I saw the title and came here in defense of duolingo. After the video I guess I'm breaking my 450 day streak. I bought a book in spanish today and I think I'll focus on that for now instead
Even with the smaller languages, you'd be surprised how many good free resources are out there. Scottish Gaelic for example, there's whole playlists from Gaelic with Jason that can take you from beginner to upper intermediate, the BBC have a tonne of free resources, SpeakGaelic, LearnGaelic, not to mention more and more creators from Scotland that have started making content in Scottish Gaelic. Duolingo might be good for establishing an interest in a language but like you say it is incredibly bad for getting results in a timeframe that isn't stupidly long.
in the back of my head i knew duolingo wasn't really working, but i didn't want to accept it. this got me to finally delete that green bird that's been living on my phone screen for years.
I wanted to learn japanese on duolingo. Ended up learning kataka and hiragana by myself....beside that duo just taught me the basic sentence building and words
I used to use Duolingo as my structured grammar supplement along with immersion, but I got sick of doing tons of variations of the same translation exercise forever unto eternity. I then switched to using the FSI free course (free, I think it’s a govt thing. kind of like Pimsleur but with a textbook) and I enjoyed that way more since it actually helped with constructing sentences on the spot and it was more enjoyable, albeit more dry. But obviously, the most important element to acquisition is comprehensible input, and the grammar course you pick, if you pick one at all, is an irrelevant aspect of the plane ride.
That walking to the airport analogy was absolutely genius! I found your page years ago for “exposing” things that were exaggerated in the language learning community. And I’m glad you’re still doing it.
I never went after Evan because I don't think he's doing it deliberately.
I think he acknowledges that his German wasn't good... but then I'm thinking "Ok so, "conversationally fluent using JUST Duolingo..."...Something here doesn't fit."
@@daysandwords I wholeheartedly agree. In the years I’ve been following you, you’ve never been malicious to another content creator or language learner. I feel your approach is always, “there’s better options to achieve your goal.”
Completely agree. After getting to decent proficiency in French I realize that the fastest flight to a new language is 1) absorb basics of the grammar to some level, 2) stuff a few hundred vocabulary in my head, and then 3) immerse immerse immerse, via reading galore and videos fully in that language and audio and repeating plots in the new language and so on… complete immersion is not given by apps at all. And it’s the only way there.
@@daysandwords I think a lot of the reason why Evan uses Duolingo is the sunk cost fallacy. He has spent so much time and he has seen some results so surely it must work, else was he just wasting his time? And it's clear that Duolingo fosters that sunk cost mentality with the streak
@ratoh1710 - Possibly!
That Duolingo owl is going to be coming for you like Michael Myers at this point
I have ADHD and it's really hard for me to stay motivated in learning. Duolingo is structured like a game which allows me to stay motivated and keep playing.
Honestly basically everyone has ADHD these days... and yes, I have an ADHD diagnosis too.
This comments section has a few people talking about how it's the WORST thing for their ADHD.
It may keep you playing, sure... it's designed to be addictive... but that's just the problem. Motivation and consistency are good, but not if you keep on doing waste-of-time things. I'm super motivated to watch lots of MLB at the moment... I could do it for hours a day for the next 6 months. At the end, I'd be an expert in something that doesn't help me at all.
I have about 1100 days of streak and I completed the whole italian tree and about half of the portuguese. I'm spanish, so it should be kind of easy to learn these two. I can only understand when an italian or a portuguese talk but I don't feel confident at all to talk, so I decided to try different methods for next year. Hopefully I can stay as consistent
I agree with you about DuoLingo.
During covid, I used the app to redo a few of the languages I already knew: German, Italian and Latin. But I didn't get much out of it.
I also did a bit of Welsh, because a few years before I had learnt a bit of it with "Say something in Welsh".
Problem with that was that it was only spoken language and while the Welsh think their language is completely logical when you write it, I as a Dutch woman found that not to be the case 😂.
I liked 'Say something....' though, because it builds up the language very nicely: you learn a few words and verbs and make sentences with it and they give you lots of different combinations with those words. So right from the start you can expres a lot of different things and then it builds from there.
Now I am searching for a good online course in Welsh which includes writing.
I learnt nothing new by using DuoLingo. So I stopped very soon. I also didn't like the game element.
Lamont this is an absolute banger. I almost never post anything on social media but I'm gonna HAVE to share this one.
Thank you!
Honestly it went through three iterations, each of which were unrecognisable from the other two, so it ended up being maybe a bit "too much video" in one video.
Keep preaching brother, you are absolutely right, especially when you described comprehensible input, that's exactly how it feels, to me it felt like a ship in the mist going nowhere xD, but it is actually the safest way to get somewhere
Just wanted to say before/if you end up doing a response to Evans video, I’m looking forward to what you’ll have to say bc Evans response was, well, very strange, to put it simply. Looked to me like he was accusing you of saying things you didn’t say, being insulting, making false equivalencies, and using “everyone has a different definition of fluency” as a shield. I don’t agree with every single thing about your video but I do appreciate it and it rly made me think, bc I resonated with a lot of what you said.
I have a degree that says I know German, and after school spent 30+ minutes a day on German Duolingo for 2, maybe even 3 years. I had the Golden Owl.
I then watched a video about comprehensible input (and a video you made about 10? things you can do better than Duolingo) and bought the first Harry Potter book in German and signed up for italki.
Not only did I do it in German, but Swedish and Norwegian at the same time, and I made more progress in a few short months than all that time in school and on Duolingo. I learned how to learn and that made a world of difference.
Relatable. I never got far with DuoLingo, but I did do a French degree. When I moved to France for a half-year, I quickly realized I knew almost nothing.
Many years later I learned about comprehensible input, and started aggressively using podcasts and shows, and doing much more *repeated listening*. This produced major improvements. Studying language like it's math gets you basically nowhere.
@@analogpark8059 I was absolutely not proud of my ability. The handful of times I had the opportunity to speak to Germans, it went nowhere except embarrassment. The killer was I'd see videos like Evan's with claims of how they got "fluent" using Duolingo and I didn't understand what I was doing wrong.
"I learned how to learn and that made a world of difference."
Exactly!! I've fallen in love with the process of learning how to learn, and frequently fall down deep rabbit holes that take me away from actually learning my TL for a few days (or more), but I always come back to it with renewed interest and new skills that I can apply. I'm continually adding tools to my language-learning toolbox, some that I can use right now, some that I'm not quite ready to employ - yet.
@@berkanathurisaso for a complete beginner what techniques what would you recommend
@@thereal_vertixx2964 Honestly, it would depend on their situation. What language are they trying to learn? What resources do they have easy access to? How much time and effort do they have (or are they willing) to devote to learning the language? WHY are they learning that particular language?
There's no magic one-size fits all language learning approach. I think that it's important to take the time to look at different approaches and different tools and assess how you might use them, not just how they're 'meant' to be used by the person selling them.
I am most definitely NOT an expert in this area. I look for things that work for me and the way my brain works. Realistically, what works for me may drive someone else absolutely bonkers.
Watching Evan's response video made me realize how dumb and biased he actually is - I am amazed that his response to your well thought out video was to childishly make personal attacks and misrepresentations of everything you said. Love your video and so glad you made it, I hate the idea of new learners watching Evan and thinking his approach is good. He really doesn't realize how much he is harming other learners language journeys!
Harming ppl? Lmao . y'all are so full of it. You are an ADULT!!!
Ì wouldn't agree that Evan's videos are particularly harmful, really, BUT... on the topic of being an adult... that response... wow... my 12 year old is actually more mature than that.
I'm not at all saying that people are not allowed to use Duolingo for 5 minutes a day, or even learn a language for 5 minutes a day.
But Evan used it for nearly an HOUR a day (average) for four years and then couldn't make a basic sentence. Using Speakly and GermanPod101 for that long, you'd be nearing C1 in German.
I'm kinda conflicted on that. I came around watching Evan's response only now and he does have a point. Though I agree regarding the personal attacks. I noticed that as well. I guess he was offended, which he has every right to be. His goal is very much different from Lamont's and I can understand why he doesn't agree with him. And I understand, it probably doesn't feel good seeing your face on another guy's thumbnail, with some claims you just don't agree with. No need for personal attacks of course. But tbh, I understand why he felt, you were being harsh on him, Lamont. Looking forward to your response :)
Regarding Duolingo: I have used it in the past, especially with languages where there just aren't any other resources. But I can ascertain it really is slow, so if efficiency is your goal, you probably need to find something else. As a german, I have to say, Evan's German really is good. Especially when his goal is learning just for fun, as he says. It's far from perfect, but it's good. I understand why he doesn't feel the need to be judged by people with different goals, though, tbh. He has a point there.
I do think Evan has some good points, or at least, points that I can see how he would think are right, given what he's seen.
My video is far from perfect, even in terms of what I wanted to make. There were mulitple bits re-written, and even the whole video was actually re-shot because the initial video just wasn't really... anything at all. It's a flawed piece of content, as basically every piece of content is, at least if it's not by James Jani.
So some parts of it give the wrong idea, and since Evan is the central theme of the video, I can see why he was upset. But many many videos have been made about me, calling me far worse than anything I called Evan. And I just ignore them, because they are garbage. So I'm surprised that Evan went out of his way to make this long video that only brings more attention to my own.
A UA-camr of his experience should know better. But anyway... I am learning about 60% towards a response now, still not certain that I'll do one.
Duolingo is the scientology of learning apps. There is always another level to complete.
From their fan-base, it looks pretty true too.
Duolingo was good for me to just get reacquainted with Spanish for a few weeks. For context, I already learned Spanish as a young child, but never properly learned it and stopped speaking it once my non-English speaking grandmother passed. After leaving behind Duolingo, I very quickly went to meet ups here in NYC and found some people looking to learn English. We exchanged audios and that’s been the most helpful thing hands down
I’m lucky there are people like that though, I’d imagine there aren’t a lot of Swedish people looking to learn English in Sydney…
This is why I recommend your channel for beginner language learners. While I think some of your techniques can be a little intimidating for beginners, I also think that beginners should have a solid foundation of what serious language learning looks like. Language learning is a balance dependent on each person, so not everyone will agree with every technique you present. However, you provide the most balanced and nuanced approach that I think is significantly more beneficial than big names like Matt or Ikenna. Kaufmann is another name I generally recommend for beginners but I think his videos tend to go into the philosophy which isn't as helpful as theory.
I also like your videos because you provide a realistic approach to people who have a job or go to school, which is most of us. Some people might criticize you for being inconsistent over the years but that is your strength and I appreciate your honesty. It is more important to grow than to be right, which is exactly what language learning is all about. Thank you for working hard to provide useful and relevant advice to language learners and I hope there won't be any haters coming after you for being honest about Duolingo.
I finally quit when they wanted me to complete 50 quests to get my monthly badge, it seemed like I was just running on a hamster wheel and they wanted me to spend more and more time on the wheel to get a digital medal which has no real value and doesn't help me speak in portuguese.
wow this was a heads-up i did not realize i needed. i think ill still keep using duolingo because it gamifies a big task and helps with being consistent but ill definitely start looking for other options.
today i hit my 200 day streak learning japanese, for context. huge thanks for making this!
There are 2 situations I have found Duolingo to be useful:
1: Learning the script to a new language (such as Japanese) and then binning the app after 1 month.
2: Encouraging the kids at my workplace to start learning languages! (I've managed to get 3 kids to learn with me which is cool as hell)
It is almost useless in every other situation, lol.
Yep, learning scripts is fair enough. I have said that (but many years ago).
I found it only moderately useful for learning Japanese script (well, kana, not kanji). It is, however, very good for Korean script. But Korean speakers i know say the Korean course itself is horrible, even by Duo standards.
I found it useful to learn the beginning stages of a language. Duolingo is very good material when you're at a point where you can't read basic sentences
And learning small languages, like Lamont said. But then again, Duolingo is fucking those languages over as well.
@@philipdavis7521 are there any apps you'd recommend for learning kanji?
I think Duo is good for drilling sentence structure (I’m learning Japanese) and for vocabulary, but it can’t be the only source. I’m sad they got rid of live classes. They were very good.
Japanese sentence structure on Duolingo is usually extremely strict compared to real life use. It's probably a good way to get the particles/SOV structure in your brain, but by intermediate level you will know how free the language really can be, but Duolingo due to its game app setup doesn't usually offer that freedom.
@@thedude3445that is what anime is for
I chinese learning regiment has been esclusively the videos from Comprehensible Chinese since July this year, It's been quite effective ! Only input
I can understand most of her intermediate videos very well, I also find myself thinking in mandarin sometimes, I can just feel the neurocircutry building up
Plus it's very low effort, I'd advise anyone who wants to learn a language to use the comprehensible input method, hell even the straight up native input for 5 years in 10x better than 5 years of duolinguo
I find Duolingo super helpful for beginners! If it’s a foreign alphabet that you are studying, Duolingo definitely helps to get a better understanding of it. Duolingo also helps with structure!
Tho it’s not useful long term!
Former language teacher here. I recently started playing with Duolingo, and I'm using it to re-learn some Turkish (that I have previously taken classes for), as well as starting to learn some Polish. I give myself homework like what I'd give to my students. I always used to listen to the radio in the past to learn languages, so I'm also listening to the radio again this time around. Duolingo can be a fun game, and if I learn some phrases while playing, that's great. I think you have to adjust your expectations when using an app like this. 😀
Yes. I agree that someone who claims to be fluent in a language after 3 years of using an app needs to adjust their expectations.
100 Day Duolingo Update:
Let's start with the fun part. I am now able to say basic phrases like hello and goodbye to my Polish best friend in Polish. He introduced me to a family member where the only mutual language was Polish. We couldn't say much to each other, but they really appreciated the effort I made, and we ended up having a good time regardless.
Sadly, the daily Duolingo grind has killed my motivation to keep playing with the app, and I think I'm ready to let the streak end. In the first month or two, I studied my languages consistently: I took notes, gave myself homework, and made a lot of effort when working on the listening exercises. After a while, I stopped doing all of those activities, and my learning has halted. There is some minor progress every day, but it's like nothing sticks without me teaching myself the languages. I still think it's possible for Duolingo as a support when learning a new language, but I see that I can't get it to work for me without using professional language teaching/learning methods at the same time.
I've been doing duolingo Arabic for 1 year. Some words get familiar but I don't believe it works. I've learnt other languages quicker through books and watching movies. Duolingo seems to teach sentences that isn't everyday used. I'm on it everyday
But I feel I haven't learnt much in this time compared to my past learning of other languages. Duolingo is OK but not the best.
It's good to hear an opinion from a fellow Australian
For learning German, the Berlitz German Self-Teacher is a good choice, in short it was originally developed for English speaking troops being stationed in post-WW2 Germany, it's a one-time payment for the book, it's German immersion in proper order written by an actual linguistics school, tests are only in German, don't have to worry about being punished for making mistakes, there's also a phrasebook and dictionary that you get buy in conjunction, and things you learn will actually stick. The number of times I've said something like "neither" and pronounced it as "Neder" (Neither = Weder), or wrote the German word when I would be writing in English, it literally trains you to think in the language, and learn it the same way a native speaker learned it, the same way you learn your native language in general, because that's how language is actually learned. Also, German isn't the only language they have.
that's a great summary and amazing clarification. thanks
It's been 1 year since I don't know what duolingo is and I feel grateful to not worry about streak days but on my English jouney.
You just made me quit for good!
I was kinda afraid of losing my streaks, but I knew all along that it wasn't helping me for real.
I also think I'm gonna quit it. It has only gotten me "XP"
I'm malding because I had the intention of quitting but my subscription auto-renewed before I realized it
I would contact them and just say that and if they try to say "too bad" just start making a tonne of noise on Reddit and Trustpilot and share those threads with them.
It's always incredibly sad to see people around me try to learn a new language and then give up completely after learning worse than nothing from Duolingo.
I did that with spanish for 2 years before I realized that my skills were still awful. I decided to get a Spanish teacher and focus more on communication and listening, rather than mindlessly learning vocab
holy shit yeah!
i am not complaining about the self-reporting people that say they would do 0 progress in language-learning but thank god for duolingo it helped them get out of the house and walk towards the airport
but there are so many people that i know that have been walking for hours and hours with duolingo and have internalised the conclusion that the issue is with them
i think this includes Evan for a bit because in his video reply he clearly sees Lamont's video as a personal attack on his language-learning ability
just because it is the easiest thing for you to do does not mean this is what 'clicks' with you and you must be bad at learning languages other ways and us 'actual language-learners' shit on you
it's easy because it is a game but after basic sentences, it will be more and more game and less and less language acquisition
honestly it is just baffling how after a period of external study your perceived level in the duolingo-space skyrockets
even only for memorisation (which is basically what duolingo is mainly) you can blow duolingo out of the water
with language comprehension you can also reach a level where you understand alternative translations for duolingo's one + a few hidden options
@@rickynoodles2816
Personally? I do vocabulary reviews and immersion for at least an hour everyday. (I occasionally study grammar, but I don’t stress out about it too much.)
This year I plan on doing a language challenge every month on top of that.
I’ve simplified this quite a bit since I don’t think writing a paragraph is going to help anyone.
This channel has a ton of videos with great advice when it comes to language learning. So you’re in a good place if you need more help.
Good luck on your language journey!
It's the videos that make you feel like a fool that are truly some of the most important ones to watch.
You've provided an invaluable perspective. Thank you.
For a while I've wondered what the 1 out of 10 who wouldn't recommend DuoLingo thought about it.
I'll probably go back to line translation where I watch something in another language and try to deduce what's going on by writing down the subtitles, translating them , and writing an interpretation. Then check to see how close mine was to the real plot.
Despite it being the slowest way to watch I vividly remember enjoying the episodes I watched of some Anime or Breaking Bad in Spanish.
I'm very interested in being fluent in French. Did some in high school, two semesters in college, tried some Pimsleur cassette courses (yes I'm old). I even did some Rosetta Stone for a bit. I found Duolingo through a friend and I love the gamey-ness and it satisfies some of my OCD tendencies. I have come to realize that just doing units everyday isn't going to make me fluent but it is helping with my vocabulary. After watching this video and confirming what I already suspected.....I really don't know where to go. I'm playing for premium but I'm not sure why anymore.
And just like everything else on the intertubes.....there's SO many options for learning that it makes my head spin. After 1200 days on Duo I feel like I might have a base....but I've no idea where to go for the next steps. Sorry for the whine.
Woof. Lamont out here killing it again.
I’m almost at 750 hours in Dreaming Spanish and can confirm Spanish learners ARE spoiled for choice and comprehensible input is where it’s at. I hope people get there sooner rather than later so they don’t look back with regret like I did when I reflected on time I wasted in Duolingo.
Once companies go public and have to answer to institutional shareholders it's only a matter of time before the product becomes a zombie just going after every possible dollar.
I can clearly see how Evans path got him there. I have a 300+ day streak on the owl studying Korean. And although Korean is hard in general, I definitely struggle with the speaking portion. Even with the speaking practice, it doesn't help speaking. I've learned alot about the alphabet and how to read it. It's great at that. I can read the language quite well. But it wasn't until recently when I started mainly using outside sources that my speaking and grammar have seen significant improvements.
Reminds me how after taking four years of American high school French, I still only tested into third quarter university French. In the US, most foreign language teaching in high school is complete crap. They teach it too slowly.
I read most of Harry Potter in French and Italian! It helped me brush up on my French, barely used in a decade. And it made Italian I and II at the local community college really effective. Another decade later, I often surprise myself with how much Italian I still understand and can spontaneously speak, better than Spanish, in fact, which is a widely spoken language where I live. Yes, that says how much my effort to master Spanish has sucked.
Young adult books seem a great way to learn. Has anybody some suggestions for reading other than Harry Potter? I'm HPed to death. I've considered Tolkien, which I enjoy enough to reread yet again. It would be cool to find some YA books quite popular elsewhere-not sparkly vampires, though. X-D
Maybe Hunger Games? They're in lots of languages.
Watching this video out of spite while my hearts refill
I speak Japanese and didn't use duolingo to learn it. Every person I've ever met who uses or has used duolingo doesn't actually know how to speak the language they're learning. Damn shame.
I learned spanish on duolingo. What i mean by that i learned the basic conjugation and a basic vocabulary. After i started using spanish at work is when i got fluent in it. Im learning vietnamese and i have the same issues that i had with spanish. At work i use Mexican spanish while duolingo taught different vocabulary. In vietnamese it uses the bac accent when all my frownds use the nam dialect. Get practice with a native speaker and you can excel where duolingo leaves off. What else do you except from a free resource.
People who are resolved to quit don't announce it. People talking and complaining are those who are still using and care about the thing. It's when they stop talking and complaining that they just quit.
I would like to thank duolingo for their continued enshitification though, if they didn't go around removing decent features, I probably wouldn't have dropped it.
I did my undergrad in linguistics and we had to do a language at the same time, I did Russian, 2 of the 3 years of studying I had an English native speaker who have lived in Russia to study as my instructor and unfortunately the class was 60% in English and I didn't learn much (or retain much), my last year was with a native Russian instructor and 100% in Russian, I learning failed the class because I wasn't prepared, and this was with studying that language 3 hours a night. I could have been practicing with my Ukranian neighbors' grandmother that was slightly bored, but I was severely insecure and shy with new people then and was too scared to do it. Before undergrad I had tried to learn French, Spanish, and Italian on my own to varying degrees of success, most low, and I lived in California with French speaking family, it should have been easy, nope, my French family never spoke to us kids in French unless we already spoke it, which means only those that had lived in French speaking countries got the good treatment 😢😢, sad I know, but it was on ghe advice of a speech therapist from the 70s before speech therapy had any contact with linguistics and first language/second language acquisition theories. Then I move to Korea for a job, I'm there 5 years, I learn to read hangeul, no big deal, takes 1-2 weeks to learn, makes more sense that the Roman alphabet, lol, no joke. I don't actively try to learn the language, other than the necessary honorifics, that's my fault, but I do pick up and retain some things from coworkers. And that's when it dawned on me, I have to learn a language and retain it in context, like live contextual setting, with someone guiding me and maybe correcting me when needed, at least for the first part of learning the language, I would need more formal learning after, but to get my brain to switch and start thinking in the language and understanding people. Hence why doing a homestay abroad works so well, or doing a work/holiday time with a bunch of people that don't know your language so it forces you to use the target language of the country you're in (by the way, I've yet to find a country that has a work/holiday agreement with the US, I don't think it exists, I never learned about it till I moved to Korea and met Koreans and non-US foreigners that had done it, and that's why their language skills were so good from a certain country). I couldn't afford going abroad for a homestay when I was a kid, nor could I do a work/holiday since I was a US citizen, so it wasn't until I moved for work that I could've really used it, but I was stupid and didn't try hard enough. While in Korea, I met my husband, and he was from France, we eventually moved to France, I had been trying to study French for 3 years in Korea to prepare but I was getting stuck because I was trying to do Korean at the same time too in Korea, and my brain couldn't handle it. But once in France I was living with my husband's mom for 3 weeks just us while my husband started at his job in another part of the country and I'd go to him once we had an apartment there. Now my mother-in-law can speak English, not well, but enough to communicate, but it was decided she would only speak French for those 3 weeks. And low and behold, guess who finally started retaining and understanding a good amount of French in that time, lol, me, lol, and I cursed my French family back in California for never teaching us. I learned and retained enough for me to kinda pass my language exam for people under my particular visa in France (yes, it's true, for those on a family visa in France you have to take a language test within your first year of being in France, if you don't pass with A1 level you are required by the government to take a years worth of language classes, the government covers the cost but you don't get to pick where nor the teachers, so it sucks, I passed above an A1 level so I wasn't required to). Once I was over the hurdle of retaining and understanding I started taking formal classes, I could communicate no problem, but I had a hard time retaining unless I was using the grammar in context and in my everyday life, so formal classes sucked a bit, but I learned enough to pass a nationally recognized test at B1 level within 2 years of being in France. Now you may ask, why didn't I just learn French from my husband?.........you wanna know how notoriously bad learning from a romantic partner could go, lol, linguists have said it's bad enough where communication is more important than trying to learn the other person's language, so it's better to communicate in the language you're both comfortable in over a new language, I'm sure some people can and have done it, but I fell into the other category where it didn't work, my husband would give me long lectures on grammar instead of just teaching me words and phrases in context without bothering with the logistics of how to get there, lol, his mom was a better teacher, but then again she'd had kids, lol.
If this is too long to read, my thoughts are, for really learning a language, homestays and work-holidays are really the only way to go to learn a language, unless you have family or neighbors that are willing to talk/teach in context, otherwise none of these gadgets work, they can supplement but should not be used as the main and sole way to learn a language.
Wow, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain your language learning journey. I read all of it, and it wasn’t too long! I’m lucky enough to have a partner who is patient and will help me speak their language. But I don’t think that is the common case.
I've said it before and I will say it again...your language learning content is some of the best I've ever seen. You talk about how brains acquire language. Your method REALLY works. I went from knowing two words in Swedish to testing at a B2 level in just over a year. It was constant inundation with the language. Audiobooks, written books, TV & Film, and daily work. I am SO surprised at how far I've come. I couldn't have done it without your channel. Thank you, Lamont. Would it be possible to go deeper into getting past the intermediate plateau? I'm at a place where I'm SUPER aware of how much I don't know and I can hear all my mistakes, but I feel like I keep making them and don't progress.
My hobby is learning languages and I have found no better way to start a language than Duolingo. Earlier this year I've become frustrated with the later changes and stopped using it, only to find out that other methods of starting a language are still worse.
So, yes, Duolingo works, it's just important to say what it works AT. Of course it will not make you fluent in a language. But if you need to study the basics of a language in order to be able to engage with it, it's the best option I've found. Feel free to tell me what methods you think work better.
I can now watch a Spanish TV show with subtitles after only doing Duolingo. I can pick up a Swedish, Czech or Italian book and be able to read it with a dictionary.
Even for the languages I already knew Duolingo noticeably helped me. It structured my German grammar understanding and pronunciation after the school completely botched doing so. I had means of actively practicing writing French sentences rather than just reading and listening to it. It even boosted my English skills.
Right now I'm working through a Korean tree. It really works much better for me than learning from a textbook. If you think I can do better than Duolingo, please share with me.
"But if you need to study the basics of a language in order to be able to engage with it, it's the best option I've found."
I get that it only does basics but to me it just does them too SLOWLY. Almost like they're incentivised to keep you on the app as long as possible.
Just buy a damn textbook. It has all the same information, sorted, organized, and arranged for easy comprehension. Read it for 5 minutes a day. Then spend the rest of your time memorizing vocab and consuming content. Duolingo is garbage.
@@WhiteScorpio2
>If you've read my comment, you would know that I already did and that I've found it much less helpful than Duolingo.
Then you're honestly using a textbook wrong. A textbook will explain all the grammar to you, and should have loads of examples sentences and exercises to practice on, which you seem to value.
>And it's obvious why: practicing in putting sentences together is much better for learning the rule
This is a misguided idea. You don't learn grammar rules via output practice. You learn grammar rules by reading and listening to content - you listen so much that you start developing an intuition for what sounds right or wrong. You can speed this process up by reading and learning about the grammar (like looking at conjugation tables for different tenses), but all the grammar drills in the world aren't going to make you fluent. You need to be able to comprehend before you output.
>I've never spent any time in any of the languages I've learnt deliberately memorizing vocab.
Well, you're missing out. Memorizing vocab is like the easiest thing to do to rapidly increase your comprehension, and it's basically THE limiting factor in reaching higher levels of fluency. Whenever I interact with a language, I never feel like my grammar is holding me back, it's always my active and passive vocabularies.
>How would I consume the content if I don't yet understand the grammar?
You should focus on learning the basic grammar of a language and it's ~100-200 most common words before consuming content. This can be done incredibly quickly though. And with western European languages, the overlap between languages is massive, grammar and vocabulary both. Learning the present, past, future tense, the basic conjugations, subject-verb-object word order, just enough of the basics to be able to survive once you start consuming. It sounds scary at first, but it gets very easy to consume stuff very quickly. And you start with stuff aimed at kids, not adult content. Think watching Peppa Pig and reading graded readers.
>"Duolingo is garbage."
>Why?
You supposedly just watched a whole 20 minite video where Lamont just explained it to you.
@@WhiteScorpio2 I don't have time to get into a long winded argument with you over this. All I'll say is that immersion (consuming content) with supplement from a textbook (to understand grammar points and provide starting vocab) does everything you want.
You say that after completing DuoLingo you were ready to consume content you wanted. This is a lie. DL leaves you at roughly a B1 level at best - and your listening and reading skills will be garbage, as you've only been exposed to simple single sentences with not context. Consuming a native level TV show takes a lot of practice to work up to. Reading an adult novel takes a 10k+ vocabularly size - DL does maybe 2k words by its own estimation, and it counts conjugations as separate words.
My methods, memorizing 200 words and learning the basic grammar concepts, take no more than two weeks. Imagine being able to watch content in your target language in a week! Meanwhile, people like yourself slave over DL for months or years, so that they can finally graduate to attempting to watch or read content.
I went from watching kids TV shows to soap operas and reading Harry Potter in less than 4 months. Solely by lightly reading a textbook as needed, doing daily Anki and learning 20 new words a day, and spending the rest of my time watching kids TV shows, reading graded readers, and otherwise consuming content.
I mean this sincerely - no one who has ever learned a language to any level of real fluency thinks DL was that helpful. All the people who do think it's worthwhile generally suck at their target language. They think they know a language, but they're probably B1 or B2 at best, and severely overestimate their abilities. It takes thousands of hours to master a language - why would you waste 400+ hours playing a language learning game that's only useful for A1/A2 level learning? You should be able to move beyond DL in a few short weeks.
@@lazydictionary only spoke truth🔥
I did four months intensive duo in Spanish to get me through the basics fast. I then combined with conversation exchange until I didn't need it. A great kickstart to learning but your motivation is the most important as no miracle method exists.
Duolingo is a decent gateway to start learning. It gave me a start with the new alphabet and some basics and made me go to an actual language learning class where i had a leg up, but i found the actual class to be way more productive. I think its best used as a supplement to actually taking a class, or as a refresher if you don`t talk or read the language daily.
In Japanese it is a very decent way to review vocabulary topics you might have forgotten about. The extremely strict translation part of it is infuriating for such a contextual language, but if you already know in advance that it's not "the one way" it can be a decent refresher. There's very common words I embarrassingly forgot even existed because they don't come up in daily life enough, but Duolingo reviews reminded me about.
ive watch a dozen of ur videos this year, and i finally subscribed today! thanks for this in depth video❤
I will say I think the Duolingo French podcast is very good. The fact they regularly produce episodes with high quality audio and have the entire transcript for free has been a huge help. It gives me the benefit of expanding my vocabulary through reading while also acquiring the language naturally through listening. Other podcasts require that you pay for the full transcript, which is completely fair, but it's great that Duolingo does this for free. The only issue is that they only offer podcasts for French, Spanish, and English for Spanish speakers (I think)
"The only issue." It’s entirely useless to me. If they decide Arabic isn't worth their time, the resources will go to...music and math? Instead of LANGUAGE. Oh brother!
@foreverdreamwithinadream6871
- I'm interested in knowing how you came to the conclusion that only French and Spanish see any benefit with Duolingo?
Personally, I agree with you that the stories are where it's at, BUT, big caveat... they're only in languages for which there are TONS of other resources, so then Duo rules itself out again.
But your take is, I would say, somewhat strange - because why not German? German has stories. I'm fairly sure Portuguese does too, and maybe even Mandarin?