I'm a Norwegian who is doing the Norwegian course for extra gems, and there are quite a few errors and things that are just straight up wrong. for instance there was a word where the "correct" translation was a name, not a translation, and several mispronounications that change the entire meaning of some words (for instance the world "stolte" which can mean both to be proud and having trusted someone, depending on pronounciation)
@@ElMona Interesting to know, as a Canadian learning Norwegian on Duolingo. I do wish there was some native speaker/natural conversation content in there like other languages have. When they had the sentence discussions I found those very helpful because there were native speakers who moderated and provided feedback, and it's really too bad that they're gone.
@ElMona I'm not Norwegian myself, but when I heard Duolingo's pronunciation of "krydres," I knew it couldn't be right. It sounded like a Norwegian saying creed-race xD I really liked learning Norwegian, though, since it's very similar (especially in word order) to Dutch, my native language. Knowing Frisian, (some) German and English definitely helps too.
Oh, thank you. I started learning Norwegian last year but gave up because asian languages keep me very busy. I found it is very easy to learn if you are a English. I love how it sound.
What kills me about Duolingo Spanish is that every time there's an update, they shuffle things around and I get weird vocab words I've never seen before pop up like I should know them, and concepts i covered months ago show up as new content. I have no idea what I've missed because there's no real patch notes for me to go back and see. I do really like it because although I'm motivated to learn Spanish, my wife isn't as much so, and it's easy to turn it into a game between us to keep her motivated to learn every day. Note: I'm not some monster forcing this poor woman to learn Spanish, we have plans to visit Central America in a couple years and want to be prepared.
I actually just spoke to my friend about my issue with the Spanish course yesterday and how it got jumbled after they left behind the tree design and then again a few times so I actually don't have certain vocab that one wouldn't be wrong to assume I'd know based on my accent and grammar. Spanishdict has been a godsend for a lot of aspects luckily, but it is annoying that so much basic vocabulary that WAS being given to me by duolingo is now not there at all or somewhere in the old lessons with poor labeling or coming in very spaced out then not reinforced nearly enough.
Prior to travelling to Amsterdam this year for only 5 days, my 16 yr old daughter completed the entire Duo Dutch course in about 8 months. In the end she did not need to know Dutch at all in Amsterdam - if you’ve ever been there you’ll understand. BUT she was super proud of the fact that she understood all the signs and what she sometimes overheard ppl saying. Additionally she has made several online Dutch friends who are happy to communicate with her in Dutch. She chats with them daily and is doing so well! Living proof that the Duo course was very effective.
Awesome! Yeah you can get by with English just fine here, but it's definitely a different experience knowing some Dutch. Makes you more independent too. She's goed bezig
good to know! I'm going to the Netherlands this Spring and while I'll be taking a Dutch class there, I was considering working on that independently ahead of time
Duolingo used to be a very competent language learning platform. There was a lesson section, even in some of its less popular languages, like Romanian. And the forums were a great way to get input from native speakers into vernacular phrases and to clarify misconceptions. But when I downloaded it again last year, it was changed entirely for the worst. Not only are the lessons no longer available, now there's a life system that prevents you from progressing if you make the typical mistakes that are bound to happen when learning a language. And even more so, when you are deprived of the lesson primer that was meant to give you a minuscule idea of the grammar behind the sentences you're filling in. It's pretty much candy crush, but less slay.
I've been doing Romanian on Duolingo and it's terrible. They removed all the lessons that explain grammar, conjugations, etc. There's no actual explanations of anything now. The voice is so bad and the lessons randomly leave out words. I have my Romanian SO sit with me while I do it to correct it.
yes i struggle every time using duolingo to understand the grammar or reasons for something vs just learning flash cards it feels so disappointing to never be able to actually understand enough to make my own sentences like school lessons were . might be me but wish there was more help/information/context
The lack of explanations on conjugations is a big red flag for me. German has ich, du, er, sie, es, wir, ihr, sie, Sie. Duolingo doesnt explain any of those when it comes to masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns and verbs. Same thing with Ukrainian. For the word "my", theres мій, моя, мої, and мене as far as ive seen. I have no clue what the difference between them is.@@kelseym8040
I started with Korean a few days ago because I want to spice up my Korean skills before I take a proper course somewhere in Korea. Kind of wish I could take an intermediate at that point and not a beginner but we shall see... (obv not relying only on duolingo). Duolingo has been driving me mad. It's like "let's learn new words!" - here are your new words: Washington, London, Tokyo, Philadelphia, Princeton. Like, what the actual... I wanted to learn KOREAN. Not how to write American cities in hangeul. 🙄
What pisses me off with the Korean Duolingo is that it sometimes just straight up doesn’t say the words it wants you to translate. At an early level it REALLY sucks because my listening comprehension is easily triple my reading comprehension when it comes to Korean.
Exactly! My basic Korean listening and reading is great and the start of the course seems to be all loan words. But it's so annoying I can't push past the early stage to see if it gets better. I can say Boston very well in Korean now.
"pardon my French" "pardon my Yiddish" I feel that you have a goal to be pardoned in as many languages as possible. Can't wait for the F bomb followed by "pardon my English"
I'm a Duolingo veteran and completed 11 courses between 2014-2018, mostly Germanic and Slavic, in many cases not long after the courses first went live. The Dutch and Danish courses were good enough to get me near-fluent, and I sat A-level Dutch in 2016 and got the highest grade. The Polish course is also excellent, really rigorous and comprehensive. All the courses were volunteer-made which is why the quality and length varies a lot - the only reason the Norwegian course is like that is because the volunteers were really passionate and added so much content. The Hungarian course is notorious for being broken and was stuck in beta for years (I don't know if it still is) - learners would reach a point about two-thirds of the way through that was basically impassable. The main complaint long-time users like myself have is the "enshittification" of Duolingo. So many good features have been gotten rid of or made pay-only. The whole thing is way more cartoonish, ad-infested and dumbed-down than it was a decade ago.
@@eurovicious I completed the Duolingo trees (as they were then) for Spanish, Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish prior to entshittification. I thought that the Turkish course was pretty excellent. The Finnish course taught what it tried to teach very clearly, but seemed to only scratch the surface of a wonderful, but difficult, language. The Hungarian course was, as you say, a bit of a mess. It taught a huge amount of material in too few lessons and got worse as you went along. It felt like trying to drink from a firehose.
I remember back in I think 2016-17 Duolingo didn't have their current shitty heart system, but had a three strikes thing in all lessons that you find currently only in the level skip things. I feel like that three strikes may have been a bit too harsh, but I think I'd prefer it to the current one which is basically just a scheme to get you to get Super Duolingo.
The enshittification is all too real. Forums/discussions were eliminated: the money guys apparently didn't like users actually banding together and discussing things--or, gasp, complaining. Hearts and gems were added, so there's no longer free and unlimited use and you're afraid to make mistakes, which is the worst case scenario for any learning process. Cartoony voices were added to "kiddify" the whole thing--someone smack that Oscar character with a fish, please. Courses are constantly altered on a seeming whim, to where I have no idea where I stand in one and what I'll be learning in the future.
I was doing Korean but non of the suffixes or verb conjugations were treated separately ;-; maybe they did later in course but at that point I've moved to better sources
Duolingo isn't gonna get me to learn languages on it's own but it optimises the 5-20 minute downtime I have on public transport and keeps me productive . It's a great bonus to my language learning experience . I compare it to Tajin . I can't live off of Tajin but a little bit goes nicely with a lot of different foods . That being said I'm always happy to check out new language learning resources and love your content
Agreed! I think it's really helpful on the first stages of learning a language, when consuming content in target language is still too challenging. But later I would rather just watch a youtube video or read something short in that language
Old people at home who are just having fun may be like me. Duolingo is fun. Rosetta Stone is free from my library. Babbel is also fun. You tube is awesome. Netflix usually has either the audio or subtitles of the language I want to study. There are free tv apps of the language I am studying. Pot is legal. X lets me vent. Poor me in this world.
Thanks!😂❤😊. Your humour, honesty, and yes… sarcasm… brings laughter to my (sometimes) tedious study of spanish. The sharing of your knowledge from several postings is much appreciated.
I was just waiting for you to mention the Dutch content because that's what I've been studying for the past few years. I'm one of the eight! Woo-hoo! I do get a little jealous when I hear about the features and stories that the Spanish learners get.
Duolingo Norwegian has so much content because, when it was user-driven, the administrator-volunteers put a LOT of energy into creating (what was then) the best course on the platform with more content than the courses Duilingo thenselves produced.
One thing I do really like using Duolingo for: when it gives you the matching exercise where it wants you to pair 5 words to their English equivalent, I like to take all of the words it gives me and build sentences out of them. Even if it doesn’t make sense for those words to be used together, I MAKE them make sense. It’s a fun exercise, and it forces you to really think in your target language, because you’ll probably have to invent your own sentences; the prompts Duo has been giving you probably won’t cut it if your sentences are going to make sense. I’d recommend trying it.
This is what strikes me - AI even has trouble pronouncing English correctly sometimes. Why would you trust it with a language that has a smaller dataset, given that the data comes from the Internet and the majority of content on the Internet isn't in Irish.
@@the_newt_nest right?! You'd expect the AI in English to be close to the best available, given the amount of data they have for it. If there are errors in the English AI there are bound to be even more in less common (on the internet) languages!
@@Risky_Santucci Duolingo might still be an okay option for learning some grammar? Just definitely put it on mute when using it. There are plenty of great textbooks you can use to learn also. When it comes to listening to native speakers speak, "TG4" is the Irish-language tv station in Ireland so that should be a good place to listen to the language correctly pronounced
The Welsh course is entirely made by volunteers, hence why no speaking practice etc, but was supported by the Welsh Government to align with government standard taught courses in Wales. However, there is no explanation of mutations or even the difference between chi and ti, unless you go digging on the internet- the volunteers put such effort into the course and DuoLingo just shat on them from a great height. Now the Welsh course has been mothballed, meaning no more updates.
If I remember correctly from dabbling in the Welsh course, it's very colloquial and quite North Walian in pronunciation and vocab. It didn't sound much like the Welsh I grew up hearing in Carmarthenshire. I think it would have given my Gu conniptions.
About 40 days into the Welsh course and I’m just getting more confused. There really is no grammar explanation at all. I might keep up with it just for fun, but it’s sad knowing what I’m learning is probably fairly useless
PSA: the audio on the Japanese course is often incorrect and I would highly discourage anyone from using the Japanese course on Duolingo because you won't know how it's incorrect unless you already speak Japanese
I just downloaded duolingo to check out the Japanese audio specifically because of this comment. I hope it’s as frustratingly entertaining as I’m imagining
i dont use duolingo for audio resources i use it for vocab most of the times, i acc practice jp speaking and listening getting references from anki decks (• •;)
Same with Irish, I'm a native speaker, was curious about the Irish course when it popped out and couldn't understand a word they were saying. I'm not great with other dialects but this wasn't that issue,,,, it was just,,,, pronounced unintelligibly
Heartfelt (and “mind-felt”) thanks, Doctor J. I came to your videographic wells first for the linguistic out-nerding, and have come back for something hard to name, but definitely connected to “Blue Mountain Hamlet” (!)
The reason Norwegian is an outlier is that it has been done by a group of very dedicated, skilled contributors. As such, it is much better than other, centralised, courses I did (Italian). They did not only add pieces of actual Norwegian culture in there, they also did it in a fun way. Now, Norwegian is a simple language for me because I know both German and English. But I went straight from doing the course to reading books. That's how good the course is (thank you, Lynn, if you ever wander in here). If you are doing more than one of the centralised courses, you will get bored by the stories quickly because they are the same everywhere, so even if you don't understand a lot of Spanish, you just know it's the same story you already listened to in the Italian course.
@@ElMona You shouldn't try to learn pronunciation in Duolingo, these are Google AI voices. What other errors did you find? How is it bad if one can read books after completing it?
Was also an early adopter of the Norwegian course. Only has a hobby, but it helped me get to B1! Lynn and the team did a great job and I do miss them. Although there were some errors, it jump started you in a really good way. And the comment sections were super useful with the team always replying. Once Duolingo got rid of the comments I knew it was going downhill.
@@ElMona I do not know the course, but could you say some examples? I always assume that type of thing to be due to regional differences. Are the mistakes like that, or are they straight-up typos and stuff? Also: I remember on a Norwegian language subreddit, somebody said that they were stuck trying to translate “hvor fant du den snusen?” Into English, because they didn’t know the word “snus”. I think duolingo should not use terms like “snus”, which is not common in English.
I enjoy Duolingo less as a language study tool, more as a language mobile game. With that in mind, I enjoy it quite a bit. I think your conclusion is on point. It's a great way to try out a language, and learn a few hundred words for a foundation, and give you a boost toward more serious study.
That's exactly how I see it. It is a game, I can confirm what he was saying about Czech. I was pronouncing things crazily. I am going to switch to western European language
That's fine, then. Just please, out of consideration for other students who have been working on learning Irish, do not ever join a regular language class as anything other than a beginner. Personal experience: I attended an immersion course where one participant, who had learned what Irish he had from Duolingo, decided to put himself into the highest class (where people have excellent vocabularies and are fluent speakers) because he had finished the Duolingo course. He was completely unable to keep up, and partner work with him was miserable because he had such a minute vocabulary. The teacher -- well, I don't know whether she saw him as a challenging project or an object of pity, but she didn't get rid of him, and I think the rest of us lost most of the benefit of the course.
It is my understanding that the US military did not simply use Navajo as a code. They used a "normal" code but instead putting English into code they put Navajo into code.
"Navajo speakers who had not been trained in the code work would have no idea what the code talkers' messages meant; they would hear only truncated and disjointed strings of individual, unrelated nouns and verbs."
There was a light coding process, where the first letter of something in English would be switched to a different word and then translated, so it would seem like nonsense on its face, but it really wouldn't take long to figure out what words were being used for specific kinds of planes, tanks, artillery pieces, etc... As long as you had someone who could translate the Navajo into English, and others who could work on the translated messages.
I'm a teacher of Japanese language and when I was researching possible sources for my students I decided to check Duolingo - it has an option to solve a test to skip to the highest level and I spent unnecessary 2 HOURS trying to finish the final level and the only reason was not Japanese at all but ENGLISH - almost all the tasks were based on putting an English sentence as a translation of a Japanese sentence and I was constantly not passing for not putting EXACTLY the ENGLISH sentence that there was supposed to be. That was so exhausting and at the end I just had to Google those English sentences to finally get them right because additionally putting a British spelling or a synonym of a word was giving a fail. And not only this type of exercise is absolutely useless on advanced level (why heavily rely on a different language when you're supposed to be already fluent in another one) but also the Japanese sentences the user was asked to translate had many mistakes. Many many mistakes. Can't imagine anyone can get anything out of Duolingo when it comes to Japanese, even the video creator sounds rather confused about the language why there shouldn't be a reason if the source is good.
Hard agree. I lived in Japan for several years when I was a teen and am almost fluent. I wanted to use Duolingo to supplement my skills and stay current, but it's just sooooo awful for Japanese
I'm at an absolute beginner level and even at that level Duolingo fails. Don't know why but Duo kinda felt the need to repeat the same six words for the entire first unit over and over again and for whatever reason "sushi" was one of the first japanese words I had to learn :/
I used Duolingo for Dutch and it worked great for me! I went there and was pleasantly surprised to be able to have actual conversations with people in Dutch, as long as they saw the idea that I was a learner and took it easy on me. Full speed from natives who don't get the idea doesn't work, but what does work is a LOT of fun and fairly useful in reading some signs and things without having to ask for help. Plus they all speak excellent English and it's easy to get along there anyway. But you get a LOT of credit for trying and they really like you for it. You get special treatment from museum docents and others, too. I ended up seeing things the average tourist wouldn't. I've now been there four months in the last three years, coming from San Diego, CA.
Something I’d like to add is that for some reason, the duo Japanese course doesn’t start consistently teaching you the kanji form of words until like 50 hours in, which means that until you get there, you won’t be able to read almost any Japanese outside of duo, even extremely simple sentences.
I attended an actual in-person Japanese course in university (1.5h once a week) and it was the same there. Didn't really start with Kanji until the next semester. I still don't think that's a good idea.
Kanji is not important to simply understand the language, and honestly I don't even recommend learning it to everyone. I find it incredibly useful personally, but to some who just want to speak as fast as possible, it's a lot of time that can be saved. And, you can get plugins and whatnot to throw up furigana which can help you read from most online sources. This is coming from someone who's studies are mainly kanji right now.
Duo started showing me Kanji like 5-10 hours in with little to no context and it confused the hell out of me, but I started a few years back so it sounds like they've since pushed the kanji back.
I went back and forth on whether to include that, since there are people who very seriously believe that Rome didn’t (doesn’t?) exist, and it’s all an elaborate hoax
@@languagejones If you consider that the Latin that Caesar wrote and that 99% of people learning Latin will study, is not a language that people will have been speaking on the streets of Rome, then yes, it's true that it's invented.
@@languagejones The "Rome didn't exist" claim has to be a hoax itself. There's no way anyone can dispute its existence when you can fly to Rome and go see the Forum, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum, not to mention Pompeii, Herculaneum and other ancient Roman remnants across Europe and North Africa.
Living in Texas on the gulf, I run into tons of people who only speak Spanish. I'm not sure about other places in the US, but regionally It always made sense to me why Spanish was the main language to learn because I'm going to interact with a lot of people who speak it.
That doesn't really work here in Florid, so many people only speak Spanish that I would not be supprrised if the state makes Spanish a co official language. I don't have time to argue with people at work to speak in English si I just speak in Spanish if they want. I have had someone yell at me for speaking to them in English instead of Spanish. Don't really care, personally, lived in many countries and the United States doesn't feel like a nation to me. So I have no expectations of national identy or language and I think thats the way it should stay.@@duekansickalsiawsoxksiay1940
Thanks for a very informative summary. I'm glad I'm on my sister's family plan for Duoliguo (which she got to better interact with her live-in Vietnamese D-i-L), as I used it first to scrape the rust off my Hindi after a few years away and TOTALLY agree with your dogwater assessment. I will say that its Hindi is so bad it had the unexpected benefit of making me realise I had NOT lost as much as I'd feared. But at least in my case, the price is right.😁
I stopped not learning a language with Duolingo ages ago but my friend got me to start not learning a language with Lingo Legend instead. Neither option really does it for me - I don't retain much from either, but Lingo Legend has gameplay that I like so I stick with it. Honestly if Duolingo had a little virtual pet that I had to keep alive with my streak I'd probably still use it. Like they leaned way too hard into the owl being scary and threatening you. But they should have threatened the owl and told me how hungry it was and that the only way I can afford food for it is to do my Spanish lessons.
@@dankwojak3689 Oh hey! I did that with an app that had virtual plants once. That's how I learned that my "dehydration" was actually an electrolyte imbalance that was made worse by drinking more water. So now whenever I feel "dehydrated" while at the same time water nauseates me, I know I need more electrolytes actually. My doctor told me to stop lowering my salt intake (something my doctors have been telling me since I was a kid due to high blood pressure) and start putting a pinch of salt in my water and see if that helps and it got rid of a lot of my worst chronic mystery symptoms.
Hearing your rendition of Tennessee-accented Shakespeare in the midst of a discussion of Yiddish gave me flashbacks to my own high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. Our Yente sounded exactly like Minnie Pearl, bless her heart. And, well, the less said about my take on Tevye, the better.
I have been studying Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo for a year and a half and I love the course. There are so few resources for this language, and even fewer with audio, that I am delighted to see how long it is. The audio, while missing occasionally, is all real recordings (one of them even sings a bit from the kid's show Dòtaman), expressing the appropriate emotion for the content, and representing a variety of dialects, which can be confusing but also provides a broader sense of how the spelling relates to pronunciation. From the posts which we used to have access to in the former discussions, people compared the Scottish Gaelic course very favorably over both the Irish and Welsh courses, which they found severly lacking in accuracy and overall quality.
I'm also taking Scottish Gaelic. I find the personality behind some of the sentences to be fun. (Iain is stupider than a seagull. Watch out for Mairi, she steals underwear.) Since my family is from Nova Scotia I enjoyed the section for the Nova Scotian dialect. I just wish they had the option for the learner to speak.
Also a Scottish Gaelic learner who completed the course twice (after ‘finishing,’ they doubled the content, so just this year I finished that section). I started when they first launched it and it was 100% crowd-sourced & an act of linguistic passion. The grammar notes are worth a read for their humor & creativity even if you’re not studying the language. Then, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig took over, and the content is much less quirky, the grammar notes have been suppressed, and yet it still lacks the more advanced Duolingo features like voice recognition and stories. 😢 Worst of both worlds.
Thanks for all this work! I live in Georgia (the country) but grew up in Indiana (the state), so I’ve needed to learn Georgian. I can’t imagine how it would work on Duolingo, which is probably why (along with the number of speakers) that it isn’t there. But I was a university level Russian instructor in a previous life, and I really enjoy Duolingo for helping me remember my Spanish, learn some French, brush up my very rusty Hungarian, and play around with Hawaiian and Polish. Everything you said rings true to my experience. When I think back to how limited resources were when I was learning Russian, I’m so impressed at the availability of such a breadth of resources.
I speak Japanese decently well and I got my foundation in the writing system and basic vocab on Duolingo but quickly found myself needing to go look for actual study resources to make real improvement. My actual Japanese Duolingo experience now a few years later is slogging through some extremely simplistic grammar while occasionally finding unique words I haven't encountered before. I'm glad Duolingo exists but I'm pretty sure I've exhausted it's potentially at this point. Fully agree with your assessment.
My situation is fairly similar. I tried Duolingo JP when I was first getting into it (keep in mind this was back in 2016ish), took the Duo course for a good three days maybe (?) then gave up on it because I was already familiar with all of katakana and hiragana after 2ish days of memorizing them from a table I made in an old notebook. I returned to it in 2022 after being self-taught up to where I am now, high N3-low N2 (low N3 at the time), and yeah holy crap is it bad for if you're looking to learn Japanese from scratch.
Exactly! I've been doing the Japanese course and the AI audio is just ok. Considering Japanese is the 3rd most demanded course, I think some investment is in order
I have to admit that I indulged in the "shock locals" kind of video for a little bit. The best thing that I got from that is that I eventually landed in this channel. So, I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time haha
I hate to say it but this is totally a "shock locals" kind of video - the idea that a single person who, admittedly, has a good grasp of linguistics can comprehensively review every duolingo language for quality is still asinine. He's guessing at the lengths and final proficiencies, and doesn't really go into the factors that define "learning difficulty" or quality for different languages from an anglophone perspective. He mentions having a leg up when new grammar concepts are introduced, but what about unintuitable logographic scripts like Hanzi and Kanji? Kind of feels like your friend who has something to say about any and every wine - you're pretty sure he has zero authority or insight on some, but because he's a "wine guy" he makes redundant non-statements with absolute confidence.
@@doctorbones941 you're right but at the same time i'm not sure there's anyone else who HAS done this, so we might as well take his word for it lol. i for one am not going to play through every duo course so this is a useful resource
@@doctorbones941 "Admittedly, has a good grasp of linguistics"? He has a PhD in linguistics, if you are going to imply smug over-confidence you might want to look in the mirror one day.
@@duggersdugers65When I make a video reviewing 30 people's reviews of every duolingo course with no data to substantiate it, I'll be sure to look in the mirror in horror. Until then, feel free to read the rest of the comment and address any of the actual points made.
I learned Portuguese on Duolingo, and it ended up landing me a job at a school 😅. I never expected that picking up a language out of boredom would help me find the life that I always wanted. Of course, I complemented my learning process with reading books, listening to music and watching videos in Portuguese.
I've been pretty impressed with the effort they've put into Scottish Gaelic, and it's been fun watching it improve. Thanks as always for great content.
Yes, I was surprised to see it was the 8th largest course on Duolingo, considering it's one of the least learned on the platform and especially how recently it was made compared to the other languages. I was also surprised to see it was a level 3 language as it's been one of the easiest languages I've learnt out of the 20 or so languages I've tried. I guess that shows how well they've made the course. Especially compared to BBC Alba's Speak Gaelic where I don't think I would really be able to learn anything from.
I'm using duolingo to supplement my Chinese learning, and the best thing they have done for Chinese in the past year is to add a section where you draw characters. Yes, obviously I could be practicising my writing with pen and paper, but since I'm self-studying and no one checks my homework, I tend to skip the tedium of writing the same character fifteen times over. The gamification of duolingo really helps with that.
@@TheDudeGuyBroManPerson But... don't they? You can turn off the pinyin in the settings and then have only the characters. And in the word match tasks (with the English on the left and the Chinese on the right) I just tap on the English first so that I don't hear the pronunciation until I've made a choice. I think having no pinyin is actually another benefit of duolingo for me. Wow, I sound like I'm paid to advertise duolingo here.
I am a B2 level in French ( B1 in writing, B2 in speaking and C1 in reading and listening). Any thoughts on being able to get to C1 in writing and speaking with Duolingo?)
You're doing what people have intuitively known for years, at least those more concerned with depth on its failings and benefits. You've put it rather succinctly in this video and gave the best quantitative approach I've seen yet. I used Duolingo for German and found it intensely frustrating the more skilled I became. It did however provide a great testing ground as a supplement and one indispensable for my pursuits to use the language in Germany. It has its place, but needs improvement like anything else.
While I know Duo won’t get me fluent in French, it did prepare me for visiting Montréal. I was able to employ VERY VERY basic French to buy things and was able to easily navigate public signage/notices in French. Which ended up being very helpful as the transit system has very little English signage.
As a native Hebrew speaker, I agree with you that the course itself is good, but most exercises don't have their alternative ways count as correct, which is something I noticed the french course is really good at. So, if you know Hebrew natively and you try out the course, you'd get more answers wrong than you'd expect to, because your ways of solving exercises aren't the ways that are counted by Duolingo.
I've been on Duolingo for a over a decade and have used it to brush up my French, Italian and German and learn Welsh, Dutch and Arabic from almost scratch. I also tried Turkish but gave up after a couple of weeks. In the Welsh learning community there is an enormous amount of debate about the value of Duolingo. The course used to be a lot better when the comments were included, ie before enshittification, and the Welsh government have supported the course and ensured it links well with the government supported and subsidised live courses. For me, it got me to A2 when combined with watching TV (especially kids TV) during lockdown, so that I could skip the first couple of years of classes. The main competition in Welsh is Say Something in Welsh, which some love but which was too audio based for me. For Arabic I felt it was never going to teach me to speak, only to understand the script. After months of using it daily I hadn't learned any real verbs! Great analysis anyway.
Can you recommend any kids series in Welsh which are also available online? Since there are no Welsh courses where I live, I try to use as many sources as possible in addition to Duolingo.
@@ShinyStarfire It's only going to get you so far, but search out "Now You're Talking: Welsh", an early 1990s video series, which I think is mostly available on UA-cam. There are over 30 short videos. Focuses mostly on conversations and features both North and South Wales dialects, with common situations you might encounter, whilst acting out a mini-soap, with some questionable fashion choices. Also visits lots of towns and cities all over Wales and so you find out about places round the country too.
The Turkish course is, in my opinion really bad. I've learned Turkish at evening classes and with private tutors. I have semi-conversational Turkish but Duolingo teaches tenses by starting with a tense which is rarely used.
@@ShinyStarfireIdk any of the tv shows. But a lot of the offical courses are done virtually over zoom. If you google learn welsh or dysgy cymraeg, you'll see the main site as the link. If your under 25 you'll get the courses for free
about the Yiddish course: I studied it and finished it while it was in beta, moved to other languages, and recently came back to see what changed since. to my amazement, it seems that the course got WORSE when it came out of beta. longer for sure, but lower quality, with a lot of pointless padding. also, one thing that automatically makes this version worse is there not being a comment section. if they don't teach me grammar rules and I don't have the comments to consult, I will literally never learn that some nouns behave like other grammatical genders in different cases.
I don't know what the Yiddish word for "enshittification" is, but I'm sure there is one. As someone who had taken some YIVO Yiddish classes, the Duolingo Yiddish course was just... odd, at least at first. I get that it was a compromise, but it was jarring if you had any background in the language from either side of that disagreement. Though as a compromise, I did kind of love what they decided to do? But the abolition of the comments section is really, seemingly deliberately unhelpful on Duolingo's part.
'If you've been under a rock....' Duolingo will still find you! Professor Jones puts correlation coefficients into language learning videos. Excellent! I expected nothing less....
I can say from experience that Duolingo has helped me do one thing I wanted to do for Japanese: recognize and read hiragana. I learned katakana first for a video game years ago, so I was learning backwards. I don't know if it's the best for kanji, but I've learned a few, so I'll look into videos here on UA-cam, maybe. As you said, it's not good for speaking properly, but I think it is good for learning the structure of the language. Heck, I'm still using it, so that's a testament to it.
Ive been using it to practise hiragana nearly every day, I think the process of tracing the strokes and repeated audio of them is helping me remember them for when I visit Japan in two years :)
Duolingo sentences: Our horse does not eat bread. Papa eats pizza on the subway. The stone is in the cafe. Is Papa an engineer? Sigh. I have not had to use any of these sentences yet in real life.
I found on the Spanish course I don't really get these kinds of nonsense sentences (except for one set of lessons where all the examples were about animals learning languages). Definitely a lot of unevenness here.
From a chat I had with an Irish man who was also learning Irish (or re-learning it? He has connections to Irish speakers in the home country, and of course they learn a solid chunk of it in school) he was really disappointed in the course's AI voices. Their pronunciation was frequently all over the place, and didn't really have a 'home accent'. The main problem I had was that they seemed to cut off the first half-second of each word? For example, I had one listening exercise where you had to hit the button to listen to a word, and then press the corresponding written word. Both "te" (hot) and "im" (butter) were options, but each of their audios sounded like a grunt, despite these words sounding completely differently when properly sounded out. And if you guess the wrong one? That's one less life for you! This happened more than once a day on average, sometimes twice or thrice in a single section, and when the app is constantly shoving "spend money to get unlimited hearts" ads in your face, it feels a little more than scummy. It was like if I were to ask someone whether I was saying "Castellano" or "Está bien" by going "tae". Not fun. It got to the point where I dropped Duolingo entirely, because why try to learn a principally-spoken language through an app when the pronunciations are dreadful and the audio cuts out half the time?
It is kinda fun how the beginner language learner just kinda uses duolingo because they don't know any better but the more advanced language learner starts to dislike duolingo because they experienced more useful ressources but then suddenly the acadamic linguist says that duolingo can actually work really well if used optimally
It is so odd that has now become the common thinking. The way I see it, all kinds of resources work well when you are a complete beginner. Duolingo is even lacking as a phrasebook or a very nice friedly app for newbies. Eventually you get past the point you can say "hello", "banana" or "A boy is in the room" but still have much to go, and that is where losing motivation can be a factor. Duolingo works in that situation, mostly using your toilet time, and keeps moving you forward. Building sentences is important, and Duolingo is not that much different from a book of exercises in that sense. Over the years, I've used some extremely frustrating textbooks that try to teach you over 50 new words before a lesson or do not track their vocabulary much. Duolingo's average course is USUALLY a bit more predictable, even if it does not reach the polish and the length of ES
It would be great if you made a mini follow-up for the languages learnable using other languages but not available for English users on the duolingo app. These languages are Guarani and Catalan for Spanish speakers and Cantonese for Mandarin speakers.
@@dogcatdogable I mean my mandarin right now is shit tier. I'd have to put a lot of work in to be able to use it to ladder to Cantonese. But good Cantonese content is so hard to find there's a non zero chance it'd be worth the effort.
@@Didntwanttomakeauser i did a few lessons. A lot of it was just changing traditional characters to simplified and vice versa. Since duolingo is more focused on writing and the biggest differences are in speaking, it's not as hard as you would first think
Romanian Duolingo learner here, Spanish and English native speaker - standout is a bit of an understatement. The course recently just axed a whole section of 20 units (which, to be fair, was purely reviewing concepts and words already taught but with harder exercises) and it only adds to a feeling of a lack of support because there's a ton of missing features. No stories, no speaking exercises, and a severe underutilization of important concepts such as different tense conjugations, prepositions, and reflexive verbs after they are taught. And that's not to mention the inconsistency of definitions an expressions used (ie. prăjituri is taught as cookies or cakes, and torturi is also taught as cakes, but Duolingo will not always accept the different interpretations even when it fails to provide context necessary to know that prăjituri and torturi are not synonymous, or when prăjituri is not cookies). Conjugations, in particular, are taught so late into the course that it is hard to internalize it through coursework, and from the little research I have made into Romanian there's a lot of common conjugations that never get explained, such as imperative. My reading and writing are okay, but I still don't feel like I have a solid grasp of Romanian after completing the course (and by complete I mean having half of my progress in the last section denied and the other erased). Definitely needs to be supported with other learning materials, and a good chunk of added/reworked content to make sure Duolingo learners are not be stuck in present tense communication.
I've been slowly going thru the Yiddish course on Duolingo and didn't know the subtleties. Your description of it was quite amusing as being like Shakespeare speeches in a Tennessee accent..
"Asymmetrically mutually intelligible" is a good description of the Scandinavian languages. As a native Swedish speaker with some friends who speak Danish and Norwegian, the impression I get is that Swedish and Danish speakers both understand Norwegian better than they understand the third language, and that Norwegian speakers understand Swedish & Danish even better than they are understood by speakers of those. While this is probably partly due to historical and social factors not inherent to the languages themselves, I still suspect learning only Norwegian would give you a better shot at understanding the other Scandinavian languages than learning only Swedish or Danish.
Can confirm. I’m four months into Norwegian and half the folks I started following on IG ended up being Danish because I couldn’t tell the difference. It’s now a running joke with my tutor. Annnnd, I discovered yesterday a song I really like is in Norwegian AND Danish FML 😆😂🤣
@sarahdawson975 makes sense. Norwegian Bokmål is basically Danish with spelling errors 😂 (sorry Norwegian friends. I love you and your sing-song language. Don't mind my potato please)
Your description of Duolingo Yiddish had me glad I was language learning on the toilet because thwt honestly sounds like a hot mess and i love it. I never knew i needed southern drawl shakespear
In my limited experience, I find two things about languages that make my experience with the free version Duolingo better. First, having some familiarity with the language helps a lot. Also, how phonetic a language is can make a big difference. In French, I can use up mistakes real quick if it's wanting me to spell a word I don't recognize. In German or Italian, I sound it out and have a good chance of getting it right. The paid version does help with both those issues.
I have a problem with the Polish course - on polish subreddit we constantly get people, who are confused by the case system. Questions like "Why in this sentence is it 'pies' but in this one it's 'psem'?". It seems that there isn't like a mandatory intro to the language or at least grammar explanation that is easily findable/accessible. I myself tried learning Korean, but it was so unstructured then, that I gave up and just used TTMIK and other resources.
@@amorupatieee It seems like it. I love TTMIK. I was able to learn some Korean even when my English wasn't very good. I also managed to learn more English thanks to them. haha
I'm finish polish course and I say it has less mistake that I suppose to approach. Les then 5 in whole course. I also read comments and see that the sentences are changed continuously to be better and better. Now when they use AI I notice that the sentences also has more meaning. My crab is fastre then your turtle maybe teach you how to build sentences. But this sentence was useless :D
I want to try TTMIK, I've learned a small amount of korean using howtostudykorean which is really good for grammar, but hard for me to stick at consistently personally. I found the korean duo course to be horrendous, because korean is another language that is based heavily on social context that you just can't get from an app that doesn't explain things. duo is not going to meaningfully teach you the difference between 이다 and 습니다, as a very simple example. That's the kind of thing that needs to be explained via other resources.
Duolingo actually removed the grammar explanations they used to have. Even when they did have grammar explanations, they were only accessible for people using the web version of Duolingo, not for people using the mobile app.
Duolingo was an excellent way for me to dip my toe back into Irish after not speaking a word since school. It was great for dusting off the cobwebs but I moved onto other (better) learning materials fairly quickly.
One issue you didn't really touch on (probably because it's not as relevant for you or your audience) is that duolingo doesn't really tell you the grammar and expects you to figure it out from context. Language learning subreddits are basically flooded with people asking "why is this wrong?", because the are seemingly completely unaware of very basic concepts like gender, cases, declinations etc. Also, when you e.g. get the gender wrong, the correction Duolingo gives you often doesn't simply correct the article but instead changes the noun to a synonym where the article fits. I've only dabbled in Portuguese and Polish and I speak related languages, so it wasn't an issue for me, but English speakers in particular seem to struggle with this.
Thank you for producing a video about Duolingo that isn't just a rant. I really benefited from your other video about how to make Duolingo work for you. The information about each of the modules was invaluable since I've been doing the Ukrainian module on repeat for at least 6 months. Now I am refreshing my high school French. It was also helpful to hear your opinions about the modules, specifically the Yiddish and Hebrew. I was infuriated when I realized the Yiddish wouldn't help me speak with my neighbors and the poor audio quality of the Hebrew just made me cry, although I didn't have as much trouble with "no vowels" as I thought I would. It's so important to get that real-life experience! I predict you will have 1000s of comments... gotta go... and do my daily practice session. ;-)
I did all the DuoLingo content for Ukrainian. It was a good starting point and it was very helpful for learning the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet. It was time well spent, but as you said you won't get to fluency. A good grammar course is needed and I used Lingq to stuff vocabulary into my brain.
As a Ukrainian learner who is trying to become fluent, do you know of any other apps or sources I could use to get closer to fluency? I fully grasp the grammar and alphabet, but I am looking to expand my vocabulary.
@@whitewolffearly0013 I am a language junkie and I've tried a lot of different apps and methods to learn vocabulary. Flashcards don't work for me. The two best ways I find to learn vocabulary are learning the words to songs in that language and the Lingq app which is both web based and it has a mobile app. The free version of the app has a LOT of great material. For EXTRA fun, I have a paid subscription to Lingq and import recordings and transcripts that my Ukrainian friends make for me. I am literally learning the words that my friends use. It makes it easier to understand each person who helps me. I have learned thousands of words on Lingq.
@@whitewolffearly0013LingQ is even free for Ukrainian, in support of the country's plight. You can import texts/UA-cam videos of your interest to use as resources.
@@whitewolffearly0013 I would say, reading is really helpful for both vocabulary and grammar. Thanks God the Ukrainian alphabet is read the way it is written. LingQ is a nice source. Reading from e-readers with pop-up dictionaries, reading in browser with pop-up dictionaries- reading everything helps a lot. Maybe primarily something easy, like comments on UA-cam, after that some stories, songs.
@@whitewolffearly0013 consider Qlango for Ukrainian. I started from scratch there after finishing the Duolingo course and even at the beginning of level A1 words was learning vocabulary not included in Duolingo, and it goes up to B2 level as well. You can modify settings to suit learning style, each unit has different levels, plus you get to learn to write Ukrainian in the final level. Everything is clearly signposted, so if you want you can go back to revise previous topics. Also, it sets up extra lessons automatically for the things you get wrong; and there is lots of extra practice as a result. There are some extra activities outside the lessons. The only things it doesn't cover is learning the alphabet, and testing pronunciation - but I always found that really tricky on Duolingo as it depended a lot on device capability.
I had a HORRIBLE experience with Duolingo Japanese. How many times can the lessons repeat "She's a cool lawyer"? Something I will NEVER say on a trip to Japan? The _FIRST_ Japanese lesson in Pimsleur taught me more useful travel terms than THREE MONTHS of daily Duolingo junk. It was decent for learning hiragana and katakana, but there were massive frustrations with that as well, because you can't easily review what you've learned if you put it down for a while, without completing the entire thing.
Disregarding how good Duolingo Japanese is; You shouldn‘t be concerned with phrase-learning if you want to learn a language properly. It‘s not about learning phrases you will use, it‘s about internalizing (important) words and using them in POSSIBLE sentences. Using your brain to think about the words you learned and creating your own sentences is a fundamental part of the learning process. If you are learning for a trip you can just write down your 50 needed sentences and learn them that way - There‘s no need for (a good) duolingo course to achieve that. Now, as to whether or not their Japanese course is good: It‘s okay. It should never be a primary learning resource for the language. It‘s a way to be in contact with the language outside of your usual learning spaces. Genki is what should dictate most of your learning journey.
@sugar5374 naw fam their Japanese course isn't even good. It actually teaches you bad Japanese manners and actively degrades native nuances of the language and pragmatism
@sugar5374 yeah I agree language learning isn't about parroting phrases. So why does the Duolingo course barely even acknowledge the concept of grammar??? You know, the thing you gotta use if you want to slap your own concepts into a sentence? Not even a hint of how to tell words from particles in spoken Japanese? It's designed to keep you on the treadmill for as long as possible with as little useful knowledge gained as they can get away with (at least the Japanese course)
I'm a teacher of Japanese language and when I was researching possible sources for my students I decided to check Duolingo - it has an option to solve a test to skip to the highest level and I spent unnecessary 2 HOURS trying to finish the final level and the only reason was not Japanese at all but ENGLISH - almost all the tasks were based on putting an English sentence as a translation of a Japanese sentence and I was constantly not passing for not putting EXACTLY the ENGLISH sentence that there was supposed to be. That was so exhausting and at the end I just had to Google those English sentences to finally get them right because additionally putting a British spelling or a synonym of a word was giving a fail. And not only this type of exercise is absolutely useless on advanced level (why heavily rely on a different language when you're supposed to be already fluent in another one) but also the Japanese sentences the user was asked to translate had many mistakes. Many many mistakes. Can't imagine anyone can get anything out of Duolingo when it comes to Japanese, even the video creator sounds rather confused about the language why there shouldn't be a reason if the source is good.
I love your unique data-driven analysis to substantiate your claims! Few bother to do anything similar. I really like seeing which languages "punch above their weight" (as you put it) in regards to content. This video was like kind of like seeing a science experiment or study carried out. Your graphs about these languages reminds me a little of the "Power Language Index" (PLI) by Dr. Kai L. Chan, where Bengali is more spoken than Japanese, but yet, Japanese remains one of the most powerful languages in the world despite having fewer speakers. Great stuff!
I like Duolingo because it's competitions get me to do it consistently (I do a little bit, twice a day, more if necessary to stay in the diamond league). I also like that it's free, it gives me lots of feedback, and it pairs reading the words with the correct audio, without me having to learn that separately. I love that I'm not translating everything. I'm now thinking (in partial sentences) in French, which never happened in any of my in-person language classes. I also enjoy the humor, where it's still present. I don't mean the weird sentences (though some of those are quite a hoot). The humor is in the stories, the in-game podcasts, and the in-game-retro-games, lol.
I agree! I've seen plenty of people reviewing Esperanto before but I'm always happy to see one more. I'd also love to see him talk more about Valyrian. "Annoyed" is such an interesting word to use to describe your opinion on something. Like, is it that it gets close to doing something good but misses in a small but profound way? Or just generally poor/lazy?
I live in Vietnam, the pronouns aren't that difficult, there's basically one for a ,man younger than you, one for a man older, one for a woman younger than you, one for a woman older than you, one for a very old woman, you can pick them up in ten minutes, where it's different is that the pronoun remains the same whether it's the subject or the object. It's not that tricky, the hard part is the lack of cognates.
And the fact that Duolingo doesn't actually explain much of anything. If you can't pick up the logic from seeing it in a few sentences absent of context, you're not going to pick it up.
@JohnnyLynnLee It's way harder than that. About Vietnamese: Yep! The pronouns depend on sex, age and social standing. You have to keep track of the age of people all the time and that's pretty hard since Asians look YOUNGER to people from the West. That's hard enough but that's NOT NLY THAT. Younger people don't adhere strictly to that so that may also change depending on the level of intimacy you have with the person. But that itself also depends on the person. SO the level of variation is WILD. Let's put it this way, you are an older man and she is a younger woman. You have to say one thing, she has to say another thing. But if she wants to date you she may DROP it. In which case you may have to drop it too (or not, because it may be too early for you to accept the invitation- yeah... it's complicated). BUT you may find that she meant to drop it ONLY between the two of you and that dropping it in front of other people may make her lose face. Good look! Exposure it's the only way o get it. It's highly contextual.
PS: it only looks easier probably because they are treating as a foreigner, meaning as an outsider. Same with Japanese (in which I'm fluent, I'm four years into Vietnamese and still there's a long way to go to be where I'm in Japanese in Vietnamese). The EXPECTATIONS put on you will drastically change along with your perceived level of Japanese. Same for Vietnamese. The better you get the less you can get away with things. Always have that in mind.
There`s a drastic difference in nuance between それがいい and それでいい as an answer in Japanese. The person can be very pleased or very upset, or sad, depending on which one you chose in a given situation. But if they see you just as a gaijin it doesn`t matter. But if one day you pick it wrong and there are consequences that means you are really good at Japanese now. So much that they expect you to UNDERSTAND the difference and, therefore, they assume you did it on purpose. Trust me! That cnan be a lot of drama.
oooh that sounds fraught with difficulty with people five years more or less.. if you see a man who's a overweight balding but he's five years younger than.
I like that you compared each language to other resources, and how comprehensive this ranking is! Also, the comments on here from native speakers about that language are interesting.
Thanks for mentioning the graphs! I usually listen to these vids, rather than watch, and I'm a sucker for a good graph! The verbal cue let me know to face the screen!
Thank you for reviewing Hebrew. I have been plodding through for years and often feel confused. I feel like I often can guess a verb but can't tell you what conjugation is which. I don't really have time to supplement it with anything but I am glad to know that it's not just my lack of talent for learning language that makes trying to figure out what rules of conjugation they are teaching me.
^^ditto here for Hebrew. I have some college classroom Hebrew and found the course useful only for keeping the rust off. I wouldn’t recommend it for learning from scratch-I’ve found a few errors in it, and the audio is awful.
For Welsh I would highly recommend taking actual classes which are heavily subsidised and can be attended on line. This is especially true if you want to learn the dialect of the north, duolingo occasionally tells you specific nouns that are different but it doesn't do a good job of the more fundamental stuff in my opinion (including a whole vowel sound that isn't made in the south).
Thanks for this review, really appreciated. I'll continue my learning journey of Italian and Russian. My brother moved to Lisbon, and in the passed I considered using Duolingo for Portuguese, but the app only offers the Brasilian variant, which is very different (apparently the difference is bigger than between European Spanish and "latin" Spanish or European english and American english). That's something you forgot to point out. Keep up the good work!
I will say as a native french speaker who is also fluent in italian, I wish dueling would teach you how to conjugate words in romance languages (or any language for that matter), as it is something I felt was lacking when I first started learning Italian. I was lucky enough to be able to spend quite a lot of time in Italy and there I took courses with native speakers and was fully immersed in the language, and being a native french speaker, this made me learn the language in record time. I do recognize, however, that not everyone has the opportunity or the means to do this.
The Welsh course used to be really good. It was designed with the national organisation for the language. If you do one of the adult learning courses (much easier since the pandemic as some of them are now on zoom) then the printed course material links to Duolingo units. I found this helpful when I was revising for my exams as I could do the units that were relevant to what I was revising. However, Duolingo abandoned this collaboration and it no longer links into the adult learning courses. Very sad.
Hello, @@LangXplorer ! 😃 Firstly, it seems there was a mix-up here, haha. 😄 When I wrote that comment, I was referring to @hijackbyejack1729 's comment. I was replying to him. I haven't seen your comment. 😅 But that's all right! Anyway, I'm very happy that you gave me an answer too! Thank you very much! Regarding the course audio, I understand that you feel this way because, indeed, it's not perfect. But honestly, I like it a lot too! I think both the female and male audios are nice. I usually supplement my learning with other resources so that I know the correct pronunciation. So that's it. Thanks again for your reply! 😊
Duolingo also not only doesn't have traditional Chinese, but also marks you incorrect if you type a traditional character into their prompts. It teaches pinyin decently, but also teaches words people don't say extremely early on (things like 哪兒）it fails to tell you that 你最近怎麼樣 means how have you been recently, but drop the time word and you just asked "what's wrong with you? " as a greeting. With all that said, I still recommend Duolingo but you can you'll basically pull all you can from it (if you're trying to learn traditional characters) within the first month.
I find HelloChinese quite a good free app. The veery sloooow pronunciation of the tones honestly sounds a bit obnoxious (and not like how I hear natives say it) but they frequently have you listen to actual natives saying the same sentences so that levels out. And it's not AI, AFAIK. It'll never get close to as good as brute forcing good ol' Anki with sentence cards with native audio though in my opinion (Spoonfed Chinese for example). But they serve different purposes.
@@zeusthunder6674I think that’s another issue with teaching “standard Mandarin” in app form with little explanation of regional differences. There are so many different types of Mandarin speakers. Not everyone is learning Mandarin for the Beijing dialect. If I want to take a trip to say Malaysia or Taiwan and I proceed to learn to speak Mandarin like a Beijinger I’m going to sound real funny to my target audience and potentially run into issues understanding what these native speakers are trying to communicate back. IMHO it’s better to focus on your goal in learning Chinese. If you just need to take HSK tests, then sure 哪儿/哪兒 is fine, but if you want to speak to people of a specific region finding something like a local tutor on italki will avoid having to unlearn weird sayings, pronunciations and general bad language habits. To more directly answer your question, (lol sorry for the rant) it depends on the region. In Taiwan for example 哪裡 (pronounced nálǐ sometimes) is way more common and 哪兒 is essentially never used.
I started using Duolingo to learn German, about two years ago. As my German improved, I started to notice that some of the English translations were quite peculiar. There were minor irritations like, why do I need to translate "Cafe (G)" to "coffee shop", instead of "cafe (E)", like I would normally say? I started to think the English had been written by non-native speakers, due to some confusion with the use of prepositions. Most notably with the misuse of "in" and "at". Finally, while trying to master the somewhat convoluted sentence structures of the English answers, I started thinking, maybe the German is as bad as the English. That was when I stopped using Duolingo.
I think the café thing is fair, at least from a UK perspective. We say 'shall we go to a coffee shop' if we mean Starbucks, Nero, Costa, etc., while 'let's find a café', I would associate more with eating something like an English breakfast, a roll, etc. Can also depend for some whether it's pronounced 'caff' (more basic premises with sausages, eggs, beans, etc) or 'café' (fancier place where I might expect a French-style brunch).
@@legatrix I go to a coffee shop. I buy coffee beans and get them to grind the beans. They sell a huge range of beans plus percolators and coffee machines etc. I go to a cafe with the café pronunciation. Caff is just plain weird, although I've heard it in UK based shows/movies. I might have breakfast, get a coffee and cake, sit down for lunch. They may or may not have table service. Starbucks failed dismally here, they made lousy coffee. There are still some of the around but not anywhere local to me. I was in Germany last year and what the Germans call a cafe looks like a cafe to me. So I feel justified! With Duolingo, what bothered me was that sense that some of the people who wrote the English translations were not 100% fluent in English and nobody had bothered to check their work.
@@legatrix I found in stydying Dutch (around the turn of the century, lol) the pronunciations were based on British english, so I had to imaging saying the English work with a British accent to say the Dutch correctly. Example the word "pot" Not the America pAHt, but the British pAWt.
One of the things you didn't really mention about Duolingo is also that the whole design of their software is very obviously based on the way European languages work, and many of the other languages have just been shoehorned into that system, instead of developing activities that are actually tailored to the sorts of things you need to learn for some of the more different languages (such as East Asian ones). For example, with Japanese, some of the types of exercises that come up would make sense with a Latin alphabet, but they don't actually make sense (or don't actually teach you anything) in Japanese because they're dealing with a different way of writing things that doesn't work the same way, etc. IMHO, it's not a deal breaker, but it does make the course feel a lot less efficient, and sometimes more tedious. On the other hand, some things that would be really useful to learn more in depth (such as kanji composition and pronunciations) just aren't really covered at all, because they only have one predefined set of exercise types that they use for everything, and none of those predefined types are designed to handle that sort of problem (because it's just not an issue with European languages, which is what all the software was obviously based on). Oh, and they basically don't teach you the Japanese kana at all anymore. Sure, they've got a weird little add-on thing which isn't actually part of the main course which runs through them quickly, but it's laughably brief, does not have any of the variety of exercise types or fun of the main course, and that's only if you know you should be going and looking for it anyway, since that is not where the course actually starts. It is so clearly an afterthought it's actually kinda insulting, IMHO. Because of this, I would not recommend Duolingo for Japanese to anyone who hasn't already at least spent time getting familiar with Hiragana and Katakana on their own using some other method first. And they keep rearranging the course, so it feels like I'm stuck in some sort of sysiphusian language limbo, where every time I make progress toward finishing the course, I find myself suddenly many lessons, or even whole sections back from where I used to be with no warning, and I don't even have any idea what's actually changed. (I'm not usually this cynical, but at this point I'm kinda legitimately suspecting that the constant reorganizations are actually a deliberate tactic to keep people from ever actually finishing the language, so they can make them keep using the app longer and try to extract more revenue out of them...) But that having been said, it is still a useful tool for me anyway. I would never recommend that anybody use it just by itself, but in combination with some other learning materials, I do find that Duolingo is useful for giving me a good variety of sentences to work with, introducing me to occasional new vocabulary words and grammar that supplement what I'm getting elsewhere, and most importantly, keeping me motivated to do at least some language study every day, which IMHO is very important to actually make real progress. That aspect alone is probably worth keeping it in many people's language learning toolbox, in my opinion.
Eh, I disagree with your Japanese course criticism. No one needs to learn to write kanji, only recognize them. And gradually integrating characters into lessons is a more effective way of getting users to learn them, rather than just having lessons dedicated to writing characters. You'll never need to write characters irl unless you're trying to genuinely form a life in Japan as if you were Japanese, and someone like that wouldn't be on Duolingo. Recognizing the characters and being able to pronounce and understand them is all you need. Everything is electronic these days. I do the writing / stroke order lessons when I didn't feel like turning on my brain enough for full lessons but still wanna hit my streak, but they're pretty much a waste of time.
As someone who tried to learn Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo I can say that the Scottish Gaelic course works way better for me than Irish or Welsh. I gave up on Irish after a few months and have stuck with Scottish Gaelic for three years, supplemented with other resources. Considering that Irish has far more speakers and a deeper academic well to draw from, I expected the opposite. The Welsh course is great, but for whatever reason my brain didn’t process Welsh as well. I will probably go back now that I have a better base to build on. I’d highly recommend the Scottish Gaelic course if you want to dig into Celtic languages. It’s incredibly well structured, makes the grammar easy to digest, and offers a ton of cultural tie-ins to make it more useful.
Personally I liked the old tree structure better, because it allowed me to progress much quicker and decide the ammount of intake by myself, I used to do 2-3 units then going back and do the older ones to gold and then switch again to new stuff... (Then again, I had had half a year of torture with an absolutely dry and boring learningpsychology class and had learnt 2.5 languages during school) ... For me the path currently has way too many repetitions, but that's a me issue...
I had fun with it with a year streak, until I decided it wasn't as helpful as it should have been. Using other resources has been much better, but Duo will always be good for beginners.
I agree. I've been using Duolingo Spanish for 6 months now, starting as a complete beginner. I'm in their B1 section, and I feel like I have a pretty good base, in grammar and vocabulary specifically. I've also been using supplemental content in addition to Duolingo, so that has helped also. I'm now at the point where I feel I need to demote Duolingo as the primary learning tool and switch to more intense comprehensible input. I'm now listening to podcasts on LinQ and doing more reading (more than just the isolated sentences on Duolingo).
My husband is a native Norwegian speaker, and I have learned/practiced my Norwegian through Duolingo daily since 2014. I would personally say that it has helped me understand the language very well, but I have the additional benefit of being able to ask my husband and in-laws for corrections and practice with them.
The Japanese course is kind of crazy at the moment, they've removed a bunch of content and randomly expect you to know words or kanji they've never taught you, but alsorandomly dedicate an entire lesson to making you add one stroke to complete a basic kanji like 日 or 十 10 times in a row. It also insists that i learn to translate 二年生 (literally "second year student") into sophomore, which would be silly even if i was an American who used yhat term
Apparently the quality of the Norwegian course is a legacy of a very involved and knowledgeable volunteer group back when Duolingo relied on that.
I'm a Norwegian who is doing the Norwegian course for extra gems, and there are quite a few errors and things that are just straight up wrong. for instance there was a word where the "correct" translation was a name, not a translation, and several mispronounications that change the entire meaning of some words (for instance the world "stolte" which can mean both to be proud and having trusted someone, depending on pronounciation)
@@ElMona Interesting to know, as a Canadian learning Norwegian on Duolingo. I do wish there was some native speaker/natural conversation content in there like other languages have. When they had the sentence discussions I found those very helpful because there were native speakers who moderated and provided feedback, and it's really too bad that they're gone.
Sounds like typical Norwegian fans, motivated & strong willed
@ElMona I'm not Norwegian myself, but when I heard Duolingo's pronunciation of "krydres," I knew it couldn't be right. It sounded like a Norwegian saying creed-race xD
I really liked learning Norwegian, though, since it's very similar (especially in word order) to Dutch, my native language. Knowing Frisian, (some) German and English definitely helps too.
Oh, thank you. I started learning Norwegian last year but gave up because asian languages keep me very busy. I found it is very easy to learn if you are a English. I love how it sound.
What kills me about Duolingo Spanish is that every time there's an update, they shuffle things around and I get weird vocab words I've never seen before pop up like I should know them, and concepts i covered months ago show up as new content. I have no idea what I've missed because there's no real patch notes for me to go back and see. I do really like it because although I'm motivated to learn Spanish, my wife isn't as much so, and it's easy to turn it into a game between us to keep her motivated to learn every day. Note: I'm not some monster forcing this poor woman to learn Spanish, we have plans to visit Central America in a couple years and want to be prepared.
leave duolingo plushies around the house if she misses a day
I am a monster forcing my wife to learn Spanish
I actually just spoke to my friend about my issue with the Spanish course yesterday and how it got jumbled after they left behind the tree design and then again a few times so I actually don't have certain vocab that one wouldn't be wrong to assume I'd know based on my accent and grammar. Spanishdict has been a godsend for a lot of aspects luckily, but it is annoying that so much basic vocabulary that WAS being given to me by duolingo is now not there at all or somewhere in the old lessons with poor labeling or coming in very spaced out then not reinforced nearly enough.
Same thing with other languages. Made me quit Czech actually.
I've encountered that.
Prior to travelling to Amsterdam this year for only 5 days, my 16 yr old daughter completed the entire Duo Dutch course in about 8 months. In the end she did not need to know Dutch at all in Amsterdam - if you’ve ever been there you’ll understand. BUT she was super proud of the fact that she understood all the signs and what she sometimes overheard ppl saying. Additionally she has made several online Dutch friends who are happy to communicate with her in Dutch. She chats with them daily and is doing so well! Living proof that the Duo course was very effective.
Awesome! Yeah you can get by with English just fine here, but it's definitely a different experience knowing some Dutch. Makes you more independent too. She's goed bezig
As you've learned, Amsterdam is the wrong place to go to speak Dutch with people.
@@estonhall5364 absolutely. Most servers in cafes and restaurants here don't even speak any Dutch nowadays :')
good to know! I'm going to the Netherlands this Spring and while I'll be taking a Dutch class there, I was considering working on that independently ahead of time
Amsterdam isn't really considered Dutch by the Dutch
Duolingo used to be a very competent language learning platform. There was a lesson section, even in some of its less popular languages, like Romanian. And the forums were a great way to get input from native speakers into vernacular phrases and to clarify misconceptions.
But when I downloaded it again last year, it was changed entirely for the worst. Not only are the lessons no longer available, now there's a life system that prevents you from progressing if you make the typical mistakes that are bound to happen when learning a language.
And even more so, when you are deprived of the lesson primer that was meant to give you a minuscule idea of the grammar behind the sentences you're filling in.
It's pretty much candy crush, but less slay.
I've been doing Romanian on Duolingo and it's terrible. They removed all the lessons that explain grammar, conjugations, etc. There's no actual explanations of anything now. The voice is so bad and the lessons randomly leave out words. I have my Romanian SO sit with me while I do it to correct it.
I was thinking there was something missing. Now I remember the lessons lol
They get worse with every update
yes i struggle every time using duolingo to understand the grammar or reasons for something vs just learning flash cards it feels so disappointing to never be able to actually understand enough to make my own sentences like school lessons were . might be me but wish there was more help/information/context
The lack of explanations on conjugations is a big red flag for me. German has ich, du, er, sie, es, wir, ihr, sie, Sie. Duolingo doesnt explain any of those when it comes to masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns and verbs. Same thing with Ukrainian. For the word "my", theres мій, моя, мої, and мене as far as ive seen. I have no clue what the difference between them is.@@kelseym8040
I started with Korean a few days ago because I want to spice up my Korean skills before I take a proper course somewhere in Korea. Kind of wish I could take an intermediate at that point and not a beginner but we shall see... (obv not relying only on duolingo).
Duolingo has been driving me mad. It's like "let's learn new words!" - here are your new words: Washington, London, Tokyo, Philadelphia, Princeton.
Like, what the actual... I wanted to learn KOREAN. Not how to write American cities in hangeul. 🙄
Lmao, same in japanese!
Yep, now I speak English with Korean accent :)
Honestly, switch to Lingodeer. I wasted 200 days on Duolingo before I switched, and I regret not having done so from the start.
What pisses me off with the Korean Duolingo is that it sometimes just straight up doesn’t say the words it wants you to translate. At an early level it REALLY sucks because my listening comprehension is easily triple my reading comprehension when it comes to Korean.
Exactly! My basic Korean listening and reading is great and the start of the course seems to be all loan words. But it's so annoying I can't push past the early stage to see if it gets better. I can say Boston very well in Korean now.
"pardon my French"
"pardon my Yiddish"
I feel that you have a goal to be pardoned in as many languages as possible. Can't wait for the F bomb followed by "pardon my English"
I'm a Duolingo veteran and completed 11 courses between 2014-2018, mostly Germanic and Slavic, in many cases not long after the courses first went live. The Dutch and Danish courses were good enough to get me near-fluent, and I sat A-level Dutch in 2016 and got the highest grade. The Polish course is also excellent, really rigorous and comprehensive.
All the courses were volunteer-made which is why the quality and length varies a lot - the only reason the Norwegian course is like that is because the volunteers were really passionate and added so much content. The Hungarian course is notorious for being broken and was stuck in beta for years (I don't know if it still is) - learners would reach a point about two-thirds of the way through that was basically impassable.
The main complaint long-time users like myself have is the "enshittification" of Duolingo. So many good features have been gotten rid of or made pay-only. The whole thing is way more cartoonish, ad-infested and dumbed-down than it was a decade ago.
@@eurovicious I completed the Duolingo trees (as they were then) for Spanish, Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish prior to entshittification. I thought that the Turkish course was pretty excellent. The Finnish course taught what it tried to teach very clearly, but seemed to only scratch the surface of a wonderful, but difficult, language. The Hungarian course was, as you say, a bit of a mess. It taught a huge amount of material in too few lessons and got worse as you went along. It felt like trying to drink from a firehose.
I remember back in I think 2016-17 Duolingo didn't have their current shitty heart system, but had a three strikes thing in all lessons that you find currently only in the level skip things. I feel like that three strikes may have been a bit too harsh, but I think I'd prefer it to the current one which is basically just a scheme to get you to get Super Duolingo.
The enshittification is all too real. Forums/discussions were eliminated: the money guys apparently didn't like users actually banding together and discussing things--or, gasp, complaining. Hearts and gems were added, so there's no longer free and unlimited use and you're afraid to make mistakes, which is the worst case scenario for any learning process. Cartoony voices were added to "kiddify" the whole thing--someone smack that Oscar character with a fish, please. Courses are constantly altered on a seeming whim, to where I have no idea where I stand in one and what I'll be learning in the future.
I was doing Korean but non of the suffixes or verb conjugations were treated separately ;-; maybe they did later in course but at that point I've moved to better sources
I don't miss the forums. It could get toxic and demotivating.
Duolingo isn't gonna get me to learn languages on it's own but it optimises the 5-20 minute downtime I have on public transport and keeps me productive . It's a great bonus to my language learning experience . I compare it to Tajin . I can't live off of Tajin but a little bit goes nicely with a lot of different foods . That being said I'm always happy to check out new language learning resources and love your content
Agreed! I think it's really helpful on the first stages of learning a language, when consuming content in target language is still too challenging. But later I would rather just watch a youtube video or read something short in that language
Old people at home who are just having fun may be like me. Duolingo is fun. Rosetta Stone is free from my library. Babbel is also fun. You tube is awesome. Netflix usually has either the audio or subtitles of the language I want to study. There are free tv apps of the language I am studying. Pot is legal. X lets me vent. Poor me in this world.
What's Tajin?
@@ElliotShayleIt’s just a popular seasoning
You mean on the toilet :)
Thanks!😂❤😊. Your humour, honesty, and yes… sarcasm… brings laughter to my (sometimes) tedious study of spanish. The sharing of your knowledge from several postings is much appreciated.
Thank you! I’m so glad it’s helping. This week’s video is about studying Spanish, btw. I also find it a little tedious, but I’m getting down to it!
I was just waiting for you to mention the Dutch content because that's what I've been studying for the past few years. I'm one of the eight! Woo-hoo! I do get a little jealous when I hear about the features and stories that the Spanish learners get.
Great video! For anyone looking for a specific language:
10:38 Scandinavian languages
11:00 German
11:08 Yiddish
12:45 Dutch
13:04 Hebrew
14:27 Arabic
14:47 Russian
15:11 Czech
15:49 Ukrainian
15:57 Polish
16:07 Romance languages
16:21 Romanian
16:34 Latin
17:44 Celtic languages
18:20 Mandarin
18:56 Japanese
20:24 Korean & Vietnamese
21:19 Greek, Hungarian & Turkish
21:30 Indonesian
21:40 Hawaiian
21:53 Hindi
22:15 Swahili & Zulu
23:06 Navajo
23:46 Valyrian
23:53 Klingon
24:26 Esperanto
oh thank you SO much
Cries in Finnish...
Finnish? @languagejones6784
yeah i guess there was no mention of Finnish in there at all…?
fInns always left out :'D
Duolingo Norwegian has so much content because, when it was user-driven, the administrator-volunteers put a LOT of energy into creating (what was then) the best course on the platform with more content than the courses Duilingo thenselves produced.
"Toilet time language learning market", I'm dying!
Somewhat accurate, though. Most other apps' lessons are way too long.
@@Ph34rNoB33r fækts
@@Ph34rNoB33r then you're eating too healthy!
Haha as I’m watching on the toilet.
Without 💩ing regularly I would've lost so many streaks or freezes already.
One thing I do really like using Duolingo for: when it gives you the matching exercise where it wants you to pair 5 words to their English equivalent, I like to take all of the words it gives me and build sentences out of them. Even if it doesn’t make sense for those words to be used together, I MAKE them make sense. It’s a fun exercise, and it forces you to really think in your target language, because you’ll probably have to invent your own sentences; the prompts Duo has been giving you probably won’t cut it if your sentences are going to make sense. I’d recommend trying it.
One of the eight learning Dutch here, glad to hear your opinion is that it’s decent.
As an Irish speaker, the audio for Irish is actually horrendous, the AI voice is really really bad and mispronounces even the most common of words
Plus short words sound truncated and are hard to understand.
This is what strikes me - AI even has trouble pronouncing English correctly sometimes. Why would you trust it with a language that has a smaller dataset, given that the data comes from the Internet and the majority of content on the Internet isn't in Irish.
@@the_newt_nest right?! You'd expect the AI in English to be close to the best available, given the amount of data they have for it. If there are errors in the English AI there are bound to be even more in less common (on the internet) languages!
Where would you suggest learning Irish then, I'd love to learn it!
@@Risky_Santucci Duolingo might still be an okay option for learning some grammar? Just definitely put it on mute when using it. There are plenty of great textbooks you can use to learn also. When it comes to listening to native speakers speak, "TG4" is the Irish-language tv station in Ireland so that should be a good place to listen to the language correctly pronounced
The Welsh course is entirely made by volunteers, hence why no speaking practice etc, but was supported by the Welsh Government to align with government standard taught courses in Wales. However, there is no explanation of mutations or even the difference between chi and ti, unless you go digging on the internet- the volunteers put such effort into the course and DuoLingo just shat on them from a great height. Now the Welsh course has been mothballed, meaning no more updates.
If I remember correctly from dabbling in the Welsh course, it's very colloquial and quite North Walian in pronunciation and vocab. It didn't sound much like the Welsh I grew up hearing in Carmarthenshire. I think it would have given my Gu conniptions.
@@carolcooper8010 Having lived in Ceredigion, I agree although at least I know the word for parsnip now since it seems to get used in many lessons.
Just like the real wales I guess
About 40 days into the Welsh course and I’m just getting more confused. There really is no grammar explanation at all. I might keep up with it just for fun, but it’s sad knowing what I’m learning is probably fairly useless
PSA: the audio on the Japanese course is often incorrect and I would highly discourage anyone from using the Japanese course on Duolingo because you won't know how it's incorrect unless you already speak Japanese
I just downloaded duolingo to check out the Japanese audio specifically because of this comment. I hope it’s as frustratingly entertaining as I’m imagining
i dont use duolingo for audio resources i use it for vocab most of the times, i acc practice jp speaking and listening getting references from anki decks (• •;)
@@leilatimeful MochiKanji is much better I hear
Same with Irish, I'm a native speaker, was curious about the Irish course when it popped out and couldn't understand a word they were saying. I'm not great with other dialects but this wasn't that issue,,,, it was just,,,, pronounced unintelligibly
I was looking for the Haitian Creole mention and am happy to know you found the language fun! :)
Where’d you hear that? I didn’t hear anything in this video about it.
@@jackspalden5143 in the description!
Heartfelt (and “mind-felt”) thanks, Doctor J. I came to your videographic wells first for the linguistic out-nerding, and have come back for something hard to name, but definitely connected to “Blue Mountain Hamlet” (!)
The reason Norwegian is an outlier is that it has been done by a group of very dedicated, skilled contributors. As such, it is much better than other, centralised, courses I did (Italian). They did not only add pieces of actual Norwegian culture in there, they also did it in a fun way. Now, Norwegian is a simple language for me because I know both German and English. But I went straight from doing the course to reading books. That's how good the course is (thank you, Lynn, if you ever wander in here).
If you are doing more than one of the centralised courses, you will get bored by the stories quickly because they are the same everywhere, so even if you don't understand a lot of Spanish, you just know it's the same story you already listened to in the Italian course.
Same here, from Duolingo directly to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and I didnt struggle with the vocabulary a lot :) Great great course, the best one
That's funny because I am Norwegian and I find the Norwegian course to be really bad. It also has some blatant errors and mispronounciations
@@ElMona You shouldn't try to learn pronunciation in Duolingo, these are Google AI voices. What other errors did you find?
How is it bad if one can read books after completing it?
Was also an early adopter of the Norwegian course. Only has a hobby, but it helped me get to B1! Lynn and the team did a great job and I do miss them. Although there were some errors, it jump started you in a really good way. And the comment sections were super useful with the team always replying. Once Duolingo got rid of the comments I knew it was going downhill.
@@ElMona I do not know the course, but could you say some examples? I always assume that type of thing to be due to regional differences. Are the mistakes like that, or are they straight-up typos and stuff?
Also: I remember on a Norwegian language subreddit, somebody said that they were stuck trying to translate “hvor fant du den snusen?” Into English, because they didn’t know the word “snus”. I think duolingo should not use terms like “snus”, which is not common in English.
I enjoy Duolingo less as a language study tool, more as a language mobile game. With that in mind, I enjoy it quite a bit. I think your conclusion is on point. It's a great way to try out a language, and learn a few hundred words for a foundation, and give you a boost toward more serious study.
That's exactly how I see it. It is a game, I can confirm what he was saying about Czech. I was pronouncing things crazily. I am going to switch to western European language
That's fine, then. Just please, out of consideration for other students who have been working on learning Irish, do not ever join a regular language class as anything other than a beginner. Personal experience: I attended an immersion course where one participant, who had learned what Irish he had from Duolingo, decided to put himself into the highest class (where people have excellent vocabularies and are fluent speakers) because he had finished the Duolingo course. He was completely unable to keep up, and partner work with him was miserable because he had such a minute vocabulary. The teacher -- well, I don't know whether she saw him as a challenging project or an object of pity, but she didn't get rid of him, and I think the rest of us lost most of the benefit of the course.
It is my understanding that the US military did not simply use Navajo as a code. They used a "normal" code but instead putting English into code they put Navajo into code.
"Navajo speakers who had not been trained in the code work would have no idea what the code talkers' messages meant; they would hear only truncated and disjointed strings of individual, unrelated nouns and verbs."
Cool
True
There was a light coding process, where the first letter of something in English would be switched to a different word and then translated, so it would seem like nonsense on its face, but it really wouldn't take long to figure out what words were being used for specific kinds of planes, tanks, artillery pieces, etc... As long as you had someone who could translate the Navajo into English, and others who could work on the translated messages.
An example I read in a book was that the Navajo words for “sheep pain” stood for “Spain”.
I'm a teacher of Japanese language and when I was researching possible sources for my students I decided to check Duolingo - it has an option to solve a test to skip to the highest level and I spent unnecessary 2 HOURS trying to finish the final level and the only reason was not Japanese at all but ENGLISH - almost all the tasks were based on putting an English sentence as a translation of a Japanese sentence and I was constantly not passing for not putting EXACTLY the ENGLISH sentence that there was supposed to be. That was so exhausting and at the end I just had to Google those English sentences to finally get them right because additionally putting a British spelling or a synonym of a word was giving a fail. And not only this type of exercise is absolutely useless on advanced level (why heavily rely on a different language when you're supposed to be already fluent in another one) but also the Japanese sentences the user was asked to translate had many mistakes. Many many mistakes. Can't imagine anyone can get anything out of Duolingo when it comes to Japanese, even the video creator sounds rather confused about the language why there shouldn't be a reason if the source is good.
it's definitely something that shouldn't be used on its own. Though, I think it's still useful if you supplement it with other sources.
Hard agree. I lived in Japan for several years when I was a teen and am almost fluent. I wanted to use Duolingo to supplement my skills and stay current, but it's just sooooo awful for Japanese
I'm at an absolute beginner level and even at that level Duolingo fails. Don't know why but Duo kinda felt the need to repeat the same six words for the entire first unit over and over again and for whatever reason "sushi" was one of the first japanese words I had to learn :/
@@forfuchsake2254 o cha, sushi, mizu, gohan, kudasai, and desu. those r the six words, right?
Is there a recommended that is better?
I used Duolingo for Dutch and it worked great for me! I went there and was pleasantly surprised to be able to have actual conversations with people in Dutch, as long as they saw the idea that I was a learner and took it easy on me. Full speed from natives who don't get the idea doesn't work, but what does work is a LOT of fun and fairly useful in reading some signs and things without having to ask for help. Plus they all speak excellent English and it's easy to get along there anyway. But you get a LOT of credit for trying and they really like you for it. You get special treatment from museum docents and others, too. I ended up seeing things the average tourist wouldn't. I've now been there four months in the last three years, coming from San Diego, CA.
Something I’d like to add is that for some reason, the duo Japanese course doesn’t start consistently teaching you the kanji form of words until like 50 hours in, which means that until you get there, you won’t be able to read almost any Japanese outside of duo, even extremely simple sentences.
I attended an actual in-person Japanese course in university (1.5h once a week) and it was the same there. Didn't really start with Kanji until the next semester. I still don't think that's a good idea.
Kanji is not important to simply understand the language, and honestly I don't even recommend learning it to everyone. I find it incredibly useful personally, but to some who just want to speak as fast as possible, it's a lot of time that can be saved. And, you can get plugins and whatnot to throw up furigana which can help you read from most online sources.
This is coming from someone who's studies are mainly kanji right now.
@@munzutaiwhat? I did a uni course too and the introductory course had us learn 100 kanji (which isn’t much but it’s useful) in the first unit.
Duo started showing me Kanji like 5-10 hours in with little to no context and it confused the hell out of me, but I started a few years back so it sounds like they've since pushed the kanji back.
@@NiteSaiya The weird thing is that they do introduce kanji early on, but they only for like ~1% of the words.
"made up languages ...like Latin" LOL
I went back and forth on whether to include that, since there are people who very seriously believe that Rome didn’t (doesn’t?) exist, and it’s all an elaborate hoax
@@languagejones given the pseudo-mythological meme status of Rome online, I suppose it shouldn't be that surprising to me, but damn.
@@languagejones If you consider that the Latin that Caesar wrote and that 99% of people learning Latin will study, is not a language that people will have been speaking on the streets of Rome, then yes, it's true that it's invented.
@@languagejones The "Rome didn't exist" claim has to be a hoax itself. There's no way anyone can dispute its existence when you can fly to Rome and go see the Forum, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum, not to mention Pompeii, Herculaneum and other ancient Roman remnants across Europe and North Africa.
@@languagejones Really, rome is a hoax according to some ? omg, people are so much fun !
Oh great algorithm please shine favorably on this content creator he's dope
Living in Texas on the gulf, I run into tons of people who only speak Spanish. I'm not sure about other places in the US, but regionally It always made sense to me why Spanish was the main language to learn because I'm going to interact with a lot of people who speak it.
same I live in North Texas but still many people who only speak spanish
Except the spanish on duo is not the spanish they speak in mexico
I speak Spanish fluently and refuse to speak Spanish to someone in the US, since they're in the US. They should speak English
That doesn't really work here in Florid, so many people only speak Spanish that I would not be supprrised if the state makes Spanish a co official language. I don't have time to argue with people at work to speak in English si I just speak in Spanish if they want. I have had someone yell at me for speaking to them in English instead of Spanish. Don't really care, personally, lived in many countries and the United States doesn't feel like a nation to me. So I have no expectations of national identy or language and I think thats the way it should stay.@@duekansickalsiawsoxksiay1940
@@dereklogan9097 another reason why I won't go to Florida. I hate everything about that state.
whit, charts and graphs, and my most favorite. you don’t explain this to me like i’m stupid and you get to the point. big fan of your videos
Thanks for a very informative summary. I'm glad I'm on my sister's family plan for Duoliguo (which she got to better interact with her live-in Vietnamese D-i-L), as I used it first to scrape the rust off my Hindi after a few years away and TOTALLY agree with your dogwater assessment. I will say that its Hindi is so bad it had the unexpected benefit of making me realise I had NOT lost as much as I'd feared. But at least in my case, the price is right.😁
I stopped not learning a language with Duolingo ages ago but my friend got me to start not learning a language with Lingo Legend instead. Neither option really does it for me - I don't retain much from either, but Lingo Legend has gameplay that I like so I stick with it. Honestly if Duolingo had a little virtual pet that I had to keep alive with my streak I'd probably still use it. Like they leaned way too hard into the owl being scary and threatening you. But they should have threatened the owl and told me how hungry it was and that the only way I can afford food for it is to do my Spanish lessons.
😂
And then send you emails with the owl slowly withering away as it perishes from its lack of nourishment.
brother I had an app for monitoring my water consumption linked to a pet like that and I let it die
@@dankwojak3689 Oh hey! I did that with an app that had virtual plants once. That's how I learned that my "dehydration" was actually an electrolyte imbalance that was made worse by drinking more water. So now whenever I feel "dehydrated" while at the same time water nauseates me, I know I need more electrolytes actually. My doctor told me to stop lowering my salt intake (something my doctors have been telling me since I was a kid due to high blood pressure) and start putting a pinch of salt in my water and see if that helps and it got rid of a lot of my worst chronic mystery symptoms.
Great comment😂
Hearing your rendition of Tennessee-accented Shakespeare in the midst of a discussion of Yiddish gave me flashbacks to my own high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. Our Yente sounded exactly like Minnie Pearl, bless her heart.
And, well, the less said about my take on Tevye, the better.
Southern US English is often closer to Shakespeare than Received Pronunciation is, so I support this reading.
And why I get irrirated at RP due to lacking the complexity or the OO is weird in here in TN.
I have been studying Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo for a year and a half and I love the course. There are so few resources for this language, and even fewer with audio, that I am delighted to see how long it is. The audio, while missing occasionally, is all real recordings (one of them even sings a bit from the kid's show Dòtaman), expressing the appropriate emotion for the content, and representing a variety of dialects, which can be confusing but also provides a broader sense of how the spelling relates to pronunciation. From the posts which we used to have access to in the former discussions, people compared the Scottish Gaelic course very favorably over both the Irish and Welsh courses, which they found severly lacking in accuracy and overall quality.
I'm also taking Scottish Gaelic. I find the personality behind some of the sentences to be fun. (Iain is stupider than a seagull. Watch out for Mairi, she steals underwear.)
Since my family is from Nova Scotia I enjoyed the section for the Nova Scotian dialect.
I just wish they had the option for the learner to speak.
Also a Scottish Gaelic learner who completed the course twice (after ‘finishing,’ they doubled the content, so just this year I finished that section). I started when they first launched it and it was 100% crowd-sourced & an act of linguistic passion. The grammar notes are worth a read for their humor & creativity even if you’re not studying the language. Then, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig took over, and the content is much less quirky, the grammar notes have been suppressed, and yet it still lacks the more advanced Duolingo features like voice recognition and stories. 😢 Worst of both worlds.
Thanks for all this work! I live in Georgia (the country) but grew up in Indiana (the state), so I’ve needed to learn Georgian. I can’t imagine how it would work on Duolingo, which is probably why (along with the number of speakers) that it isn’t there. But I was a university level Russian instructor in a previous life, and I really enjoy Duolingo for helping me remember my Spanish, learn some French, brush up my very rusty Hungarian, and play around with Hawaiian and Polish. Everything you said rings true to my experience. When I think back to how limited resources were when I was learning Russian, I’m so impressed at the availability of such a breadth of resources.
Hi Amanda, greetings from Hungary! I'm happy you are interested in learning our language.
I speak Japanese decently well and I got my foundation in the writing system and basic vocab on Duolingo but quickly found myself needing to go look for actual study resources to make real improvement. My actual Japanese Duolingo experience now a few years later is slogging through some extremely simplistic grammar while occasionally finding unique words I haven't encountered before. I'm glad Duolingo exists but I'm pretty sure I've exhausted it's potentially at this point. Fully agree with your assessment.
My situation is fairly similar. I tried Duolingo JP when I was first getting into it (keep in mind this was back in 2016ish), took the Duo course for a good three days maybe (?) then gave up on it because I was already familiar with all of katakana and hiragana after 2ish days of memorizing them from a table I made in an old notebook.
I returned to it in 2022 after being self-taught up to where I am now, high N3-low N2 (low N3 at the time), and yeah holy crap is it bad for if you're looking to learn Japanese from scratch.
Can I just say as a language learning content consumer that I HATE ai generated voices?! Just hire a voice actor; it’s not even that expensive.
I'm a voice actor. I agree, hire a voice actor, but it's not cheap.
Exactly! I've been doing the Japanese course and the AI audio is just ok. Considering Japanese is the 3rd most demanded course, I think some investment is in order
@@adrianamendesporcellato I quit Japanese because of the AI voices.
I refuse to pay for Duolingo anymore bc of it. I keep my streak, but I study Russian on Memrise now which is far more enjoyable for me
Thank you this soooooo stupid
I have to admit that I indulged in the "shock locals" kind of video for a little bit. The best thing that I got from that is that I eventually landed in this channel. So, I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time haha
I hate to say it but this is totally a "shock locals" kind of video - the idea that a single person who, admittedly, has a good grasp of linguistics can comprehensively review every duolingo language for quality is still asinine. He's guessing at the lengths and final proficiencies, and doesn't really go into the factors that define "learning difficulty" or quality for different languages from an anglophone perspective. He mentions having a leg up when new grammar concepts are introduced, but what about unintuitable logographic scripts like Hanzi and Kanji?
Kind of feels like your friend who has something to say about any and every wine - you're pretty sure he has zero authority or insight on some, but because he's a "wine guy" he makes redundant non-statements with absolute confidence.
@@doctorbones941 you're right but at the same time i'm not sure there's anyone else who HAS done this, so we might as well take his word for it lol. i for one am not going to play through every duo course so this is a useful resource
@@doctorbones941 "Admittedly, has a good grasp of linguistics"? He has a PhD in linguistics, if you are going to imply smug over-confidence you might want to look in the mirror one day.
@@duggersdugers65When I make a video reviewing 30 people's reviews of every duolingo course with no data to substantiate it, I'll be sure to look in the mirror in horror. Until then, feel free to read the rest of the comment and address any of the actual points made.
@@doctorbones941 those things are different. i understand you're making a comparison, but it's a poor one.
JFC. The amount of work that went into this video is just staggering. Humbling. Dr Jones is up there with the all-time UA-cam creators.
I learned Portuguese on Duolingo, and it ended up landing me a job at a school 😅. I never expected that picking up a language out of boredom would help me find the life that I always wanted. Of course, I complemented my learning process with reading books, listening to music and watching videos in Portuguese.
Ok i find your comment as a sign to finish the Portuguese course 😅
I've been pretty impressed with the effort they've put into Scottish Gaelic, and it's been fun watching it improve. Thanks as always for great content.
Yes, I was surprised to see it was the 8th largest course on Duolingo, considering it's one of the least learned on the platform and especially how recently it was made compared to the other languages. I was also surprised to see it was a level 3 language as it's been one of the easiest languages I've learnt out of the 20 or so languages I've tried. I guess that shows how well they've made the course. Especially compared to BBC Alba's Speak Gaelic where I don't think I would really be able to learn anything from.
I'm using duolingo to supplement my Chinese learning, and the best thing they have done for Chinese in the past year is to add a section where you draw characters. Yes, obviously I could be practicising my writing with pen and paper, but since I'm self-studying and no one checks my homework, I tend to skip the tedium of writing the same character fifteen times over. The gamification of duolingo really helps with that.
i like the letter drawing part of the korean duolingo for the same reason :)
I wish they would add hanzi word match without pinyin so we can memorize the characters and actually read Mandarin and not just pinyin.
@@TheDudeGuyBroManPerson But... don't they? You can turn off the pinyin in the settings and then have only the characters. And in the word match tasks (with the English on the left and the Chinese on the right) I just tap on the English first so that I don't hear the pronunciation until I've made a choice. I think having no pinyin is actually another benefit of duolingo for me. Wow, I sound like I'm paid to advertise duolingo here.
I wish they would do that with Arabic. I can recognize letters but am worse than inept at writing them
I am a B2 level in French ( B1 in writing, B2 in speaking and C1 in reading and listening). Any thoughts on being able to get to C1 in writing and speaking with Duolingo?)
You're doing what people have intuitively known for years, at least those more concerned with depth on its failings and benefits. You've put it rather succinctly in this video and gave the best quantitative approach I've seen yet. I used Duolingo for German and found it intensely frustrating the more skilled I became. It did however provide a great testing ground as a supplement and one indispensable for my pursuits to use the language in Germany. It has its place, but needs improvement like anything else.
While I know Duo won’t get me fluent in French, it did prepare me for visiting Montréal. I was able to employ VERY VERY basic French to buy things and was able to easily navigate public signage/notices in French. Which ended up being very helpful as the transit system has very little English signage.
As a native Hebrew speaker, I agree with you that the course itself is good, but most exercises don't have their alternative ways count as correct, which is something I noticed the french course is really good at.
So, if you know Hebrew natively and you try out the course, you'd get more answers wrong than you'd expect to, because your ways of solving exercises aren't the ways that are counted by Duolingo.
I've been on Duolingo for a over a decade and have used it to brush up my French, Italian and German and learn Welsh, Dutch and Arabic from almost scratch. I also tried Turkish but gave up after a couple of weeks.
In the Welsh learning community there is an enormous amount of debate about the value of Duolingo. The course used to be a lot better when the comments were included, ie before enshittification, and the Welsh government have supported the course and ensured it links well with the government supported and subsidised live courses. For me, it got me to A2 when combined with watching TV (especially kids TV) during lockdown, so that I could skip the first couple of years of classes. The main competition in Welsh is Say Something in Welsh, which some love but which was too audio based for me.
For Arabic I felt it was never going to teach me to speak, only to understand the script. After months of using it daily I hadn't learned any real verbs!
Great analysis anyway.
Can you recommend any kids series in Welsh which are also available online? Since there are no Welsh courses where I live, I try to use as many sources as possible in addition to Duolingo.
@@ShinyStarfire It's only going to get you so far, but search out "Now You're Talking: Welsh", an early 1990s video series, which I think is mostly available on UA-cam. There are over 30 short videos. Focuses mostly on conversations and features both North and South Wales dialects, with common situations you might encounter, whilst acting out a mini-soap, with some questionable fashion choices. Also visits lots of towns and cities all over Wales and so you find out about places round the country too.
The Turkish course is, in my opinion really bad. I've learned Turkish at evening classes and with private tutors. I have semi-conversational Turkish but Duolingo teaches tenses by starting with a tense which is rarely used.
@@ShinyStarfireIdk any of the tv shows. But a lot of the offical courses are done virtually over zoom.
If you google learn welsh or dysgy cymraeg, you'll see the main site as the link.
If your under 25 you'll get the courses for free
ah the enshittification. i've been on duolingo for over a decade and i hardly want to keep up my streak any more it's so crap now
about the Yiddish course: I studied it and finished it while it was in beta, moved to other languages, and recently came back to see what changed since.
to my amazement, it seems that the course got WORSE when it came out of beta. longer for sure, but lower quality, with a lot of pointless padding.
also, one thing that automatically makes this version worse is there not being a comment section. if they don't teach me grammar rules and I don't have the comments to consult, I will literally never learn that some nouns behave like other grammatical genders in different cases.
They're constantly making things worse. They are awful.
I don't know what the Yiddish word for "enshittification" is, but I'm sure there is one. As someone who had taken some YIVO Yiddish classes, the Duolingo Yiddish course was just... odd, at least at first. I get that it was a compromise, but it was jarring if you had any background in the language from either side of that disagreement. Though as a compromise, I did kind of love what they decided to do? But the abolition of the comments section is really, seemingly deliberately unhelpful on Duolingo's part.
Iirc, the comments section was constantly getting locked because everyone was complaining about the pronunciation 😂
@@shainachana
I don't mind it being locked, I mind it being deleted.
'If you've been under a rock....'
Duolingo will still find you!
Professor Jones puts correlation coefficients into language learning videos. Excellent! I expected nothing less....
I can say from experience that Duolingo has helped me do one thing I wanted to do for Japanese: recognize and read hiragana. I learned katakana first for a video game years ago, so I was learning backwards. I don't know if it's the best for kanji, but I've learned a few, so I'll look into videos here on UA-cam, maybe. As you said, it's not good for speaking properly, but I think it is good for learning the structure of the language. Heck, I'm still using it, so that's a testament to it.
Ive been using it to practise hiragana nearly every day, I think the process of tracing the strokes and repeated audio of them is helping me remember them for when I visit Japan in two years :)
Duolingo sentences: Our horse does not eat bread. Papa eats pizza on the subway. The stone is in the cafe. Is Papa an engineer? Sigh. I have not had to use any of these sentences yet in real life.
Duo taught me tygrys nie jest warzywo. Poland is missing out on these vegetable tigers everywhere else in the world.
I found on the Spanish course I don't really get these kinds of nonsense sentences (except for one set of lessons where all the examples were about animals learning languages). Definitely a lot of unevenness here.
@@courtneyr6645it was „warzywo” or „warzywem”? because if it was a 1st one then there’s a mistake in duolingo 😭
@@julcia7992 it is warzywo at the beginning, but the correct conjugations come later in the subsequent units
Yesterday I had “the sponge wears square pants” in the Dutch course. I was impressed.
From a chat I had with an Irish man who was also learning Irish (or re-learning it? He has connections to Irish speakers in the home country, and of course they learn a solid chunk of it in school) he was really disappointed in the course's AI voices. Their pronunciation was frequently all over the place, and didn't really have a 'home accent'. The main problem I had was that they seemed to cut off the first half-second of each word? For example, I had one listening exercise where you had to hit the button to listen to a word, and then press the corresponding written word. Both "te" (hot) and "im" (butter) were options, but each of their audios sounded like a grunt, despite these words sounding completely differently when properly sounded out. And if you guess the wrong one? That's one less life for you! This happened more than once a day on average, sometimes twice or thrice in a single section, and when the app is constantly shoving "spend money to get unlimited hearts" ads in your face, it feels a little more than scummy.
It was like if I were to ask someone whether I was saying "Castellano" or "Está bien" by going "tae". Not fun. It got to the point where I dropped Duolingo entirely, because why try to learn a principally-spoken language through an app when the pronunciations are dreadful and the audio cuts out half the time?
It is kinda fun how the beginner language learner just kinda uses duolingo because they don't know any better but the more advanced language learner starts to dislike duolingo because they experienced more useful ressources but then suddenly the acadamic linguist says that duolingo can actually work really well if used optimally
It is so odd that has now become the common thinking. The way I see it, all kinds of resources work well when you are a complete beginner. Duolingo is even lacking as a phrasebook or a very nice friedly app for newbies. Eventually you get past the point you can say "hello", "banana" or "A boy is in the room" but still have much to go, and that is where losing motivation can be a factor. Duolingo works in that situation, mostly using your toilet time, and keeps moving you forward. Building sentences is important, and Duolingo is not that much different from a book of exercises in that sense.
Over the years, I've used some extremely frustrating textbooks that try to teach you over 50 new words before a lesson or do not track their vocabulary much. Duolingo's average course is USUALLY a bit more predictable, even if it does not reach the polish and the length of ES
holy crap it’s the IQ bell curve meme
@@sunmethods exactly
Like that IQ distribution meme with the hooded wojak :D
I am learning Norwegian for over a year now. Not really active like 5 lessons a day, but I can already read and hear a lot for 8 or 10 sections!
It would be great if you made a mini follow-up for the languages learnable using other languages but not available for English users on the duolingo app. These languages are Guarani and Catalan for Spanish speakers and Cantonese for Mandarin speakers.
That’s a great idea!
Oh no, did you just give me a reason to try and learn Mandarin again? How good does your Mandarin need to be to do the Cantonese course?
@@Didntwanttomakeauser i imagine you just have to set your language to mandarin. i checked out the english course that way.
@@dogcatdogable I mean my mandarin right now is shit tier. I'd have to put a lot of work in to be able to use it to ladder to Cantonese. But good Cantonese content is so hard to find there's a non zero chance it'd be worth the effort.
@@Didntwanttomakeauser i did a few lessons. A lot of it was just changing traditional characters to simplified and vice versa. Since duolingo is more focused on writing and the biggest differences are in speaking, it's not as hard as you would first think
Romanian Duolingo learner here, Spanish and English native speaker - standout is a bit of an understatement. The course recently just axed a whole section of 20 units (which, to be fair, was purely reviewing concepts and words already taught but with harder exercises) and it only adds to a feeling of a lack of support because there's a ton of missing features. No stories, no speaking exercises, and a severe underutilization of important concepts such as different tense conjugations, prepositions, and reflexive verbs after they are taught. And that's not to mention the inconsistency of definitions an expressions used (ie. prăjituri is taught as cookies or cakes, and torturi is also taught as cakes, but Duolingo will not always accept the different interpretations even when it fails to provide context necessary to know that prăjituri and torturi are not synonymous, or when prăjituri is not cookies). Conjugations, in particular, are taught so late into the course that it is hard to internalize it through coursework, and from the little research I have made into Romanian there's a lot of common conjugations that never get explained, such as imperative. My reading and writing are okay, but I still don't feel like I have a solid grasp of Romanian after completing the course (and by complete I mean having half of my progress in the last section denied and the other erased). Definitely needs to be supported with other learning materials, and a good chunk of added/reworked content to make sure Duolingo learners are not be stuck in present tense communication.
16:07 "Most have Portuguese.. of either flavor: spicy or original. "😂😂😂😂 This bursted me into loud laughter. 😂😂 Thank you. Original here.
Oh THATS why its called rosetta stone.
hahahaha wow yeah clever
lol, it all makes sense now
You serious?
I've been slowly going thru the Yiddish course on Duolingo and didn't know the subtleties. Your description of it was quite amusing as being like Shakespeare speeches in a Tennessee accent..
"Asymmetrically mutually intelligible" is a good description of the Scandinavian languages. As a native Swedish speaker with some friends who speak Danish and Norwegian, the impression I get is that Swedish and Danish speakers both understand Norwegian better than they understand the third language, and that Norwegian speakers understand Swedish & Danish even better than they are understood by speakers of those. While this is probably partly due to historical and social factors not inherent to the languages themselves, I still suspect learning only Norwegian would give you a better shot at understanding the other Scandinavian languages than learning only Swedish or Danish.
Can confirm. I’m four months into Norwegian and half the folks I started following on IG ended up being Danish because I couldn’t tell the difference. It’s now a running joke with my tutor. Annnnd, I discovered yesterday a song I really like is in Norwegian AND Danish FML 😆😂🤣
@sarahdawson975 makes sense. Norwegian Bokmål is basically Danish with spelling errors 😂 (sorry Norwegian friends. I love you and your sing-song language. Don't mind my potato please)
Your description of Duolingo Yiddish had me glad I was language learning on the toilet because thwt honestly sounds like a hot mess and i love it. I never knew i needed southern drawl shakespear
In my limited experience, I find two things about languages that make my experience with the free version Duolingo better. First, having some familiarity with the language helps a lot. Also, how phonetic a language is can make a big difference. In French, I can use up mistakes real quick if it's wanting me to spell a word I don't recognize. In German or Italian, I sound it out and have a good chance of getting it right. The paid version does help with both those issues.
I have a problem with the Polish course - on polish subreddit we constantly get people, who are confused by the case system. Questions like "Why in this sentence is it 'pies' but in this one it's 'psem'?". It seems that there isn't like a mandatory intro to the language or at least grammar explanation that is easily findable/accessible. I myself tried learning Korean, but it was so unstructured then, that I gave up and just used TTMIK and other resources.
TTMIK is the best korean learning resource around the internet me thinks
@@amorupatieee It seems like it. I love TTMIK. I was able to learn some Korean even when my English wasn't very good. I also managed to learn more English thanks to them. haha
I'm finish polish course and I say it has less mistake that I suppose to approach. Les then 5 in whole course. I also read comments and see that the sentences are changed continuously to be better and better. Now when they use AI I notice that the sentences also has more meaning. My crab is fastre then your turtle maybe teach you how to build sentences. But this sentence was useless :D
I want to try TTMIK, I've learned a small amount of korean using howtostudykorean which is really good for grammar, but hard for me to stick at consistently personally. I found the korean duo course to be horrendous, because korean is another language that is based heavily on social context that you just can't get from an app that doesn't explain things. duo is not going to meaningfully teach you the difference between 이다 and 습니다, as a very simple example. That's the kind of thing that needs to be explained via other resources.
Duolingo actually removed the grammar explanations they used to have. Even when they did have grammar explanations, they were only accessible for people using the web version of Duolingo, not for people using the mobile app.
Duolingo was an excellent way for me to dip my toe back into Irish after not speaking a word since school. It was great for dusting off the cobwebs but I moved onto other (better) learning materials fairly quickly.
One issue you didn't really touch on (probably because it's not as relevant for you or your audience) is that duolingo doesn't really tell you the grammar and expects you to figure it out from context.
Language learning subreddits are basically flooded with people asking "why is this wrong?", because the are seemingly completely unaware of very basic concepts like gender, cases, declinations etc. Also, when you e.g. get the gender wrong, the correction Duolingo gives you often doesn't simply correct the article but instead changes the noun to a synonym where the article fits.
I've only dabbled in Portuguese and Polish and I speak related languages, so it wasn't an issue for me, but English speakers in particular seem to struggle with this.
This video actually reminded me I was about to lose my streak, I swear to christ that owl is everywhere, friends. Take care. Don't let it take you!!!
Add the widget to your phone screen, if you have the app. Those little icons get WILD.
Man! I spent so long getting nowhere learning Hindi on Duolingo. Thank you for this video. I will be sure not to waste any more of my precious time!
Thank you for producing a video about Duolingo that isn't just a rant. I really benefited from your other video about how to make Duolingo work for you. The information about each of the modules was invaluable since I've been doing the Ukrainian module on repeat for at least 6 months. Now I am refreshing my high school French.
It was also helpful to hear your opinions about the modules, specifically the Yiddish and Hebrew. I was infuriated when I realized the Yiddish wouldn't help me speak with my neighbors and the poor audio quality of the Hebrew just made me cry, although I didn't have as much trouble with "no vowels" as I thought I would. It's so important to get that real-life experience!
I predict you will have 1000s of comments... gotta go... and do my daily practice session. ;-)
I did all the DuoLingo content for Ukrainian. It was a good starting point and it was very helpful for learning the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet. It was time well spent, but as you said you won't get to fluency. A good grammar course is needed and I used Lingq to stuff vocabulary into my brain.
As a Ukrainian learner who is trying to become fluent, do you know of any other apps or sources I could use to get closer to fluency? I fully grasp the grammar and alphabet, but I am looking to expand my vocabulary.
@@whitewolffearly0013 I am a language junkie and I've tried a lot of different apps and methods to learn vocabulary. Flashcards don't work for me. The two best ways I find to learn vocabulary are learning the words to songs in that language and the Lingq app which is both web based and it has a mobile app. The free version of the app has a LOT of great material. For EXTRA fun, I have a paid subscription to Lingq and import recordings and transcripts that my Ukrainian friends make for me. I am literally learning the words that my friends use. It makes it easier to understand each person who helps me. I have learned thousands of words on Lingq.
@@whitewolffearly0013LingQ is even free for Ukrainian, in support of the country's plight.
You can import texts/UA-cam videos of your interest to use as resources.
@@whitewolffearly0013 I would say, reading is really helpful for both vocabulary and grammar. Thanks God the Ukrainian alphabet is read the way it is written. LingQ is a nice source. Reading from e-readers with pop-up dictionaries, reading in browser with pop-up dictionaries- reading everything helps a lot. Maybe primarily something easy, like comments on UA-cam, after that some stories, songs.
@@whitewolffearly0013 consider Qlango for Ukrainian. I started from scratch there after finishing the Duolingo course and even at the beginning of level A1 words was learning vocabulary not included in Duolingo, and it goes up to B2 level as well. You can modify settings to suit learning style, each unit has different levels, plus you get to learn to write Ukrainian in the final level. Everything is clearly signposted, so if you want you can go back to revise previous topics. Also, it sets up extra lessons automatically for the things you get wrong; and there is lots of extra practice as a result. There are some extra activities outside the lessons. The only things it doesn't cover is learning the alphabet, and testing pronunciation - but I always found that really tricky on Duolingo as it depended a lot on device capability.
I had a HORRIBLE experience with Duolingo Japanese. How many times can the lessons repeat "She's a cool lawyer"? Something I will NEVER say on a trip to Japan? The _FIRST_ Japanese lesson in Pimsleur taught me more useful travel terms than THREE MONTHS of daily Duolingo junk. It was decent for learning hiragana and katakana, but there were massive frustrations with that as well, because you can't easily review what you've learned if you put it down for a while, without completing the entire thing.
I've never had a Japanese teacher mention duolingo unless it's to warn me away from using it
Disregarding how good Duolingo Japanese is; You shouldn‘t be concerned with phrase-learning if you want to learn a language properly. It‘s not about learning phrases you will use, it‘s about internalizing (important) words and using them in POSSIBLE sentences. Using your brain to think about the words you learned and creating your own sentences is a fundamental part of the learning process.
If you are learning for a trip you can just write down your 50 needed sentences and learn them that way - There‘s no need for (a good) duolingo course to achieve that.
Now, as to whether or not their Japanese course is good: It‘s okay. It should never be a primary learning resource for the language. It‘s a way to be in contact with the language outside of your usual learning spaces. Genki is what should dictate most of your learning journey.
@sugar5374 naw fam their Japanese course isn't even good. It actually teaches you bad Japanese manners and actively degrades native nuances of the language and pragmatism
@sugar5374 yeah I agree language learning isn't about parroting phrases.
So why does the Duolingo course barely even acknowledge the concept of grammar??? You know, the thing you gotta use if you want to slap your own concepts into a sentence? Not even a hint of how to tell words from particles in spoken Japanese?
It's designed to keep you on the treadmill for as long as possible with as little useful knowledge gained as they can get away with (at least the Japanese course)
I'm a teacher of Japanese language and when I was researching possible sources for my students I decided to check Duolingo - it has an option to solve a test to skip to the highest level and I spent unnecessary 2 HOURS trying to finish the final level and the only reason was not Japanese at all but ENGLISH - almost all the tasks were based on putting an English sentence as a translation of a Japanese sentence and I was constantly not passing for not putting EXACTLY the ENGLISH sentence that there was supposed to be. That was so exhausting and at the end I just had to Google those English sentences to finally get them right because additionally putting a British spelling or a synonym of a word was giving a fail. And not only this type of exercise is absolutely useless on advanced level (why heavily rely on a different language when you're supposed to be already fluent in another one) but also the Japanese sentences the user was asked to translate had many mistakes. Many many mistakes. Can't imagine anyone can get anything out of Duolingo when it comes to Japanese, even the video creator sounds rather confused about the language why there shouldn't be a reason if the source is good.
I love your unique data-driven analysis to substantiate your claims! Few bother to do anything similar. I really like seeing which languages "punch above their weight" (as you put it) in regards to content. This video was like kind of like seeing a science experiment or study carried out. Your graphs about these languages reminds me a little of the "Power Language Index" (PLI) by Dr. Kai L. Chan, where Bengali is more spoken than Japanese, but yet, Japanese remains one of the most powerful languages in the world despite having fewer speakers. Great stuff!
I like Duolingo because it's competitions get me to do it consistently (I do a little bit, twice a day, more if necessary to stay in the diamond league). I also like that it's free, it gives me lots of feedback, and it pairs reading the words with the correct audio, without me having to learn that separately. I love that I'm not translating everything. I'm now thinking (in partial sentences) in French, which never happened in any of my in-person language classes. I also enjoy the humor, where it's still present. I don't mean the weird sentences (though some of those are quite a hoot). The humor is in the stories, the in-game podcasts, and the in-game-retro-games, lol.
Can't wait for the 'why I don't like Esperanto' video.
I do like opinionated videos made by linguists, I'm hanging out for that too.
@@liquensrollant They're great because linguists aren't really meant to say a language is good or bad so seeing them do that is very entertaining
@@Matzu-Music Haha, too right!
I agree! I've seen plenty of people reviewing Esperanto before but I'm always happy to see one more.
I'd also love to see him talk more about Valyrian. "Annoyed" is such an interesting word to use to describe your opinion on something. Like, is it that it gets close to doing something good but misses in a small but profound way? Or just generally poor/lazy?
Same here, now I'm very curious. Valyrian too lol.
"Maybe you can order in a restaurant and SHOCK locals" 😂
I live in Vietnam, the pronouns aren't that difficult, there's basically one for a ,man younger than you, one for a man older, one for a woman younger than you, one for a woman older than you, one for a very old woman, you can pick them up in ten minutes, where it's different is that the pronoun remains the same whether it's the subject or the object. It's not that tricky, the hard part is the lack of cognates.
And the fact that Duolingo doesn't actually explain much of anything. If you can't pick up the logic from seeing it in a few sentences absent of context, you're not going to pick it up.
@JohnnyLynnLee It's way harder than that.
About Vietnamese:
Yep! The pronouns depend on sex, age and social standing. You have to keep track of the age of people all the time and that's pretty hard since Asians look YOUNGER to people from the West. That's hard enough but that's NOT NLY THAT. Younger people don't adhere strictly to that so that may also change depending on the level of intimacy you have with the person. But that itself also depends on the person. SO the level of variation is WILD. Let's put it this way, you are an older man and she is a younger woman. You have to say one thing, she has to say another thing. But if she wants to date you she may DROP it. In which case you may have to drop it too (or not, because it may be too early for you to accept the invitation- yeah... it's complicated). BUT you may find that she meant to drop it ONLY between the two of you and that dropping it in front of other people may make her lose face.
Good look! Exposure it's the only way o get it. It's highly contextual.
PS: it only looks easier probably because they are treating as a foreigner, meaning as an outsider. Same with Japanese (in which I'm fluent, I'm four years into Vietnamese and still there's a long way to go to be where I'm in Japanese in Vietnamese). The EXPECTATIONS put on you will drastically change along with your perceived level of Japanese. Same for Vietnamese. The better you get the less you can get away with things. Always have that in mind.
There`s a drastic difference in nuance between それがいい and それでいい as an answer in Japanese. The person can be very pleased or very upset, or sad, depending on which one you chose in a given situation. But if they see you just as a gaijin it doesn`t matter. But if one day you pick it wrong and there are consequences that means you are really good at Japanese now. So much that they expect you to UNDERSTAND the difference and, therefore, they assume you did it on purpose. Trust me! That cnan be a lot of drama.
oooh that sounds fraught with difficulty with people five years more or less.. if you see a man who's a overweight balding but he's five years younger than.
I like that you compared each language to other resources, and how comprehensive this ranking is! Also, the comments on here from native speakers about that language are interesting.
Thanks for mentioning the graphs! I usually listen to these vids, rather than watch, and I'm a sucker for a good graph! The verbal cue let me know to face the screen!
Thank you for reviewing Hebrew. I have been plodding through for years and often feel confused. I feel like I often can guess a verb but can't tell you what conjugation is which. I don't really have time to supplement it with anything but I am glad to know that it's not just my lack of talent for learning language that makes trying to figure out what rules of conjugation they are teaching me.
The course defeated me. Without full audio, it’s really hard. I’m looking for something else.
^^ditto here for Hebrew. I have some college classroom Hebrew and found the course useful only for keeping the rust off. I wouldn’t recommend it for learning from scratch-I’ve found a few errors in it, and the audio is awful.
@kaelynharris1895 that's comforting
I'm ready to listen to a livestream where you recite all of Shakespeare's Hamlet using a Tennessee accent.
For Welsh I would highly recommend taking actual classes which are heavily subsidised and can be attended on line. This is especially true if you want to learn the dialect of the north, duolingo occasionally tells you specific nouns that are different but it doesn't do a good job of the more fundamental stuff in my opinion (including a whole vowel sound that isn't made in the south).
Which course are available to Americans?
Love the statistics and linguistics talk! Thank you for this video! Subscribed!
Thank you! There's definitely more where that came from
You had me at "graphs"
Thanks for this review, really appreciated. I'll continue my learning journey of Italian and Russian.
My brother moved to Lisbon, and in the passed I considered using Duolingo for Portuguese, but the app only offers the Brasilian variant, which is very different (apparently the difference is bigger than between European Spanish and "latin" Spanish or European english and American english). That's something you forgot to point out.
Keep up the good work!
Удачи с изучением русского языка! 🫶 Greetings from Volgograd
@@yourwaifu4306 Спасибо!
Hello from Catalonia.
I've been on Duolingo Italian for 33 days, it's been pretty okay. They give me a premium for free so I'm happy.
Now I can say I'm from Philadelphia.
Ha. Congrats 👍. I'm about to play right now......hope that I get one more free day
PHILLY MENTIONED 🎉🥪
Come il pugile Rocky Balboa???
@@MikeVoltz non lo so
I'm a little ahead of you at 53 days. Il mio vicino è di Filadelfia.
You got me at "I have graphs" ^^
I will say as a native french speaker who is also fluent in italian, I wish dueling would teach you how to conjugate words in romance languages (or any language for that matter), as it is something I felt was lacking when I first started learning Italian. I was lucky enough to be able to spend quite a lot of time in Italy and there I took courses with native speakers and was fully immersed in the language, and being a native french speaker, this made me learn the language in record time. I do recognize, however, that not everyone has the opportunity or the means to do this.
The Welsh course used to be really good. It was designed with the national organisation for the language. If you do one of the adult learning courses (much easier since the pandemic as some of them are now on zoom) then the printed course material links to Duolingo units. I found this helpful when I was revising for my exams as I could do the units that were relevant to what I was revising. However, Duolingo abandoned this collaboration and it no longer links into the adult learning courses. Very sad.
Cool, I am spoiled as the only user of Duolingo Norwegian 😊
Nope it’s my second highest score language. jeg snakker det litt lol
Er du sikker på det?
@@aidanb.c.2325 Ja selvfølgelig
The Norwegian course is the best on Duolingo! They put a lot of effort into it. I've finished the whole course. Jeg elsker dette kurset! ☺
Hello, @@LangXplorer ! 😃 Firstly, it seems there was a mix-up here, haha. 😄 When I wrote that comment, I was referring to @hijackbyejack1729 's comment. I was replying to him. I haven't seen your comment. 😅 But that's all right! Anyway, I'm very happy that you gave me an answer too! Thank you very much! Regarding the course audio, I understand that you feel this way because, indeed, it's not perfect. But honestly, I like it a lot too! I think both the female and male audios are nice. I usually supplement my learning with other resources so that I know the correct pronunciation. So that's it. Thanks again for your reply! 😊
It had been a while since I needed to take a shot
Also just want to mention, this is one of my favorite channels currently
Duolingo also not only doesn't have traditional Chinese, but also marks you incorrect if you type a traditional character into their prompts. It teaches pinyin decently, but also teaches words people don't say extremely early on (things like 哪兒）it fails to tell you that 你最近怎麼樣 means how have you been recently, but drop the time word and you just asked "what's wrong with you? " as a greeting.
With all that said, I still recommend Duolingo but you can you'll basically pull all you can from it (if you're trying to learn traditional characters) within the first month.
From what I have seen of it the vocabulary actually seems to follow the HSK list pretty closely though.
I find HelloChinese quite a good free app. The veery sloooow pronunciation of the tones honestly sounds a bit obnoxious (and not like how I hear natives say it) but they frequently have you listen to actual natives saying the same sentences so that levels out. And it's not AI, AFAIK.
It'll never get close to as good as brute forcing good ol' Anki with sentence cards with native audio though in my opinion (Spoonfed Chinese for example). But they serve different purposes.
isn't 哪兒 pretty common though?
I think "what's wrong with you" is actually a much more profound greeting than it appears 😂
@@zeusthunder6674I think that’s another issue with teaching “standard Mandarin” in app form with little explanation of regional differences. There are so many different types of Mandarin speakers. Not everyone is learning Mandarin for the Beijing dialect. If I want to take a trip to say Malaysia or Taiwan and I proceed to learn to speak Mandarin like a Beijinger I’m going to sound real funny to my target audience and potentially run into issues understanding what these native speakers are trying to communicate back. IMHO it’s better to focus on your goal in learning Chinese. If you just need to take HSK tests, then sure 哪儿/哪兒 is fine, but if you want to speak to people of a specific region finding something like a local tutor on italki will avoid having to unlearn weird sayings, pronunciations and general bad language habits. To more directly answer your question, (lol sorry for the rant) it depends on the region. In Taiwan for example 哪裡 (pronounced nálǐ sometimes) is way more common and 哪兒 is essentially never used.
Ooo He brought out the graphs :} Let's get into this!
Subscribed ❤
Last time I checked in on duo Navajo there wasn’t even audio so I’m glad thats updated!
I started using Duolingo to learn German, about two years ago. As my German improved, I started to notice that some of the English translations were quite peculiar. There were minor irritations like, why do I need to translate "Cafe (G)" to "coffee shop", instead of "cafe (E)", like I would normally say? I started to think the English had been written by non-native speakers, due to some confusion with the use of prepositions. Most notably with the misuse of "in" and "at". Finally, while trying to master the somewhat convoluted sentence structures of the English answers, I started thinking, maybe the German is as bad as the English. That was when I stopped using Duolingo.
I think the café thing is fair, at least from a UK perspective. We say 'shall we go to a coffee shop' if we mean Starbucks, Nero, Costa, etc., while 'let's find a café', I would associate more with eating something like an English breakfast, a roll, etc. Can also depend for some whether it's pronounced 'caff' (more basic premises with sausages, eggs, beans, etc) or 'café' (fancier place where I might expect a French-style brunch).
@@legatrix I go to a coffee shop. I buy coffee beans and get them to grind the beans. They sell a huge range of beans plus percolators and coffee machines etc.
I go to a cafe with the café pronunciation. Caff is just plain weird, although I've heard it in UK based shows/movies. I might have breakfast, get a coffee and cake, sit down for lunch. They may or may not have table service. Starbucks failed dismally here, they made lousy coffee. There are still some of the around but not anywhere local to me.
I was in Germany last year and what the Germans call a cafe looks like a cafe to me. So I feel justified!
With Duolingo, what bothered me was that sense that some of the people who wrote the English translations were not 100% fluent in English and nobody had bothered to check their work.
And there is no longer a way to suggest real changes or read what others thought. Also, the gender obfuscation thing drove me crazy.
@@Myrune1 agree 100%. In German, you have to learn the gender religiously. But in Duolingo, they rarely teach you the gender of the nouns
@@legatrix I found in stydying Dutch (around the turn of the century, lol) the pronunciations were based on British english, so I had to imaging saying the English work with a British accent to say the Dutch correctly. Example the word "pot"
Not the America pAHt, but the British pAWt.
One of the things you didn't really mention about Duolingo is also that the whole design of their software is very obviously based on the way European languages work, and many of the other languages have just been shoehorned into that system, instead of developing activities that are actually tailored to the sorts of things you need to learn for some of the more different languages (such as East Asian ones).
For example, with Japanese, some of the types of exercises that come up would make sense with a Latin alphabet, but they don't actually make sense (or don't actually teach you anything) in Japanese because they're dealing with a different way of writing things that doesn't work the same way, etc. IMHO, it's not a deal breaker, but it does make the course feel a lot less efficient, and sometimes more tedious. On the other hand, some things that would be really useful to learn more in depth (such as kanji composition and pronunciations) just aren't really covered at all, because they only have one predefined set of exercise types that they use for everything, and none of those predefined types are designed to handle that sort of problem (because it's just not an issue with European languages, which is what all the software was obviously based on).
Oh, and they basically don't teach you the Japanese kana at all anymore. Sure, they've got a weird little add-on thing which isn't actually part of the main course which runs through them quickly, but it's laughably brief, does not have any of the variety of exercise types or fun of the main course, and that's only if you know you should be going and looking for it anyway, since that is not where the course actually starts. It is so clearly an afterthought it's actually kinda insulting, IMHO. Because of this, I would not recommend Duolingo for Japanese to anyone who hasn't already at least spent time getting familiar with Hiragana and Katakana on their own using some other method first.
And they keep rearranging the course, so it feels like I'm stuck in some sort of sysiphusian language limbo, where every time I make progress toward finishing the course, I find myself suddenly many lessons, or even whole sections back from where I used to be with no warning, and I don't even have any idea what's actually changed. (I'm not usually this cynical, but at this point I'm kinda legitimately suspecting that the constant reorganizations are actually a deliberate tactic to keep people from ever actually finishing the language, so they can make them keep using the app longer and try to extract more revenue out of them...)
But that having been said, it is still a useful tool for me anyway. I would never recommend that anybody use it just by itself, but in combination with some other learning materials, I do find that Duolingo is useful for giving me a good variety of sentences to work with, introducing me to occasional new vocabulary words and grammar that supplement what I'm getting elsewhere, and most importantly, keeping me motivated to do at least some language study every day, which IMHO is very important to actually make real progress. That aspect alone is probably worth keeping it in many people's language learning toolbox, in my opinion.
Sysiphean?
Eh, I disagree with your Japanese course criticism. No one needs to learn to write kanji, only recognize them. And gradually integrating characters into lessons is a more effective way of getting users to learn them, rather than just having lessons dedicated to writing characters. You'll never need to write characters irl unless you're trying to genuinely form a life in Japan as if you were Japanese, and someone like that wouldn't be on Duolingo. Recognizing the characters and being able to pronounce and understand them is all you need. Everything is electronic these days. I do the writing / stroke order lessons when I didn't feel like turning on my brain enough for full lessons but still wanna hit my streak, but they're pretty much a waste of time.
Just found your channel. Love your videos man. Keep it up. Very useful while im on my journey.
As someone who tried to learn Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo I can say that the Scottish Gaelic course works way better for me than Irish or Welsh. I gave up on Irish after a few months and have stuck with Scottish Gaelic for three years, supplemented with other resources. Considering that Irish has far more speakers and a deeper academic well to draw from, I expected the opposite. The Welsh course is great, but for whatever reason my brain didn’t process Welsh as well. I will probably go back now that I have a better base to build on. I’d highly recommend the Scottish Gaelic course if you want to dig into Celtic languages. It’s incredibly well structured, makes the grammar easy to digest, and offers a ton of cultural tie-ins to make it more useful.
hey im one of those 8 people learning dutch, thank you for the well wishes!
Personally I liked the old tree structure better, because it allowed me to progress much quicker and decide the ammount of intake by myself, I used to do 2-3 units then going back and do the older ones to gold and then switch again to new stuff... (Then again, I had had half a year of torture with an absolutely dry and boring learningpsychology class and had learnt 2.5 languages during school) ...
For me the path currently has way too many repetitions, but that's a me issue...
I had fun with it with a year streak, until I decided it wasn't as helpful as it should have been. Using other resources has been much better, but Duo will always be good for beginners.
I agree. I've been using Duolingo Spanish for 6 months now, starting as a complete beginner. I'm in their B1 section, and I feel like I have a pretty good base, in grammar and vocabulary specifically. I've also been using supplemental content in addition to Duolingo, so that has helped also. I'm now at the point where I feel I need to demote Duolingo as the primary learning tool and switch to more intense comprehensible input. I'm now listening to podcasts on LinQ and doing more reading (more than just the isolated sentences on Duolingo).
90 mins on the app 7 days a week ,6 months in ,learns so much.
My husband is a native Norwegian speaker, and I have learned/practiced my Norwegian through Duolingo daily since 2014. I would personally say that it has helped me understand the language very well, but I have the additional benefit of being able to ask my husband and in-laws for corrections and practice with them.
The Japanese course is kind of crazy at the moment, they've removed a bunch of content and randomly expect you to know words or kanji they've never taught you, but alsorandomly dedicate an entire lesson to making you add one stroke to complete a basic kanji like 日 or 十 10 times in a row.
It also insists that i learn to translate 二年生 (literally "second year student") into sophomore, which would be silly even if i was an American who used yhat term