Duolingo

[liv]

Duolingo, who's playing? I've seen various mentions of the site and thought I might check it out, and then I discovered via FB that they now have a Swedish-for-English-speakers course in beta. So I signed up and poked at it a bit.

I'm not madly impressed, I must say. It's got some cute gamification but nothing that really stands out. If the Swedish course is typical, it's very much in the model of the old-style language tapes, that is lots of repetition of phrases to give a fairly fast route to superficial fluency, without really understanding much of the underlying structure of the language. That certainly works better as a combined website / mobile app (though Swedish isn't available for mobile yet) than on a magnetic tape that you play in the car. Primarily because you can get actual feedback, which of course a tape-based course can't do, and that's got to make learning more effective. Other advantages include the ability to do an odd five minutes every day, rather than having to sit down and listen to an episode of a tape. Plus unlike with a tape you can practise writing as well as speaking, and reading as well as listening. The set-up seems to have a pretty good mix, including translating in both directions, transcribing spoken language and so on.

The interface is a bit clunky, pretty visually, but a pain to use, in particular continuing to the next question after you've answered the previous question takes enough clicks to break the flow and to risk being physically hard on your hands. And I struggled quite a lot with creating a profile, because the account creation screen was a pop-up and there was absolutely no visual indication that you're supposed to type about an inch to the right of each prompt.

For me, the worst thing about the Swedish course as I've played with it so far is that the audio is kind of awful. It's an automated text-to-speech thing, and its Swedish pronunciation is worse than mine, which is making me think I should just turn it off, it's quite possibly doing me more harm than good. This is obviously an issue of scale; it's not going to be practical to offer free / crowd-sourced language courses with real native speakers doing all the voicing. But it's sometimes actively wrong (there are notes in the discussion forum to this effect, particularly that it can't pronounce de [them] correctly, and often just sounds weird with the stresses slightly in the wrong place and the intonation, which is an important part of Swedish, off or missing altogether.

I'm also mildly annoyed with the way that the translations into English lean heavily on literal word-for-word translations rather than idiomatic English, which again makes sense as a scaling thing, it's a lot easier to give automated feedback if you're looking for the most literal possible meaning of a phrase. And there is some flexibility where you can still get it correct if you don't type the exact answer that the course is looking for, which is helpful. One good feature it has is that it lets you jump in to a course not right at the beginning, through a "testing out" mechanism. I appreciate that, especially because my Swedish is really patchy, my receptive Swedish is, even after 5 years away, pretty good, but I can not even slightly spell in Swedish or remember the plurals and genders of anything. So being placed at what the course calls level 6 is about right, and hopefully the course will in fact help with those awkward bits of inflection.

Not at all clear what their business model is. My money's on hoping to get bought out by Google or Facebook, tbh; they don't have adverts or micropayments, which does make the site pleasant to use at least, but also makes me suspicious about how sustainable it is. They're at least up-front about having VC funding as well as believing in their "mission", but still. And they seem to be relying mainly on user-created content, which certainly can work well, but I'm not sure what the incentive is for people to put time into creating and curating medium quality language courses. The people involved are portrayed on the site as cute little cartoons, which makes it hard to judge things like race and gender, but I'd guess very heavily white dominated, with some female-appearing cartoons including in the technical sectors.

I think I may go back to Memrise, which is more of an automated flashcards thing in some ways, it's for drilling vocabulary at a slightly more atomic level than Duolingo. But I like its gamification stuff better, and I find the interface more usable and less annoying.

Anyway, username ewerb; anyone who's using it want to be friends? I'm sure the social side of it will be a benefit if I do decide to go on with it.

Comments

[ursula]

I thought the duolingo business plan involved getting people to pay for crowdsourced translation?

I'm ursulageorges there; I have the app on my phone and play with it in airports, so my usage is kind of episodic.

[liv]

Ah, I hadn't found the paying for crowdsourced translation bit with my fairly limited poking around the site. I suppose that could work, but it does confirm my suspicion that the users aren't really the site's main customers.

I added you so you can wave hi when you're next poking at the app in an airport :-)

[vatine]

I've looked at Duolingo multiple times and gone "meh". But, now that they offer Swedish, maybe.

If you happen to know German, there's an almost-good trick to Swedish genders. Almost all German neuter words (the "das" words) end up being neutrum ("det" words), everything else is utrum (the bulk male/female/reale gender-group, or "den" words).

Looking at it, that seems of limited utility, actually. But it was borderline handy the other way. And, yes, there are exceptions.

[liv]

Thank you for the tip. I learned some rules of thumb for person versus object, but trying to figure it out from first principles doesn't really work for grammatical gender, you have to just build up the habit. The course is making me realize that when I speak Swedish I kind of blur the word endings when I don't know what gender I should be using! Which would be good to fix, really. Similarly the robot lady seems to pronounce verbs in -er and -ar exactly the same, which is not helpful for fixing my bad habits in that direction.

[vatine]

Ahahaha. Yes. Text-to-speech people seem to dislike Swedish. I don't even wonder why, anymore (some of my colleagues work on TTS, so I get to hear a lot of horror stories).

[liv]

I did not know that there was friction around Swedish TTS. I can imagine that the tonal stuff may make it a hard problem, maybe. I think I might turn the audio off though because picking up a robot accent in my Swedish isn't much better than having an English accent!

[vatine]

It is hilarious, in exactly the worst kind of hilarity.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

I do DuoLingo German and Irish, but I think it's more about being good at DuoLingo than actually learning Irish, and although it's helpful for getting me to actually speak in German, if I didn't already try and do that every day - and have people around who are willing and able to talk with me - I'm not sure it would be helpful at all.

[liv]

Yeah, that's always the danger with gamified methods of learning, you get better at playing the game than learning the underlying skill. I'm pretty sure I couldn't learn a language just with Duolingo (or just with Memrise either), but it's useful to have a simple and rewarding tool for a bit of drilling to supplement other aspects of learning.

[jack]

I used Anki for a while, and tried DuoLingo once, and haven't quite worked out what I'm going to do.

I thought having an actual teaching sequence, not just flashcards (which are intended primarily for revision not teaching) was a good advantage of duolingo (or anything but Anki). But I was enraged by the insistence on making you type in answers, I'd previously fallen in love with the obvious-in-retrospect idea of Anki of pitching it towards people who actively want to learn the language and don't want to deliberately sabotage themselves, so simply showing the question, then saying "click for answer", then having three buttons for "easy (show me again in long time), hard (show me again soon) and wrong (show me again almost immediately)". That doesn't work if it's easy to lie to yourself, but mostly for vocab it's pretty obvious whether you really knew it, or kinda knew it, or didn't know it, and no-one's measuring you so there's no incentive to lie. So I was really annoyed by services that take ten times as long per word by forcing you to go through a "type it out on a phone keyboard, BZZZT FAIL you knew the answer but you made a typo" cycle.

[liv]

I definitely know what you mean about the typing thing. That might mean it's not really worth it at all for me to get the Duolingo app, because typing on the phone is too slow and too annoying. It seems to be relatively forgiving of typos, except that sometimes it's too forgiving because the difference between the right and the wrong answer is a single letter and I know I actually got it wrong because there was a gap in my language knowledge, not because I accidentally pressed the wrong key. Also I don't have the facility to type in Swedish, and... it's marking me wrong if I type o for å, e for ä and oe for ö, whereas forcing myself to type a/a/o is I suspect actively harmful for my learning correct spelling.

The problem is that there are measurable benefits from getting feedback from an external source about whether you're right or wrong, beyond the benefits of just you internally comparing your answer to the correct answer. I think Anki's model of just assuming you're not going to sabotage your own learning does make sense, but it has some downsides. And all the gamification stuff on Duolingo does require the site to do the deciding whether you're right or not, because by providing rewards for doing well it's also providing that incentive to lie.

[emperor]

I used anki for the flashcards that came with a Portuguese course I was doing, as it was better than making dead-tree cards.

[ewt]

I used the express (ie free) version of BYKI for a bit of Hebrew for a while and found it OK-ish; but it didn't have a social aspect and I didn't really stick with it long enough to make significant progress.

[ceb]

I use Duo for German (I'm ceb, though not a heavy user at the moment because Too Much Life) which is kinda OK for a keep-the-rust-off thing. I find it awful for grammar, and I dislike its insistence on correct genders (because in real life no-one cares that much, and I'd much rather have the brain-space taken up with e.g. more vocab). The word-for-word translation thing does get better as that language becomes more popular, as they have a mechanism for discussing translations and suggesting alternative, more idiomatic ones. There are a handful of German words which I *cannot* hear correctly from their automated voice though.

[zhelana]

I have added you to duolingo. I use the same username.

[kerrypolka]

I used Duolingo for about three months before going to live in Paris and I didn't feel it helped me very much. Although that's partially because an hour a week for three months is not actually very much practice, it's also true that Duolingo is aimed at helping you translate a language rather than speak it; it did help my French reading skills.

I've heard Pimsleur is better for speaking, but I'm happy to play Duolingo for a few minutes during work downtime in a way that I'm not happy to sit down and do a half-hour Pimsleur lesson recording.

I like Memrise too but I think Duolingo is gamified better, by which I mean it makes me want to play it more.