LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

by hyperific • 1 year ago

804 363 1 year ago

For the curious, here's an article from the developer on why they built LibreLingo https://dev.to/kantord/why-i-built-librelingo-280o

darkstar_162• 1 year ago

who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and learn a foreign language ... :D

cyborgx7• 1 year ago

The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.

fleischhauf• 1 year ago

who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and develop software to learn a foreign language

sschueller• 1 year ago

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978

Tor38• 1 year ago

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".

devrandoom• 1 year ago

What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?

navigate8310• 1 year ago

Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.

joshdavham2• 1 year ago

What are the modern methods

It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall

what's to back up they're better?

Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")

In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)

wodenokoto• 1 year ago

Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.

damnitbuilds2• 1 year ago

I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.

jamager5• 1 year ago

I wrote https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.

bluGill10• 1 year ago

I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.

unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.

mobtrain2• 1 year ago

This comment would be 60 times more helpful if in addition to your strong opinion on the failures of learning with Duolingo it’d supply some of the good alternatives.

sudahtigabulan• 1 year ago

I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners.

With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though.

You can also sign up to in-person classes.

Hamcha• 1 year ago

As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to instead build a foundation first, and many other little things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term learning.

makingstuffs2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet.

Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.

Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.

Tor38• 1 year ago

My learning finally picked up speed again when I started using CCI (Compelling Comprehensive Input). How easy it is to find material differs a lot between languages. Way way back in time I learned English that way, though I didn't think of it as "learning" back then - I was so focused on what is now called "compelling input".

However, you'll need some kind of foundation, otherwise it'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach" in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I talked to had never heard about the guy.

When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge mistake was to switch to Duolingo.

jamager5• 1 year ago

Italki, LingQ, Languagetransfer, StoryLearning...

chrisco255• 1 year ago

Duolingo is a multimodal learning tool. There's some translation but there's also fill in the blank, describe from prompt, oral story interpretation, spoken descriptions, and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.

If you have that, you don't need the other things.

One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language.

(You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)

gary17the6• 1 year ago

[learning by translation] [is] an utterly broken approach to learning languages

I speak one foreign language fluently, which I learned in a traditional classroom environment with a teacher, and recently started to learn another language with Duolingo. I actually find their "learning by translation" method possibly easier (and definitely less boring) than the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach, usually featured in a classroom or in self-learning video courses.

The only feature missing from Duolingo is short grammar summaries before new grammar constructs are introduced for the first time, as Duolingo unit/section "guidebook" entries are way to short and thus useless. You have to ask an LLM for an explanation every time a particular sentence turns out to be different from what you would expect.

tossandthrow5• 1 year ago

This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.

If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.

The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.

internet_points• 1 year ago

traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach

That's not better than Duolingo, no.

Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to

* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)

* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)

* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly

* lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons that give more control over subtitles, eventually only foreign subtitles or none)

* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now

You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.

huimang4• 1 year ago

The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion.

My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a level of conversations with native speakers or being able to engage with media.

Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not speaking a language but moreso learning about it academically.

There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial. It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and barely be able to speak the language at all with someone... which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?

I love the hobby of studying languages and things like Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they can't speak very much even after a long time investment, which is damn shame.

My point is neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods.

criddell2• 1 year ago

English grammar (my native language) has always been a mystery to me. Any time I hear about participles or present perfect or infinitives or passive voice etc… my eyes glaze over and I have no idea what any of it means. In school I failed those units.

Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn’t be a very effective path for me…

bluGill10• 1 year ago

Research has figured out that grammar is the wrong thing to focus on in a classroom. There are better ways to teach in a classroom that work. However many schools are not following the latest research so you need to find a good one.

grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have had around 50 hours in the classroom.

InsideOutSanta3• 1 year ago

recently started to learn another language with Duolingo

Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.

the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"

Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.

mawadev• 1 year ago

I like how this type of critique pops up when someone sits down and makes a free/libre version of an app with a flawed premise.

bornfreddy2• 1 year ago

Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).

switch007• 1 year ago

Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language.

Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.

It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space

zsoltkacsandi2• 1 year ago

Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages

No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.

While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:

- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials

- at what point you should move on from Duolingo

palata• 1 year ago

but that they do not communicate two things clearly: this alone won't make you a fluent speaker

Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.

at what point you should move on from Duolingo

I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.

znpy• 1 year ago

My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless.

Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.

The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).

So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.

luotuoshangdui• 1 year ago

Because Duolingo is perhaps the most well-known language learning app right now, people call their apps 'alternatives to Duolingo' regardless of how much they actually have in common.

wkat42422• 1 year ago

Yeah Duolingo is so bad. It doesn't explain what you're trying to do, why one word is better than the other. It's just dumb gamification.

I learn a lot more from taking to an LLM, asking it to make me language questions and then explaining the answers if I don't get them right. Duolingo is obsolete.

gary17the6• 1 year ago

Duolingo is obsolete.

I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more.

I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.

vintermann• 1 year ago

Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM. Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can run locally totally trash Norwegian grammar. And they even claim it (both written forms!) as one of the languages they explicitly trained on.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

Whats a better way and mobile app? I tried a few but everything is pretty crap. Then a lot languages like Spanish or Portuguese are often the south American ones even though they (including duolingo) say they are not, which means it's fully unusable as no one will take you serious.

arghwhat5• 1 year ago

I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.

Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.

On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.

Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.

(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)

Tor38• 1 year ago

I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.

rvba• 1 year ago

Using AI for conversations is really interesting approach - it generally speaks the language correctly (not like classmates).

isaacremuant3• 1 year ago

Next time pay enough for a class or have a good private tutor and all you've said becomes true.

But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.

cess11• 1 year ago

I don't trust Duolingo so I've never used it but I've been looking for something similar that seems less megacorporate and still would allow me to add to my vocabulary in a few languages in such a lazy way.

TFA might work for my use case.

trueismywork• 1 year ago

One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language.

For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.

I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.

porridgeraisin• 1 year ago

It's a broken approach only if you are talking about the academic approach to learning language. If all you want is to be able to form basic sentences with some english nouns (which is mostly all most people want from a secondary language) then it is absolutely productive.

jamager5• 1 year ago

There is nothing wrong with learning via translation.

What Duolingo does wrong is many other things: emotional manipulation, lack of context, low content density, countless distractions, being mobile first, and a long list. But translation is OK.

crispyambulance• 1 year ago

People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine.

If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.

To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.

dilap2• 1 year ago

You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.

Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point.

It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.

Ajedi323• 1 year ago

Note that DuoLingo does offer live voice conversations with an AI partner so it's not just translation. Unfortunately that's a "super premium" feature though; even the normal paid tier doesn't include it.

HWR_14• 1 year ago

I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.

simonbarker873• 1 year ago

Going to plug Language Transfer again, an excellent free app that is a much better way to learn a language than the DuoLingo approach.

bornfreddy2• 1 year ago

Thank you! Is there any advantage to using the app instead of just playing the audio files directly?

AnonC• 1 year ago

I found this in the app’s description:

This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone locked.
We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings

jcul5• 1 year ago

The app is really basic, in a good way. There are no ads or unnecessary permissions. It's just a basic media player that lets you download the audio files for offline playback and tracks whan you have already listened to.

I find I pretty convenient.

detectivestory• 1 year ago

I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.

jcul5• 1 year ago

Spanish after hours looks great, thanks.

Do you just watch / listen to random videos or is it more structured?

I am planning a trip to Mexico soon, so I have been listening to how to Spanish, and mextalki podcasts. The latter is pretty difficult to follow, though I feel you need to listen to real native speakers speaking at a normal pace to have any chance of understanding locals.

SAH seems great because she does seem to speak normally and not too slowed down (or it just sounds quick to me :))

hombre_fatal3• 1 year ago

So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?

Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.

Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.

Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.

The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.

Alex-Programs8• 1 year ago

Language transfer is rather good. I'm not quite sure what it does differently, but there's a reason people recommend it.

simonbarker873• 1 year ago

No, it’s a series of audio activities framed as a conversation between someone who knows the new language and someone learning. You pause the audio and play the part of the student when required and it focusses on the positive language transfer aspects between languages and how they can be used to build up sentences and phrases.

Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and comprehension are all practiced and developed through the courses and, for me, it has been the most effective way to learn Spanish.

After just a handful of lessons I was able to structure many useful sentences based on the teachings that we weren’t taught directly but that I was able to create a fresh as needed in the moment.

jcul5• 1 year ago

It's not really a podcast.

It's closer to courses like pimsleur or Paul noble where a teacher and student are speaking and there is pause before the student answers in which you are supposed to answer.

The thing I love about LanguageTransfer is how he explains _why_ something works a certain way. I find it easier to remember some grammar when I know the background evolution. He also makes an effort to map between languages which is the biggest contrast to things like pimsleur, which try to be more immersive.

WinstonSmith84• 1 year ago

up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I wish there would have been more content though

simonbarker873• 1 year ago

My wife and I used it for Spanish as well and it’s a game changer for sure. I can now have a surpassingly decent (if simple) conversation with Spanish speakers based on this app and some supporting vocab learning

jcul5• 1 year ago

Yes! Language transfer is amazing imo. I found it here on hacker news and it's probably the most effective tool I have found for learning languages.

For Spanish, over the years, I have taken formal immersive classes, finished the Duolingo tree and the reverse tree, spent time in Spanish speaking countries etc. My level of Spanish was good but clunky and I made a lot of mistakes. After finishing about half of the course, I found I was making far fewer mistakes.

I love the etymology background he gives, I love linguistics so it keeps me interested, maybe not for everyone.

I completed the Paul noble learn Italian course, so that I could compare to language transfer. In my opinion language transfer was much better, I found Paul noble's a bit slow and less engaging, for me personally.

gramie2• 1 year ago

I used it for Spanish too, and it really gave me confidence. I went through the course once and was able to travel through rural Panama for two weeks. I plan to redo the entire course (total about 15 hours) soon, to freshen things up after five years.

I think it needs to be supported with other techniques (speaking to natives, watching Spanish TV or movies, etc.), but for taking in and understanding the language it can't be beat.

gramie2• 1 year ago

I learned French, German, Sesotho, Japanese, with a mixture of classroom teaching and full immersion. I decided to learn Spanish with Language Transfer. It is by far the best system I have ever used (short of immersion; the absolute best way to learn Japanese was to fall in love with a Japanese woman in Japan).

I have been supporting it with monthly donations for about 4 years now, because I believe it is such an important tool.

est2• 1 year ago

been using Duolingo in the 10s and last year, I gave up because the course seems very repetitive. Even if I got the answer right 10 out of 10 times, the same question kept coming. It almost looks like the app is trying very hard to make me stay as long as possible, instead of study as effecient as possible.

So for a good alternative app, is there a dynamic course pace I can adapt to?

freetonik• 1 year ago

Which course?

The quality of different language courses on Duolingo differs a lot. For example, the Finnish language course is very bad, full of useless words and nonsensical phrases like "The cat is a viking". In contrast, the Swedish course (which happens to be the 2nd official language of Finland) is amazing and full of phrases immediately useful in daily life. A few modules in, Finnish Duolingo is all e.g. "My mom is a shaman" and "The cat is a viking", while Swedish is e.g. "I'd like a glass of cold water" and "Emma wants a pizza".

In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).

est2• 1 year ago

German and Arabic course.

So in other words, the course is programmed by a human?

Well I hope with today's AI tech the course should be highly customizable. I don't want to learn "The cat is a viking" 100 times.

vladvasiliu• 1 year ago

In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).

They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.

gary17the6• 1 year ago

the same question kept coming

I was under the same impression, but later the problem disappeared. You have to give Duolingo a couple of months of learning effort first, so that Duolingo has a larger base of sentences that you should already understand.

npinsker• 1 year ago

I used the app for 6 months (granted this was around 5 years ago) and the problem never disappeared for me.

To answer the question, it depends on which language you're learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most resources for English-speaking learners.

xandrius2• 1 year ago

Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually learning.

Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.

For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.

That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.

rmnwski• 1 year ago

Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.

d332• 1 year ago

I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.

cynicalkane• 1 year ago

You can skip ahead full units by passing a test, and I recommend always doing it if you can.

I do 1-2 Duolingo lessons daily, supplemented with 15-30 minutes of real Japanese study. If I can't skip ahead after completing the first "star", I feel disappointed. I'm often able to skip two or three units in a row.

Though this is partly because I'm only using Duolingo as an easy, gamified supplement to serious study.

i_am_a_squirrel• 1 year ago

The signup button just spins indefinitely :(

neofight78• 1 year ago

The problem is that Duolingo optimises for time spent on the app, not for progress in the language. The majority of experienced language learners do not recommend it.

monkeyelite2• 1 year ago

If I’m going to spend a thousand hours learning a new language, I’m willing to pay for professional study material.

oguz-ismail• 1 year ago

professional study material

What would that be for Spanish? I couldn't even find a decent dictionary app

shawabawa32• 1 year ago

something like https://michelthomas.com/landing-page/mt-spanish/#start-span...

or https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin-american/

yeyeyeyeyeyeyee• 1 year ago

I am personally quite happy with the Teach Yourself study materials as first step when picking up a new language.

bluGill10• 1 year ago

App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about language learning would consider great. If you are going to pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't about language learning, but it has native content in your language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your money.

There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.

monkeyelite2• 1 year ago

I would probably include duo lingo when I started - but I wouldn’t say “hmm I wish there was something worse but free”.

charcircuit3• 1 year ago

All language apps are destined to become essentially an SRS app, which at that point you might as well just use an anki.

GardenLetter273• 1 year ago

I disagree, the old HelloChinese course was great for covering Chinese character writing, as well as exercises with Pinyin and only Chinese characters, etc.

Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.

Zmajche2• 1 year ago

old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer app is alternative that right now is better for Asian languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while learning.

charcircuit3• 1 year ago

How is it different from SRS? If you need to learn the strokes for thousands of characters you will need something like SRS.

GardenLetter273• 1 year ago

It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.

It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.

Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.

Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.

lukaslalinsky• 1 year ago

Completely agree, when Duolingo started, I took the Spanish course and actually got something out of it. The lessons, comments were super helpful. I've tried it again last year and I couldn't believe my eyes that most of it is gone. It feels exactly like an addictive game, making you focus on the game part of it, not learning. And the fact that you can buy out of failures is just WTF.

GardenLetter273• 1 year ago

Same, I now speak fluent Spanish and have lived in Spain but I started with Duolingo (although just watching loads of films was by far the best way to learn once you get that far!).

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 year ago

The reason is the App Store (and Play Store) value things like DAU (as a proxy for "quality"), IAPs (because they get a cut), no real interaction (too risky), etc. The end result is "real language learning" doesn't align with "launching a top mobile app". This is also the reason none of games are hard (can't let people uninstall) and nothing unique shows up anymore (it's impossible to compete)

Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store

PennRobotics• 1 year ago

It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any meaningful way whatsoever.

Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.

A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.

vaylian• 1 year ago

Agree. Duolingo lost most of its appeal when the discussion forums were taken offline.

It was really nice to discuss the sentences with other learners and the creator of the course.

And it was always fun to open the thread for the sentence "I love you" in the language that you were learning.

mentalgear• 1 year ago

I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.

I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.

But overall, great work !

unbleaveable2• 1 year ago

Having trouble understanding why you thought it was acceptable to steal their business name, and concept, and software application design.

Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?

Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add the word libre?

Funes-• 1 year ago

Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"?

You don't know about LibreOffice, really? Your post is so ridiculously ironic I'm having trouble determining if it's satire.

unbleaveable2• 1 year ago

How about "Google Word", "GoogleWord", or "Rosetta Stones"?

jeffhuys• 1 year ago

They call the package LibreOffice though... So... Yeah?

thedumbname• 1 year ago

A lot of FOSS projects were sued for these things, see GAIM/Pidgin, etc. Newcomers should understand that is a copyright violation.

pabs3• 1 year ago

Trademark, not copyright.

ReflectedImage• 1 year ago

Sadly the authors of LibreLingo were last seen being lead into the back of a white van by an enormous green owl

_fat_santa2• 1 year ago

I have to say Duolingo has some of the best corporate humor I've seen.

krick• 1 year ago

Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose customers over stupid jokes.

That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly, most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality. They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on. After a couple of years you start really wondering what are they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's just community?

pergadad• 1 year ago

Very nice initiative, the language space is overcrowded with commercial offers that have an incentive to keep you locked in. Apart from LanguageTransfer there seem to be few other good offers.

That said, looking at the current offer it seems to lack the one thing Duolingo offers: Duolingo (for all its many faults and pedagogical uselessness) takes the burden of decision making away - I don't need to really think what to do next. Here I don't have this guidance - do I start with basics? Or introduction? Or something else?

Crucial in my view would be to provide a path or at least a tree to guide the user where to go. This will make it easy to jump in and get carried along.

TheJoeMan• 1 year ago

Do any alternatives take a more "fully immersive" approach? I tried this LibreLingo, but the first question I got was "Which of these is The Sun?".

Once you learn/memorize a few basic Spanish phrases such as "¿Qué significa?" you can stay immersed in the language. When you see a photo of the sun, you need to jump straight to El Sol, not Photo->"The Sun"->"El Sol".

vitro3• 1 year ago

Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners, you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a listening-first approach and contextual translations with vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other contexts.

[0] https://www.latudio.com/

jeltz2• 1 year ago

I feel that Duolingo has the same issue. Not enough immersion.

Alex-Programs8• 1 year ago

I built https://nuenki.app, which follows a fully immersive approach by immersing you while you browse the web. It translates entire sentences at your knowledge level into the target language, and you hover for definitions/the original sentence/etc.

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

for Chinese (which duolingo is garbage) study stroke order, then get children books and the Pleco app.

ximeng• 1 year ago

Skritter is good for stroke order

anothereng2• 1 year ago

The problem with duolingo is that translating a language is not the best way to learn a language. The best way is to make a connection between the concept and the word. Like rosetta stone does. An open source rosetta stone would be better, at least for learning vocabulary

tempest_• 1 year ago

Duolingo is sorta like flashcards and I think it makes a good easy entry into learning

codethief• 1 year ago

But flashcards that connect words and concepts are still much better than flashcards where you merely translate.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

I find Duolingo is pretty good for vocabulary in a "slow" context.

The trouble is, that slow context is already better served by translation apps.

Duolingo is really bad at developing verbal fluency, which is the thing you actually need in today's world of translation apps.

zdc1• 1 year ago

Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are rather aligned.

However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.

Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.

wisty2• 1 year ago

I think you're mistaken?

The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.

If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.

People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.

The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.

And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.

And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...

anothereng2• 1 year ago

duolingo doesnt do grammar but it does translation. Unless you want to become a translator then theres no point in learning how to translate from language A to B. What most people want is to understand and speak which is a different skill than translation

kmeisthax• 1 year ago

No, the best way to learn a language is comprehensible input. Every other language acquisition method is bootstrapping that eventually needs to segue into actually using your target language to read or listen to things, unaided.

What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.

If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.

mattkevan2• 1 year ago

I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project in particular.

But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.

Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]

---

[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.

[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.

Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?

shayway• 1 year ago

I agree with your overall point - I'd also like to see more novel FOSS projects rather than knockoffs of proprietary software - but at the same time, there's a lot of value in FOSS clones for a few reasons.

The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better. Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually less janky overall than Win11.

Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are another good example of my point, the former being largely superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity, and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly less of a risk with FOSS.

Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie, not to mention tiling window managers.

I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front page.

mattkevan2• 1 year ago

That's a really good point, thank you.

Blender is another good example – incredible product with a great community. It's becoming the default choice for 3D now, unless you're working for a company that already uses something else. (As an aside, I don't use it much but really enjoy reading the release notes as they're well written, engaging and show how they're regularly delivering real value.)

Don't want to seem like I'm being down on open source - I'm not, it's genuinely a beautiful thing, but I would love to see more innovation and not just copying existing things. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, like someone complaining about how there's no good new music but never listening further than top 40 radio.

throwaway743• 1 year ago

Anyone have any suggestions for learning Korean? I have Hangul characters down and know some words/phrases from my partner, but would like to dive in a bit more.

jiffygist• 1 year ago

I can recommend https://polski.info for Polish. Not FOSS, but at least non-commercial.

Pavilion2095• 1 year ago

But why? These apps are ineffective. If you want to learn a language, don't waste your time on Duolingo or this...

_fat_santa2• 1 year ago

I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.

First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.

With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.

thenoblesunfish2• 1 year ago

It's an awesome way to get from nothing to something. I started German with it before doing more traditional classes and live speaking with a partner Annoyances (in particular, ads disguised as "partner offers") aside, I still find it worth paying for as a quick daily refresher.

nine_k• 1 year ago

From my experience, Duolingo teaches you the vocabulary and the set sentences very well. But this is by far not enough. I use regular textbooks that describe the structure of the language, the grammar, the syntax, etc, so as to gain some analytical understanding of it. On top of that, Duolingo helps to get used to recognize these structures and flesh them out with various words. Also, unlike a book, it forces you to listen, and, crucially, to speak. It's a very important step from being able to read written language only to being able to actually talk.

bdcravens• 1 year ago

I think Duolingo does an okay job of teaching structure, but it probably comes around the 2nd year or so (I've been using it about 3 years, but I did have a few years in high school of Spanish a long time ago)

jghn3• 1 year ago

Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5 years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site works.

leke• 1 year ago

I never thought to check Udemy to learn my target language

LorenPechtel2• 1 year ago

Words without structure are generally comprehensible, especially if you are in an interactive situation where you can generally catch cases where there is a coherent but wrong meaning. (No, you do not want the microwave, you want what's in the microwave!)

jmyeet• 1 year ago

I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.

Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:

- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")

- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);

- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;

- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.

- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;

- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.

- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.

My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.

Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).

I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.

psychoslave• 1 year ago

Anyone as experience with feedback on https://www.rocketlanguages.com/ and https://babbel.com/ ?

I’m mostly interested in speaking out loud skills, and those two have voice recognition it seems.

tarentel• 1 year ago

I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on. Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking a class.

angry_moose• 1 year ago

I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.

I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.

For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.

joaohaas• 1 year ago

Cool... but nothing will ever beat Anki + Immersion. Here's one guide most Japanese learners follow: https://learnjapanese.moe/

masijo• 1 year ago

Wish there were similar pages for other languages, I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.

joshdavham2• 1 year ago

I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.

You could give Refold a shot! https://refold.la/how-to-learn-russian/

(disclosure: I also used to work there.)

Tainnor• 1 year ago

I don't think it's accurate to say that this is a guide "most" Japanese learners follow. There are some good (and some arguable) ideas there, but it's just one guide out of several, and most learners probably don't even browse the internet for such things and just learn Japanese in class or something.

kobebrookskC3• 1 year ago

i bet 99% of people will wash out of the 30 day routine, me being one of them. there are better ways to start than drinking from the firehose of "simple anime"

thenoblesunfish2• 1 year ago

Hope this takes off! Early Duolingo was very community focused and lots of fun, and proves people are really motivated to participate if you make the UI easy enough.

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

it's interesting how they had a huge community when they wanted everyone contributing new lessons and fixes.

kamatour• 1 year ago

Has anyone tried both LibreLingo and Duolingo? I'm curious if the open-source approach makes learning feel more natural?

pkdpic• 1 year ago

Nice to see this pop up, not that I mind giving Duo money every month for my kids account.

Still looking for DuoLingo for actual programming... python etc... Specifically for elementary school kids... I know it's out there... Im getting closer...

I know this is a false statement but it would be so easy for DuoLingo to add Python along side their Math and Music betas!!

Please Duo hear my prayers...

alkonaut• 1 year ago

This space seems like one of those areas where it would be really hard to break in because their whole selling point is having had hundreds or thousands of people record and annotate an enormous amount of voice input, which I assume has to be hand polished for every single exercise?

I'm sure some part of it could be automated these days, or some parts even use voice synthesis, but I'm sure it would take basically an army of people hand-crafting it for the experience not to be very janky in the end.

salimmadjd• 1 year ago

Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.

Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.

Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).

If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.

I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.

otherayden• 1 year ago

I actually really like this take. Despite the fact that most language learners hate on it, Duolingo has great product market fit, and I think it's for this reason. It's in the toilet time distraction/edutainment market as much as it is in the language market

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

Have a friend, who is on his 7th or 8th year of every day using DuoLingo (DL) "learning" German. His German is still terrible. Phrase structure goes all overboard, verbs are not adapted to time, person and whatever else. It is a bit painful to see. People also say that some languages just have terrible lessons on DL. Maybe German is one of those.

I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads. It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic Chinese is better learned elsewhere.

bunderbunder2• 1 year ago

An even basic Chinese is better learned from a Chinese-specific app like Lingodeer or HelloChinese.

I tried all three when I was first getting started. I didn't end up going with any of them (I bought a textbook instead - gamification just isn't my jam), but I was at least fairly impressed with Lingodeer and HelloChinese. Both were clearly made with love. And I've met several more advanced learners who got started with them. By contrast, for all its users, I've yet to meet a single person who went with Duolingo and subsequently made it to an intermediate level in Chinese. I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere, but overall it seems that people's success rate with that app is bleak.

int_19h• 1 year ago

I know several people who're trying to learn various languages via Duolingo for several years now, and not a single one has anything to boast about.

tylersmith• 1 year ago

The gamification is what made it work for me. I had 2 months to learn some Turkish before a trip and once I realized it was a game I beat everyone else in my cohort every day. When someone would come up on my heels I'd make sure to spend 30-60 extra minutes that day. I still know Turkish better than any other language and I've been immersed in Spanish for 3 years.

bmacho2• 1 year ago

Competition or rivalry is probably the single best motivating factor.

watwut6• 1 year ago

I am getting ads on clothes.

littlekey• 1 year ago

Agreed, and the sad part is the gamification - while helpful for motivation - actively works against learning in other ways. Duolingo clearly doesn't want their lessons to be actually challenging because that would get in the way of the cycle of "just smash out a quick lesson to continue your streak, then get on with your day". Learners need to embrace failure and be encouraged to spend more time with the material, but the company has been steadily and purposely moving away from that over time.

shemtay• 1 year ago

If I could change one thing about Duolingo, it would be to allow the user to turn off all the gamification completely. I don't care about fake internet gems, knowing how to speak Chinese (or whatever) is it's own reward, so stop wasting my time with bs!

Nevertheless, Duolingo is an amazing and convenient starting point for unlocking the learning of new languages.

Make your way through the entire course as fast as you can, while also listening to music, talking to people, talking to chatGPT, reading books, etc in the target language as soon as you can manage.

Protip: learn your 3rd language using your second as the language of instruction.

damjon• 1 year ago

How about gamification in LibreLingo ? It's number one Duolingo feature.

sieve15• 1 year ago

As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult.

The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.

After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like

sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti

sarvē janāḥ gacchanti

sarvē janāḥ namanti

and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.

To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.

[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)

luqtas2• 1 year ago

i don't know why people are taking Duolinguo and relatives as the definitive course to learn a language... they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency'

some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages

[0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/

edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive joke) if you are using something like uBlock!

djeastm• 1 year ago

they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency

Sure, they've got that fig leaf covering them.

sieve15• 1 year ago

Frankly, people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up.

This happened to me about ten years ago.

I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking around. There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff:

- Alexander Argüelles

- Steve Kaufmann

- Luke Ranieri

I might be missing a few others.

You first have to know what your problem is, before you can solve it.

no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages

True. In culturally homogeneous countries, you don't need four languages to make yourself understood.

It becomes somewhat necessary in places like mine where different groups of acquaintances/relatives/friends speak different languages and finding a single language at the intersection of those groups can be hard.

adastra22• 1 year ago

My own experience mirrors yours. My first thought in seeing this was “…why?” Duolingo is a gamified app that feels like learning a language but actually teaches you next to nothing while driving engagement. I get why they got stuck on that path, but why copy it?

sieve15• 1 year ago

They might have found it useful enough to attempt their own spin on it, I guess.

I don't think that Duolino is absolutely useless. But my reason for learning languages might be different from those of others. Some people want to be able to say a few words in the language they are learning. I want to read novels, poetry and philosophical texts.

The approach you take and the kind of vocabulary you want to acquire will differ accordingly.

LorenPechtel2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I've seen my wife's time with the owl not translate into understanding much of the Spanish she sees around town.

Alex-Programs8• 1 year ago

I built a tool[0] that gives you constant input at your level as you browse the web, so you don't need to take time out of your day. You can just learn a little as you browse, and let it compound over time.

It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.

[0] https://nuenki.app

czbond• 1 year ago

I like your approach here, thanks for posting

koreth1• 1 year ago

This looks really useful! Wish I'd had something like this when I was learning Mandarin.

I'm curious what determines whether or not you add a given language to the list. DeepL and Claude, at least, have usable translation ability in more languages than the app currently supports. Is there a lot of manual effort required for each language, or do you want to keep the list limited just to avoid overwhelming users?

boriselec• 1 year ago

Good tool, I like it so far.

My biggest progress in English was when I started to read the English internet (HN, Reddit, etc.). I used an browser extension to translate words that I didn't know.

I'm learning Spanish now, but there is no content that interests me. Maybe the Spanish Wikipedia sometimes.

So this extension gives me that language exposure.

foolinaround2• 1 year ago

this tool is really nice...

Suggestions: Can I get some transliteration when I hover over it, rather than translation? Maybe a Alt+ ?

sehansen• 1 year ago

Cool idea, unfortunately the example on the front page has errors in both Danish and French.

In Danish the third line is translated as "Du kan vende tilbage til oversættelser ved at holde musen over dem." which means "You can return to translations by hovering over them." i.e. the opposite of what happens. As a native Danish speaker I'd write "Du kan vende tilbage til originalerne ved at holde musen over dem.". I've had a hard time finding a translation that more accurately matches the wording of the original. The best I could come up with is "Du kan reversere oversættelserne ved at holde musen over dem.", but that just sounds like you're speaking English with Danish words to me, so I don't know if it's useful.

In French the second line is translated as "Plus la difficulté augmente, plus la traduction est importante" which means "As the difficulty increases, translation becomes more important.". Kagi Translate proposes "Plus la difficulté augmente, le volume de traduction augmente" and a few other things that don't look quite right to me.

I don't know how much this matters, since you'd probably end up exposed to a lot of different translations of many different sentences with this tool. Statistically, most of those will be correct and so you'll end up good enough understanding of the other language anyway.

In any case, you'd probably want to make extra sure that the examples on the front page are absolutely correct, so I hope you find my two corrections useful.

Oh! One more thing... when you select Japanese it says "Supports Furigana", but there's no furigana shown in the example. It would've been cool to see that on the example page as well.

syndeo• 1 year ago

Ah, is Lingva Latina the one with Caecilius and his family? I had a Latin class in 7th grade and remember having a book of that same name, and I somehow remember the main father character's name. They had a dog too, I want to say his name was Cerberus, haha. "Cave canem"—"beware of dog"

Every day, we'd start class by the teacher saying "Salvete, discipuli!" to which we'd reply "Salve, magistra!"

The fact that all these years later I still remember some things from it shows its effectiveness I suppose.

In any case, in years since, I've used Pimsleur (for other languages), which is a similar "get actual language input rather than learning a set of language rules up front" method, and I like to think it's worked decently for me at least!

sieve15• 1 year ago

I am not sure about the names of the characters. But a Roman family is definitely involved in the first part (Familia Romana).

I like to think it's worked

It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days every few months, read something, and then disappear.

You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences in the applicable context.

aleffert• 1 year ago

Caecilius who, spoiler for a decades old Latin textbook, dies when Vesuvius erupts, is from the Cambridge Latin Course. The dog, who survives, is in fact named Cerberus.

gary17the6• 1 year ago

I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.

I don't get it why everyone seems to think that translation exercises in a foreign language learning course such as Duolingo absolutely MUST result in a comprehension-less memorization process, which must be doomed to fail sooner or later, since memorization alone might not really contribute to the capability to build new combinations of memorized words.

From my experience with Duolingo, it all depends on how a learner approaches translation exercises. If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

However, if you keep investigating, on your own accord (for example, by using an LLM) the underlying REASONS as to why each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen (i.e., grammar), then no, IMHO you will indeed learn how to build new language constructs and thus use the actual language.

I think the trick is to push yourself and attempt - as soon as you can - to ignore sentence "building blocks", "missing words" and "hints" provided by Duolingo and always try to build an answer to every exercise entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to understand what is really going on and create a "set of rules" for using a language as opposed to only memorizing a "set of samples" of a language.

I also don't mind the "gamification" of the learning process: it allows a learner to expect more out of himself or herself by watching it not to carelessly lose the "hearts" exercise currency, by trying to earn the "gems" bonus exercise currency, by comparing himself or herself against his or her peers through leagues and leaderboards and, the last but not least, by continuing to learn every single day because of his or her running "learning streak".

Duolingo can give you only as much as you decide to get out of yourself - as is the case with any other kind of foreign language learning course. Effortless, magical learning processes simply do not exist.

sieve15• 1 year ago

If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

This is where comprehensible input shines.

- you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences

- the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus

This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.

I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed to recognize the patterns in the language and store the sequence information somewhere.

If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful. However, I believe if you are capable of doing that, comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck. It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days of CI-based learning than the previous six months of memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating random sentences.

hintymad• 1 year ago

Duolinguo tries to follow the input hypothesis. For instance, it barely teaches any grammar but simply asks its users to translate sentences. Unfortunately that's very ineffective. Compared to reading or watching live conversations, the amount of input in unit time on Duolingo is too little. In the meantime the sentences lack sufficient context for Duolingo users to build up intuitive understanding of phrases. Take Duolingo Japanese for English speakers, for instance, it's really hard to learn the meaning and usage of Hiragana words in those short sentences.

That said, I still do about 10 minutes of Duolingo every day, just as a kick start of my daily language-learning routine. It's also an effortless way for me to pick up a few new words on a daily basis. Somehow once I did that, I have more drive to do more comprehensive input by watching Youtube videos or reading some readers.

sieve15• 1 year ago

I completely agree with everything you have mentioned in the first paragraph.

You NEED to consume tens of thousands of words repeatedly used in different contexts for the brain to make those automatic connections. Random sentences do not maintain the context which would have otherwise helped you figure out the possible meaning of some words in the following sentences/paras. That is one of the biggest flaws of any translation method.

bunderbunder2• 1 year ago

The thing is, the input hypothesis all by itself is not enough. It's arguably close to where the modern paradigm of second language acquisition started, but it's not where we still are nearly 50 years later.

For example, one big thing that Duolingo's method completely misses out on is the importance of a rich communicative context. This was implicitly there in Krashen's original monitor model, but wasn't fully appreciated until closer to the turn of the century.

jcul5• 1 year ago

Yeah I think Duolingo is a great vocabulary expanded. But it's not going to get you to a conversational level.

primitivesuave• 1 year ago

I learned Sanskrit by translating the Bhagavad Gita (https://gita.pub), and I experienced a similar jump in comprehension to what you described. At first I needed to look up every word, even the ones I'd seen many times, but eventually (after many many repetitions) I finally started having an intuitive idea of what the words and sounds meant.

It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.

sieve15• 1 year ago

I have seen some people do this successfully. But I find the BG to be too complex as a learning tool. It is too dense for me to concentrate on the words rather than the content.

I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of laghukathā collections over the last couple of years and read from them as time permits.

I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:

- a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama

- a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of Lingva Latina.

Tycho• 1 year ago

I read a story by Roberto Bolaño recently where the Spanish-speaking protagonist reads novels in French, a language he cannot speak. He said that even though he couldn’t understand most of the words, he usually understood the plot. For some reason your comment made me think of this.

mvieira382• 1 year ago

Orbeg's Lingva Latina is so good, especially if you use the supplemental exercises and stories as well. It's a shame it didn't catch on as much, the material for modern languages is now outdated and it seems no one is working on newer editions. Deutsch Nach der Naturmethode, Français par la Méthode Nature and English by the Nature Method are excelent at teaching the basics, but I hear criticism over the vocabulary often.

sieve15• 1 year ago

Things are much better today, I feel. If the publishers do not feel that there is a market, then the gap must be filled by enthusiasts. Some time for creating the content and $6/m on DO, and hundreds/thousands of people can benefit.

barrell2• 1 year ago

I’m very interested in Sanskrit, and working on an application to learn it (and many other languages).

If you have any interest in app based review (not courses - I specifically try to work with input) I would love to get feedback on the Sanskrit experience.

I posted a bunch of comments about it in the past few days, I don’t want to take over another apps thread, but there are so many cool languages being learned here

DontchaKnowit3• 1 year ago

learning spanish currently and I disagree on the grammer part. I never made any progress with spanish until I found a program that started with drilling all the grammer rules. after that my learning took off

sieve15• 1 year ago

In my experience, knowledge of grammar gives you a false sense of knowledge of language. You might know what the form of the word is, but you may not grasp its meaning in context, or be able to use it in your own sentences.

Grammar is the analytical part of language. It is not the language itself.

Try reading Spanish texts for a few days without doing these drills and you will notice a massive increase in relative comprehension.

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

It's a bad idea to imitate Duolingo, which has become VC without a purpose.

The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.

Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.

I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.

Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.

So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.

hyperific• 1 year ago

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the recent announcement that Duolingo is replacing contractors with AI.

https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...

brewdad3• 1 year ago

I'm guessing that's why this hit the front page today.

gnarlouse2• 1 year ago

If DuoLingo is currently a thriving company, I am convinced it is exclusively because of branding momentum. I think Match.com's trajectory foreshadows the fate of DuoLingo. In the 00's, Match.com used to be the premier "try to meet a not-weird-fuck to date online" system. Then in the early 2010s, Tinder-style dating apps consumed the market. Shortly after, match.com started doing some really fucked up business practices because their niche market got swallowed up in a larger general market by a superior "free" product.

Duolingo's users are sticky so long as the brand ideology holds: "if you want to learn a second language, play duolingo".

Also, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn also founded ReCAPTCHA. Every idea this man has capitalized on has been made obsolete by the advance of AI.

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

The app could use some spinners, when actions lead to a delay. I clicked on the landing page on the only available purple action button and nothing seemed to happen. I already checked my uBlock Origin, whether it is blocking something, but it does not. Already wanted to reload the page, when finally something visually changed, and the course was loaded. Simply a little spinner/animation would make this way less confusing.

I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.

One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".

valbaca• 1 year ago

For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".

buenos dias does mean good morning. it literally means good day and can be used as such but most often used as "good morning"

sh3rl0ck• 1 year ago

Really hope they can do something about the UX; well built OSS generally lacks good UI/UX.

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

Great to see a FOSS app for language learning! Kudos.

However, I think apps that focus on one particular language and how to learn that language are better than a one-size-fits-all approach like Duolingo. The structure and grammar of languages like Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and French (I've learned all 4) are all significantly different from each other. Or at least different approaches for language groups (French and Spanish, which I also speak, are similar enough to warrant the same approach).

brewdad3• 1 year ago

Can anyone recommend a solid resource for learning Tagalog?

Being a far less popular language than the standard "big boys" that most apps, web sites, books etc tend to offer, it's been a lot of false starts for me or simply feeling a bit lost when a resource throws me directly into a scene to learn dialog without having any of the foundational knowledge first.

I plan to spend a year or two (at least) in the Philippines in the not too distant future. While most Filipinos understand English, I feel like learning at least some Tagalog would go a long way in fitting in and feeling less like an outsider.

barrell2• 1 year ago

I really don’t want to be doing self promotion in someone else’s thread, but I have Tagalog support on https://phrasing.app. I just posted some demo videos this morning in comments if you check out my profile

dang• 1 year ago

Related ongoing thread:

Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 - April 2025 (43 comments)

alganet• 1 year ago

This language thing reminds me of Willian James Sidis.

gnarlouse2• 1 year ago

Hot take y'all but what if, just what if,

coded applications with injected content are ~GASP~ not the way humans learn language.

I know that this LibreLingo project is probably somebody's baby, and if it works for them great. Heck, if it works for you, great! But for anybody who really wants to (durably) learn a new language, aren't the results already in? Immerse yourself in the language, be around people. At the very least, listen to native speakers on YouTube or something. Read articles/books. Struggle at it, like a baby! That's not pejorative either; babies are the world's premier language learners.

gitroom• 1 year ago

Yeah, I've used Duolingo and always end up doing the same stuff, but it's way too easy to just tap through and not actually learn anything real. Got me thinking - you think anything can really replace just talking to people and living with the language day to day?

martinrue• 1 year ago

Not FOSS, but for anyone who may find it useful, I launched a language learning project I've been hacking away on for a few months. Any feedback most welcome! https://langsesh.com

LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

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