Language learning / Thoughts on Duolingo

Likes:

• Learning via practice is a great approach.
• Also like the use of repetition and small chunks. Sometimes you learn something without knowing it.
• The fuzzy matching in translation exercises. You can leave out accents and punctuation, and answers are still accepted. Even typos too, though they annoyingly get less typo-tolerant as you go on.
• There are often multiple accepted answers for translation exercises. Very helpful, especially for a language where "you" can be three different words.
• Impressed by how much thought they put into all this. From their insightful blog posts to features like classrooms, their incubator, and events, they're clearly here on serious business.

Dislikes:

• Excessive repetition. I get the point of learning by rote, but sometimes it's just tiresome.

• Gamification. Can be useful, but often gets excessive, what with things like the pressure to finish high up in your leaderboard. Multiple horror stories like this. I gave in to the pressure and finished top of the Diamond League (it was painful 😢), then disabled leaderboards entirely.

• It's super annoying when some perfectly valid translations are not accepted.

• More annoying: when their expected translation is really poor, like it was done by someone who doesn't speak English.

• Very un-challenging sometimes. Some questions are repeated multiple times, with no changes. So by the end of a chapter, you might know how to ask about that one thing, but only that one thing. Would help if they modified questions more.

• Really dislike the lack of in-depth "Tips". Yes, learning by rote is useful, but it should also be backed up with deeper explanations of what you're learning.

• Even worse: no explanation for seeming contradictions or overlaps. Eg:

  • They teach you "quiet" is „ruhig“, then later „leise“, without ever acknowledging the former, or saying when you might use one or other.
  • They tell "I'm hungry" is „Ich habe Hunger“ (literally: "I have hunger"), then later introduce „Ich bin hungrig“. No explanation.
  • They say "really" is „wirklich“, but later use „gut“ ("good") or „sehr“ ("very") sometimes, and fail you if you can't guess the one they want.
  • They introduce different word orders with zero explanations.

• And the big bad: the hearts system. They've shut down the forums now (another 👎), but there were dozens of posts that went into detail about how the hearts system is anti-education, and exists just to frustrate you into paying. Which is true. IMO, using the free version of Duolingo is a waste of time.

• Also, I dislike their overall product direction. They have different features available between Android, iOS and web, and it doesn't look like they plan to unify them anytime soon. It's like three different apps. Tbh, I'm impressed by the engineering ability it takes to not fuck that up.

Oh, here's a screenshot of complaints about the hearts system I saved before the forums were shut down:

Overall, I still think Duolingo is a big win. Their engineering and language research work are truly impressive. Major minus is the hearts thing. I'll overlook that because they need to make money somehow (but I detest the tactics and marketing of "free education").