Duolingo app - waste of time?

[roni]

I started to learn some Swedish with Duolingo. The idea is to use 20 minutes a day to learn some grammar and vocab to be able to read novels and communicate at least as a tourist. So far I've been using it for 2 weeks and learnt some basic vocab and very basic grammar.
What bothers me is the complete lack of explicit grammar explanation. I myself is not big fun of grammar learning but it is quite hard to deduct from examples nouns formation rules, for instance. As vocabulary learning app Duo feeds me with teaspoon, which is actually quite ok, because I don't have the fixed schedule, Swedish it more like fun side project along my major undertaking which is Finnish. Another thing that I don't like is text-to-speech. I think it will harm my aural comprehension in a long run and I will need to do additional work to mend the damage.
What you, dear forum members, think of Duolingo? Is it efficient or I would be better off learning somewhere else?

[blaurebell]

I actually find Duolingo very useful. Do you use it on the computer or on the phone? On the computer at least each skill has grammar explanations and with Russian they are very detailed. Also with the French and Spanish courses I found the explanations rather helpful, although maybe a tad less detailed than the explanations of the Russian course. I believe the French and Spanish courses were made by Duolingo while the Russian course was contributed by users, so the quality of the explanations may differ from course to course. The good thing about Duolingo is that it is very unforgiving, so it's actually really good for grammar drilling. Whenever you actually have to produce the language, you have to be exactly right, unlike in normal conversations where you can get away with a lot of nonsense and still be understood. Usually you don't have to produce a lot of the language when you do the tree as intended, as in when you learn Russian from English for example. That's why a lot of people turn the game around as soon as they finish the tree or understand enough of the language to know what's going on. The learning English for Russian speakers tree will ask for mostly Russian, so it's really a lot harder. For that you will have to know the grammar pretty well already though because it might require more complicated structures early on.

I actually don't think the text to speech will hurt your listening comprehension, on the contrary! It means you will understand stuff even when the pronunciation and intonation is slightly off. It's good when you speak to a lot of foreigners who don't pronounce very well. Just don't ever repeat what the text to speech is saying!

With Spanish I actually also used the timer option a lot, because it forced me to think less and just get my production to be more automatic. It worked really well and got me speaking with less uhms, ahs and pauses.

As for better resources that could do the same thing in 20 minutes, I actually like Assimil a lot. It's somewhat similar since it expects you to deduce a lot, but gives you detailed explanations later on. The explanations are usually better than the ones given in Duolingo and it has proper audio that you can shadow if you're into that. I think these two actually complement each other very nicely and I tend to use them together. 20-30 minutes a day each and you will get a good overview without much effort. Assimil for pronunciation and more detailed explanations, Duolingo for some light drilling - or heavy drilling if you do the reverse tree too.

[Brun Ugle]

I like Duolingo, but not as my main learning tool. I always use it as an extra, for practice.

Grammar notes do exist for most courses, but you have to use the website to see them. I always go to the website to read the notes for a new skill, but I use the app the rest of the time.

[DaveBee]

With Spanish I actually also used the timer option a lot, because it forced me to think less and just get my production to be more automatic. It worked really well and got me speaking with less uhms, ahs and pauses.

A canadian YouTuber recommend Karaoke for speeding up japanese reading/speaking skills.

[blaurebell]

A canadian YouTuber recommend Karaoke for speeding up japanese reading/speaking skills.

I think you'd have to be studying Japanese to be ok with karaoke

[roni]

I actually find Duolingo very useful. Do you use it on the computer or on the phone? On the computer at least each skill has grammar explanations and with Russian they are very detailed.

As for better resources that could do the same thing in 20 minutes, I actually like Assimil a lot. It's somewhat similar since it expects you to deduce a lot, but gives you detailed explanations later on. The explanations are usually better than the ones given in Duolingo and it has proper audio that you can shadow if you're into that. I think these two actually complement each other very nicely and I tend to use them together. 20-30 minutes a day each and you will get a good overview without much effort. Assimil for pronunciation and more detailed explanations, Duolingo for some light drilling - or heavy drilling if you do the reverse tree too.

Thank you for the tip about the desktop version! Desktop version has all the grammar points. That is really strange that it is completely missing from mobile app, not even mentioned. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to sit in front of computer while doing Duolingo. I would like to keep it as a filler for "hidden moments" (c). I need to check if it is possible to use web version from mobile phone. Also, it might be that somebody collected notes to a single file which I could peek at while doing Duo in the mobile app.

Regarding the Assimil I like it too. And it possible to drill the material while commuting. I do it now with Glossika. Unfortunately there is no Russian, English or Finnish version versions for Assimil Swedish. I would have to learn German or French first, if I remember right. Although can try it at some later phase, I did first 40 lessons German to Finnish last year.

[blaurebell]

A regular Duolingo tree only has about 80 skills, so theoretically you could go ahead and just spend some 20 minutes copy pasting that into a file.

I didn't know there was no Assimil Swedish from English yet! What a shame! That said, I just taught myself French primarily because there is no advanced Assimil Russian course in English, German or Spanish. I do enjoy French in its own right, but it was the existence of the Russian Perfectionnement course that triggered my attempt to learn it. And of course now I have Assimil courses for all sorts of obscure languages available as well, that's pretty cool!

[jeff_lindqvist]

The thing which I think I find most annoying is the lack of variation - it seems that the same sentences pop up. If I'm only going to see a limited number of examples of the concept, I'm less likely to learn it, compared to if the sentences were based on the vocabulary from the whole course. Say, if you want to review Politics, you won't get those words paired up with the Conditional mood. Only the preset Politics sentences will show up.

Anyway, I use Duolingo on a daily basis to review my languages (all of them finished). As I wrote just a minute ago in my own log, the number of questions differ between "Strengthen my skills" (21 questions) and a specified skill (17 questions), and I also think that desktop version has ~25 questions for the "Strengthen my skills". This is good to know if you just have a few minutes of dead time.

[Cainntear]

I had the Duolingo app on my iPad Mini for a while. I deleted it because I liked typing in answers, even if I was stuck with the on-screen keyboard. (When I got the iPad, I had a broken collarbone and was happier with the iPad while lounging around than trying to use a laptop one-handed.) The app replaces all (?) the typing exercises from the website with "fridge magnet" style drag-and-drop exercises. Apparently early versions of the app had typing too, but users didn't like it, so they cut it out.

I actually find Duolingo very useful. Do you use it on the computer or on the phone? On the computer at least each skill has grammar explanations and with Russian they are very detailed.

The problem with those explanations is that they aren't programmed into the learning very well. You get all the grammar for the entire unit in a oner*, with no indication of which lesson in the unit will practice that point -- and even if you knew which lesson they related to, there's no guarantee that any examples of that point will come up in a given session (the Duolingo scheduler seems to be a bit simple).
(* "in a oner" = "at the same time", "at once"; "oner" = one (1)+ -er)

The thing which I think I find most annoying is the lack of variation - it seems that the same sentences pop up. If I'm only going to see a limited number of examples of the concept, I'm less likely to learn it, compared to if the sentences were based on the vocabulary from the whole course. Say, if you want to review Politics, you won't get those words paired up with the Conditional mood. Only the preset Politics sentences will show up.

I get the feeling that most decisions made by the Duolingo dev team are made on very shallow criteria.

For example, have a look at this post from the Duolingo forums. [i](Note that the poster uses "recall" as I would use "productive skills" and "recognition" as I would use "receptive skills" -- to me "recognition" is a matching exercise, and translating from L2->L1 is an example of "receptive recall" (recall of meaning from form) whereas L1->L2 is an example of "productive recall" (recall of form from meaning). But that's not important right now.)[i]

Many of us here agree with what the first poster says -- that you learn more from pushing yourself to remember the form, rather than simply understanding it when you see or hear it.

Luis van Ahn's reason for the decision is "every time we try to give more recall exercises (where you translate from the language you know to the new language), people use the website less!"

Now of course there is a balance to be struck between what you would do in an ideal world and what you have to do in the world you live in, but it seems really restrictive to me. On the other hand, the decision to remove the typing exercises from the mobile app makes sense, because it's not really a "typing" medium, even if I personally prefer it the other way. (However, they could have left it in, but only brought up the typing question if the user has a physical keyboard plugged in, or connected via Bluetooth...)

My suspicion about the repeated prompts is that they've either found the same thing as with translation (a drop-off in users) or they've noted that people apparently "learn quicker" that way, in the sense that it's often easier to memorise something than to try and see how it's built... which brings me back to the way Duolingo presents grammar notes.

My personal hypothesis is that the majority of users are finding it difficult to learn in the absence of programmed instruction, and thus fail to generalise. Because of this, fail to answer questions right if they haven't seen the exact example before. Repeating the same example hides the symptoms (low scores) but doesn' deal with the core problem (failure to generalise).

[Cavesa]

I believe Duolingo, the desktop version, can be useful, even though by far not as much as most people there belive.

But I found the app to be absolutely horrible and useless.

The most important=writing exercises aren't there, or much less. And the design is really bad. The smartphone screen is already far from huge and they fill half of it with useless pictures (that have nothing to do with content). That makes it much less practical.

When it comes to apps, the Memrise one is good, even though easier than the desktop version as well (which is why I don't use it much). Anki is great. Does Clozemaster have an app?