Duolingo app - waste of time?

[Cavesa]

I totally agree the sentence construction by clicking on words is far too easy.

... Unless you want to start writing King's speeches

A great idea for practice! Thanks! How comes I've never thought of this?

[reineke]

Why do some people dislike Duolingo?

Judith Meyer

"As a veteran language course designer (1000+ lessons spread over 6 languages) and computational linguist, I have a love-hate relationship with Duolingo.

I love that it's the furthest we've come in terms of a computer-driven course.
I love that it forces students to prove they learned something.
I love that it's attuned to the individual, able to react by suggesting more exercises for his specific weaknesses.
I love it so much that its flaws feel like betrayals.
I love it so much that I created http://www.learnyu.com, applying what we learned from Duolingo to Chinese.

Those are my cards on the table. Here are the biggest problems with Duolingo:
No teaching professionals. The initial course plans as well as most of the lessons are developed by people who never taught their language in their life - and Duolingo does not give them even basic training in course design before throwing them into the cold water.
Acceptance of mistake-riddled lessons. To become a course designer on Duolingo, you don't have to master either of the two languages. I usually report at least one mistake (or what looks like one) when studying a lesson. The "beta" languages are worse; I've been in situations where I couldn't progress past a lesson because there were so many problems. As more students study lessons and report problems, the mistakes get fixed, but traditional language course publishers (or other online courses) would have a significantly higher starting quality rather than wait for students to point out all mistakes.
Use of machine voices. Students should carefully and repeatedly imitate the recordings of a course in order to master the foreign pronunciation and intonation patterns. If you imitate Duolingo and don't take great care to expose yourself to lots of other materials, your accent will be so bad native speakers will run away screaming.
No communicative goal. Using Duolingo, you learn to translate a language. We can argue about whether this harms your ability to develop thought processes in the target language or not, but what's clear is that Duolingo does nothing to prepare you for conversations. In fact, most Duolingo courses I've tried never teach you essential phrases like "I'm from America", "I have never been to Paris before", "I think French is a beautiful language", "Please pass the salt" and so on. If any useful phrases do make an appearance, they are torn from the natural context of the questions to which you'll later have to answer them.
Insufficient explanations. Originally, all explanations were user-contributed. Now, Duolingo course developers are able to add some explanations themselves, but since they're not trained teachers, they often don't realize that there's new grammar in the phrases they're asking you to translate.
Their business model is based on contempt of translators. See my answer at Judith Meyer's answer to What is the hardest job everyone thinks they can do?

I love Duolingo and I hate it. With even a few thousand dollars more, they could have created an amazing set of courses, rather than one more language-learning product that most Americans try and then quit after the first few lessons, contributing to learner burnout.

Duolingo recently revealed that non-Americans are much more committed to their courses. No, non-Americans are much more likely to have had prior language lessons, or to know how to supplement bad lessons through extra materials and native-speaker friends. Duolingo is an exciting development, but it could have been so much better."

Follow the link for other reviews:
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-peopl ... e-Duolingo