The Duolingo Thread

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galaxyrocker
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Thu Aug 06, 2015 6:44 pm

getreallanguage wrote:I use Duolingo exclusively on my Android tablet, since it is exceedingly slow on my mac. Since one of my students is using the Spanish from English course at Duolingo, I decided to check it out (I'm a self employed Spanish and ESL tutor). After a few tries with the placement test, I managed to test out of 59 out of 64 skills and then individually tested out of those other five skills plus the two bonus skills. I have to say there are quite a few problems with the course, though I can't comment on the voice because I did the whole thing with the app muted. So many, in fact, that I'm considering applying as a course contributor to see if I can iron some of them out.



There are definitely a lot of problems, with all of the courses. As I said, the Irish course needs to be done without audio, if at all. But, on top of that, there's a lot of Anglicisms. In Irish, the object of a sentence, if a pronoun, generally comes at the end of a clause. This is never done, and rarely accepted, on Duolingo. Instead, they just stick it in the corresponding place with English. This is done throughout the course. There was also an issue, now fixed, where they would translate what is a passive sentence in Irish to an active one in English. It's just frustrating. I've applied to contribute, but I doubt they accept me due to how critical I've been of the moderators and the course in general. Despite what they say, they're not all 'native' or 'near-native' (or, if they are, they speak what can best be called English-Irish; not Irish as spoken by people whose parents were also natives, etc.)
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Arnaud
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby Arnaud » Thu Aug 06, 2015 6:45 pm

deleted
Last edited by Arnaud on Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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getreallanguage
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby getreallanguage » Thu Aug 06, 2015 7:43 pm

Which courses, besides Esperanto and Irish, feature a real human voice as opposed to a TTS? As others have pointed out, it's no guarantee of quality, but it'd be interesting information to know.
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Cavesa
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby Cavesa » Thu Aug 06, 2015 8:25 pm

I've noticed several people using the Spanish Duolingo. Is it still the same and you like it despite the troubles (I hated the weird vocabulary at times, but more importantly the overuse of personal pronouns) or have they been working on the course and improving it?
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garyb
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby garyb » Fri Aug 07, 2015 8:22 am

Arnaud wrote:I've tested the french quickly and I can say the audio is not good at all.


Yeah, with French I've gotten a few questions wrong just because the audio has been too unclear, ends of words being cut off and things like that. But recently I've noticed a few sentences that have a more real-sounding male voice, so I suppose they're working on it.
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pir
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby pir » Wed Aug 12, 2015 10:21 am

Yes, the new male voice in Duolingo's French "course" is better than the female one, but it is still TTS and prone to all the annoying things that come with it. IMO learning good pronunciation from the very start is actually more important than the folks at Duolingo seem to think, so their general use of TTS is a black mark against them. TTS is fine for Google Translate; they are not attempting to teach me a language -- and frankly, GT's French bot is actually better than Duo's.

What I consider even worse though is the weird pedagogy behind Duo's teaching -- the way the "course" is presented to me heavily prioritizes reading and listening. There's no speaking at all (I don't blame them, speech recognition is hard). But there is also very limited production of L2 writing, and that's a deal breaker in my book. I was apparently slotted into the "quick and easy" section of one of their A/B tests, which means that for each unit within a section, I get as few as 7 sentences (which is not enough to learn any new material). Also, 8 out of 10 translations are into my L1. I question the validity of A/B testing for actual learning (as opposed to website design), and this makes the entire endeavour seem like a waste of time to me. I find myself motivated to cheat when "strengthening" sections since I don't actually learn anything much the first time through and when I am asked to produce something moderately complex, I draw blanks so often that it depresses me. Now, I don't cheat because I'm not gonna cut my nose off to spite my face, but I wonder -- if I feel like it, experienced as I am with learning, how many less experienced people will cheat? And that could easily blow their A/B results up without them even knowing it.

Whatever they use as SRS algorithm is complete crap. I often end up repeating sentences ad nauseam that I got perfectly the first time, while sentences in which I made real mistakes (not just typos) don't reappear for ages. Compared to Memrise, this is seriously flawed. Memrise has SRS nailed down; when I finish a "course" there I do know all the words with at least one meaning.

Duo claims I am 59% fluent (I've been gathering that this is meant in regard to the number of words in the tree). That's pretty misleading without any explanation -- I had to search the forums to find some information, and I am still not sure it was correct. They list 1592 words that I supposedly know. I don't. I know (to the point of being able to reproduce them reliably) 552 words. And most of those I refreshed on Memrise after originally learning them decades ago in high school. What basic grammar I know I sought out myself, I certainly didn't get it from the sentences or the short "tips and notes" preceding some of the sections (which have disappeared completely since I passed the halfway mark of the tree). Because of the many errors I've come across in the English translations, I don't even trust the French I am presented with, so are they teaching me good sentence structure, and common ways of expressing myself?

The only reason I am sticking it out -- aside from wanting to finish an entire tree so I can more fairly evaluate it -- is the grammar discussion in some of the comment threads. There are a couple of knowledgeable people who're native French speakers fluent in English, and their explanations beat the pants off my reference grammar. But I've noticed them being less active now than they were a year ago, which probably means they're burning out. That would not be surprising, since the same questions come up over and over and over because the comment threads stand alone (that makes them easy to access from each individual sentence, but means all those gems are buried and most people will never see them).

I see some really nifty stuff happening at Duo, but the basic model leaves a lot to be desired, and I am not sure it can be fixed without throwing a lot of money and experienced teachers at it. Duo proudly touts this study that showed them as more effective than Rosetta Stone (shooting for low-hanging fruit) and a college semester (this was measured by administering a college placement test before and after the study). People did improve. Novices improved the most (predictably), the most experienced people improved the least. But the study says nothing about why and how, and exactly how useful this actually is for people who want to learn a language as opposed to gaining a semester in college. My assessment is that self-motivated self-studiers can do better; I know I could.

PS: "course" in quotes because I consider the terminology misleading. The French offering is not a stand-alone course; it needs to be considerably augmented to actually teach somebody French.
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galaxyrocker
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:32 am

Pir,

I completely agree about Duolingo. Also, it is hard staying motivated to help people. I'I'm fairly active on the Irish forum, but my activity has even dropped in the past year. I'm just getting tired of it.

Also, something to note about the 'comparison' between academic classes: they didn't count the people who didn't have enough interest to actually complete Duolingo and the required portion. However, nobody could drop the college class. I feel that skews the results, since the people who don't want to do Duolingo don't get counted, but the people who don't want to do the class, and thus are obviously not going to learn as much, do get counted, since the next level mus repeat stuff for them, just possibly dumbing it down.. Just not a fair comparison in my book.

Don't even get me started on their A/B tests and 'fluency' metric. Also, as to how Duolingo counts words: they don't use lemmas, apparently. So verb forms all count as separate words, for instance. This also skews the results.
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garyb
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby garyb » Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:40 am

pir: Your post is a great summary of the drawbacks and why I see it as just an accessory to other study. I don't understand how it could sensibly be used as a main method for learning a language, especially by a beginner.

Like many courses, I think it's a decent resource with misleading marketing. Just like Michel Thomas won't make you fluent and Assimil won't take you to B2, DuoLingo won't teach you a language by itself. All of these products are good at what they actually do even if that isn't what they claim they do. It's just important to look past the marketing and be aware of their limitations.

I do think they have some good ideas. Their SRS might not work great, but at least it has some notion of skills being forgotten over time without regular practice. I remember previous sites like Busuu and LiveMocha that would just consider that once you've finished a unit, that's it done and you've learnt it. Speech recognition is a nice idea even if it doesn't always work great. It has potential, although like you say, it would take a lot of investment to realise it.
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kimchizzle
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby kimchizzle » Wed Aug 12, 2015 2:34 pm

I've really been enjoying Duo Spanish. I started from the beginning even though I had a background in Spanish. I just understand there will be some mistakes with the course and I may have to relearn a few things later, hopefully not many. I'm having fun learning and that is more important to me than a 100% perfect course. Also the course is free, so I have no expectations of perfection like I would for a paid course.

I've also begun the Dutch course and I can't comment too much yet but the voice is very TTS sounding and robotic.

Another reason little imperfections with a course don't bother me too much is because I use other learning tools also like memrise, FSI, and listening and reading and not just Duo
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Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

Cavesa
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby Cavesa » Wed Aug 12, 2015 3:33 pm

kimchizzle wrote:I've really been enjoying Duo Spanish. I started from the beginning even though I had a background in Spanish. I just understand there will be some mistakes with the course and I may have to relearn a few things later, hopefully not many. I'm having fun learning and that is more important to me than a 100% perfect course. Also the course is free, so I have no expectations of perfection like I would for a paid course.

I've also begun the Dutch course and I can't comment too much yet but the voice is very TTS sounding and robotic.

Another reason little imperfections with a course don't bother me too much is because I use other learning tools also like memrise, FSI, and listening and reading and not just Duo


Thanks for the review. I think I won't return to Duo Spanish.

When it comes to free vs paid sources, I expect the free ones to not contain mistakes, no matter how much less I "demand" when it comes to other aspects. Learning mistakes is something I try to avoid as much as possible. It turns a free product into an actually expensive one.

You use lots of other tools, me as well. But in my case, it lead to a simple question: "Why should I use Duolingo Spanish at all?". ANd I found no reason. Sure, it will be different for the smaler langauges, once I get there. But why spread myself too thin for a product that isn't without langauge mistakes?

Has anyone here applied to help creating a new langauge mutation? I am considering it.
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