Do you incorporate Duolingo as part of your learning approach?

[Henkkles]

I play Duolingo every day, I've learned some French words through it.

[kealist]

I just stopped after a 150 day streak. To be honest, it was good to get me back into the swing of Mandarin regularly after not doing much, but it's so....segmented, not really like practicing/understanding language to me. I think I learned some vocab mostly from it.

[sirgregory]

The question says "do you," so I had to say no. But if it had said "have you" I would have said yes. Probably most of us have used it.

I have to give it some credit since it helped me get started in German. I had been meaning to learn German for a while but kept putting it off. Duolingo was what finally got me started. One day on a whim I did a lesson. Next thing I knew I was racking up lessons. In this way, it has a lower barrier to entry compared to a textbook. It works best for acquiring vocabulary. It could easily be structured to be useful for grammar points as well but they have inexplicably gone out of their way to make it useless for this. I have also used it to dabble with some other languages but I find it does not work nearly as well with more opaque languages. I also do not like most of the changes they have made and how they forced a new tree on me. That made me abandon it. That and the fact that it seems designed to trap you at beginner level forever.

Ok, I was trying to make a positive comment about it but it ended up somewhat critical. I suppose I got frustrated with it since I feel it could have been so much better. But I would not be where I am today with German without it. That is to say Duo set me on the path to my current meager level of German. But meager is better than zero!

[mick33]

I have never used Duolingo, and I doubt that I ever will.

My sister has said she uses it to try to maintain the limited French she learned in school. She has also tried to encourage me to use Duolingo, but I was not impressed by the nonsensical sentences that no one would ever use in real life in any language or the lack of any grammar explanations.

[lichtrausch]

I use it for getting my feet wet, familiarizing myself with new orthographies, learning some basic vocab, and just getting a little bite-size exposure to the language. It was especially helpful for getting started with Russian.

[Granrey]

I currently use:
Lingodeer
Memrise
Babbel
Mondly
Lingopie
Duolingo.
Anki

I use them all. If I have to stick with just one, it would be Duolingo hands down. Duolingo it's fun, the other ones tend to be more serious or hard-core.

Duolingo also can be used for free with unlimited hearts by opening a classroom or joining one.

I try to do 3 to 6 lessons per day on Duolingo.

Why not just Duolingo then? if I do too many lessons per day, I don't think the material will stick in my head. Thas why I prefer to use several apps at similar level to do the same thing in different ways to avoid boredom and tiredness.

Same with books. I also read several books (one after the other). I don't read the same book twice. There is lots of free books online.

Podcasts, YouTube, Netflix.

All part of the mix.

[Cainntear]

The question says "do you," so I had to say no. But if it had said "have you" I would have said yes. Probably most of us have used it.

I had a bit of a quandary over the wording too.

"Do you incorporate Duolingo as part of your learning approach?"

I answered yes, but my problem with Duolingo is that it wants to be an "all or nothing" thing -- it tries to grab you and keep you in as the only thing you use, and I've got the sort of personality that falls for that. I do more time learning with Duolingo than I would without it, but it is so far from complete that I don't know if it qualifies as "doing more" in strict pedagogical terms. Duolingo tries to capture my attention and succeeds; so (for example) I started cutting up the Peace Corps Ukranian course into individual sound files and data about written forms with the intention of making an Anki deck or similar, but then I switched my Duolingo language to Ukranian and the motivation for making the cards was killed by the fact that some of the words and phrases in the Peace Corps were taught to me very quickly in Duolingo, and others weren't even touched on. So for me, there's the issue that I'd just be throwing more words and phrases at my own head, and why bother with that?

[MapleLeaf]

I currently use:
Lingodeer
Memrise
Babbel
Mondly
Lingopie
Duolingo.
Anki

I use them all.

How many of these would you say are gamified flashcard applications? I've tried Lingodeer, Memrise, Mondly, and Duolingo; and they're all gamified and based on flashcards. I haven't tried Babbel or Lingopie, and I don't know how these operate. Anki isn't gamified although it's the classic flashcard app; its quality depends on its deck.

Some apps have attributes in addition to being a gamified flashcard app; Duolingo has stories and podcasts for its most popular languages, and just this week they've added audio-only stories (but with a transcript at the very end, so I can still use them). Duolingo doesn't let you access these stories without going through their flashcards, so it can be tedious trying to get to these resources. The podcasts, at least, are easy to access and do not even require an account. Duolingo added grammar explanations for the more popular languages a couple of years ago; these were collected and can be reviewed at https://duome.eu/tips . Duolingo also gives grammar explanations for the more common grammar mistakes in French and Spanish. Duolingo is uneven with respect to the quality of its support across the various languages; I would be hesitant in suggesting Duolingo for any language other than French or Spanish without further investigation. Duolingo's support for learning the Japanese writing system is the best I've seen so far of any app; but I'm unable to offer an evaluation of the rest of the course yet.

I'd like to know what an app has to offer before putting significant effort into it, and it's hard finding a review with this information. For example, in my sample lesson with Lingodeer, it gave me listening exercises that I couldn't skip, so it is off my list of apps to use. Most flashcard apps offer less than 200 words; I found one (Lingvist, although it's more a Cloze app than flashcard and thankfully wasn't gamified) that promised and delivered 5000 words of French. What do these other apps have?

And to return to the theme of this thread: Yes, I use Duolingo as part of my learning approach. I use it for French and Spanish; each day Duolingo gives me sentences and ministories and sometimes a longer story; these sentences use vocabulary and grammar that I have to practice and are stretching my ability to use the language. I have tried it for Latin and Navajo with less optimal results. Duolingo has never been my only resource, but it's a steady one that I use each day to remind myself not to give up.

[garyb]

I said yes, but actually I broke my streak about a week ago and I've had no interest in going back...

Duo has certainly got worse over time: it used to be possible to use it on a computer browser rather than a phone to avoid most of the disadvantages (ads, hearts, gamification clutter, unavailability of typing exercises) and enjoy the benefits, but in the last year or two they've made the web version much closer to the mobile version.

I have heard people say that Duolingo Stories are supposed to be good, but I've never tried them.

They were good, so of course the company killed them, or rather made them a very minor part of the main learning path instead of a standalone feature as they originally were.

The whole PR debacle on Reddit (that galaxyrocker mentioned in the context of their lack of understanding of Irish, but most of the answers to common questions and concerns were of a similar tone) also did a lot of harm to my image of the company.

But I kept using it for a while because I got some value from it, especially during a long period when my life was busy and language learning was a lower priority for me but I wanted to keep it moving slowly. I found Duo to be a useful complementary resource and a good way to get some practice on days when I didn't have time or wasn't in the mood for much else, and sometimes a few lessons would get me in the mood for some more serious study.

I also found it to be a very good introduction to Japanese that taught me some geniunely useful language with enough repetition to make it stick, although after the first few units it started to just throw a lot of new words and structures at me with inadequate explanation so I felt quite lost. I've also heard good things about its teaching of Japanese scripts, but I had already learnt Kana before I started Duo so I can't comment.

I would say that Duo gave me a somewhat faulty mental model of Japanese structure, but that's a common criticism of many beginner resources that try to explain it in English/Indo-European terms, or don't explain it and so leave the learner to infer it based on English/Indo-European terms. I'm not sure whether it's actually a big issue at all. There seems to be an eternal debate over teaching a full correct model right from the beginning versus teaching a rough and not-quite-correct one that gets the learner started and will be corrected and refined as they continue to learn; I'll leave that debate to the learning experts who actually enjoy these kinds of arguments. To me it seems like all roads lead to Rome, within reason, but Duo maybe doesn't ever do that correction and refinement: another reason to not use it as a main resource, and another problem with the way that it's marketed as a main resource.

I'm relatively immune to all the gamification tricks and I managed to ignore them, and I still have no idea what leagues are or how they work or what most of the numbers mean (although since they added hearts to the desktop version, I know that the blue things are needed to buy more hearts when you run out...). But I realise that I'm quite lucky there and the designers are clever and good at exploiting common weaknesses, and ultimately the app is designed to maximise ad views over learning and those are at odds with each other.

I will say that it's still way ahead of the competition, although that's not saying much since it's so dominant that it's hard for anyone to compete with. I've experimented with other apps like LingoDeer, Bunpo, Clozemaster, and Renshuu and mostly found them to be an unusable mess with no logical structure or progression.

[Cainntear]

The podcasts, at least, are easy to access and do not even require an account.

...although the podcasts are all for fluent English speakers, doubling down on Duolingo being overly focused on English.

I do suspect that Duolingo is only doing them as an SEO hack -- advertising Duolingo podcasts to Duolingo users should have got them quite far up the list of podcasts about language learning, so if they're getting podcasts in front of people who are trying to learn a language, they'll get peopl from the podcast channels using the app.

I don't believe they've got any real intention of ever competing with the likes of Innovative Language Learning (xxxPod101) or Coffee Break, so they're only trying to draw people out of the podcast market and kill it.

I am pretty staggered how Duolingo has singularly failed to develop a modular approach allowing the learning of any language X from any language Y -- they're big enough, and they're putting enough money into R&D, so why the hell are they still not doing it. Hell, with AI, they'd probably be able to generate multiple translations of their podcasts with minimal human intervention...