# Language learning apps



## LeifGoodwin

I used to speak French at a lowish level when I lived in Montreal for two years, over thirty years ago. I had been meaning to pick up French again, and six months ago I started using Duolingo. I really like the fact that there is a lot of repetition, which helps vocabulary and grammar sink in. However, it has many very serious flaws:


There are bugs that made the iPad app unusable until I figured out workarounds. I was unable to select a multiple choice answer because the button did not respond. Turning the iPad round, to portrait orientation, fixed that bug. Sometimes when I typed an answer, I could not see the text that I was typing, which made it near impossible to do. Again, it works correctly only in portrait orientation.
Words are usually only repeated over a short series of lessons, so they don’t enter long term memory. I use Anki to fix that fault.
The English is American, which means learning American English. *To wash up* is a good example.
The standard of English is poor. I often have to ask someone what an English sentence means. Grammatical mistakes are commonplace. Thus the grammatically incorrect *He met a girl as outgoing as him* is accepted whereas the correct form, using *himself*, is not accepted.
The characters presented by the voice actors are weird. One is a suicidally depressed woman who speaks in a flat monotone. Another is a very snooty and uptight man. A third actor barks sentences, it sounds aggressive and rude. A fourth actor speaks in a very condescending manner. I have had to listen to podcasts to hear normal French speakers.
Translations are odd, and I fail most lessons due to this. For example, the rather odd *I cannot fall asleep* is allowed whereas the commonly used *I cannot get to sleep* is not allowed. *Extraverti* is translated as *outgoing*, *extrovert* is not allowed. You have to *set up a tent*, you cannot *put up a tent *or* pitch a tent*. The second and third forms are current usage, the first is not. Comments on the Duolingo forum indicate that these issues have been reported by other users, and they are not Americanisms.
It is heavily into identity politics. I don’t want to fund someone else’s politics.
So, are there better affordable alternatives to Duolingo? Please note that I listen to French podcasts every day while driving, which provides me with a lot of input. These are mostly podcasts for French speakers eg Chasseurs de science.

I am using Busuu for German (from scratch), and it is very good, but there is not enough practice. They clearly think that simply explaining a piece of grammar is sufficient. Well in my book it isn’t, you must practice it a lot for it to become second nature. And of course to pick up the accent you have to listen and practice a lot. I tried Mosalingua for German, the recordings were poor quality, and they threw long sentences at me (a total beginner). I was unimpressed.


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## Yendred

Did you try Babbel?
I used it for Spanish and it was a great help.


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## se16teddy

I found Duolingo a great help when learning Irish, and I am dipping into it from time to time now to learn a bit of Welsh.

I thought Duolingo was fun and encouraging. Ideally you should do human classes as well, to enjoy real human interaction. Irish Duolingo does/did not explain grammatical principles well or at all. I was lucky in that I had a grounding in many linguistic concepts and terms, so I could look up the grammar in a grammar book. If you are not a linguist, this may be more of a problem.

It is inevitable that a machine will not recognize all possible translations. If you want to learn from a machine you have to accept this. As I remember, if your translation was marked as wrong, and you felt that it was right, you could report it; and I think that over time more and more translations are accepted. I fear, though, that in frustration I submitted several reports like this without understanding what point Duolingo was trying to make in preferring one option over another. (Incidentally, why is "He met a girl as outgoing as *himself*" the correct form?)

I suppose that all teachers have personalities - even machine ones. I don't know if Babbel is one of the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati as well. It seems to be an occupational disease among teachers, for some reason. Suella Braverman blames ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ for disruptive protests – video


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## dojibear

Programs like Duolingo are not created by machines. Computers can't think. These programs are created by humans. The computer program handles repeated tasks: showing the same lesson to 5,000 students, comparing your answers to ones in a table, endless repetition, etc.



se16teddy said:


> I fear, though, that in frustration I submitted several reports like this without understanding what point Duolingo was trying to make


That's a valid criticism. But it was the point the human creators of the Duolingo lesson were trying to make.



LeifGoodwin said:


> For example, the rather odd *I cannot fall asleep* is allowed whereas the commonly used *I cannot get to sleep* is not allowed.


The "get" sentence was not put into the database. No human is present to understand. You get what you pay for. A live 1-on-1 human teacher would be very expensive. And computers can't understand and converse.

I found Busuu useful for learning alphabets, where memorization is necessary. Repetition, review, testing. But for most things, I think memorizing is a waste of time. Why should I memorize the sentence "This office has 14 chairs.", when there are countless sentences using "chairs" or "offices" or "14"?

Busuu also has a feature where you answer a simple question (your answer can be spoken or written) and your answer is sent to native speakers of that language (not computers) for correction. That was very useful. I often corrected English sentences, and other people corrected mine.

I can't suggest any language-learning app. I learned a fair amount of basic information from traditional courses (courses on-line, in recent years). But I think the best way is to listen a lot (to real native speakers) and to read a lot. If you understand part of it, you will learn the rest.


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## Frank78

se16teddy said:


> Irish Duolingo does/did not explain grammatical principles well or at all.



This is true for all languages on Duolingo. It's more like try and error and in the end you may recognize a rule behind it or not.


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## Stoggler

I've managed to find grammatical explanations on Duolingo for every language I’ve had a go at (under Tips).  I don’t think this was always available on the mobile app (it was on the desktop version) but it is now.


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## WadiH

Frank78 said:


> This is true for all languages on Duolingo. It's more like try and error and in the end you may recognize a rule behind it or not.



Which is a very odd way of teaching a language to an adult learner.  I made more progress with a simple French textbook in two days then I did from weeks of Duolingo use.


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## LeifGoodwin

Yendred said:


> Did you try Babbel?
> I used it for Spanish and it was a great help.


Thank you, I think I will give it a try for beginner German. I originally discounted it due to the price, but I see they have regular offers.


dojibear said:


> Programs like Duolingo are not created by machines. Computers can't think. These programs are created by humans. The computer program handles repeated tasks: showing the same lesson to 5,000 students, comparing your answers to ones in a table, endless repetition, etc.


Obviously. However, the framework allows for a range of translations, thus préparer and cuisiner (and even faire) can be used to mean cook. The problem is that they have created too narrow translations. And they use American grammar and idioms, rather than international.


dojibear said:


> I can't suggest any language-learning app. I learned a fair amount of basic information from traditional courses (courses on-line, in recent years). But I think the best way is to listen a lot (to real native speakers) and to read a lot. If you understand part of it, you will learn the rest.


I routinely listen to podcasts such as Chasseurs de science, made for native French speakers. I try and listen to many channels, so as to expose myself to a range of accents, and expressions. However, my brain tends to skip details, and the beauty of basic drills such as translating from English "Les baguettes, il les a achetées" is that it picks up on details such as the es at the end of achetées, and it tests my spelling.


Frank78 said:


> This is true for all languages on Duolingo. It's more like try and error and in the end you may recognize a rule behind it or not.


Indeed, the iPad app has almost no grammar tips.


se16teddy said:


> I found Duolingo a great help when learning Irish, and I am dipping into it from time to time now to learn a bit of Welsh.
> 
> I thought Duolingo was fun and encouraging. Ideally you should do human classes as well, to enjoy real human interaction. Irish Duolingo does/did not explain grammatical principles well or at all. I was lucky in that I had a grounding in many linguistic concepts and terms, so I could look up the grammar in a grammar book. If you are not a linguist, this may be more of a problem.
> 
> It is inevitable that a machine will not recognize all possible translations. If you want to learn from a machine you have to accept this. As I remember, if your translation was marked as wrong, and you felt that it was right, you could report it; and I think that over time more and more translations are accepted. I fear, though, that in frustration I submitted several reports like this without understanding what point Duolingo was trying to make in preferring one option over another. (Incidentally, why is "He met a girl as outgoing as *himself*" the correct form?)


I can’t say what British or US grammarians consider correct, however to my ear using *him* sounds completely wrong. *He met someone as outgoing as her* sounds fine, as *her* refers to someone else, *him* would work too in this sense IMO.


se16teddy said:


> I suppose that all teachers have personalities - even machine ones. I don't know if Babbel is one of the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati as well. It seems to be an occupational disease among teachers, for some reason. Suella Braverman blames ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ for disruptive protests – video


An NHS nurse, Amy Gallagher, is taking the NHS to court for racism. She had to do a course for a new job, and she was told by the teacher during the course that her whiteness was a problem, and that she was racist by virtue of being white. This is not an isolated case, but few people are brave enough to risk losing their job by complaining. It’s not really about woke, so much as teaching toxic, racist, divisive ideologies with no evidential basis.


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## dojibear

One interesting app/website is LingQ (on Ipad, Android and PC). It offers 42 different languages. There are some simple lessons, then there are 60 "mini-stories", which are the same in every language. Each story is about 20 short sentences, plus a set of follow-up questions, all in the target language. Almost no sounds or graphics to entertain you. Just learning.

The focus is reading sentences (though you can also listen to each sentence, spoken by a native speaker). In the paid version there are various features such as quickly looking up word definitions, marking words as "partially known" or "known", and getting English translations of words, phrase and sentences. You can check out the basic setup for free, but if you want to find out if LingQ is useful for studying, you need to get a single month of the Premium ($13 for all languages) so you can try using all the features.

Once you get more advanced (beyond the 60 mini-stories) there is other content. For more advanced students, there are features for importing almost any online movie or TV show or podcast, and letting LingQ turn it into sentences you can study.

I don't think it's good for for complete beginners (it doesn't teach an alphabet or sounds, or have any grammar lessons), but I like the method: simple complete sentences, written (and spoken) by native speakers of the target language.


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## se16teddy

LeifGoodwin said:


> An NHS nurse, Amy Gallagher, is taking the NHS to court for racism. She had to do a course for a new job, and she was told by the teacher during the course that her whiteness was a problem, and that she was racist by virtue of being white. This is not an isolated case, but few people are brave enough to risk losing their job by complaining.


What does this have to do with Duolingo?


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## LeifGoodwin

se16teddy said:


> What does this have to do with Duolingo?


In my review of Duolingo, I pointed out that it pushes identity politics. I didn’t go into details, however someone commented on that, so I responded.

And I did not mention that on the Duolingo Facebook page I asked why they focussed massively on countries such as Brazil, China, Benin, Jamaica, Algeria, Morocco etc and hardly at all on Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark etc. I was and am genuinely puzzled. The first reply said that I had been reported for nationalistic hate speech. Several other people said I was a racist, and one said they had seen my Facebook profile and I was "a disgusting person". These were people I’d never seen before. The forum rules explicitly ban rudeness. I was banned from posting a reply, and blocked from contacting the moderators. In short I was repeatedly libelled and bullied. Normal adults who disagreed with my observation might say "Well I have finished the course, and I think you are mistaken", or even "Yes you are right, but they balance it out towards the end" or something along those lines. After all, disgreememt is a normal part of life. Experiencing that sort of abusive behaviour, as well as other issues, does not encourage me to continue with Duolingo.


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## Dymn

They changed the Duolingo structure last week. My Arabic course (just dabbling in it, really) now consists of 30 units. For each unit until unit 23 there is a tiny "guidebook" which only consists of five or six sentences and their translations. So essentially they got rid of grammar tips which were insufficient anyway. I guess I will stop using it.


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## elroy

I've tried Duolingo for a few different languages and always got too annoyed with it to continue.


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## LeifGoodwin

They forceably updated my French course at the beginning of this month. I was half way through unit nine with one more to go. Now I have no idea where I am in the tree. I have about forty so called Legendary lessons to do to reach the first set of new lessons. I repeatedly fail the legendary lessons because they use new words and grammar that I have not met before. And there are no grammar explanations. This morning I had to repeat a lesson five times, it is demoralising. The reviews on TrustPilot are appalling. They have also made it so it doesn’t work well for people like me who use other resources such as podcasts.

A good example of the frustration is that as part of a larger translation, I translated *in my opinion* as *à mon avis* which was marked wrong, it should be *à mon opinion*. Later on in many lessons they translate *à mon avis* as *in my opinion*. It is that sort of lack of attention to detail that drives me potty.


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## Yendred

LeifGoodwin said:


> I translated *in my opinion* as *à mon avis* which was marked wrong, it should be *à mon opinion*.



It must be a mistake on their part.
"_à mon opinion_" is not French, it's an awful literal translation from English.


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## dojibear

For the problem @LeifGoodwin describes, my guess is that Duolingo only accepts one translation (the one they taught), even though other translations are equally correct. So you have to use what they taught, and nothing else that is "correct". This is a big problem with computerized language courses, since there are usually multiple "correct" translations. Any program that only accepts one of those translations is simply wrong.

I stopped a Chinese online course for that reason. The video lessons were excellent, but they added a rule that you couldn't watch the next lesson until you passed the "quiz" for this lesson. And I couldn't pass the quiz, because it only accepted the word in that lesson, not other same-sounding words you already knew. Chinese is full of same-sounding words, so even an advanced beginner knows many of them.


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## LeifGoodwin

dojibear said:


> For the problem @LeifGoodwin describes, my guess is that Duolingo only accepts one translation (the one they taught), even though other translations are equally correct. So you have to use what they taught, and nothing else that is "correct". This is a big problem with computerized language courses, since there are usually multiple "correct" translations. Any program that only accepts one of those translations is simply wrong.


Exactly. They do allow multiple translations, but clearly they don’t put enough effort in at the start. You can mark your answer as should have been accepted and supposedly they will check it, and update the allowed answers accordingly. However, looking at the (now closed) discussion forum, some of these issues were known about years ago. It gets worse towards the end of the French course, probably because fewer people have got that far. It makes me wonder who created the lessons, I can’t believe they were experienced French language teachers with a sound knowledge of English.


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