Do you consider duolingo or librelingo learning, or maybe it’s just good for practice? Or do you feel you get neither or if it?
I personally don’t like how Duolingo teaches you to translate in your head, some people seem to really like it so no hate from me to those people as my general opinion is: contact with your target language will eventually lead to comprehension.
However, I think being taught to translate, and also read so early leads to:
- slow speaking (need to translate in your head first)
- Bad grammar (sentences are formed around your original languages grammar then translated)
- Bad pronunciation, as you brain already thinks particular letters have particular sounds, and they are different on other languages (e.g. “r” in Spanish)
In my opinion, the absolute best way to learn a language is through comprehensible input, and delaying reading (or speaking) for a very long time.
I get the impression from others that duolingo is “unproven” or “unscientific”. Which I agree with. BUT… to really make a language mine I need to practice in a couple of different ways which I feel duolingo hits pretty good. I look for answers to my questions in text books or YouTube but duolingo is where I get consistent practice
Like I said before, any contact with your target language is better than none, if you are more consistent at interacting with your target language using Duolingo than anything else, then maybe that’s your system.
For me, I noticed that the parts of my target language that I learned from Duolingo (which I used for the first year, one hour a day) are the most broken, slow and mispronounced when it comes to talking, compared to the parts I learned through comprehensible input. They are the parts I’m most having to focus on fixing now.
I feel like I’m making progress with Duolingo
Awesome, I see on reddit that people post they just study from duolingo for a couple of years and passed their Russian proficiency test for university or other things like that. For me I feel like I understand the grammar of a language better from a textbook or website but I can put it into practice in duolingo
I’m taking the Duolingo Spanish course. I’m interested to see how I feel when I complete it. My goal is to be able to hold a normal conversation in Spanish and be able to ask what things mean when I don’t understand. I think Duolingo will be perfect for this level of proficiency but it will be far from fluency.
I think - pre enshittification at least - Duolingo is (was) great for starting into a language’s A1/A2 level, and giving you a good basic to start with an actual language course. No more, no less.
