Duolingo. What are you learning?

[friendly dave]

Im relearning Portuguese after doing a six month cultural exchange back when i was in high-school. Just hit a 155 day streak. Who else is learning, or relearning a new language and why? Lets keep these streaks going. Education is important.

[Enrico Pallazzo]

Just dropping a plug for Superfluent - Duolingo has a great UI and was helpful for me for picking up elements of new languages, but for a mid-level speaker, Superfluent is where it’s at. Much more conversational and challenging and gives you some really good insights. Can’t go wrong with the green owl though.

[Atiba Applebum]

How has their shift to AI changed things

[friendly dave]

Just dropping a plug for Superfluent - Duolingo has a great UI and was helpful for me for picking up elements of new languages, but for a mid-level speaker, Superfluent is where it’s at. Much more conversational and challenging and gives you some really good insights. Can’t go wrong with the green owl though.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to check that out.

[Sila]

I was trying to learn Japanese and French. It's ok. But some phrases and words are straight up not used. It's ok to get your head around the basics of the language like core sounds and things like that. But it just feels like playing a game mostly. Still helpful but nothing works as well as immersion and butchering phrases and making life awkward until you find success haha.

[FrAnKenFrEd]

I go through spurts of diving into Cymraeg (Welsh). Need to be more consistent.

[sharkjumper]

I’ve been using Babbel and enjoying it. Gives more explanation than Duolingo. And I was disliking that Duolingo uses so much computer generated voices. Sounds so weird to me.

[Sedition]

I’ve been learning German for years…my housemate is a linguist and did his PhD at Harvard in medieval German. He speaks like seven languages. He’s been teaching me German for a long time. I’m by no means fluent, but if I was suddenly dropped in Germany, I’d get by.

Last year I downloaded DuoLingo as means to just do some German practice on my phone while out in the wild. I had mixed feelings about it. If someone wants to dip toes into a language, it’s ok. That said, I think it really lacks some basic explanations about sentence structure, grammatical case, and verb construction/tense that would really help people who were not already aware of those things (I was). And one shocking thing I discovered when I started learning German? I had to relearn •English• grammar to really grasp what was going on with grammar in a second language—-and Duolingo doesn’t really address that, unfortunately.

Use Duolingo as tool, but not the only one.

[Síota]

I need to get back at my French and Gaelic...homies gave up correcting me.