question for natives, what do you think about doulingo?

[pallid yarrow]

As a native hebrew speaker and member of the Hebrew learning discord, I actually have opinion on doulingo hebrew. Because I tested it because of curiosity

[night mortar]

Actually, I am a native speaker and I do have some limited experience with learning German per duolingo. I wanted to try learning another language there, but after a while I wasn't sure how effective that was going to be. As I had registered "English" as my default language, I was able to try the German course and see where I'd be heading. I tried some of the harder exercises, but wasn't really convinced. Either my English was way worse than I thought. Or duolingo was too constrained? stifling? in its accepted solutions. Most likely a combination of both. Also I didn't like some of the audio samples. I effectively quit duolingo a while after that experiment.

It's not a hard experiment to replicate, anyone knowing at least two languages present on duolingo could try it him/herself.

Then of course, I've seen people here pointing out duolingo not being much help for higher level learning.

[wraith dew]

Or duolingo was too constrained? stifling? in its accepted solutions.

Duolingo is indeed constrained in its accepted solutions. A number of times, there are valid solutions that it just doesn't have on its list of "acceptable solutions", so it counts them as wrong.

It used to be the case that you could comment on that exercise and be like, "Hey, this is a valid solution, you should add it" and they might theoretically add that one day...but then they did away with comments, so uh... I guess that's not an option anymore. 🤷‍♂️

I'm not a native German speaker, but I can say that Duolingo is really quite bad at explaining grammar--not only does it not give you enough explanation, but several times during the course it uses a grammatical feature that it has not yet taught you, meaning there is simply no way for you to know the correct answer unless you've been learning German outside of Duolingo and happen to know the grammar anyway.

[cerulean fox]

yeah obviously, duolingo expects you to not know the language they're teaching you so why would you know how to say it any way other than what they taught you?

[cerulean fox]

iirc every lesson has an explanation section you can read before the lesson

forgot what it was called

[wraith dew]

Oh, I'm aware. The explanation section is bad. You'd be far better off watching YouTube videos explaining the concepts, because often the explanations are like 2 sentences that don't actually give you all the details.

[wraith dew]

In several cases, a permutation that they allow for one sentence is not allowed for another sentence--this comes from the fact that they would add valid solutions manually for every individual sentence, without making sure the answers were consistent across the whole course.

So for instance, you might have a sentence where you could translate it as either "he" or "she" for the subject, and on the previous sentence they allowed both, but on this sentence they only allow it with "he", simply because they didn't add the sentence with "she" as a valid solution for this particular sentence.

This was particularly bad when it came to typing out the sentences manually, and I've heard that they've since significantly reduced how many sentences you're even allowed to type in--rather than working to fill out all the possible valid solutions, they decided to just remove functionality instead.

[cerulean fox]

oh wow I didn't know that

[wraith dew]

Yeah, Duolingo really was formed from "let's google translate all these sentences automatically, and then add corrections/additional solutions when people post enough comments complaining about it"

And then they decided they didn't like comment threads where people were complaining about something being wrong, so they disabled comments...

I used Duolingo all the way through its German course 2 years ago, and that's how I started learning German, so it definitely helped me, but it also has significant flaws.

[wraith dew]

The other thing, and idk if this has changed now, but when I used Duolingo, those explanation sections literally ran out. Halfway through the course, they simply stopped having explanation sections for the lessons, so after that point you had to google stuff for yourself; they literally didn't explain it at all.