<story><title>How much can Duolingo teach us?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/how-much-can-duolingo-teach-us</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>&amp;gt; I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese.&lt;p&gt;How is this possible? You know the words but you can&amp;#x27;t use them? This hasn&amp;#x27;t been my experience at all. I think I&amp;#x27;m learning a lot from Duolingo. I still need a bit of time to parse big numbers especially when listening but I can recognize and understand countdowns when they show up in anime.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been sort of tracking my progress by watching japanese content and it&amp;#x27;s been extremely motivating. It&amp;#x27;s like wow, they really do use those words I learned about.</text></item><item><author>firefoxd</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m the pro Duolingo user. I used to pick up new languages just for fun. It did help me a bit when conversing with uber drivers in Spanish, but I was stumped when i completed the Japanese course.&lt;p&gt;I could quickly, and effectively go through the course with no hurdles. But then my sister asked me to count to ten in Japanese. I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese. Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.&lt;p&gt;I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue. It&amp;#x27;s still up if you can find it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>somenameforme</author><text>I think you kind of answered your own question. You &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to have outside experience of the words to really have them click. We all have extremely strong associative memories. And you risk associating those words with the games&amp;#x2F;sentences on Duolingo, instead of the thing they actually represent. This is why watching movies, reading books, listening to music, etc in the target language is so important.&lt;p&gt;Duolingo lessons generally fail to build up on each other sufficiently. Lesson 10 should regularly reuse the vocabulary of 1-9 (to help &amp;#x27;widen&amp;#x27; the association). Instead, it tends to be lesson 10 vocabulary paired with extremely simple words to form grammatically correct sentences and learn the vocabulary of lesson 10, which is then almost entirely discarded in the lessons that follow.</text></comment>
<story><title>How much can Duolingo teach us?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/how-much-can-duolingo-teach-us</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>&amp;gt; I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese.&lt;p&gt;How is this possible? You know the words but you can&amp;#x27;t use them? This hasn&amp;#x27;t been my experience at all. I think I&amp;#x27;m learning a lot from Duolingo. I still need a bit of time to parse big numbers especially when listening but I can recognize and understand countdowns when they show up in anime.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been sort of tracking my progress by watching japanese content and it&amp;#x27;s been extremely motivating. It&amp;#x27;s like wow, they really do use those words I learned about.</text></item><item><author>firefoxd</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m the pro Duolingo user. I used to pick up new languages just for fun. It did help me a bit when conversing with uber drivers in Spanish, but I was stumped when i completed the Japanese course.&lt;p&gt;I could quickly, and effectively go through the course with no hurdles. But then my sister asked me to count to ten in Japanese. I know the words, I can complete a challenge that include numbers, but I could not count to ten in the real world in Japanese. Duolingo banked on the gamification, and that works really well. However, learning a language is only incidental.&lt;p&gt;I wrote an article about it and received threats to take it down. From time to time, i get a hoard of emails calling me toxic and threatening to sue. It&amp;#x27;s still up if you can find it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leke</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve experienced something similar in Finnish. The best I can come up with is the memories are connected with the app. Without the app the association with the learned content is lost. Well, it&amp;#x27;s just a theory.</text></comment>