<story><title>Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51208154</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nmfisher</author><text>I learned Mandarin and German pre-Duolingo, both to reasonable levels of proficiency.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve messed around with Duolingo a few times, just to get a feel for how useful it is. I came away feeling that it was about the same level as flashcard vocabulary learning - useful, but only a small part of the pie.&lt;p&gt;Vocabulary is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to carry on a conversation. Mandarin in particular is more difficult, since you need to grind through hours and hour writing&amp;#x2F;rote learning characters to improve your vocabulary.&lt;p&gt;The one thing that noticeably accelerated my proficiency was having an actual conversation with a native speaker (host family&amp;#x2F;tutor&amp;#x2F;etc). That&amp;#x27;s not something that Duolingo really replicates.&lt;p&gt;Self-plug - coincidentally, earlier today I just released a small tool for Mandarin learners to practise their tone recognition! I&amp;#x27;ve been working on a larger app and this seemed like something that would have helped me when I first started out. App is currently live @ &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fluent.academy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fluent.academy&lt;/a&gt; - I&amp;#x27;ll be introducing more functionality for Mandarin learners in the near future, so would really love to hear from students of any level.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>standardUser</author><text>&amp;quot;...the same level as flashcard vocabulary learning&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;How exactly were you using it? It speaks to you, which is invaluable for developing an ear for the language. It forces you to translate both ways, which helps with reading and writing immensely. And optionally you can even speak answers in the foreign language to practice pronunciation (such that your phone can correctly transcribe what you&amp;#x27;re saying).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not exactly an immersive language course, but it is vastly more useful than flash cards.&lt;p&gt;I know a lot of people like to speed through the tree and only complete the first level, which I suppose is a more vocab-focused way of using the app. But if you go deeper on each level it forces you to grapple with grammar a lot more.</text></comment>
<story><title>Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51208154</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nmfisher</author><text>I learned Mandarin and German pre-Duolingo, both to reasonable levels of proficiency.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve messed around with Duolingo a few times, just to get a feel for how useful it is. I came away feeling that it was about the same level as flashcard vocabulary learning - useful, but only a small part of the pie.&lt;p&gt;Vocabulary is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to carry on a conversation. Mandarin in particular is more difficult, since you need to grind through hours and hour writing&amp;#x2F;rote learning characters to improve your vocabulary.&lt;p&gt;The one thing that noticeably accelerated my proficiency was having an actual conversation with a native speaker (host family&amp;#x2F;tutor&amp;#x2F;etc). That&amp;#x27;s not something that Duolingo really replicates.&lt;p&gt;Self-plug - coincidentally, earlier today I just released a small tool for Mandarin learners to practise their tone recognition! I&amp;#x27;ve been working on a larger app and this seemed like something that would have helped me when I first started out. App is currently live @ &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fluent.academy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fluent.academy&lt;/a&gt; - I&amp;#x27;ll be introducing more functionality for Mandarin learners in the near future, so would really love to hear from students of any level.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dlevine</author><text>I have been learning Mandarin casually for a few years. A while back I went all the way through Duolingo. I picked up some new vocabulary, but it was probably the least effective study method I used.&lt;p&gt;With that said, it was reasonably fun, and I did stick with it for a while due to the gamification, so maybe there&amp;#x27;s hope for the feature. Just getting people to study a foreign language regularly is probably a good step.&lt;p&gt;I also think that they have implemented some more advanced learning features with a few languages.</text></comment>