February 13

APP

 

geralt / Pixabay

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Duolingo teaches you to read, write, listen and speak.   Practice conversation with the intelligent Chatbots. Duolingo is also completely free. Learn online or on the go with the mobile apps.

I checked it out and then did some research on it looking for reviews  Here is one that talks about the shortcomings of this app.

 

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This is a user who responded to @Langfocus with his comments on what was not good and suggestions for improvement.

 

I’ve used Duolingo for a few months (and completing 2 trees fully) but I immediately identified some crucial shortcomings: – Almost total lack of grammar. Sometimes just a tiny bit of it could save you hours of memorizing. – Not enough phrases for practice. After a while you just remember what the answers were instead of trying to translate correctly. – The “decay” system is too simplistic. It’s based on the words contained in the lessons. Duolingo is pretty inept at identifying your grammar shortcomings. – The voice recognition feature just plain doesn’t work. One of the main complaints. It’s way too lenient. Sometimes you can just say anything and get a pass. – The fluency rating (in %) is meaningless. Nobody knows how it works. The level system is pretty bad too. I know it’s supposed to work like an RPG, your lvl corresponds to your “experience” accumulated in the “game”, but it shouldn’t. It should try to determine your actual level of proficiency. I’m a native French speaker and my level of proficiency stands at 40%. What gives? – The lingot system is a failure. I’ve 500 lingots (many people have far more) and nothing to spend them on. Not a main gripe this one but still worth mentioning – It’s not motivating to keep a streak going because you can make your daily goal anything. If Duolingo is tutoring you into a new language, shouldn’t help you somehow at determining what this goal should be? – It’s not motivating to keep the tree golden. Sometimes you have to redo a really easy skill practice many times, with the same exact questions which you all got right, to make a skill golden again – It’s not motivating after you’ve finished the tree. The translation system is not very good and feels like work – in addition to the fact that’s you’re almost always translating something that’s already been translated before. I think it’s far better when learning a new language to start with a little vocabulary, learn the phonology and grammar (get a good book) and have the old spreadsheet for a vocabulary list. Much more efficient than Duolingo. It’s a very nice service for free and fun in the beginning, but it needs some pretty fundamental improvements
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